THE SOUL OF THE FAR EAST
Back in Japan in the early spring of 1884, Percival stayed there until
midsummer, when he turned his face homeward and westward, for he had
crossed the Pacific three times and preferred to go home the other way.
Touching at Shanghai and Hong Kong he stopped off at Singapore to make a
detour to Java, which delayed him so much that he saw only the southern
part of India. At Bombay he stayed with Charles Lowell, a cousin and
class-mate, in charge of the branch there of the Comptoir d’Escompte of
Paris; thence his route led through the Red Sea and Alexandria to
Venice, where to his annoyance he was quarantined; not, as he
sarcastically remarks, because he came from an infected country, but on
account of cholera in the city itself. Finally he went home by way of
Paris and London.
At this time he had clearly decided to write his book on Korea; for in
his letters, and in memoranda in his letter book, are found many pages
that appear afterwards therein. But he certainly had not lost his
interest in mathematics or physics, for any casual observation would
quickly bring it out. From the upper end of the Red Sea he sees a cloud
casting a shadow on the desert toward Sinai, and proceeds to show how by
the angle of elevation of the cloud, the angle of the sun, and the
distance to the place where the shadow falls one can compute the height
of the cloud. He looks at the reflection of the moon along the water and
points out why, when there is a ripple on the surface, the track of
light does not run directly toward the moon but to windward of it. All
this was a matter of general intellectual alertness in a mind familiar
with the subject, but there is as yet no indication that he had any
intention of turning his attention to scientific pursuits. On the
contrary, two letters written on this journey appear to show that he
regarded literature, in a broad sense, as the field he proposed to
enter, and with this his publications for several years to come accord.
In a letter from Bombay to Frederic J. Stimson,—a classmate who had
already won his spurs by his pen, and was destined to go far,—he begins
by speaking of his friend’s writings, then of the subject in general,
and finally turns to himself and says: “Somebody wrote me the other day
apropos of what I may or may not write, that facts not reflections were
the thing. Facts not reflections indeed. Why that is what most pleases
mankind from the philosopher to the fair; one’s own reflections on or
from things. Are we to forego the splendor of the French salon which
returns us beauty from a score of different points of view from its
mirrors more brilliant than their golden settings. The fact gives us but
a flat image. It is our reflections upon it that make it a solid truth.
For every truth is many-sided. It has many aspects. We know now what was
long unknown, that true seeing is done with the mind from the
comparatively meagre material supplied by the eye....
“I believe that all writing should be a collection of the precious
stones of truth which is beauty. Only the arrangement differs with the
character of the book. You string them into a necklace for the world at
large. You pigeon-hole them into drawers for the scientist. In the
necklace you have the calling of your thought; _i.e._, the expressing of
it and the arrangement of the thoughts among themselves. I wonder how
many men are fortunate enough to have them come as they are wanted. A
question by the bye nearly incapable of solution because what seems good
to one man, does not begin to satisfy the next.”
A month later he writes to his mother from Paris on October 7th: “As for
me, I wish I could believe a little more in myself. It is at all times
the one thing needful. As it is I often get discouraged. You will—said
Bigelow the other day to me in Japan. There will be times when you will
feel like tearing the whole thing up and lighting your pipe with the
wreck. Don’t you do it. Put it away and take it out again at a less
destructive moment.” Then, speaking of what his mother had written him,
he says: “But I shall most certainly act upon your excellent advice and
what is more you shall have the exquisite ennui of reading it before it
goes to print and then you know we can have corrections and improvements
by the family.”
Reaching Boston in the autumn of 1884, he made it his headquarters for
the next four years. The period was far from an idle one; for, apart
from business matters that engaged his attention, he was actively at
work on two books: First, the “Chosön,” that study already described of
Korea and the account of his own sojourn there. The preface to this is
dated November 1885, and the publication was early in the following
year. The second book,—smaller in size and type, and without
illustrations,—is the most celebrated of his writings on the Orient. Its
title, “The Soul of the Far East,” denotes aptly its object in the mind
of the author, for it is an attempt to portray what appeared to him the
essential and characteristic difference between the civilizations of
Eastern Asia and Western Europe. From an early time in his stay in Japan
he had been impressed by what he called the impersonality of the people,
the comparative absence, both in aspiration and in conduct, of
diversified individual self-expression among them. The more he thought
about it the stronger this impression became; and this book is a study
of the subject in its various manifestations.
