The Soul of the Far East

by Percival Lowell

Our youth has now reached the flowering season of life, that brief May time when the whole world takes on the rose-tint, and when by all dramatic laws he ought to fall in love. He does nothing of the kind. Sad to say, he is a stranger to the feeling. Love, as we understand the word, is a thing unknown to the Far East; fortunately, indeed, for the possession there of the tender passion would be worse than useless. Its indulgence would work no end of disturbance to the community at large, beside entailing much misery upon its individual victim. Its exercise would probably be classed with kleptomania and other like excesses of purely personal consideration. The community could never permit the practice, for it strikes at the very root of their whole social system.

The immense loss in happiness to these people in consequence of the omission by the too parsimonious Fates of that thread, which, with us, spins the whole of woman's web of life, and at least weaves the warp of man's, is but incidental to the present subject; the effect of the loss upon the individuality of the person himself is what concerns us now.

If there is one moment in a man's life when his interest for the world at large pales before the engrossing character of his own emotions, it is assuredly when that man first falls in love. Then, if never before, the world within excludes the world without. For of all our human passions none is so isolating as the tenderest. To shut that one other being in, we must of necessity shut all the rest of mankind out; and we do so with a reckless trust in our own self-sufficiency which has about it a touch of the sublime. The other millions are as though they were not, and we two are alone in the earth, which suddenly seems to have grown unprecedentedly beautiful. Indeed, it only needs such judicious depopulation to make of any spot an Eden. Perhaps the early Jewish myth-makers had some such thought in mind when they wrote their idyl of the cosmogony. The human traits are true to-day. Then at last our souls throw aside their conventional wrappings to stand revealed as they really are. Certain of comprehension, the thoughts we have never dared breathe to any one before, find a tongue for her who seems fore-destined to understand. The long-closed floodgates of feeling are thrown wide, and our personality, pent up from the time of its inception for very mistrust, sweeps forth in one uncontrollable rush. For then the most reticent becomes confiding; the most self-contained expands. Then every detail of our past lives assumes an importance which even we had not divined. To her we tell them all,—our boyish beliefs, our youthful fancies, the foolish with the fine, the witty with the wise, the little with the great. Nothing then seems quite unworthy, as nothing seems quite worthy enough. Flowers and weeds that we plucked upon our pathway, we heap them in her lap, certain that even the poorest will not be tossed aside. Small wonder that we bring as many as we may when she bends her head so lovingly to each.

As our past rises in reminiscence with all its oldtime reality, no less clearly does our future stand out to us in mirage. What we would be seems as realizable as what we were. Seen by another beside ourselves, our castles in the air take on something of the substance of stereoscopic sight. Our airiest fancies seem solid facts for their reality to her, and gilded by lovelight, they glitter and sparkle like a true palace of the East. For once all is possible; nothing lies beyond our reach. And as we talk, and she listens, we two seem to be floating off into an empyrean of our own like the summer clouds above our heads, as they sail dreamily on into the far-away depths of the unfathomable sky.

It would be more than mortal not to believe in ourselves when another believes so absolutely in us. Our most secret thoughts are no longer things to be ashamed of, for she has sanctioned them. Whatever doubt may have shadowed us as to our own imaginings disappears before the smile of her appreciation. That her appreciation may be prejudiced is not a possibility we think of then. She understands us, or seems to do so to our own better understanding of ourselves. Happy the man who is thus understood! Happy even he who imagines that he is, because of her eager wish to comprehend; fortunate, indeed, if in this one respect he never comes to see too clearly.

