of Sphinxes at Karnak LXI

An Arab Village on the Nile LXII

The Colossi of Memnon, near Thebes LXIII

The Great Sphinx, Showing the Temple Underneath LXIV

Introduction

This book of impressions of the Far East is called "The Critic in the
Orient," because the writer for over thirty years has been a
professional critic of new books--one trained to get at the best in all
literary works and reveal it to the reader. This critical work--a
combination of rapid reading and equally rapid written estimate of new
publications--would have been deadly, save for a love of books, so deep
and enduring that it has turned drudgery into pastime and an enthusiasm
for discovering good things in every new book which no amount of
literary trash was ever able to smother.

After years of such strenuous critical work, the mind becomes molded in
a certain cast. It is as impossible for me to put aside the habit of the
literary critic as it would be for a hunter who had spent his whole life
in the woods to be content in a great city. So when I started out on
this trip around the world the critical apparatus which I had used in
getting at the heart of books was applied to the people and the places
along this great girdle about the globe.

Much of the benefit of foreign travel depends upon the reading that one
has done. For years my eager curiosity about places had led me to read
everything printed about the Orient and the South Seas. Add to this the
stories which were brought into a newspaper office by globe trotters and
adventurers, and you have an equipment which made me at times seem to be
merely revising impressions made on an earlier journey. When you talk
with a man who has spent ten or twenty years in Japan or China or the
Straits Settlements, you cannot fail to get something of the color of
life in those strange lands, especially if you have the newspaper
training which impels you to ask questions and to drag out of your
informant everything of human interest that the reader will care to
know.

This newspaper instinct, which is developed by training but which one
must possess in large measure before he can be successful in journalism,
seizes upon everything and transmutes it into "copy" for the printer. To
have taken this journey without setting down every day my impressions of
places and people would have been a tiresome experien