Foreignness

“ Having seen some parts of the Continent, having enjoyed the spectacle of those wonderful things of nature and of art which a tour abroad would display, and having acquired that facility in languages which comes so rapidly by their daily use, I should like to go home again, adding to the pleasures my own country supplies, stores of knowledge and resources from other lands. I neither want to think that Frenchmen and Germans are better bred than my own countrymen, nor that the rigid decorum of English manners is only a flimsy veil of hypocrisy thrown over the coarse vices of a coarse people. ”

“ There is so much that is foreign and so little of our own! Even our home subjects are worked up in foreign lands, by our own homesick artists, it is true, but bearing on them the servile mark of exile, set there by a borrowed, foreign brush. ”

“ If a knowledge of other countries and a study of the manners and customs of foreign nations teach us to appreciate what we have at home, they likewise form the best cure of that national conceit and want of sympathy with which we are too apt to look on all that is strange and foreign. ”

“ I have always been taught to believe foreigners a cold, practical, calculating kind of people—so different from us. You never seemed to me like a foreigner; ah, Richard, why will you make me remember that you are not one of us! ”

“ It has happened to many of you to be in foreign lands. You look: there are people there also, God’s creatures, too; and you talk with them as with the men of your own country. But when it comes to saying a hearty word—you will see. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. ”

“ Am I to divide it up at this time of day with a beggarly foreigner—a man without means, without appearance, without proof, a pretender, an adventurer, a chattering mountebank? I thought America boasted having lands for all men! ”

“ In temperament, in feeling, in mind, and even in unreason, they are Western, with an absolute comprehension of all Western modes of thought, even of those which are remote from their historical experience. ”

“ We, as a nation, take this calm assurance of foreigners at its own valuation. We consent to be told that we do not know our own poets, cannot pronounce our own language, and have no well-educated women. ”

“ Of great importance to the determination of the sentiment and of the idea of nationality is the state of thought and feeling towards other nations, towards foreigners in general, and more particularly towards neighbour nations. We have to ask to what extent strangers are known, for in the foreign nation the same wealth of qualities has to be considered as in our own; the knowledge of foreigners and the quality of feeling towards foreigners are just as variable and manifold as the knowledge of one's own folk and the feelings associated with that knowledge. ”

“ Our function is a legitimate one, and, far from confusing or alienating our readers, our hearts are actually with our own nation and we help our fellow-countrymen to see themselves as quite distinctive. Our minds certainly are confused by the writings and sayings of those stay-at-home folk who imagine that difference of nationality is only difference of speech and customs, and perhaps of dress, not understanding that first of all it is difference of soul and difference in destiny. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It favours the existence of whatever is peculiar and local; of a distinctive literature, manners, dress, and character. When it conceives the common country to be weak, it tries to discard every foreign element as dangerous; and when it is conscious of its strength, it tries to assimilate what is best from abroad. ”

“ Do you find in it that sagacity, prudence, that dexterity, that quickness of perception, and those conciliatory moods which we are always taught to believe necessary in the transaction of our foreign affairs? Is there to be seen that knowledge of human nature, and especially that peculiar kind of science, most necessary in these affairs—an acquaintance with the character of foreign countries and of the chief actors in the scene? ”

“ Show yourselves to him in the right light; approach him in the right way; protect him from evil influences and above all protect him from exploitation of the “also citizen” whose only design is the foreigner’s scalp. And do not forget, gentlemen, that while the foreigner is undergoing americanization he also is constantly living in memories and in comparisons, and bear with him patiently when, on account of recalling to his mind things he believes were better in his old home, he cannot promptly see things that may be better here in their proper light. ”

“ The great snare to be avoided is the foreign character of improvements; so long as speaking a foreign language, wearing foreign clothes, and aping foreign manners are thought to be the objects of a change, we cannot expect to see a real progress in the character of a nation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This we might have valued ourselves upon without vanity; but to disown our descent from them, talk big of our ancient families, and long originals, and stand at a distance from foreigners, like the enthusiast in religion, with a Stand off, I am more holy than thou: this is a thing so ridiculous, in a nation derived from foreigners, as we are, that I could not but attack them as I have done. ”

