LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

These letters were duly photographed and reproduced in the advertisements, and they now make interesting, if disconcerting, reading for the non-British student who put his faith in them and bought the Britannica. There is no need here to quote from these letters; for a subsequent inspection of the work thus recommended must have sufficiently mortified those of the enthusiastic correspondents who were educated and had consciences; and the others would be unmoved by any revelations of mine.

      Mention, however, should be made of the remarks of the American Ambassador to Great Britain at the banquet given in London to celebrate the Encyclopædia's birth. This gentleman, in an amazing burst of unrestrained laudation, said he believed that “it is the general judgment of the scholars and the investigators of the world that the one book to which they can go for the most complete, comprehensive, thorough, and absolutely precise statements of fact upon every subject of human interest is the Encyclopædia Britannica” This is certainly an astonishing bit of eulogy. Its dogmatic positiveness and its assumption of infallibility caused one critic (who is also a great scholar) to write: “With all due respect for our illustrious fellow-countryman, the utterance is a most superlative absurdity, unless it was intended to be an exercise of that playful and elusive American humor which the apperceptions of our English cousins so often fail to seize, much less appreciate.” But there were other remarks of similar looseness at the banquet, and the dinner evidently was a greater success than the books under discussion.

      Even the English critics themselves could not accept the Britannica as a source for “the most comprehensive, thorough and absolutely precise statements on every subject of human interest.” Many legitimate objections began appearing. There is space here to quote only a few. The London Nation complains that “the particularly interesting history of the French Socialist movement is hardly even sketched.” And again it says: “The naval question is handled on the basis of the assumption which prevailed during our recent scare; the challenge of our Dreadnought building is hardly mentioned; the menace of M. Delcassé's policy of encirclement is ignored, and both in the article on Germany and in the articles on Europe, Mr. McKenna's panic figures and charges of accelerated building are treated as the last word of historical fact.” The same publication, criticising the article on Europe, says: “There is nothing but a dry and summarized general history, ending with a paragraph or two on the Anglo-German struggle with the moral that ‘Might is Right.’ It is history of Europe which denies the idea of Europe.”

      Again, we find evidence of a more direct character, which competently refutes the amazing announcement of our voluble Ambassador to Great Britain. In a letter to the London Times, an indignant representative of Thomas Carlyle's family objects to the inaccurate and biased manner in which Carlyle is treated in the Encyclopædia. “The article,” he says, “was evidently written many years ago, before the comparatively recent publication of new and authentic material, and nothing has been done to bring it up to date. … As far as I know, none of the original errors have been corrected, and many others of a worse nature have been added. The list of authorities on Carlyle's life affords evidence of ignorance or partisanship.”

      “Evidently,” comments a shrewd critic who is not impressed either by the Ambassador's panegyric or the photographed letters, “the great man's family, and the public in general, have a reasonable cause of offense, and they may also conclude that if the Encyclopædia Britannica can blunder when handling such an approachable and easy British subject as Carlyle, it can be reasonably expected to do worse on other matters which are not only absolutely foreign, but intensely distasteful to the uninformed and prejudiced scribes to whom they seem to be so frequently, if not systematically, assigned.”

      The expectation embodied in the above comment is more fully realized perhaps than the writer of those words imagined; and the purpose of this book is to reveal the blundering and misleading information which would appear to be the distinguishing quality of the Britannica's articles on culture. Moreover, as I have said, and as I shall show later, few subjects are as “intensely distasteful” to the “uninformed and prejudiced” British critics as is American achievement. One finds it difficult to understand how any body of foreigners would dare offer America the brazen insult which is implied in the prodigal distribution of these books throughout the country; for in their unconquerable arrogance, their unveiled contempt for this nation—the outgrowth of generations of assumed superiority—they surpass even the London critical articles dealing with our contemporary literary efforts.

      Several of our more courageous and pro-American scholars have called attention to the inadequacies and insularities in the Britannica, but their voices have not been sufficiently far-reaching to counteract either the mass or the unsavory character of the advertising by which this unworthy and anti-American encyclopædia was foisted upon the United States. Conspicuous among those publications which protested was the Twentieth Century Magazine. That periodical, to refer to but one of its several criticisms, pointed out that the article on Democracy is “confined to the alleged democracies of Greece and their distinguished, if some time dead, advocates. Walt Whitman, Mazzini, Abraham Lincoln, Edward Carpenter, Lyof Tolstoi, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Iceland, Oregon are unknown quantities to this anonymous classicist.”

      It is also noted that the author of the articles on Sociology “is not very familiar with the American sociologists, still less with the German, and not at all with the French.” The article is “a curious evidence of editorial insulation,” and the one on Economics “betrays freshened British capitalistic insularity.” In this latter article, which was substituted for Professor Ingram' s masterly and superb history of political economy in the Britannica's Ninth Edition, “instead of a catholic, scientific survey of economic thought, we have a ‘fair trade’ pamphlet, which actually includes reference to Mr. Chamberlain,” although the names of Henry George, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John A. Hobson, and William Smart are omitted.

      The Eleventh Edition, concludes the Twentieth Century, after recording many other specimens of ignorance and inefficiency, “is not only insular; it betrays its class-conscious limitation in being woefully defective in that prophetic instinct which guided Robertson Smith in his choice of contributors to the Ninth Edition, and the contributors themselves in their treatment of rapidly changing subjects.” Robertson Smith, let it be noted, stood for fairness, progressiveness, and modernity; whereas the Britannica's present editor is inflexibly reactionary, provincial, and unjust to an almost incredible degree.

      The foregoing quotations are not isolated objections: there were others of similar nature. And these few specimens are put down here merely to show that there appeared sufficient evidence, both in England and America, to establish the purely imaginary nature of the Britannica's claims of completeness and inerrancy, and to reveal the absurdity of the American Ambassador's amazing pronouncement. Had the sale of the Encyclopædia Britannica been confined to that nation whose culture it so persistently and dogmatically glorifies at the expense of the culture of other nations, its parochial egotism would not be America's concern. But since this reference work has become an American institution and has forced its provincial mediocrity into over 100,000 American homes, schools and offices, the astonishing truth concerning its insulting ineptitude has become of vital importance to this country. Its menace to American educational progress can no longer be ignored.

      England's cultural campaign in the United States during past decades has been sufficiently insidious and pernicious to work havoc with our creative effort, and to retard us in the growth of that self-confidence and self-appreciation which alone make the highest achievement possible. But never before has there been so concentrated and virulently inimical a medium for British influence as the present edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. These books, taken in conjunction with the methods by which they have been foisted upon us, constitute one of the most subtle and malign dangers to our national enlightenment and development which it has yet been our misfortune to possess; for they bid fair to remain, in large measure, the source of America's information for many years to come.

      The regrettable part of England's intellectual intrigues in the United States is the subservient and docile acquiescence of Americans themselves. Either they are impervious to England's sneers and deaf to her insults, or else their snobbery

Скачать книгу