First comes a general discussion of the meaning and essence of
individuality, with the deduction that the Japanese suffer from arrested
development; that they have always copied but not assimilated; added but
not incorporated the additions into their own civilization, like a tree
into which have been grafted great branches while the trunk remains
unchanged. “The traits that distinguished these peoples in the past have
been gradually extinguishing them ever since. Of these traits,
stagnating influences upon their career, perhaps the most important is
the great quality of impersonality”; and later he adds, “Upon this
quality as a foundation rests the Far Oriental character.”
He then proceeds to demonstrate, or illustrate, his thesis from many
aspects of Japanese life, beginning with the family. He points out that
no one has a personal birthday or even age of his own, two days in the
year being treated as universal birthdays, one for girls and the other
for boys, the latter, in May, being the occasion when hollow paper fish
are flown from poles over every house where a boy has been born during
the preceding year. Everyone, moreover, is credited with a year’s
advance in age on New Year’s Day quite regardless of the actual date of
his birth. If a youth “belongs to the middle class, as soon as his
schooling” in the elements of the Classics “is over he is set to learn
his father’s trade. To undertake to learn any trade but his father’s
would strike the family as simply preposterous.” But to whatever class
he may belong he is taught the duty of absolute subordination to the
head of the family, for the family is the basis of social life in the
Far East. Marriage, with us a peculiarly personal matter, is in the East
a thing in which the young people have no say whatever; it is a business
transaction conducted by the father through marriage brokers. A daughter
becoming on marriage a part of her husband’s family ceases to be a
member of her own, and her descendants are no benefit to it, unless,
perchance, having no brothers, one of her sons is adopted by her father.
Thus it is that when a child is born the general joy “depends somewhat
upon the sex. If the baby chances to be a boy, everybody is immensely
pleased; if a girl there is considerably less effusion shown. In the
latter case the more impulsive relatives are unmistakably sorry; the
more philosophic evidently hope for better luck next time. Both kinds
make very pretty speeches, which not even the speakers believe, for in
the babe lottery the family is considered to have drawn a blank. A
delight so engendered proves how little of the personal, even in
prospective, attaches to its object.”
In the fourth chapter he takes up the question of language, bringing out
his point with special effect, showing the absence of personal pronouns,
and indeed of everything that indicates an expression of individuality
or even of sex, replacing them by honorifics which occur in the most
surprising way. But the matter of language, though highly significant,
is somewhat technical, and his discussion can be left to those who care
to follow it in his book.
He turns next to nature and to art, pointing out how genuine, how
universal, and at the same time how little individual, how impersonal,
is the Japanese love of those things. Of them he says “that nature, not
man, is their _beau idéal_, the source to them of inspiration, is
evident again in looking at their art.” Incidentally, the account of the
succession of flower festivals throughout the year is a beautiful piece
of descriptive writing, glowing with the color it portrays and the
delight of the throngs of visitors.
On the subject of religion he has much to say. Shintoism, though
generally held by the people, and causing great numbers of them to go as
pilgrims to the sacred places on mountain tops, he regards as not really
a religion. That is the reason it is not inconsistent with Buddhism. “It
is not simply that the two contrive to live peaceably together; they are
actually both of them implicitly believed by the same individual.
