The Soul of the Far East
by Percival Lowell
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

Contents

Chapter 1. Individuality

Chapter 2. Family

Chapter 3. Adoption

Chapter 4. Language

Chapter 5. Nature and Art

Chapter 6. Art

Chapter 7. Religion

Chapter 8. Imagination

Chapter 1. Individuality.

The boyish belief that on the other side of our globe all things are
of necessity upside down is startlingly brought back to the man when
he first sets foot at Yokohama. If his initial glance does not,
to be sure, disclose the natives in the every-day feat of standing
calmly on their heads, an attitude which his youthful imagination
conceived to be a necessary consequence of their geographical position,
it does at least reveal them looking at the world as if from the
standpoint of that eccentric posture. For they seem to him to see
everything topsy-turvy. Whether it be that their antipodal situation
has affected their brains, or whether it is the mind of the observer
himself that has hitherto been wrong in undertaking to rectify the
inverted pictures presented by his retina, the result, at all events,
is undeniable. The world stands reversed, and, taking for granted
his own uprightness, the stranger unhesitatingly imputes to them an
obliquity of vision, a state of mind outwardly typified by the
cat-like obliqueness of their eyes.

If the inversion be not precisely of the kind he expected, it is
none the less striking, and impressibly more real. If personal
experience has definitely convinced him that the inhabitants of that
under side of our planet do not adhere to it head downwards, like
flies on a ceiling,--his early a priori deduction,--they still
appear quite as antipodal, mentally considered. Intellectually,
at least, their attitude sets gravity at defiance. For to the mind's
eye their world is one huge, comical antithesis of our own. What we
regard intuitively in one way from our standpoint, they as
intuitively observe in a diametrically opposite manner from theirs.
To speak backwards, write backwards, read backwards, is but the a b c
of their contrariety. The inversion extends deeper than mere modes
of expression, down into the very matter of thought. Ideas of ours
which we deemed innate find in them no home, while methods which
strike us as preposterously unnatural appear to be their birthright.
From the standing of a wet umbrella on its handle instead of its
head to dry to the striking of a match away in place of toward one,
there seems to be no action of our daily lives, however trivial,
but finds with them its appropriate reaction--equal but opposite.
Indeed, to one anxious of conforming to the manners and customs of
the country, the only road to right lies in following unswervingly
that course which his inherited instincts assure him to be wrong.

Yet these people are human beings; with all their eccentricities
they are men. Physically we cannot but be cognizant of the fact, nor
mentally but be conscious of it. Like us, indeed, and yet so unlike
are they that we seem, as we gaze at them, to be viewing our own
humanity in some mirth-provoking mirror of the mind,--a mirror that
shows us our own familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out.
Humor holds the glass, and we become the sport of our own reflections.
But is it otherwise at home? Do not our personal presentments mock
each of us individually our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of
his dressing-glass, and complacently conceives himself to be a very
different appearing person from what he is, forgetting that his
right side has become his left, and vice versa? Yet who, when by
chance he catches sight in like manner of the face of a friend,
can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the mirror's
left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
unsuspected by their innocent original? Perhaps, could we once see
ourselves as others see us, our surprise in the case of foreign
peoples might be less pronounced.

Regarding, then, the Far Oriental as a man, and not simply as a
phenomenon, we discover in his peculiar point of view a new
importance,--the possibility of using it stereoptically. For his
mind-photograph of the world can be placed side by side with ours,
and the two pictures combined will yield results beyond what either
alone could possibly have afforded. Thus harmonized, they will help
us to realize humanity. Indeed it is only by such a combination of
two different aspects that we ever perceive substance and distinguish
reality from illusion. What our two eyes make possible for material
objects, the earth's two hemispheres may enable us to do for mental
traits. Only the superficial never changes its expression;
the appearance of the solid varies with the standpoint of the observer.
In dreamland alone does everything seem plain, and there all is
unsubstantial.

To say that the Japanese are not a savage tribe is of course
unnecessary; to repeat the remark, anything but superfluous, on the
principle that what is a matter of common notoriety is very apt to
prove a matter about which uncommonly little is known. At present
we go halfway in recognition of these people by bestowing upon them
a demi-diploma of mental development called semi-civilization,
neglecting, however, to specify in what the fractional qualification
consists. If the suggestion of a second moiety, as of something
directly complementary to them, were not indirectly complimentary to
ourselves, the expression might pass; but, as it is, the self-praise
is rather too obvious to carry conviction. For Japan's claim to
culture is not based solely upon the exports with which she
supplements our art, nor upon the paper, china, and bric-a-brac with
which she adorns our rooms; any more than Western science is
adequately represented in Japan by our popular imports there of
kerosene oil, matches, and beer. Only half civilized the Far East
presumably is, but it is so rather in an absolute than a relative
sense; in the sense of what might have been, not of what is. It is
so as compared, not with us, but with the eventual possibilities of
humanity. As yet, neither system, Western nor Eastern, is perfect
enough to serve in all things as standard for the other. The light
of truth has reached each hemisphere through the medium of its own
mental crystallization, and this has polarized it in opposite ways,
so that now the rays that are normal to the eyes of the one only
produce darkness to those of the other. For the Japanese civilization
in the sense of not being savagery is the equal of our own. It is
not in the polish that the real difference lies; it is in the
substance polished. In politeness, in delicacy, they have as a
people no peers. Art has been their mistress, though science has
never been their master. Perhaps for this very reason that art,
not science, has been the Muse they courted, the result has been all
the more widespread. For culture there is not the attainment of the
few, but the common property of the people. If the peaks of intellect
rise less eminent, the plateau of general elevation stands higher.
But little need be said to prove the civilization of a land where
ordinary tea-house girls are models of refinement, and common
coolies, when not at work, play chess for pastime.

If Japanese ways look odd at first sight, they but look more odd on
closer acquaintance. In a land where, to allow one's understanding
the freer play of indoor life, one begins, not by taking off his
hat, but by removing his boots, he gets at the very threshold a hint
that humanity is to be approached the wrong end to. When, after thus
entering a house, he tries next to gain admittance to the mind of
its occupant, the suspicion becomes a certainty. He discovers that
this people talk, so to speak, backwards; that before he can hope to
comprehend them, or make himself understood in return, he must learn
to present his thoughts arranged in inverse order from the one in
which they naturally suggest themselves to his mind. His sentences
must all be turned inside out. He finds himself lost in a labyrinth
of language. The same seems to be true of the thoughts it embodies.
The further he goes the more obscure the whole process becomes,
until, after long groping about for some means of orienting himself,
he lights at last upon the clue. This clue consists in "the survival
of the unfittest."

