I have not written you before because feeling under the weather--hungry for sympathy I cannot get, and have no reason really to expect. It is only long after one gets credit as a writer that one wins any recognition as a thinker. My critics are careful to discriminate. One assures me that as a poet I am impeccable, and "a great man," but that I must remember my theories can only be decided by the "serious student." Or in other words that I am never to be taken seriously. The men taken seriously get $10,000 a year for trying to do what I could do much better. Poor myself must try to live on "dream-stuff."
I am sorry you cannot read. But still you are fortunate, because you are able to live without being at the mercy of cads and clerks. That alone is a great happiness. I am pestered with requests to do vulgar work for fools at prices they would not dare to offer, if they did not imagine me an object of charity. Happily I can get away from them all, and keep the door locked.
What a privilege to live in Ky[=o]to. I should be glad of a very small post there. The Exhibition is marvellous--showing how Japan will revenge herself on the West. Artistically it is very disappointing. There are funny things--a naked woman (not a "nude study," but simply a naked woman in oil) for which the artist insolently asks $3000. It is worth about three rin. The Japanese don't like it, and they are right. But I fear they do not know why they are right.
DEAR PAGE,--It was _almost_ unkind, after all to have sent the very dear picture, because it brought back too vividly hours of pleasant talk and kind words and great projects and all sorts of things which have forever passed away. But there was a pleasure in the pain too,--for it is quite a help in life to feel that ever so far away there is somebody who loves you, and whom Time will not quickly change. You look just the same. I--I should scare you were I to send you a picture--you would think Time was much faster than he is. For I am very ancient to behold.
Of news little to tell you that you do not get from other sources. Japan has yielded the Liao-tung Peninsula; but the nation is full of sullen anger against Russia and the interference-powers. The press is officially muzzled; but there is no mistaking the popular feeling. Even an overthrow of the existing Government is not impossible, and a return to that military autocracy which is really the natural government of an essentially military race. If the Japanese house of representatives had not interfered seriously and idiotically with naval expansion, Russian interference would have been almost impossible.