“ While we were staying in their country, did we not think of the French as foreigners? In these chapters, not originally intended for us, we have the piquant and salutary experience of seeing what we look like on at least one occasion when we are the foreigners; we catch at least a glimpse of what to the Orient seems exotic in us, and it does us no harm to observe that the peculiarly Western aspects of our culture are not self-justifying nor always justifiable when looked at through eyes not already disposed in their favour. ”

“ Such a discovery comes to either a nation or an individual like a douche of cold water on nice, warm conceit, and brings with it a feeling of discouragement, of being unjustly treated, that is painful, for we are very “touchy” in America, and cry out when a foreigner expresses anything but admiration for our ways, yet we are the last to lend ourselves to foreign customs. ”

“ Cultivate, above all things, your foreign dispositions, for you are now on foreign duty, and your country reposes on your shoulders and eminent talents the whole burden of its foreign interests in this part of the world. ”

“ Are we to do everything for you and you nothing for yourselves?” What are we to say to that? What after all are we doing, what are we giving? If we had only kept ourselves acquainted with our country, that would have been something,—but so lazy are we, we know next to nothing about her. The foreigner writes our history, we translate it, the foreigner discovers our grammar, we cram it! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thought and feeling amongst the western nations are conforming to a single pattern: they are losing their old chivalrous character, their possibilities of isolated conquest and intellectual adventure. ”

“ This spectacle—this unparalleled effort of a people to lay aside what they were born to reverence and follow, because alien customs seemed to promise a greater good to a greater number—this spectacle, which should have challenged the admiration, the sympathy, and the generous aid of western nations—has been met almost by their opposition. ”

“ The foreigner is already on his way to sully with his hot and pestilential breath the purity of thy beloved. And what would be my future fate shouldst thou deliver me into the hands of mine enemy, to his hated embraces? ”

“ If we, who were once prone to believe our knowledge, our manners, and our customs to be all-sufficient, have been borrowing from others, so we in our turn have been imitated by the older nations of Europe, and the result is an approximation in sympathies and a blurring of distinctions. Political differences and race superficialities of expression seem a larger barrier than they really are, for in its broader faiths and vision the civilized world is becoming homogeneous. ”

“ 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? ”

“ But when you are a stranger in a strange land, whose language you are imperfectly acquainted with and whose inhabitants are as uncommunicative as oysters and inclined to regard the foreigner as an enemy till he has proved the contrary, the difficulties are considerably aggravated. ”

“ 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 words which our authours have introduced by their knowledge of foreign languages, or ignorance of their own, by vanity or wantonness, by compliance with fashion or lust of innovation, I have registred as they occurred, though commonly only to censure them, and warn others against the folly of naturalizing useless foreigners to the injury of the natives. ”

“ Well, all these motives for some definite course of action on our part towards foreign countries rest upon very serious facts; too serious, perhaps you will think, to be interfered with; for we are all of us in the habit of leaving great things alone, as if Providence would mind them, and attending ourselves only to little things which we know, practically, Providence doesn't mind unless we do. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He had no ideal of a philosophical, eclectic nation, that should advance civilization by "intercourse with foreigners and familiarity with their point of view, and readiness to adopt whatever is best and most suitable in their ideas, manners, and customs." ”

“ And it is a curious coincidence that while men's minds were turned to foreign parts, to the effort to obtain knowledge of foreign peoples and affairs, there should have been a revival in other matters. ”

“ Here are still to be found some of the few remaining places, on this over-handled Earth, which have as yet been but little disturbed by extraneous influences, and here the lover of things as they are, and ought not to be, may find a dwelling among an unregenerate and more or less uncivilised people, whose customs are still unsullied by European vulgarity, and the surface of whose lives is but little ruffled by the fever-heated breath of European progress. ”

“ 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! ”

“ How serious a hindrance the imperfect mastery of foreign tongues was to anything beyond a merely superficial social intercourse, and how greatly it contributed to mutual misunderstandings, we need hardly remark. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In traveling through foreign lands, one sees so much that is indecent, obscene, and shockingly profane, according to his our way of thinking, that he scarcely knows what to include and what to suppress in his accounts of foreign manners, customs and institutions. ”

“ Certainly the true End of visiting Foreign Parts, is to look into their Customs and Policies, and observe in what Particulars they excel or come short of our own; to unlearn some odd Peculiarities in our Manners, and wear off such awkward Stiffnesses and Affectations in our Behaviour, as may possibly have been contracted from constantly associating with one Nation of Men, by a more free, general, and mixed Conversation. ”