In the civilization of Japan we have presented to us a most
interesting case of partially arrested development; or, to speak
esoterically, we find ourselves placed face to face with a singular
example of a completed race-life. For though from our standpoint the
evolution of these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in
mid-career, looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of
having fully run its course. Development ceased, not because of
outward obstruction, but from purely intrinsic inability to go on.
The intellectual machine was not shattered; it simply ran down.
To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar interest. For we
behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we see
cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that
has died of old age. No weak spot in their social organism
destroyed them from within; no epidemic, in the shape of foreign
hordes, fell upon them from without. For in spite of the fact that
China offers the unique example of a country that has simply lived
to be conquered, mentally her masters have invariably become her
pupils. Having ousted her from her throne as ruler, they proceeded
to sit at her feet as disciples. Thus they have rather helped than
hindered her civilization.

Whatever portion of the Far East we examine we find its mental
history to be the same story with variations. However unlike China,
Korea, and Japan are in some respects, through the careers of all
three we can trace the same life-spirit. It is the career of the
river Jordan rising like any other stream from the springs among the
mountains only to fall after a brief existence into the Dead Sea.
For their vital force had spent itself more than a millennium ago.
Already, then, their civilization had in its deeper developments
attained its stature, and has simply been perfecting itself since.
We may liken it to some stunted tree, that, finding itself prevented
from growth, bastes the more luxuriantly to put forth flowers and
fruit. For not the final but the medial processes were skipped.
In those superficial amenities with which we more particularly link
our idea of civilization, these peoples continued to grow. Their
refinement, if failing to reach our standard in certain respects,
surpasses ours considering the bare barbaric basis upon which it
rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as of the proverbial Russian,
though in a more scientific sense, that if you scratch him you will
find the ancestral Tartar. But it is no less true that the descendants
of this rude forefather have now taken on a polish of which their
own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection. The surface was
perfected after the substance was formed. Our word finish, with its
double meaning, expresses both the process and the result.

There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in
minds that lack originality--the spirit of imitation. Though
consequent enough upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait
appear anything but natural to people of a more progressive past.
The proverbial collar and pair of spurs look none the less odd to
the stranger for being a mental instead of a bodily habit. Something
akin to such a case of unnatural selection has there taken place.
The orderly procedure of natural evolution was disastrously
supplemented by man. For the fact that in the growth of their tree
of knowledge the branches developed out of all proportion to the
trunk is due to a practice of culture-grafting.

From before the time when they began to leave records of their
actions the Japanese have been a nation of importers, not of
merchandise, but of ideas. They have invariably shown the most
advanced free-trade spirit in preferring to take somebody else's
ready-made articles rather than to try to produce any brand-new
conceptions themselves. They continue to follow the same line of life.
A hearty appreciation of the things of others is still one of their
most winning traits. What they took they grafted bodily upon their
ancestral tree, which in consequence came to present a most
unnaturally diversified appearance. For though not unlike other
nations in wishing to borrow, if their zeal in the matter was
slightly excessive, they were peculiar in that they never assimilated
what they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existing
growth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by
that indigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally,
the foreign boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood,
nor was the tree in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with
it only as separable parts of its structure, the cuttings might have
been lopped off again without influencing perceptibly the condition
of the foster-parent stem. The grafts in time grew to be great
branches, but the trunk remained through it all the trunk of a
sapling. In other words, the nation grew up to man's estate, keeping
the mind of its childhood.

What is thus true of the Japanese is true likewise of the Koreans
and of the Chinese. The three peoples, indeed, form so many links in
one long chain of borrowing. China took from India, then Korea
copied China, and lastly Japan imitated Korea. In this simple manner
they successively became possessed of a civilization which originally
was not the property of any one of them. In the eagerness they all
evinced in purloining what was not theirs, and in the perfect
content with which they then proceeded to enjoy what they had taken,
they remind us forcibly of that happy-go-lucky class in the
community which prefers to live on questionable loans rather than
work itself for a living. Like those same individuals, whatever
interest the Far Eastern people may succeed in raising now, Nature
will in the end make them pay dearly for their lack of principal.

The Far Eastern civilization resembles, in fact, more a mechanical
mixture of social elements than a well differentiated chemical
compound. For in spite of the great variety of ingredients thrown
into its caldron of destiny, as no affinity existed between them, no
combination resulted. The power to fuse was wanting. Capability to
evolve anything is not one of the marked characteristics of the Far
East. Indeed, the tendency to spontaneous variation, Nature's mode
of making experiments, would seem there to have been an enterprising
faculty that was exhausted early. Sleepy, no doubt, from having got
up betimes with the dawn, these dwellers in the far lands of the
morning began to look upon their day as already well spent before
they had reached its noon. They grew old young, and have remained
much the same age ever since. What they were centuries ago, that at
bottom they are to-day. Take away the European influence of the
last twenty years, and each man might almost be his own
great-grandfather. In race characteristics he is yet essentially
the same. 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.

If we take, through the earth's temperate zone, a belt of country
whose northern and southern edges are determined by certain limiting
isotherms, not more than half the width of the zone apart, we shall
find that we have included in a relatively small extent of surface
almost all the nations of note in the world, past or present.
Now if we examine this belt, and compare the different parts of it
with one another, we shall be struck by a remarkable fact.
The peoples inhabiting it grow steadily more personal as we go west.
So unmistakable is this gradation of spirit, that one is tempted to
ascribe it to cosmic rather than to human causes. It is as marked
as the change in color of the human complexion observable along any
meridian, which ranges from black at the equator to blonde toward
the pole. In like manner, the sense of self grows more intense as
we follow in the wake of the setting sun, and fades steadily as we
advance into the dawn. America, Europe, the Levant, India, Japan,
each is less personal than the one before. We stand at the nearer
end of the scale, the Far Orientals at the other. If with us the I
seems to be of the very essence of the soul, then the soul of the
Far East may be said to be Impersonality.

Curious as this characteristic is as a fact, it is even more
interesting as a factor. For what it betokens of these peoples in
particular may suggest much about man generally. It may mark a
stride in theory, if a standstill in practice. Possibly it may help
us to some understanding of ourselves. Not that it promises much aid
to vexed metaphysical questions, but as a study in sociology it may
not prove so vain.

And for a thing which is always with us, its discussion may be said
to be peculiarly opportune just now. For it lies at the bottom of
the most pressing questions of the day. Of the two great problems
that stare the Western world in the face at the present moment, both
turn to it for solution. Agnosticism, the foreboding silence of
those who think, socialism, communism, and nihilism, the petulant
cry of those who do not, alike depend ultimately for the right to be
upon the truth or the falsity of the sense of self.

