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]