beneath. For it is not rules that make the character, but character that makes the rules. No energetic mind could be bound by so exquisitely exacting an etiquette." (Percival Lowell, in Occult Japan.}
"We should say … that the most striking quality of the Japanese is precocity, that the keenness of their perceptions is far in advance of the soundness of their judgments, that their minds, or rather the minds of their leading classes, are always on the rush, that they receive ideas and lay aside ideas much as acute youngsters do … The Japanese upper class strike us, in fact, as the undergraduates of the human family, clever, enjoying, and full of 'go,' but as yet immature … They love change for the sake of change, take up ideas because they are startling to their seniors or to their Government or to themselves, and suffer none of them to really dye their minds with any permanent colour … They are open to all teachings, which, however, go about one inch deep … They devise a constitution which does not work, except so far as it is sustained by the old fact of the Mikado's authority; they start a press which discusses everything in the spirit of an undergraduate's wine-party; they even adopt a new costume and live in constricting uniforms before the majority have given up the habit of living in a loin-cloth … [The Japanese] has an enormous respect for the words of ancient philosophers and European writers, will quote them, as our countrymen quote proverbs, as if they ended discussion; but he does not all the while absorb this wisdom, and will pass from believing in, say, St. Augustine, to believing in, say, Mr. Grant Allen at a bound, and with no sense that he is exhibiting volatility of intellect." (From an article in the Spectator of the 5th December, 1896, founded on numerous appreciations forwarded by a twenty years resident.)
Pierre Loti, in his Madame Chrysanthème and Japoneries d'Automne, emphasises over and over again one particular aspect of Japanese life—its smallness, its quaintness, its comicality. Here are just a few samples of the adjectives which he sows broadcast