For if there be no such actual thing as individuality, if the
feeling we call by that name be naught but the transient illusion
the Buddhists would have us believe it, any faith founded upon it as
basis vanishes as does the picture in a revolving kaleidoscope,--
less enduring even than the flitting phantasmagoria of a dream.
If the ego be but the passing shadow of the material brain, at the
disintegration of the gray matter what will become of us? Shall we
simply lapse into an indistinguishable part of the vast universe
that compasses us round? At the thought we seem to stand straining
our gaze, on the shore of the great sea of knowledge, only to watch
the fog roll in, and hide from our view even those headlands of hope
that, like beseeching hands, stretch out into the deep.

So more materially. If individuality be a delusion of the mind, what
motive potent enough to excite endeavor in the breast of an ordinary
mortal remains? Philosophers, indeed, might still work for the
advancement of mankind, but mankind itself would not continue long
to labor energetically for what should profit only the common weal.
Take away the stimulus of individuality, and action is paralyzed at
once. For with most men the promptings of personal advantage only
afford sufficient incentive to effort. Destroy this force, then any
consideration due it lapses, and socialism is not only justified,
it is raised instantly into an axiom of life. The community, in that
case, becomes itself the unit, the indivisible atom of existence.
Socialism, then communism, then nihilism, follow in inevitable
sequence. That even the Far Oriental, with all his numbing
impersonality, has not touched this goal may at least suggest that
individuality is a fact.

But first, what do we know about its existence ourselves?

Very early in the course of every thoughtful childhood an event
takes place, by the side of which, to the child himself, all other
events sink into insignificance. It is not one that is recognized
and chronicled by the world, for it is wholly unconnected with
action. No one but the child is aware of its occurrence, and he
never speaks of it to others. Yet to that child it marks an epoch.
So intensely individual does it seem that the boy is afraid to avow
it, while in reality so universal is it that probably no human being
has escaped its influence. Though subjective purely, it has more
vividness than any external event; and though strictly intrinsic to
life, it is more startling than any accident of fate or fortune.
This experience of the boy's, at once so singular and yet so general,
is nothing less than the sudden revelation to him one day of the
fact of his own personality.

Somewhere about the time when sensation is giving place to
sensitiveness as the great self-educator, and the knowledge gained
by the five bodily senses is being fused into the wisdom of that
mental one we call common sense, the boy makes a discovery akin to
the act of waking up. All at once he becomes conscious of himself;
and the consciousness has about it a touch of the uncanny. Hitherto
he has been aware only of matter; he now first realizes mind.
Unwarned, unprepared, he is suddenly ushered before being, and
stands awe-struck in the presence of--himself.

If the introduction to his own identity was startling, there is
nothing reassuring in the feeling that this strange acquaintanceship
must last. For continue it does. It becomes an unsought intimacy he
cannot shake off. Like to his own shadow he cannot escape it.
To himself a man cannot but be at home. For years this alter ego
haunts him, for he imagines it an idiosyncrasy of his own, a morbid
peculiarity he dare not confide to any one, for fear of being
thought a fool. Not till long afterwards, when he has learned to
live as a matter of course with his ever-present ghost, does he
discover that others have had like familiars themselves.

Sometimes this dawn of consciousness is preceded by a long twilight
of soul-awakening; but sometimes, upon more sensitive and subtler
natures, the light breaks with all the suddenness of a sunrise at
the equator, revealing to the mind's eye an unsuspected world of
self within. But in whatever way we may awake to it, the sense of
personality, when first realized, appears already, like the fabled
Goddess of Wisdom, full grown in the brain. From the moment when we
first remember ourselves we seem to be as old as we ever seem to
others afterwards to become. We grow, indeed, in knowledge, in
wisdom, in experience, as our years increase, but deep down in our
heart of hearts we are still essentially the same. To be sure,
people pay us more deference than they did, which suggests a doubt
at times whether we may not have changed; small boys of a succeeding
generation treat us with a respect that causes us inwardly to smile,
as we think how little we differ from them, if they but knew it.
For at bottom we are not conscious of change from that morning, long
ago, when first we realized ourselves. We feel just as young now as
we felt old then. We are but amused at the world's discrimination
where we can detect no difference.

Every human being has been thus "twice born": once as matter, once
as mind. Nor is this second birth the birthright only of mankind.
All the higher animals probably, possibly even the lower too, have
experienced some such realization of individual identity. However
that may be, certainly to all races of men has come this revelation;
only the degree in which they have felt its force has differed
immensely. It is one thing to the apathetic, fatalistic Turk, and
quite another matter to an energetic, nervous American. Facts,
fancies, faiths, all show how wide is the variance in feelings.
With them no introspective [greek]cnzhi seauton overexcites the
consciousness of self. But with us; as with those of old possessed
of devils, it comes to startle and stays to distress. Too apt is it
to prove an ever-present, undesirable double. Too often does it
play the part of uninvited spectre at the feast, whose presence no
one save its unfortunate victim suspects. The haunting horror of
his own identity is to natures far less eccentric than Kenelm
Chillingly's only too common a curse. To this companionship,
paradoxical though it sound, is principally due the peculiar
loneliness of childhood. For nothing is so isolating as a
persistent idea which one dares not confide.

And yet,--stranger paradox still,--was there ever any one
willing to exchange his personality for another's? Who can imagine
foregoing his own self? Nay, do we not cling even to its outward
appearance? Is there a man so poor in all that man holds dear that
he does not keenly resent being accidentally mistaken for his
neighbor? Surely there must be something more than mirage in this
deep-implanted, widespread instinct of human race.

But however strong the conviction now of one's individuality, is
there aught to assure him of its continuance beyond the confines of
its present life? Will it awake on death's morrow and know itself,
or will it, like the body that gave it lodgment, disintegrate again
into indistinguishable spirit dust? Close upon the heels of the
existing consciousness of self treads the shadow-like doubt of its
hereafter. Will analogy help to answer the grewsome riddle of the
Sphinx? Are the laws we have learned to be true for matter true also
for mind? Matter we now know is indestructible; yet the form of it
with which we once were so fondly familiar vanishes never to return.
Is a like fate to be the lot of the soul? That mind should be
capable of annihilation is as inconceivable as that matter should
cease to be. Surely the spirit we feel existing round about us on
every side now has been from ever, and will be for ever to come.
But that portion of it which we each know as self, is it not like to a
drop of rain seen in its falling through the air? Indistinguishable
the particle was in the cloud whence it came; indistinguishable it
will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality
is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to
an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preached in the
past; so modem science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seems the
bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as
the fairest flower of their faith. What is dreaded now as the
impious suggestion of the godless four thousand years ago was
reverenced as a sacred tenet of religion.

