affect the dissemination of French very little. The French reading
public is something different and very much larger than the existing
French political system. The number of books published in French is
greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception
for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a
writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and
efficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and to
recall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing of
French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have
the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and
no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank
indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement
to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book,
the _Text-book of Psychology_ of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for
'The Text Book of Psychology,' _read_ 'The Principles of Psychology'.]
in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera--three copies of a book that I have
never seen anywhere in England outside my own house,--and I am an
attentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all so
pleasant in the page, and so cheap--they are for a people that buys to
read. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downs
of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still more
horribly "illustrated," the exasperating pointless variety in the size
and thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book is
that it is something sold by a dealer in _bric-a-brac_, honestly sorry
the thing is a book, but who has done _his_ best to remedy it, anyhow!
And all the English shopful is either brand new fiction or illustrated
travel (of '_Buns with the Grand Lama_' type), or gilded versions of the
classics of past times done up to give away. While the French bookshop
reeks of contemporary intellectual life!

These things count for French as against English now, and they will
count for infinitely more in the coming years. And over German also
French has many advantages. In spite of the numerical preponderance of
books published in Germany, it is doubtful if the German reader has
quite such a catholic feast before him as the reader of French. There is
a mass of German fiction probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as
popular English and American romance. And G