China and the West

[Eliot, George]. Zhi gong Ma'nan zhuan. Liang Shiqiu yi. [ID D14330].
In the preface Liang said : "Eliot does not write novels only to entertain people, but completely devotes herself to very book she writes".
In the edition Taipei : Jiu ge, 1988 he writes : "In the story, there are rich people as well as hard-working laborers, but its main point is not to describe the class conflict, but to elaborate human nature. This is an English novel written more than 120 years ago, and this is an old translation done more than 50 years ago. Now that the novel is offered to the readers again, it has lost none of its significance, as human nature is universal and eternal."
Bai Liping : Liang chose to translate Silas Marner partly because he thought the novel reflected the moral seriousness of the British nationality. Liang believed that in this respect British nationality was different from that of southern Europe ; the latter in his view, tended toward frivolousness. Liang observed that there were few depictions of lewdness in Silas Marner. Only one sentence was used to narrate how a pair of lovers move from getting acquainted to engaging in physical love. "If the writer of this novel had been a Frenchman", he wrote, "this part of the story probably would have covered several chapters and would have been told in great detail."