Shorter even than his short threescore years and ten is that soul's
life of which man is directly cognizant. Bounded by two seemingly
impersonal states is the personal consciousness of which he is made
aware: the one the infantile existence that precedes his boyish
discovery, the other the gloom that grows with years,--two twilights
that fringe the two borders of his day. But with the Far Oriental,
life is all twilight. For in Japan and China both states are found
together. There, side by side with the present unconsciousness of
the babe exists the belief in a coming unconsciousness for the man.
So inseparably blended are the two that the known truth of the one
seems, for that very bond, to carry with it the credentials of the
other. Can it be that the personal, progressive West is wrong, and
the impersonal, impassive East right? Surely not. Is the other side
of the world in advance of us in mind-development, even as it
precedes us in the time of day; or just as our noon is its night,
may it not be far in our rear? Is not its seeming wisdom rather the
precociousness of what is destined never to go far?

Brought suddenly upon such a civilization, after the blankness of a
long ocean voyage, one is reminded instinctively of the feelings of
that bewildered individual who, after a dinner at which he had
eventually ceased to be himself, was by way of pleasantry left out
overnight in a graveyard, on their way home, by his humorously
inclined companions; and who, on awaking alone, in a still dubious
condition, looked around him in surprise, rubbed his eyes two or
three times to no purpose, and finally muttered in a tone of
awe-struck conviction, "Well, either I'm the first to rise, or I'm a
long way behind time!"

Whether their failure to follow the natural course of evolution
results in bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these
people are now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point
at which we all set out. They are still in that childish state of
development before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet
simplicity of nature. An impersonal race seems never to have fully
grown up.

Partly for its own sake, partly for ours, this most distinctive
feature of the Far East, its marked impersonality, is well worthy
particular attention; for while it collaterally suggests pregnant
thoughts about ourselves, it directly underlies the deeper oddities
of a civilization which is the modern eighth wonder of the world.
We shall see this as we look at what these people are, at what they
were, and at what they hope to become; not historically, but
psychologically, as one might perceive, were he but wise enough, in
an acorn, besides the nut itself, two oaks, that one from which it
fell, and that other which from it will rise. These three states,
which we may call its potential past, present, and future, may be
observed and studied in three special outgrowths of a race's
character: in its language, in its every-day thoughts, and in its
religion. For in the language of a people we find embalmed the
spirit of its past; in its every-day thoughts, be they of arts or
sciences, is wrapped up its present life; in its religion lie
enfolded its dreamings of a future. From out each of these three
subjects in the Far East impersonality stares us in the face.
Upon this quality as a foundation rests the Far Oriental character.
It is individually rather than nationally that I propose to scan it
now. It is the action of a particle in the wave of world-development
I would watch, rather than the propagation of the wave itself.
Inferences about the movement of the whole will follow of themselves
a knowledge of the motion of its parts.

But before we attack the subject esoterically, let us look a moment
at the man as he appears in his relation to the community. Such a
glance will suggest the peculiar atmosphere of impersonality that
pervades the people.

However lacking in cleverness, in merit, or in imagination a man may
be, there are in our Western world, if his existence there be so
much as noticed at all, three occasions on which he appears in print.
His birth, his marriage, and his death are all duly chronicled in
type, perhaps as sufficiently typical of the general unimportance of
his life. Mention of one's birth, it is true, is an aristocratic
privilege, confined to the world of English society. In democratic
America, no doubt because all men there are supposed to be born free
and equal, we ignore the first event, and mention only the last two
episodes, about which our national astuteness asserts no such
effacing equality.

Accepting our newspaper record as a fair enough summary of the
biography of an average man, let us look at these three momentous
occasions in the career of a Far Oriental.

Chapter 2. Family.

In the first place, then, the poor little Japanese baby is ushered
into this world in a sadly impersonal manner, for he is not even
accorded the distinction of a birthday. He is permitted instead
only the much less special honor of a birth-year. Not that he
begins his separate existence otherwise than is the custom of
mortals generally, at a definite instant of time, but that very
little subsequent notice is ever taken of the fact. On the contrary,
from the moment he makes his appearance he is spoken of as a year
old, and this same age he continues to be considered in most simple
ease of calculation, till the beginning of the next calendar year.
When that epoch of general rejoicing arrives, he is credited with
another year himself. So is everybody else. New Year's day is a
common birthday for the community, a sort of impersonal anniversary
for his whole world. A like reckoning is followed in China and
Korea. Upon the disadvantages of being considered from one's birth
up at least one year and possibly two older than one really is,
it lies beyond our present purpose to expatiate. It is quite evident
that woman has had no voice in the framing of such a chronology.
One would hardly imagine that man had either, so astronomic is the
system. A communistic age is however but an unavoidable detail of
the general scheme whose most suggestive feature consists in the
subordination of the actual birthday of the individual to the
fictitious birthday of the community. For it is not so much the
want of commemoration shown the subject as the character of the
commemoration which is significant. Some slight notice is indeed
paid to birthdays during early childhood, but even then their
observance is quite secondary in importance to that of the great
impersonal anniversaries of the third day of the third moon and the
fifth day of the fifth moon. These two occasions celebrated the
coming of humanity into the world with an impersonality worthy of
the French revolutionary calendar. The first of them is called the
festival of girls, and commemorates the birth of girls generally,
the advent of the universal feminine, as one may say. The second is
a corresponding anniversary for boys. Owing to its sex, the latter
is the greater event of the two, and in consequence of its most
conspicuous feature is styled the festival of fishes. The fishes
are hollow paper images of the "tai" from four to six feet in length,
tied to the top of a long pole planted in the ground and tipped with
a gilded ball. Holes in the paper at the mouth and the tail enable
the wind to inflate the body so that it floats about horizontally,
swaying hither and thither, and tugging at the line after the manner
of a living thing. The fish are emblems of good luck, and are set
up in the courtyard of every house where a son has been born during
the year. On this auspicious day Tokio is suddenly transformed into
eighty square miles of aquarium.

For any more personal purpose New Year's day eclipses all particular
anniversaries. Then everybody congratulates everybody else upon
everything in general, and incidentally upon being alive. Such
substitution of an abstract for a concrete birthday, although
exceedingly convenient for others, must at least conduce to
self-forgetfulness on the part of its proper possessor, and tend
inevitably to merge the identity of the individual in that of the
community.

It fares hardly better with the Far Oriental in the matter of marriage.
Although he is, as we might think, the person most interested in the
result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact,
it is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply
made a cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction,
entered into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage
brokers. In it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge
for being thus bartered out of what might be the better half of his
life, he takes eventually on the next succeeding generation.

His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
begin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to
these people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of
much more individual distinction. Particularly is this the case in
China and Korea, but the same respect, though in a somewhat less
rigid form, is paid the dead in Japan. Then at last the individual
receives that recognition which was denied him in the flesh.
In Japan a mortuary tablet is set up to him in the house and duly
worshipped; on the continent the ancestors are given a dwelling of
their own, and even more devotedly reverenced. But in both places
the cult is anything but funereal. For the ancestral tombs are
temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not
simply to rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general
jollification. And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still
half as sentient as his dutiful descendants suppose, that his
earthly life, like other approved comedies, has ended well.

