INTRODUCTION

Since the days of Latin, to how few authors has itbeen given to obtain an European reputation!

We English seem exceptionally slow in making ourselvesacquainted with the works of foreigners. Danteand Cervantes, Goethe and Dumas, are perhaps noworse known among us than they are in their homes;but we seldom find out a modern writer till he has beenthe round of all the other countries. We are opinionatedin England. We think other folk barbarians, evenif we don't call them so; we visit them for the makingof comparisons, generally in our own favour; of tryingtheir manners and customs, arts and morals, not bytheir standard but by ours. We never forget that onthe map of Europe there is the big continent, and awayin a corner, by themselves, extraneous, cut off, and"very superior," physically and morally isolated andself-contained, are our two not over enormous islands.We don't regret that sea-voyage, literal and metaphorical,which is necessary to transport us to the landsof the barbarians; and though we travel a great deal, Ideclare I think we all (and especially newspaper correspondents)go about enclosed in a little bubble of ourown foggy atmosphere, seeing only the things we intendto see, hearing the things we mean to hear, and already[iv]believe. We are poor linguists moreover, and when wetalk with the barbarians we only catch half they sayand omit all attention to what they hint; we frightenthem by our abruptness, our unintentional hortatorinessand unconscious conceit, so that they don't say to uswhat they mean, nor tell what they suppose to be true.We come home swollen with false report and evilsurmise, and at once commit ourselves to criticism andlaudation equally beside the mark. I wonder now dowe really understand the errors of Abdul Hamed andNicholas II as thoroughly as we think we do? and inour long glibness about the Dreyfus case has it neveroccurred to us we may have been partly deluded?—asthe barbarians were deluded when they chattered of usin the time of the Boer War!

Well, we can't help our position in the far-awaycorner of the map; but perhaps we should become lessodd and more sympathetic if we read the barbarian'sbooks a little oftener; books in which he is talking tohis brother barbarians, and has not been questioned byan island catechist; books, superior or inferior to ourown it matters little, which at least are written fromanother standpoint, and which by their mere perusalmust extend our knowledge, and remind us that "ittakes all sorts to make a world."

The best way, of course, is to read foreign books intheir original language. Don Quixote was right whenhe said translation

BU KİTABI OKUMAK İÇİN ÜYE OLUN VEYA GİRİŞ YAPIN!

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