Foreigner

“ A Foreigner therefore can form a solid Judgment of none but those with whom he is conversant; and if he has the good luck to pitch his Tent well, he entertains an advantageous Opinion of the Nation in general. Let Foreigners, when they return home, after having kept such various sorts of Company, sit down to draw the Characters of the Nations they have seen, I do but think what a strange difference would appear in their Descriptions! ”

“ If you will attempt to compel the foreigner to do something similar, he may learn how to tell you in plain English what he thinks of you, but then your purpose may be spoiled. And remember, gentlemen, that if the foreigner will be docile and willing and will see his best interest in becoming speedily americanized, that he can hardly do it in any other way except by imitating you and your ways in order to produce the golden American amalgam, and utimately you will be able to see yourself in him like in a mirror. ”

“ The country-folk gaze wonderingly at the foreigner. At various places where we halt, old men approach to touch my clothes, apologising with humble bows and winning smiles for their very natural curiosity, and asking my interpreter all sorts of odd questions. ”

“ Whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say that ‘he looks like an Englishman,’ or that ‘it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman,’ and when they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner they ask him whether such a thing is made in his country. ”

“ They point over to the foreigner, the clean-stepping, braced, self-confident foreigner, good at arms, good at the arts, and eclipsing us in industriousness manual and mental, and some dare to say, in splendour of verse=-our supreme accomplishment. ”

“ Wherever we have a place, a foreigner can find a cheery and sincere welcome. This custom, coeval with our national birth, has grown and developed until the Americans are acclaimed the most hospitable people on the face of the earth. ”

“ Also, if he be selected by his country as a specimen of the best moral, physical, and intellectual type that she can produce for the astounding of the effete foreigner, and incidentally for the purpose of raising that foreigner’s tone, he must—mustn’t he?—do his best to astound, to exalt. ”

“ The foreigner, as an object of curiosity, creates about him, as a matter of course, huge crowds of obstreperous boys and wonder seekers,—but they are not vicious, and give vent to no such obscene and insulting expressions as are continually heard in the south. ”

“ The foreigner finds one of his senses rudely assailed at times, though, as to that matter, he may go into one of the most refined cities of America, and, with the exception of a few summer months, encounter the same discomforts. ”

“ Do you think that the only distressed foreigners are the people who want to give lessons, or get orders for wine and cigars, the poor governesses, the demoiselles de magasin, the émigrés of the Republic and the Empire? No, there is another kind of distressed foreigner,--the woman with a small sum, on which she must live for the rest of her days, in penury if she manages ill, in decent thrift if she manages well. ”

“ But who is to remedy this unfornate susceptibility on the part of foreigners? The foreign employé has his work to do—diplomatic, professional, or commercial; the native is in no particular hurry to court the esteem of outsiders, being quite contented with his own high estimate of himself. Must it always be an officer "on short leave," or a journalist in a hurry, who undertakes to record superficial impressions of a passing spectacle? ”

“ Foreigners all say of us, that we are the saddest of all people; that when they come to England, they are struck with our silence, and gloominess, and careworn faces, and our want of merriment and cheerfulness. ”

“ Let them pay up the arrears first Molly, before they think of establishing any claim of the kind on your humble servant. But the fact is, my dear, the longer you live abroad, the more you like it; and going back to the strict rules and habits of England, after it, is for all the world like putting on a strait-waistcoat. If you only heard foreigners the way they talk of us, and we all the while thinking ourselves the very pink of the creation! ”

“ Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours. Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,—but it lay there under all their culture. ”

“ It was a poor thing, she felt, for any one to be born a foreigner. ”

“ It is popular to gibe at the Englishman's taciturnity abroad. There is a reason. The foreigner, not the best nor the aristocratic foreigner perhaps, but the common run of him, act like amiable invaders. ”

“ It looks as if our characters as travellers were improving. We might perhaps take more trouble than we do to be understood. The average Englishman is a little too apt to stand calmly aloof, and to say: 'Only a foreigner! ”

“ Foreigners, too, have aided me in my task as much as my own country, and I shall carry to my grave a feeling of affection for Europe as well as for France, to whom I would at times go on my knees and entreat not to divide her own household by fratricidal jealousy, nor to forget her duty and her common task, which is civilization. ”

“ That is, "This fellow has such an odd appearance; is so unlike a man civilized, and taught the duties of life, that I cannot credit him." To be a foreigner was always in England, and I suppose everywhere else, a reason of dislike. ”

“ But the salt of the native character remains undiluted in the blood of the people, and marks them as genuinely as ever, though they have learned to avoid some of the exuberance of language and look which made foreigners smile, and their sensitive countrymen blush when they met them in the picture galleries of Europe. ”

“ We find it often. You are traveling with escort—with another of your nation, your brother, we suppose. There are servants. You are rich. For some great freak you leave all in the town down there and ride on alone. Foreigners often act like madmen. ”

“ To support your argument, you illustrated by observing, that neither education, time, nor talent, could ever give to a foreigner, in any given country, so complete a possession of its language as to make him pass for a native ”

“ The foreigner approaches with what courage he may and introduces himself by name to the party severally. They make a place for him in the circle and thereafter, with a courtesy which a group of Englishmen would find difficulty in imitating, they continue the conversation in the language of the foreigner. ”

“ Nearly all of us have an antipathy to a stranger, even of our own nationality. We pile grip-sacks in a vacant seat to keep him from getting it; and a dog goes further, and does as a savage would—challenges him on the spot. The German dictionary seems to make no distinction between a stranger and a foreigner; in its view a stranger is a foreigner—a sound position, I think. You will always be by ways and habits and predilections substantially strangers—foreigners—wherever you are, and that will probably keep the race prejudice against you alive. ”