Important, however, as these critical points in his career may be
reckoned by his relatives, they are scarcely calculated to prove
equally epochal to the man himself. In a community where next to no
note is ever taken of the anniversary of his birth, some doubt as to
the special significance of that red-letter day may not unnaturally
creep into his own mind. While in regard to his death, although it
may be highly flattering for him to know that he will certainly
become somebody when he shall have ceased, practically, to be anybody,
such tardy recognition is scarcely timely enough to be properly
appreciated. Human nature is so earth-tied, after all, that a
post-mundane existence is very apt to seem immaterial as well as be so.

With the old familiar landmarks of life obliterated in this
wholesale manner, it is to be doubted whether one of us, placed in
the midst of such a civilization, would know himself. He certainly
would derive but scanty satisfaction from the recognition if he did.
Even Nirvana might seem a happy limbo by comparison. With a communal,
not to say a cosmic, birthday, and a conventional wife, he might
well deem his separate existence the shadow of a shade and embrace
Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.

Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life
presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what
it seems to us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of
socio-biology, if one may so express it.

In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence,
is not the individual, but the family.

We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our
pretensions so prominently as sometimes to tread on other people's
prejudices of a like nature. Yet we scarcely seem to appreciate the
inheritance. For with a logic which does us questionable credit, we
are proud of our ancestors in direct proportion to their remoteness
from ourselves, thus permitting Democracy to revenge its
insignificance by smiling at our self-imposed satire. To esteem a
man in inverse ratio to the amount of remarkable blood he has
inherited is, to say the least, bathetic. Others, again, make
themselves objectionable by preferring their immediate relatives to
all less connected companions, and cling to their cousins so closely
that affection often culminates in matrimony, nature's remonstrances
notwithstanding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take
in the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really
springs from viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social
system. In our own eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's
dream, our relatives revolve and upon which they help to shed an
added lustre. Our Ptolemaic theory of society is necessitated by our
tenacity to the personal standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes
all else seemingly to rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception
is quite foreign to our longitudinal antipodes. However much
appearances may agree, the fundamental principles upon which family
consideration is based are widely different in the two hemispheres.
For the far-eastern social universe turns on a patricentric pivot.

Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit
depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat
modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of
their less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic
continent. From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in
his hovel it is the idea of kinship that knits the entire body
politic together. The Empire is one great family; the family is a
little empire.

The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well
known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All
nations may be said to have experienced such a paternal government,
but most nations outgrew it.

Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is,
not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;
that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages.
It is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern
is constantly changing as time merges one combination of its
elements into another, that on the other side of the globe this set
should have remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years,
in spite of the altered conditions of existence, in spite of an
immense advance in civilization, such a primitive state of society
has continued there to the present day, in all its essentials what
it was when as nomads the race forefathers wandered peacefully or
otherwise over the plains of Central Asia. The principle helped
them to expand; it has simply cramped them ever since. For, instead
of dissolving like other antiquated views, it has become, what it
was bound to become if it continued to last, crystallized into an
institution. It had practically reached this condition when it
received a theoretical, not to say a theological recognition which
gave it mundane immortality. A couple of millenniums ago Confucius
consecrated filial duty by making it the basis of the Chinese moral
code. His hand was the finishing touch of fossilification.
For since the sage set his seal upon the system no one has so much
as dreamt of changing it. The idea of confuting Confucius would be
an act of impiety such as no Chinaman could possibly commit. Not
that the inadmissibility of argument is due really to the authority
of the philosopher, but that it lies ingrained in the character of
the people. Indeed the genius of the one may be said to have
consisted in divining the genius of the other. Confucius formulated
the prevailing practice, and in so doing helped to make it perpetual.
He gave expression to the national feeling, and like expressions,
generally his, served to stamp the idea all the more indelibly upon
the national consciousness.

In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life
became fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of
mutual advantage hardened into restrictions by which the young were
hopelessly tethered to the old. Midway in its course the race
undertook to turn round and face backwards, as it journeyed on.
Its subsequent advance could be nothing but slow.

The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense.
From him emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts.
Any other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as
is the hand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian
doctors of divinity might appropriately administer psychically to
the egoistic the rebuke of the Western physician to the too
self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion
failed to give him what he considered its proper sensations, had
come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel. "Feel! young
man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you have a
digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word
"own," which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol
of possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes
the most conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights.
A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to
the land he tills is vested absolutely in the family, of which he is
an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even the administration of the
property is not his, but resides in the family, represented by its
head. The outward symbols of ownership testify to the fact.
The bourns that mark the boundaries of the fields bear the names of
families, not of individuals. The family, as such, is the proprietor,
and its lands are cultivated and enjoyed in common by all the
constituents of the clan. In the tenure of its real estate, the
Chinese family much resembles the Russian Mir. But so far as his
personal state is concerned, the Chinese son outslaves the Slav.
For he lives at home, under the immediate control of the paternal
will--in the most complete of serfdoms, a filial one. Even existence
becomes a communal affair. From the family mansion, or set of
mansions, in which all its members dwell, to the family mausoleum,
to which they will all eventually be borne, a man makes his life
journey in strict company with his kin.

A man's life is thus but an undivisible fraction of the family life.
How essentially so will appear from the following slight sketch of it.

To begin at the beginning, his birth is a very important event--for
the household, at which no one fails to rejoice except the new-comer.
He cries. The general joy, however, depends somewhat upon his 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. The reason for the invidious
distinction in the matter of sex lies of course in an inordinate
desire for the perpetuation of the family line. The unfortunate
infant is regarded merely in the light of a possible progenitor.
A boy is already potentially a father; whereas a girl, if she marry
at all, is bound to marry out of her own family into another, and is
relatively lost. The full force of the deprivation is, however,
to some degree tempered by the almost infinite possibilities of
adoption. Daughters are, therefore, not utterly unmitigable evils.

From the privacy of the domestic circle, the infant's entrance into
public life is performed pick-a-back. Strapped securely to the
shoulders of a slightly older sister, out he goes, consigned to the
tender mercies of a being who is scarcely more than a baby herself.
The diminutiveness of the nurse-perambulators is the most surprising
part of the performance. The tiniest of tots may be seen thus
toddling round with burdens half their own size. Like the dot upon
the little i, the baby's head seems a natural part of their childish
ego.

