Читать книгу Thoughts on South Africa онлайн

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It is customary to ridicule the traveller who passes rapidly through a country, and then writes his impression of it. The truth is he sees much that is hidden for ever from the eyes of the inhabitants. Habit and custom have blinded them. They are indignant when it is said that their land is arid, that it has few running streams, that its population is scanty, and that vegetables are scarce; and they are amused and surprised when he discants for three pages on the glorious rarity of their air, and the scientific interest of their mingled peoples: yet these are the prominent external features which differentiate their land from all others.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which the people of a country are justified in their contempt of the bird's-eye view of the stranger. There is a certain knowledge of a land which is only to be gained by one born in it, or brought into long-continued, close, personal contact with it, and which in its perfection is perhaps never obtained by any man with regard to a country which he has not inhabited before he was thirty. It is the subjective emotional sympathy with its nature, and the comprehension not merely of the vices and virtues of its people, but of the how and why of their existence, which is possible to a man only with regard to a country that is more or less his own. The stranger sees the barren scene, but of the emotion which that barren mountain is capable of awakening in the man who lives under its shadow he knows nothing. He marks the curious custom, but of the social condition which originated it, and the passions concerned in its maintenance, he understands absolutely nothing.