The nations of the earth, close as they are together in these days, are worlds apart in thought. Each builds its life in words, and the words are as little alike as in the days of Babel; and thus it comes about that we misunderstand one another. We translate one another only into our own language, and understand one another as little as before, because we only know one another in translations, and the best of the life of each nation remains and always will remain untranslatable. No one has ever really translated the Greek lyrics or the choruses of Aeschylus, or the incomparable songs of Heine. Who could dream of putting the best of Robert Louis Stevenson into German, or Kipling's rollicking ballads of soldier life into Spanish, or Walter Pater into Dutch, or Edgar Allan Poe into Russian! The one language common to us all, music, tells as many tales as there are men to hear. Each melody melts into the blackness or the brightness of the listener's soul and becomes a thousand melodies instead of one. What does the moaning monotony of a Korean love-song mean to the westerner, or what does the Swan song mean to the Korean? Only God knows. We can never translate one nation into the language of another; our best is only an interpretation, and we must always meet the criticism that we have failed with the reply that we had never hoped to succeed. We are forever explaining ourselves even in our own small circles; how can we dare to suggest even, that we have made one people to speak clearly in the language of another? The best we can do is to give a kindly, a good-humored, and, at all times and above all things, a charitable interpretation. Information, facts, are merely the raw material of culture; sympathy is its subtlest essence.
There is a world of good humor, of cheerfulness, of contentment, of domestic peace and happiness in Germany. There are courtesy, politeness, even grand manners here and there. But these words mean one thing to them, another thing to us, and it is that I am striving, feebly enough to be sure, to make clear. May I beg the reader and the student to follow me with this point clearly in mind? While I am outlining with these painful details that their ways are not as our ways, I am not denouncing their ways, but merely offering matter for consideration and comparison.