An economy of the kind in the matter of nurses is highly suggestive.
That it should be practicable thus to entrust one infant to another
proves the precociousness of children. But this surprising maturity
of the young implies by a law too well known to need explanation,
the consequent immaturity of the race. That which has less to grow
up to, naturally grows up to its limit sooner. It may even be
questioned whether it does not do so with the more haste; on the
same principle that a runner who has less distance to travel not
only accomplishes his course quicker, but moves with relatively
greater speed, or as a small planet grows old not simply sooner, but
comparatively faster than a larger one. Jupiter is still in his
fiery youth, while the moon is senile in decrepid old age, and yet
his separate existence began long before hers. Either hypothesis
will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race,
and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful
nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present
precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her
sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little
head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most
distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the
proceedings.

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home
life consists of attentive subordination. The relation his
obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps
sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on
the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor
thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same
injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.
To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to
the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he
is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his
only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping
from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of
domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be remembered, was
for his father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife.
He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the
greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a
monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be
otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree
of patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically
divine. This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the
individual, as it has never been outgrown by the race.

Our boy now begins to go to school; to a day school, it need hardly
be specified, for a boarding school would be entirely out of keeping
with the family life. Here, he is given the "Trimetrical Classic"
to start on, that he may learn the characters by heart, picking up
incidentally what ideas he may. This book is followed by the
"Century of Surnames," a catalogue of all the clan names in China,
studied like the last for the sake of the characters, although the
suggestion of the importance of the family contained in it is
probably not lost upon his youthful mind. Next comes the "Thousand
Character Classic," a wonderful epic as a feat of skill, for of the
thousand characters which it contains not a single one is repeated,
an absence of tautology not properly appreciated by the enforced
reader. Reminiscences of our own school days vividly depict the
consequent disgust, instead of admiration, of the boy. Three more
books succeed these first volumes, differing from one another in
form, but in substance singularly alike, treating, as they all do,
of history and ethics combined. For tales and morals are
inseparably associated by pious antiquity. Indeed, the past would
seem to have lived with special reference to the edification of the
future. Chinamen were abnormally virtuous in those golden days,
barring the few unfortunates whom fate needed as warning examples of
depravity for succeeding ages. Except for the fact that instruction
as to a future life forms no part of the curriculum, a far-eastern
education may be said to consist of Sunday-school every day in the
week. For no occasion is lost by the erudite authors, even in the
most worldly portions of their work, for preaching a slight homily
on the subject in hand. The dictum of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
that "history is philosophy teaching by example" would seem there to
have become modified into "history is filiosophy teaching by
example." For in the instructive anecdotes every other form of merit
is depicted as second to that of being a dutiful son. To the
practice of that supreme virtue all other considerations are
sacrificed. The student's aim is thus kept single. At every turn
of the leaves, paragons of filial piety shame the youthful reader to
the pitch of emulation by the epitaphic records of their deeds.
Portraits of the past, possibly colored, present that estimable
trait in so exalted a type that to any less filial a people they
would simply deter competition. Yet the boy implicitly believes and
no doubt resolves to rival what he reads. A specimen or two will
amply suggest the rest. In one tale the hero is held up to the
unqualified admiration of posterity for having starved to death his
son, in an extreme case of family destitution, for the sake of
providing food enough for his aged father. In another he
unhesitatingly divorces his wife for having dared to poke fun, in
the shape of bodkins, at some wooden effigies of his parents which
he had had set up in the house for daily devotional contemplation.
Finally another paragon actually sells himself in perpetuity as a
slave that he may thus procure the wherewithal to bury with due
honor his anything but worthy progenitor, who had first cheated his
neighbors and then squandered his ill-gotten gains in riotous living.
Of these tales, as of certain questionable novels in a slightly
different line, the eventual moral is considered quite competent to
redeem the general immorality of the plot.

Along such a curriculum the youthful Chinaman is made to run.
A very similar system prevails in Japan, the difference between the
two consisting in quantity rather than quality. The books in the
two cases are much the same, and the amount read differs surprisingly
little when we consider that in the one case it is his own classics
the student is reading, in the other the Chinaman's.

If he belong to the middle class, as soon as his schooling 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.
Why should he adopt another line of business? And, if he did, what
other business should he adopt? Is his father's occupation not
already there, a part of the existing order of things; and is he not
the son of his father and heir therefore of the paternal skill?
Not that such inherited aptness is recognized scientifically; it is
simply taken for granted instinctively. It is but a halfhearted
intuition, however, for the possibility of an inheritance from the
mother's side is as out of the question as if her severance from her
own family had an ex post facto effect. As for his individual
predilection in the matter, nature has considerately conformed to
custom by giving him none. He becomes a cabinet-maker, for instance,
because his ancestors always have been cabinet-makers. He inherits
the family business as a necessary part of the family name. He is
born to his trade, not naturally selected because of his fitness for it.
But he usually is amply qualified for the position, for generations
of practice, if only on one side of the house, accumulate a vast
deal of technical skill. The result of this system of clan guilds
in all branches of industry is sufficiently noticeable. The almost
infinite superiority of Japanese artisans over their European
fellow-craftsmen is world-known. On the other hand the tendency of
the occupation in the abstract to swallow up the individual in the
concrete is as evident to theory as it is patent in practice.
Eventually the man is lost in the manner. The very names of trades
express the fact. The Japanese word for cabinet-maker, for example,
means literally cutting-thing-house, and is now applied as
distinctively to the man as to his shop. Nominally as well as
practically the youthful Japanese artisan makes his introduction to
the world, much after the manner of the hero of Lecocq's comic
opera, the son of the house of Marasquin et Cie.

If instead of belonging to the lower middle class our typical youth
be born of bluer blood, or if he be filled with the same desires as
if he were so descended, he becomes a student. Having failed to
discover in the school-room the futility of his country's
self-vaunted learning, he proceeds to devote his life to its
pursuit. With an application which is eminently praiseworthy, even
if its object be not, he sets to work to steep himself in the
classics till he can perceive no merit in anything else. As might
be suspected, he ends by discovering in the sayings of the past more
meaning than the simple past ever dreamed of putting there.
He becomes more Confucian than Confucius. Indeed, it is fortunate
for the reputation of the sage that he cannot return to earth, for
he might disagree to his detriment with his own commentators.

Such is the state of things in China and Korea. Learning, however,
is not dependent solely on individual interest for its wonderfully
flourishing condition in the Middle Kingdom, for the government
abets the practice to its utmost. It is itself the supreme sanction,
for its posts are the prizes of proficiency. Through the study of
the classics lies the only entrance to political power. To become a
mandarin one must have passed a series of competitive examinations
on these very subjects, and competition in this impersonal field is
most keen. For while popular enthusiasm for philosophy for
philosophy's sake might, among any people, eventually show symptoms
of fatigue, it is not likely to flag where the outcome of it is so
substantial. Erudition carries there all earthly emoluments in its
train. For the man who can write the most scholastic essay on the
classics is forthwith permitted to amass much honor and more wealth
by wronging his less accomplished fellow-citizens. China is a
student's paradise where the possession of learning is instantly
convertible into unlimited pelf.