No such blissful infatuation falls to the lot of the Far Oriental. He never is the dupe of his own desire, the willing victim of his self-illusion. He is never tempted to reveal himself, and by thus revealing, realize. No loving appreciation urges him on toward the attainment of his own ideal. That incitement to be what he would seem to be, to become what she deems becoming, he fails to feel. Custom has so far fettered fancy that even the wish to communicate has vanished. He has now nothing to tell; she needs no ear to hear. For she is not his love; she is only his wife,—what is left of a romance when the romance is left out. Worse still, she never was anything else. He has not so much as a memory of her, for he did not marry her for love; he may not love of his own accord, nor for the matter of that does he wish to do so. If by some mischance he should so far forget to forget himself, it were much better for him had he not done so, for the choice of a bride is not his, nor of a bridegroom hers. Marriage to a Far Oriental is the most important mercantile transaction of his whole life. It is, therefore, far too weighty a matter to be entrusted to his youthful indiscretion; for although the person herself is of lamentably little account in the bargain, the character of her worldly circumstances is most material to it. So she is contracted for with the same care one would exercise in the choice of any staple business commodity. The particular sample is not vital to the trade, but the grade of goods is. She is selected much as the bride of the Vicar of Wakefield chose her wedding-gown, only that the one was at least cut to suit, while the other is not. It is certainly easier, if less fitting, to get a wife as some people do clothes, not to their own order, but ready made; all the more reason when the bargain is for one's son, not one's self. So the Far East, which looks at the thing from a strictly paternal standpoint and ignores such trifles as personal preferences, takes its boy to the broker's and fits him out. That the object of such parental care does not end by murdering his unfortunate spouse or making way with himself suggests how dead already is that individuality which we deem to be of the very essence of the thing.

Marriage is thus a species of investment contracted by the existing family for the sake of the prospective one, the actual participants being only lay figures in the affair. Sometimes the father decides the matter himself; sometimes he or the relative who stands in loco parentis calls for a plebiscit on the subject; for such an extension of the suffrage has gradually crept even into patriarchal institutions. The family then assemble, sit in solemn conclave on the question, and decide it by vote. Of course the interested parties are not asked their opinion, as it might be prejudiced. The result of the conference must be highly gratifying. To have one's wife chosen for one by vote of one's relatives cannot but be satisfactory—to the electors. The outcome of this ballot, like that of universal suffrage elsewhere, is at the best unobjectionable mediocrity. Somehow such a result does not seem quite to fulfil one's ideal of a wife. It is true that the upper classes of impersonal France practise this method of marital selection, their conseils de famille furnishing in some sort a parallel. But, as is well known, matrimony among these same upper classes is largely form devoid of substance. It begins impressively with a dual ceremony, the civil contract, which amounts to a contract of civility between the parties, and a religious rite to render the same perpetual, and there it is too apt to end.

So much for the immediate influence on the man; the eventual effect on the race remains to be considered. Now, if the first result be anything, the second must in the end be everything. For however trifling it be in the individual instance, it goes on accumulating with each successive generation, like compound interest. The choosing of a wife by family suffrage is not simply an exponent of the impersonal state of things, it is a power toward bringing such a state of things about. A hermit seldom develops to his full possibilities, and the domestic variety is no exception to the rule. A man who is linked to some one that toward him remains a cipher lacks surroundings inciting to psychological growth, nor is he more favorably circumstanced because all his ancestors have been similarly circumscribed.

As if to make assurance doubly sure, natural selection here steps in to further the process. To prove this with all the rigidity of demonstration desirable is in the present state of erotics beyond our power. Until our family trees give us something more than mere skeletons of dead branches, we must perforce continue ignorant of the science of grafts. For the nonce we must be content to generalize from our own premises, only rising above them sufficiently to get a bird's-eye view of our neighbor's estates. Such a survey has at least one advantage: the whole field of view appears perfectly plain.

Surveying the subject, then, from this ego-altruistic position, we can perceive why matrimony, as we practise it, should result in increasing the personality of our race: for the reason namely that psychical similarity determines the selection. At first sight, indeed, such a natural affinity would seem to have little or nothing to do with marriage. As far as outsiders are capable of judging, unlikes appear to fancy one another quite as gratuitously as do likes. Connubial couples are often anything but twin souls. Yet our own dual use of the word "like" bears historic witness to the contrary. For in this expression we have a record from early Gothic times that men liked others for being like themselves. Since then, our feelings have not changed materially, although our mode of showing them is slightly less intense. In those simple days stranger and enemy were synonymous terms, and their objects were received in a corresponding spirit. In our present refined civilization we hurl epithets instead of spears, and content ourselves with branding as heterodox the opinions of another which do not happen to coincide with our own. The instinct of self-development naturally begets this self-sided view. We insensibly find those persons congenial whose ideas resemble ours, and gravitate to them, as leaves on a pond do to one another, nearer and nearer till they touch. Is it likely, then, that in the most important case of all the rule should suddenly cease to hold? Is it to be presumed that even Socrates chose Xantippe for her remarkable contrariety to himself?