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.”