In Japan the study of the classics was never pursued professionally.
It was, however, prosecuted with much zeal en amateur. The Chinese
bureaucratic system has been wanting. For in spite of her students,
until within thirty years Japan slumbered still in the Knight-time
of the Middle Ages, and so long as a man carried about with him
continually two beautiful swords he felt it incumbent upon him to
use them. The happy days of knight-errantry have passed. These
same cavaliers of Samurai are now thankful to police the streets in
spectacles necessitated by the too diligent study of German text,
and arrest chance disturbers of the public peace for a miserably
small salary per month.

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?

Mere physical attraction is another matter. Corporeally considered,
men not infrequently fall in love with their opposites, the
phenomenally tall with the painfully short, the unnecessarily stout
with the distressingly slender. But even such inartistic
juxtapositions are much less common than we are apt at times to
think. For it must never be forgotten that the exceptional
character of the phenomena renders them conspicuous, the customary
more consorted combinations failing to excite attention.

Besides, there exists a reason for physical incongruity which does
not hold psychically. Nature sanctions the one while she
discountenances the other. Instead of the forethought she once
bestowed upon the body, it receives at her hands now but the
scantiest attention. Its development has ceased to be an object
with her. For some time past almost all her care has been devoted
to the evolution of the soul. The consequence is that physically
man is much less specialized than many other animals. In other
words, he is bodily less advanced in the race for competitive
extermination. He belongs to an antiquated, inefficient type of
mammal. His organism is still of the jack-of-all-trades pattern,
such as prevailed generally in the more youthful stages of organic
life--one not specially suited to any particular pursuit. Were it
not for his cerebral convolutions he could not compete for an
instant in the struggle for existence, and even the monkey would
reign in his stead. But brain is more effective than biceps, and a
being who can kill his opponent farther off than he can see him
evidently needs no great excellence of body to survive his foe.

The field of competition has thus been transferred from matter to
mind, but the fight has lost none of its keenness in consequence.
With the same zeal with which advantageous anatomical variations
were seized upon and perpetuated, psychical ones are now grasped and
rendered hereditary. Now if opposites were to fancy and wed one
another, such fortunate improvements would soon be lost. They would
be scattered over the community at large even it they escaped entire
neutralization. To prevent so disastrous a result nature implants a
desire for resemblance, which desire man instinctively acts upon.

Complete compatibility of temperament is of course a thing not to be
expected nor indeed to be desired, since it would defeat its own end
by allowing no room for variation. A fairly broad basis of agreement,
however, exists even when least suspected. This common ground of
content consists of those qualities held to be most essential by the
individuals concerned, although not necessarily so appearing to
other people. Sometimes, indeed, these qualities are still in the
larvae state of desires. They are none the less potent upon the
man's personality on that account, for the wish is always father to
its own fulfilment.

The want of conjugal resemblance not only works mediately on the
child, it works mutually on the parents; for companionship, as is
well recognized, tends to similarity. Now companionship is the last
thing to be looked for in a far-eastern couple. Where custom
requires a wife to follow dutifully in the wake of her husband,
whenever the two go out together, there is small opportunity for
intercourse by the way, even were there the slightest inclination to
it, which there is not. The appearance of the pair on an excursion
is a walking satire on sociability, for the comicality of the
connection is quite unperceived by the performers. In the privacy
of the domestic circle the separation, if less humorous, is no less
complete. Each lives in a world of his own, largely separate in
fact in China and Korea, and none the less in fancy in Japan.
On the continent a friend of the husband would see little or nothing
of the wife, and even in Japan he would meet her much as we meet an
upper servant in a friend's house. Such a semi-attached
relationship does not conduce to much mutual understanding.

The remainder of our hero's uneventful existence calls for no
particular comment. As soon as he has children borne him he is
raised ipso facto from the position of a common soldier to that of
a subordinate officer in the family ranks. But his opportunities
for the expression of individuality are not one whit increased.
He has simply advanced a peg in a regular hierarchy of subjection.
From being looked after himself he proceeds to look after others.
Such is the extent of the change. Even should he chance to be the
eldest son of the eldest son, and thus eventually end by becoming
the head of the family, he cannot consistently consider himself.
There is absolutely no place in his social cosmos for so particular
a thing as the ego.

With a certain grim humor suggestive of metaphysics, it may be said
of his whole life that it is nothing but a relative affair after
all.

Chapter 3. Adoption.

But one may go a step farther in this matter of the family, and by
so doing fare still worse with respect to individuality. There are
certain customs in vogue among these peoples which would seem to
indicate that even so generic a thing as the family is too personal
to serve them for ultimate social atom, and that in fact it is only
the idea of the family that is really important, a case of
abstraction of an abstract. These suggestive customs are the
far-eastern practices of adoption and abdication.

Adoption, with us, is a kind of domestic luxury, akin to the keeping
of any other pets, such as lap-dogs and canaries. It is a species
of self-indulgence which those who can afford it give themselves
when fortune has proved unpropitious, an artificial method of
counteracting the inequalities of fate. That such is the plain
unglamoured view of the procedure is shown by the age at which the
object is adopted. Usually the future son or daughter enters the
adoptive household as an infant, intentionally so on the part of the
would-be parents. His ignorance of a previous relationship largely
increases his relative value; for the possibility of his making
comparisons in his own mind between a former state of existence and
the present one unfavorable to the latter is not pleasant for the
adopters to contemplate. He is therefore acquired young. The
amusement derived from his company is thus seen to be distinctly
paramount to all other considerations. No one cares so heartily to
own a dog which has been the property of another; a fortiori of a
child. It is clearly, then, not as a necessity that the babe is
adopted. If such were the case, if like the ancient Romans all a
man wanted was the continuance of the family line, he would
naturally wait until the last practicable moment; for he would thus
save both care and expense. In the Far East adoption is quite a
different affair. There it is a genealogical necessity--like having
a father or mother. It is, indeed, of almost more importance.
For the great desideratum to these peoples is not ancestors but
descendants. Pedigrees in the land of the universal opposite are not
matters of bequest but of posthumous reversion. A man is not
beholden to the past, he looks forward to the future for inherited
honors. No fame attaches to him for having had an illustrious
grandfather. On the contrary, it is the illustrious grandson who
reflects some of his own greatness back upon his grandfather. If a
man therefore fail to attain eminence himself, he always has another
chance in his descendants; for he will of necessity be ennobled
through the merits of those who succeed him. Such is the immemorial
law of the land. Fame is retroactive. This admirable system has
only one objection: it is posthumous in its effect. An ambitious
man who unfortunately lacks ability himself has to wait too long for
vicarious recognition. The objection is like that incident to the
making of a country seat out of a treeless plain by planting the
same with saplings. About the time the trees begin to be worth
having the proprietary landscape-gardener dies of old age. However,
as custom permits a Far Oriental no ancestral growth of timber,
he is obliged to lay the seeds of his own family trees. Natural
offspring are on the whole easier to get, and more satisfactory when
got. Hence the haste with which these peoples rush into matrimony.
If in despite of his precipitation fate perversely refuse to grant
him children, he must endeavor to make good the omission by
artificial means. He proceeds to adopt somebody. True to instinct,
he chooses from preference a collateral relative. In some far-eastern
lands he must so restrict himself by law. In Korea, for instance,
he can only adopt an agnate and one of a lower generation than his own.
But in Japan his choice is not so limited. In so praiseworthy an
act as the perpetuation of his unimportant family line, it is deemed
unwise in that progressive land to hinder him from unconsciously
bettering it by the way. He is consequently permitted to adopt
anybody. As people are by no means averse to being adopted, the
power to adopt whom he will gives him more voice in the matter of
his unnatural offspring than he ever had in the selection of a more
natural one.