“ TO the majority of Englishmen foreigners are dirty foreigners, though, of course, to Americans, one concedes the name cousin. But when you travel about in the world you soon find that in other countries we also are foreigners, perhaps even “dirty foreigners.” ”

“ Foreigners, in like manner, means Frenchmen, Germans, Swiss, Italians. In the country called Abroad, the most important parts are the parts nearest England; of the people called Foreigners, the most important are those who dress like Englishmen. The dim black lands that lie below the horizon are hardly worth noticing.
Would it surprise you to learn that most people live in Asia? ”

“ Their indifference towards disquiet and discomfort and noisy uproar [34] often dismays the foreigner, but it is not that they are inconsiderate of the feelings of others, they have a deep sensitiveness and refinement, but they have not been enervated and rendered over-sensitive by a luxurious civilization. ”

“ It was uphill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with the Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country. They never thought of inquiring how many of their own countrymen would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the world, if the principle were generally recognised; they considered it particularly and peculiarly British. ”

“ I’m intensely interested, as you know, in the problems of life, and this is one of them.”
“But you know foreigners claim that we as a nation are not really interested in culture and knowledge, but only in their money value. ”

“ The English aversion to foreigners is in opposition to reason, judgment, and politeness. Because we are islanders, the happiest circumstances in some respects belonging to us; are our manners more refined, or are our customs nearer perfection, than the customs and manners of other people? I fear the contrary. Our separation from the Continent gives us peculiarities which other nations have not. It gives us that shyness, `that obstinate, silent, rude reserve, which we practise towards ourselves and all the rest of the world. ”

“ Foreigners coming here think in their own language, even though they may be able to speak in ours; gradually they come to think in English, but still they dream in their mother-tongue; at last they dream, think, and speak in the language of the land, and become homogeneous with the nation. ”

“ Foreigners, by which English and Americans mean people of Continental Europe, know vastly more of the art of catering to the traveller than do Anglo-Saxons. This is the first, last, and intermediate verse of the litany of good cheer. ”

“ With respect to our national character, it is obvious, that will be found more carefully studied, and more frequently attended to, in the travels of foreigners in Britain, than in native travels, though necessarily in the former there must be much mistake and misapprehension, and there is often much prejudice and misrepresentation. ”

“ I shall close this brief summary of national peculiarities, by an allusion to one more. Foreigners accuse the English of being capricious in their ordinary intercourse. They are allowed to be fast friends, but uncertain acquaintances. The man, or woman, who receives you to-day with a frank smile, and a familiar shake of the hand, may meet you to-morrow coldly, and with a chilling or repulsive formality. ”

“ I could stalk abroad into foreign lands with a reckless disregard for everybody's toes, and the full assurance that the more toes I stepped on the more honour I would confer upon benighted foreigners, and the more credit I would reflect upon my own benevolent disposition! ”

“ But the peculiar traits of national character are found in the internal parts of a country, among that class of people who do not travel, nor are tempted by an intercourse with foreigners, to quit their own habits. ”

“ This was all on account of their friendship for foreigners. Every one, down to the lowest interpreter, who has had anything to do with the introduction of foreigners, has disappeared or been disgraced. ”

“ The great tides of immigration which have since made it the most cosmopolitan of countries, had not set in. Foreigners among us were so few that they were regarded with a great deal of curiosity, some contempt, and not a little pity. ”

“ We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners because most of us were once foreigners. I say this to you as the son of immigrants, knowing that so many of you are also descendants of immigrants. ”

“ The outer boughs droop like a weeping-willow, and their flowers seem to be slipping down them like rosy rain-drops. Poets and peers, dreamers and plodders, coolies, fishermen, and the unspiritual foreigner, all admire this lovely tree, and its wide arms flutter with poems in its praise. All around the thatched roof of the old temple stand plum-trees covered with fragrant blossoms—snow white, palest yellow, rose, or deep carnation-red. ”

“ On the continent, perhaps, you can keep better terms with them; they are usually, like yourself, foreigners in the country, and this gives them a cosmopolitan, independent air which tempers their subjection to the housekeeper or the beadle. ”

“ When I call them fanciers of other nations, I feel it only fair to add that some of those other nations express the same truth in different language. I have often heard the complaint made that Englishmen cannot speak of foreigners without an air of patronage. ”

“ Is conduct of that kind right? What will foreigners say? Does any one care calmly to sit by and hear himself traduced? Why should you lead foreigners to suppose that all is not well with us, and that we are not patriotic? ”

“ Foreigners, the French in particular, take from us precisely that which is least ours, that which least clashes with their spirit, and, naturally enough, that which best accommodates itself to the idea that they have formed of us, an idea that is always and necessarily superficial. ”

“ The only foreigners I know are those who write me letters: malicious busybodies, people who want subscriptions to all sorts of shams, or invite me to join respectable, humbug societies, or write merely to gratify a low curiosity. ”

“ People will tell you, "Foreigners do this"; "Foreigners do that"; "Foreigners smoke so much"; "Foreigners always take coffee for breakfast." "Indeed," I love to answer; "I've never observed it myself in Central Asia." 'Tis Parson Adams and the Christian religion. Nine English people out of ten, when they talk of Abroad, mean what they call the Continent; and when they talk of the Continent, they mean France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy; in short, the places most visited by Englishmen when they consent now and again to go Abroad for a holiday. ”