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Updated: May 26, 2025
The conquest of the two sister kingdoms, with the carrying away of the influential portion of the people into exile, was a blessing in disguise. Israel was taken out of its petty provincialisms, its race insularity, and placed amid one of the most highly cultivated civilizations of the ancient world. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia had been from immemorial antiquity the seat of great enterprises.
The Siamese are by no means opposed to foreigners visiting their country, and they would welcome the development of its resources by foreign capital, but, owing to the insularity, indifference, timidity and pride which are inherent in the Siamese character, they have taken no steps to bring their country to the attention of the outside world.
The insularity of their citadel has worked in the same direction, by focussing their interests upon the purely human. That inland sea, again: were it not an ideal breeding-place for shell-fish, the Tarentines would long ago have learnt to vary their diet. Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical tone of a people.
Before the event they would have protested against losing their insularity, but would they have done so afterwards, when the water which divided them from each other was gone, and they knew that they were part of the great mountain which before they had only dimly seen, obscured by the mists rising from the sea? See C. Montefiore, Judaism and St. Paul. 1 Cor. viii. 6.
I know that the current opinion is to the contrary, and that your country is constantly accused, even by yourselves, of its insularity; but I, for my part, have found an almost feminine receptivity amongst you in my endeavour to bring you into contact with some ideas of my native country a receptivity which, however, has also this in common with that of the female mind, that evidently nothing sticks deeply, but is quickly wiped out by what any other lecturer, or writer, or politician has to tell you.
It is not enlightenment, on the contrary it is ignorance and insularity, which causes most of us to miss this fact. But it certainly is the fact that religious war is in itself much more rational than patriotic war. I for one have often defended and even encouraged patriotic war, and should always be ready to defend and encourage patriotic passion.
"Pictures have been drawn," he remarks, "of the moral anarchy such marriages must produce, which are read by American, Colonial, and Continental observers with a bewilderment that is not unmixed with disgust, and are, indeed, a curious illustration of the extreme insularity of the English mind."
He advanced the idea that the English, from the insularity of their character, were incapable of making a perfect translation. Americans, French, and Germans, he said, have much larger adaptability to and sympathy in the thought of others. He would not hear Chapman's Homer or anything else quoted on the other side, but was zealous in enforcing this argument.
Indeed, the effect on England was profound, and it lasted for more than two generations. No doubt there was something in the danger they dreaded, but the evil was not unmixed with good, for insularity will always be an enemy of good literature. The Elizabethans learned much more than their plots from Italian models, and the worst effects dreaded by the patriots never reached our shores.
"The insularity of the English that you speak of is not worse than the insularity of the French. When I wrote my 'Life of Turner' for the 'Artistes Celebres' series, I was asked to reduce the MS. by one third, for the reason that the thicker numbers were only given to great artists. The sale was very moderate, as so few French people care anything about English art."
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