The adopted changes his name, of course, to take that of the family
he enters. As he is very frequently grown up and extensively known
at the time the adoption takes place, his change of cognomen
occasions at first some slight confusion among his acquaintance.
This would be no worse, however, than the change with us from the
maid to the matron, and intercourse would soon proceed smoothly
again if people would only rest content with one such domestic
migration. But they do not. The fatal facility of the process
tempts them to repeat it. The result is bewildering: a people as
nomadic now in the property of their persons as their forefathers
were in their real estate. A man adopts another to-day to unadopt
him to-morrow and replace him by somebody else the day after.
So profoundly unimportant to them is their social identity, that they
bandy it about with almost farcical freedom. Perhaps it is fitting
that there should be some slight preparation in this world for a
future transmigration of souls. Still one fails to conceive that
the practice can be devoid of disadvantages even to its beneficiaries.
To foreigners it proves disastrously perplexing. For if you chance
upon a man whom you have not met for some time, you can never be
quite sure how to accost him. If you begin, "Well met, Green, how
goes it?" as likely as not he replies, "Finely. But I am no longer
Green; I have become Brown. I was adopted last month by my maternal
grandfather." You of course apologize for your unfortunate mistake,
carefully note his change of hue for a future occasion, and behold,
on meeting him the next time you find he has turned Black. Such a
chameleon-like cognomen is very unsettling to your idea of his
identity, and can hardly prove reassuring to his own. The only
persons who reap any benefit from the doubt are those, with us
unhappy, individuals who possess the futile faculty of remembering
faces without recalling their accompanying names.

Girls, as a rule, are not adopted, being valueless genealogically.
A niece or grandniece to whom one has taken a great fancy might of
course be adopted there as elsewhere, but it would be distinctly out
of the every-day run, as she could never be included in the
household on strict business principles.

The practice of adopting is not confined to childless couples.
Others may find themselves in quite as unfortunate a predicament.
A man may be the father of a large and thriving family and yet be as
destitute patriarchally as if he had not a child to his name.
His offspring may be of the wrong sex; they may all be girls.
In this untoward event the father has something more on his hands
than merely a houseful of daughters to dispose of. In addition to
securing sons-in-law, he must, unless he would have his ancestral
line become extinct, provide himself with a son. The simplest
procedure in such a case is to combine relationships in a single
individual, and the most self-evident person to select for the dual
capacity is the husband of the eldest daughter. This is the course
pursued. Some worthy young man is secured as spouse for the senior
sister; he is at the same time formally taken in as a son by the
family whose cognomen he assumes, and eventually becomes the head of
the house. Strange to say, this vista of gradually unfolding honors
does not seem to prove inviting. Perhaps the new-comer objects to
marrying the whole family, a prejudice not without parallel
elsewhere. Certainly the opportunity is not appreciated. Indeed,
to "go out as a son-in-law," as the Japanese idiom hath it, is
considered demeaning to the matrimonial domestic. Like other
household help he wears too patently the badge of servitude.
"If you have three koku of rice to your name, don't do it," is the
advice of the local proverb--a proverb whose warning against
marrying for money is the more suggestive for being launched in a
land where marrying for love is beyond the pale of respectability.
To barter one's name in this mercenary manner is looked upon as
derogatory to one's self-respect, although, as we have seen, to part
with it for any less direct remuneration is not attended with the
slightest loss of personal prestige. As practically the unfortunate
had none to lose in either event, it would seem to be a case of
taking away from a man that which he hath not. So contumacious a
thing is custom. It is indeed lucky that popular prejudice
interposes some limit to this fictitious method of acquiring
children. A trifling predilection for the real thing in sonships is
absolutely vital, even to the continuance of the artificial variety.
For if one generation ever went in exclusively for adoption, there
would be no subsequent generation to adopt.

As it to give the finishing touch to so conventional a system of
society, a man can leave it under certain circumstances with even
greater ease than he entered it. He can become as good as dead
without the necessity of making way with himself. Theoretically, he
can cease to live while still practically existing; for it is always
open to the head of a family to abdicate.

The word abdicate has to our ears a certain regal sound.
We instinctively associate the act with a king. Even the more
democratic expression resign suggests at once an office of public or
quasi public character. To talk of abdicating one's private
relationships sounds absurd; one might as well talk of electing his
parents, it would seem to us. Such misunderstanding of far-eastern
social possibilities comes from our having indulged in digressions
from our more simple nomadic habits. If in imagination we will
return to our ancestral muttons and the then existing order of
things, the idea will not strike us as so strange; for in those
early bucolic days every father was a king. Family economics were
the only political questions in existence then. The clan was the
unit. Domestic disputes were state disturbances, and clan-claims
the only kind of international quarrels. The patriarch was both
father to his people and king.

As time widened the family circle it eventually reached a point
where cohesion ceased to be possible. The centrifugal tendency
could no longer be controlled by the centripetal force. It split up
into separate bodies, each of them a family by itself. In their
turn these again divided, and so the process went on. This
principle has worked universally, the only difference in its action
among different races being the greater or less degree of the
evolving motion. With us the social system has been turning more
and more rapidly with time. In the Far East its force, instead of
increasing, would seem to have decreased, enabling the nebula of its
original condition to keep together as a single mass, so that to-day
a whole nation, resembling a nebula indeed in homogeneity, is swayed
by a single patriarchal principle. Here, on the contrary, so rapid
has the motion become that even brethren find <a href="http://www.selfkno