Millions of Japanese are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same
time. That such a combination should be possible is due to the essential
difference in the character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic,
the other intrinsic, in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells
a man but little about himself and his hereafter; Buddhism, little but
about himself and what he may become. In examining Far Eastern religion,
therefore, for personality, or the reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as
having no particular bearing upon the subject.” Turning to the other
system he says: “At first sight Buddhism is much more like Christianity
than those of us who stay at home and speculate upon it commonly
appreciate. As a system of philosophy it sounds exceedingly foreign, but
it looks unexpectedly familiar as a faith.” After dwelling upon the
resemblances in the popular attitude, he continues: “But behind all this
is the religion of the few,—of those to whom sensuous forms cannot
suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings; whose god is something
more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom worship means not the
cramping of the body, but the expansion of the soul.”... “In relation to
one’s neighbor the two beliefs are kin, but as regards one’s self, as
far apart as the West is from the East. For here, at this idea of self,
we are suddenly aware of standing on the brink of a fathomless abyss,
gazing giddily down into that great gulf which divides Buddhism from
Christianity. We cannot see the bottom. It is a separation more profound
than death; it seems to necessitate annihilation. To cross it we must
bury in its depths all we know as ourselves.
“Christianity is a personal religion; Buddhism, an impersonal one. In
this fundamental difference lies the worldwide opposition of the two
beliefs. Christianity tells us to purify ourselves that we may enjoy
countless aeons of that bettered self hereafter; Buddhism would have us
purify ourselves that we may lose all sense of self for evermore.”
At the end of this chapter he sums up his demonstration thus: “We have
seen, then, how in trying to understand these peoples we are brought
face to face with impersonality in each of those three expressions of
the human soul, speech, thought, yearning. We have looked at them first
from a social standpoint. We have seen how singularly little regard is
paid the individual from his birth to his death. How he lives his life
long the slave of patriarchal customs of so puerile a tendency as to be
practically impossible to a people really grown up. How he practises a
wholesale system of adoption sufficient of itself to destroy any
surviving regard for the ego his other relations might have left. How in
his daily life he gives the minimum of thought to the bettering himself
in any worldly sense, and the maximum of polite consideration to his
neighbor. How, in short, he acts toward himself as much as possible as
if he were another, and to that other as if he were himself.
“Then, not content with standing stranger-like upon the threshold, we
have sought to see the soul of their civilization in its intrinsic
manifestations. We have pushed our inquiry, as it were, one step nearer
its home. And the same trait that was apparent sociologically has been
exposed in this our antipodal phase of psychical research. We have seen
how impersonal is his language, the principal medium of communication
between one soul and another; how impersonal are the communings of his
soul with itself. How the man turns to nature instead of to his
fellowman in silent sympathy. And how, when he speculates upon his
coming castles in the air, his most roseate desire is to be but an
indistinguishable particle of the sunset clouds and vanish invisible as
they into the starry stillness of all-embracing space.
“Now what does this strange impersonality betoken? Why are these peoples
so different from us in this most fundamental of considerations to any
people, the consideration of themselves? The answer leads to some
interesting conclusions.”
The final chapter is entitled “Imagination,” for he regards this as the
source of all progress, and the far orientals as particularly
unimaginative. Their art he ascribes to appreciation rather than
originality. They are, he declares, less advanced than the occidentals,
their rate of progress is less rapid and the individuals are more alike;
and he concludes that unless their newly imported ideas really take root
they will vanish “off the face of the earth and leave our planet the
eventual possession of the dwellers where the day declines.”
One cannot deny that he made a strong case for the impersonality of the
Japanese; and if it be thought that his conclusions therefrom were
unfriendly it must be remembered that he had a deep admiration and
affection for that people, wishing them well with all his heart.
Without attempting to survey the reviews and criticisms of the book,
which was translated into many languages, it may be interesting to
recall the comments of three Europeans of very diverse qualities and
experiences. Dr. Pierre Janet, the great French neurologist, said to a
friend of the author that as a study of Japanese mentality it seemed to
him to show more insight than any other he had ever read on the subject.
