MODERN LANGUAGES IN A TOUR AROUND THE WORLD 35 



other European countries where the current of travel is established 

 and steady, Such is the case. With English one can get along. 

 Now, to get along is much, but it is not all. If one wishes to do more 

 than get along, there is no limit to the possibilities within his reach, 

 if he is able to speak his modern languages. The conversations with 

 chance acquaintances in their own tongue are of more enduring 

 satisfaction than all the information gathered from guide-books. It 

 is the impossibility of conversing with the people at large in the 

 Asiatic tongues that makes one return home filled with the impen- 

 etrability of the East. In Europe one feels much less ill at ease, 

 not knowing the language of a particular place, from feeling the 

 kinship of race. It requires no violent shock to interpret what we 

 see before our eyes. Thus it is that most Americans traveling in 

 Europe are contented and happy, without being able to speak the 

 foreign languages, and not knowing what they are missing. They 

 are perhaps all the happier. English suffices. German, French, 

 Spanish and Italian may add to one's comfort, but are after all not 

 necessary — why then learn them ? That is what many college stu- 

 dents ask. and they decide not to study them. They can graduate 

 without them, after having fulfilled the requirements for graduation 

 by passing in other courses which seem more valuable for the purpose, 

 and it is a fact that an undergraduate student in the classics, mathe- 

 matics, history, economics, philosophy and the natural sciences can 

 have his time more than taken up without studying modern languages. 

 Moreover, he will tell you that as for acquiring a reading of French 

 and German, for example, that is after all a luxury and not a necessity, 

 as everything worth while is to be had in an English translation, or 

 at least in a review which gives the gist. There is much truth in this. 

 Many things are to be had in translations, such as they are. Usually 

 these translations are sufficiently satisfactory, but often they are so 

 inaccurate as to be very disturbing to the reader with a critical mind. 

 Some years ago the New York Evening Post published two parallel 

 English versions of a passage from Tolstoy. They were so different 

 that it was hard to note any resemblance. An American reader 

 would be helpless to decide which was the better or the worse transla- 



