162 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



the substance of the ideas expanded in the oc- 

 tavo volume will generally be found to have been 

 first put out in the magazine article of thirty 

 pages. Hence the monthlies cannot be disposed 

 of by slightly looking into them ; they form at 

 this moment the most characteristic and pithy 

 part of our literary produce. It has been calcu- 

 lated that the insect-life upon our globe, if piled 

 in one mass, would exceed in magnitude the heap 

 which would be made by bringing together all the 

 beasts and birds. For though each insect be 

 iudividually minute, their collective number is 

 enormous. So a single number of a periodical 

 seems little compared with a book ; but then 

 there are so many of them, and they are repro- 

 duced so fast ! A newspaper seems less than it 

 is on account of the spread of the sheet. One 

 uumber of the Times, a double sheet containing 

 16 pages, or 96 columns, contains a quantity of 

 printing equal to 384 pages 8vo, or an average- 

 sized 8vo volume. Even a hard reader might 

 find it difficult within thirty days to overtake the 

 periodical output of the month ; and then on the 

 first he would have to begin all over again. 



So much for periodicals ; we come now to the 

 books. 



The total number of new books, not includ- 

 ing new editions and reprints, published in Great 

 Britain in 18*76, was 2,920. In accordance with 

 the construction I have put on the term litera- 

 ture, we must subtract from this total all re- 

 ligious, political, legal, commercial, medical, ju- 

 venile books, aud all pamphlets. There will 

 remain somewhere about 1,620 books of litera- 

 ture, taking the word in its widest extent. I may 

 say, by-the-way, that these figures can only be 

 regarded as approximative. Cataloguing in this 

 country is disgracefully careless. Many books 

 published are every year omitted from the Lon- 

 don catalogue. For example, out of 267 works 

 published in the two counties of Lancashire and 

 Cheshire, only 31 are found entered in the last 

 London catalogue. But I will take no account 

 of omissions. I will even strike off the odd 120 

 from my total of 1,620, and say that English lit- 

 erature grows only at the rate of 1,500 works 

 per annum. At this rate in ten years our liter- 

 ary product amounts to 15,000 books. Put the 

 duration of man's reading life at forty years. If 

 he had to read everything that came out, to keep 

 pace with the teeming press, he would have had 

 in his forty years 60,000 works of contemporary 

 literature to wade through. This in books only, 

 over and above his periodical work, which we 

 calculated would require pretty well all his time. 



But as yet we have got only Great Britain. 

 But England is not all the world, as Mr. Matthew 

 Arnold reminds us (" Essays," p. 43). By the very 

 nature of things, much of the best that is known 

 and thought in the world cannot be of English 

 growth, must be foreign ; in a survey of litera- 

 ture we cannot afford to ignore what is being 

 said and written in the countries near us, any 

 more than in politics we can afford to ignore 

 what is being done by them. At present Ger- 

 many and France are the two countries with 

 whom we are most closely connected, and whose 

 sayings are the most influential sayings in the 

 world. 



Germany is the country of books, and its out- 

 put of books is enormous. The average annual 

 number of books printed in that language is 

 about 12,000. However, only a fraction of this 

 total of German books deserves to rank as liter- 

 ature. Mere book-making is carried in Germany 

 to a frightful pitch. The bad tobacco and the 

 falsified wines of Mayence and Hamburg find 

 their counterpart in the book-wares of Leip- 

 sic. The German language is one of the most 

 powerful instruments for the expression of thought 

 and feeling to which human invention has ever 

 given birth. The average German literary style 

 of the present day is a barbarous jargon, wrap- 

 ping up an attenuated and cloudy sense in bales 

 of high-sounding words. The fatigue which this 

 style of utterance inflicts upon the mind is as 

 great as that which their Gothic letter, a relic of 

 the fifteenth century, inflicts upon the eye, black- 

 ening and smearing all the page. An examina- 

 tion of the boys in the Johanneum of Hamburg 

 elicited the fact that sixty-one per cent, of the 

 upper class were short-sighted. A large part of 

 German books is not significant of anything — 

 mere sound without meaning. 



Putting aside, however, the meaningless, there 

 remains not a little in German publication which 

 requires the attention of one who makes it 

 his business to know the thoughts of his age. 

 The residuum of these 12,000 annual vol- 

 umes has to be sifted out of the lumber of the 

 book-shops, for it embodies the thoughts and the 

 moral ideal of a great country and a great peo- 

 ple. Poor as Germany is in literature, it is rich 

 in learning. As compilers of dictionaries, as ac- 

 cumulators of facts, the German book-maker is 

 unrivaled. The Germans are the hewers of 

 wood and drawers of water for a literature which 

 they have not got. All the rest of the European 

 nations put together do not do so much for the 

 illustration of the Greek and Latin classics as 



