d who
are neither waiters nor commercial travellers, the inducements to learn
English, rather than French or German, do not increase. If our initial
assumptions are right, the decisive factor in this matter is the amount
of science and thought the acquisition of a language will afford the man
who learns it. It becomes, therefore, a fact of very great significance
that the actual number of books published in English is less than that
in French or German, and that the proportion of serious books is very
greatly less. A large proportion of English books are novels adapted to
the minds of women, or of boys and superannuated business men, stories
designed rather to allay than stimulate thought--they are the only
books, indeed, that are profitable to publisher and author alike. In
this connection they do not count, however; no foreigner is likely to
learn English for the pleasure of reading Miss Marie Corelli in the
original, or of drinking untranslatable elements from _The Helmet of
Navarre_. The present conditions of book production for the English
reading public offer no hope of any immediate change in this respect.
There is neither honour nor reward--there is not even food or
shelter--for the American or Englishman who devotes a year or so of his
life to the adequate treatment of any spacious question, and so small is
the English reading public with any special interest in science, that a
great number of important foreign scientific works are never translated
into English at all. Such interesting compilations as Bloch's work on
war, for example, must be read in French; in English only a brief
summary of his results is to be obtained, under a sensational
heading.[45] Schopenhauer again is only to be got quite stupidly
Bowdlerized, explained, and "selected" in English. Many translations
that are made into English are made only to sell, they are too often the
work of sweated women and girls--very often quite without any special
knowledge of the matter they translate--they are difficult to read and
untrustworthy to quote. The production of books in English, except the
author be a wealthy amateur, rests finally upon the publishers, and
publishers to-day stand a little lower than ordinary tradesmen in not
caring at all whether the goods they sell are good or bad. Unusual
books, they allege--and all good books are unusual--are "difficult to
handle," and the author must pay the fine--amounting, more often than
not, to the greater