r
philologist combined would claim that the three words, love and amour
and Liebe mean the same thing. No word in the English language is used
so often from the pulpit as the word love, but this cannot be said of
the use of amour in France or of Liebe in Germany. Nations pour
themselves into the tiny moulds of words and give us statuettes of
themselves. The Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Teuton have filled
these three words with a certain vague philosophy of themselves, a
hazy composite photograph of themselves. No one writer or painter, no
one incident, no one tragedy, no one day or year of history has done
this. To us, love is the coldest, cleanest, as it is perhaps the most
loyal of the three. L'amour sounds to us seductive, enticing, often
indeed little more than lust embroidered to make a cloak for ennui.
Liebe is to us friendly, soft, childlike.

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,