By the end of the summer of 1866 Mother was well enough to go home, and the whole family sailed for Boston. Percival’s education there was of the ordinary classical type preparatory for college, for one year at a school kept by a Mr. Fette, brother of his teacher in childhood, and then for five years in that of Mr. George W. C. Noble, whose influence, both by teaching and character, was strong with all boys capable of profiting thereby. Percival was always near the top of his class, especially in the Classics, which he acquired so easily that while playing with a toy boat, in a shallow pond made by the melting snow on the lawn at Brookline, it occurred to him to describe an imaginary shipwreck thereof; and he did so in some hundreds of Latin hexameter verses.
PERCIVAL LOWELL
And His Biographer
In the spring of 1867 Father bought the place at the corner of Heath and Warren Streets in Brookline, where he lived until his death in 1900; and where his last child, Amy, passed her whole life. Here Percival spent his boyhood, summer and winter, until he went to college, enjoying the life and sports of the seasons; and, in fact, he was a normal boy like his comrades, only more so. During the earlier years Father drove us into town and out again each day, he going to his office and the children to school. On the road he talked on all subjects and we learned much in this way. Somehow he made us feel that every self-respecting man must work at something that is worth while, and do it very hard. In our case it need not be remunerative, for he had enough to provide for that; but it must be of real significance. I do not know that he ever said this formally, but, by the tenor of his conversation and his own attitude toward life, he impressed that conviction deeply upon the spirit. From his own active and ambitious nature, Percival little required such a stimulus; and, indeed, he struck out an intellectual path of his own in boyhood. He took to astronomy, read many books thereon, had a telescope of his own, of about two and a quarter inches in diameter, with which he observed the stars from the flat roof of our house; and later in life he recalled that with it he had seen the white snow cap on the pole of Mars crowning a globe spread with blue-green patches on an orange ground. This interest he never lost, and after lying half-dormant for many years it blazed forth again as the dominant one in his life, and the field of his remarkable achievements.
The two years of school in Paris certainly had not retarded his progress, if, indeed, the better European discipline had not advanced it; for he could have been prepared for college at sixteen, but it was thought well to extend the time another year and fill in with other things. Strangely enough, Mr. Noble thought him not so strong as he might be in two subjects where he later excelled,—English Composition and Mathematics,—and in these he was tutored the year before entering college. Later he thought he had been misjudged, but one may suspect it was rather because his interest in these matters had not been aroused. The capacity was there but not yet awakened. However, he entered college in the autumn of 1872 not only clear but with honors in Mathematics. In fact he studied that subject every year in college, took second-year honors in it, and Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great mathematician, spoke of him as one of the most brilliant scholars ever under his observation, hinting to him that if he would devote himself thereto he could succeed him in his chair. Yet it was by no means his sole field of knowledge, for he elected courses also in the Classics, Physics and History, doing well enough in all of them to be in the Φ Β Κ and have a Commencement part. An impression of his versatility is given by the fact that in his senior year he won a Bowdoin Prize for an essay on “The Rank of England as a European Power from the Death of Elizabeth to the Death of Anne,” and spoke his part on “The Nebular Hypothesis.”
Yet he was no recluse; for he was constantly that year at dancing parties in Boston; and, being naturally sociable, and strongly attached to his friends, he made many in college. With Harcourt Amory, his Freshman chum, he went abroad, after graduating in 1876, and spent a year in Europe. The young men went to London with letters that brought them into delightful society there, and they travelled over the British Isles and the Continent. It was mainly the grand tour; but although he wrote many letters, and kept a journal, these, so far as preserved, reveal little of his personality except a keen joy in natural beauty and a readiness in acquaintance with people casually met. Alone, he went down the Danube, and tried,—fortunately without success,—to get to the front in the war then raging between Servia and Turkey. With Harcourt Amory he went also to Palestine and Syria, at that time less visited than they are to-day; but for this part of his journey, where it would be most interesting, his journal, if written, is lost. His love of travel had fairly begun.