The second commentator is Lafcadio Hearn, a very different type of
person, given to enthusiasm. He had not yet been to Japan, and “The Soul
of the Far East” had much to do with his going there. In his book
“Concerning Lafcadio Hearn” George M. Gould says:
“Perhaps I should not have succeeded in getting Hearn to attempt Japan
had it not been for a little book that fell into his hands during the
stay with me. Beyond question, Mr. Lowell’s volume had a profound
influence in turning his attention to Japan and greatly aided me in my
insistent urging him to go there. In sending the book Hearn wrote me
this letter:
“Gooley!—I have found a marvellous book,—a book of books!—a colossal,
splendid, godlike book. You must read every line of it. For heaven’s
sake don’t skip a word of it. The book is called “The Soul of the Far
East,” but its title is smaller than its imprint.
Hearneyboy
“P.S. Let something else go to H—, and read this book instead. May God
eternally bless and infinitely personalize the man who wrote this
book! Please don’t skip one solitary line of it, and don’t delay
reading it,—because something, much! is going to go out of this book
into your heart and life and stay there! I have just finished this
book and feel like John in Patmos,—only a d——d sight better. He who
shall skip one word of this book let his portion be cut off and his
name blotted out of the Book of Life.”
Hearn had read the book on Korea and was impressed by that also, for in
a letter of 1889, he wrote, after commenting on another work he had been
reading, “How luminous and psychically electric is Lowell’s book
compared with it. And how much nobler a soul must be the dreamer of
Chosön!”[5]
After living in Japan Hearn came to different conclusions about
Percival’s ideas on the impersonality of the Japanese, but he never lost
his admiration for the book or its author. In May, 1891, he writes;
“Mr. Lowell has, I think, no warmer admirer in the world than myself,
though I do not agree with his theory in “The Soul of the Far East,”
and think he has ignored the most essential and astonishing quality of
the race: its genius of eclecticism.”[6]
And again,
“I am not vain enough to think I can ever write anything so beautiful
as his “Chosön” or “Soul of the Far East,” and will certainly make a
poor showing beside his precise, fine, perfectly worded work.”[7]
And, finally, as late as 1902 he speaks of it as “incomparably the
greatest of all books on Japan, and the deepest.”[8]
The third European critic to be quoted is Dr. Clay Macauley, a Unitarian
missionary to Japan, who had been a friend of Percival’s there, and
after his death at Flagstaff in 1916 was still at work among the
Japanese. On January 24, 1917, he read before the Asiatic Society of
Japan a Memorial to him, in which he gave an estimate of “The Soul of
the Far East”:
“The year after the publication of “Cho-son,” the book which has
associated Lowell most closely with a critical and interpretative
study of the peoples and institutions of this part of the world,
appeared his much-famed “Soul of the Far East.” I have no time for an
extended critique of this marvellous ethnic essay. “Marvellous” I name
it, not only because of the startling message it bears and the
exquisitely fascinating speech by which the message is borne, but also
because of the revelation it gives of the distinctive mental measure
and the characteristic personality of the author himself ... the book
is really a marvellous psychical study. However, in reading it today,
the critical reader should, all along, keep in mind the time and
conditions under which Lowell wrote. His judgment of “The Soul of the
Far East” was made fully a generation ago. Time has brought much
change to all Oriental countries since then, especially to this “Land
of the Rising Sun.”
He then refers to the author’s conviction that owing to their
impersonality the Oriental people, if unchanged and unless their newly
imported ideas take root, would disappear before the advancing nations
of the West, and proceeds:
“Now, notice Lowell’s “ifs” and “unless.” He had passed his judgment;
but he saw a possible transformation. And I know that he hailed the
incoming into the East of the motive forces of the West as forerunner
of a possible ascendancy here of the genius of the world’s advancing
civilization, prophetic of that New East into which, now, the Far East
is becoming wonderously changed.”
Japan certainly is not in a process of disappearing before the advancing
nations of the West; but it may be that this is not because her people
have radically changed their nature. The arts of the West, civil and
military, they have thoroughly acquired; but Percival Lowell may have
been right in his diagnosis and wrong in his forecast. His estimate of
their temperament may have been correct, and the conclusion therefrom of
their destiny erroneous. The strange identity with which all Japanese
explain the recent international events is not inconsistent with his
theory of impersonality, and it may be that from a national standpoint
this is less a source of weakness than of strength.