Biography of Percival Lowell

by A. Lawrence Lowell

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.