CHAPTER II
FIRST VISIT TO JAPAN
In the summer of 1877 he came home; and, having no impulse toward a profession, he went into the office of his grandfather, John Amory Lowell, where he was engaged in helping to manage trust funds. In this,—in learning the ways of business, for a time as acting treasurer, that is the executive head, of a large cotton mill, and withal as a young man of fashion,—he spent the next six years. With money enough for his wants, never extravagant, and with the increase that came from shrewd investment, he felt free in the spring of 1883 to go to Japan to study the language and the people. Both of these he did with his habitual energy, learning to speak with great rapidity, meeting socially Japanese and foreign residents in Tokyo, and observing everything to be seen. His own view of the value of travel and study is given in a letter to a sister seven years his junior, written apparently in the preceding summer when she was in Europe.[1] “I am very glad,” he says, “that you are taking so much interest in studying what you come across in your journey and after all life itself is but one long journey which is not only misspent but an unhappy one if one does not interest one’s-self in whatever one encounters—Besides, from another standpoint, you are storing up for yourself riches above the reach of fickle fate,—what the moths and rust of this world cannot touch. You are making, as it were, a friend of yourself. One to whom you can go when time or place shall sever you from others, and the older you grow, sweet puss, the more you have to depend upon yourself. So, school your mind then, that it may come to the rescue of your feelings—and a great thing is to cultivate this love of study while yet you are happy. For if you wait until you need it to be happy, you will, with much more difficulty, persuade yourself to forget yourself in it—Now as to particulars, you need never worry yourself if you do not happen to like what it is orthodox to prefer. You had much better be honest with yourself even if wrong, than dishonest in forcing yourself to agree with the multitude. That is, the opinion one most commonly hears is not always the opinion of the best. And again, always be able to give a reason for what you think and, to a great extent, for what you like.”
At once he was fascinated by Japan, its people, their customs, their tea-houses, gardens and their art. Much of this was more novel to his friends at home when he wrote about it than it would be now; although even at that time he saw how much Tokyo had already been influenced by Western ideas and habits. He kept his attention alert, observing, studying, pondering everything that he saw or heard. In fact, within a fortnight he lit upon two things that later led to careful examination and the writing of books. In a letter to his mother on June 8, in dealing with differences that struck him between the people of Japan and occidentals, he writes: “Again, perhaps, a key to the Japanese is impersonalism. Forced upon one’s notice first in their speech, it may be but the expression of character. In the Japanese language there is no distinction of persons, no sex, no plural even. I speak of course of their inflected speech. They have pronouns, but these are used solely to prevent ambiguity. The same is true of their genders and plurals. To suppose them, however, destitute of feeling, as some have done, I am convinced would be an error. The impersonalism I speak of is a thing of the mind rather than the heart. I suggest rather than posit.” In a letter, three days later, he tells of a friend whose jin-riki-sha man’s wife had the fox disease, “a species of acute mania supposed by the people to be a bewitchment by the fox. As the person possessed so regards it and others assist in keeping up the delusion by interpreting favorably to their own views, it is no wonder that the superstition survives.” Some years later an unexpected sight of a religious trance on Mount Ontake gave rise to a careful study of these psychic phenomena. Well did Pasteur remark that in the fields of observation chance favors only the minds that are prepared.
He hired a house in Tokyo, set up his own establishment as if he had been born and bred there, and after three weeks on shore wrote: “I am beginning to talk Japanese like a native (of America), and I take to ye manners and customs of ye country like a duck to the water.” He stayed enjoying the life, and the many friends he made, until the middle of July, when, with Professor Terry of the University, he started on a trip across the mountains to the other side of the island. The journey was hard, and at times the food and lodging poor. “Think,” he writes, “of the means of subsistence in a land where there is no milk, no butter, no cheese, no bread, almost no meat, and not over many eggs. Rice is the staple article of food, then vegetables, eggs and fish; the last two being classed as the food of the richer, and most eaten in the greater centres. Some country people are so poor that they have not rice, and eat barley instead. It is considered a sign of poverty to be without this universal article of diet, but in travelling about in out-of-the-way corners one meets with such places. I have myself lit upon such at the noon-day halt but have never been obliged to spend the night there.” But the scenery was fine, and the people unchanged by contact with the foreigner. He noted archaic devices still in use for pumping and boiling water; yet, in visiting a ruined castle, he saw that while the interior of the country had as yet been little affected by the impact of the West its political condition had been transformed with amazing speed. “We mounted through some seven barnlike rooms, up Japanese ladders to the top story. Sitting by the window and looking at the old feudal remains below, the moat with its stagnant slime and the red dragon flies skimming its surface, the old walls, the overgrown ramparts where now the keeper tries to grow a crop of beans, all tended to carry my thoughts back to the middle ages, or was it only to my own boyhood when the name middle ages almost stood for fairy land? And yet all this had been a fact, even while I had been dreaming of it. My dreams of Western feudalism had been co-existent with Eastern feudalism itself. So it was only eleven years ago that the last Daimio of the place left the castle of his ancestors forever.”