II
us inspect first the manner in which the
world's great modern novelists and story-tellers
are treated in the Encyclopædia Britannica. No
better department could be selected for the
purpose; for literature is the most universal and
popular art. The world's great figures in fiction
are far more widely known than those in painting
or music; and since it is largely through literature
that a nation absorbs its cultural ideas, especial
interest attaches to the way that writers are interpreted
and criticised in an encyclopædia.
It is disappointing, therefore, to discover the
distorted and unjust viewpoint of the Britannica. An aggressive insular spirit is shown in both the general literary articles and in the biographies. The importance of English writers is constantly exaggerated at the expense of foreign authors. The number of biographies of British writers included in the Encyclopædia far overweighs the biographical material accorded the writers of other nations. And superlatives of the most
sweeping kind are commonly used in describing
the genius of these British authors, whereas in the
majority of cases outside of England, criticism, when offered at all, is cool and circumscribed and not seldom adverse. There are few British writers of any note whatever who are not taken into account; but many authors of very considerable importance belonging to France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States are omitted entirely.
In the Encyclopædia's department of literature, as in other departments of the arts, the pious middle-class culture of England is carefully and consistently forced to the front. English provincialism and patriotism not only dominate the criticism of this department, but dictate the amount of space which is allotted the different nations. The result is that one seeking in this encyclopædia adequate and unprejudiced information concerning literature will fail completely in his quest. No mention whatever is made of many of the world's great novelists (provided, of course, they do not happen to be British); and the information given concerning the foreign authors who are included is, on the whole, meagre and biased. If, as is natural, one should judge the relative importance of the world's novelists by the space devoted to them, one could not escape
the impression that the literary genius of the
world resides almost exclusively in British writers.
This prejudiced and disproportionate treatment
of literature would not be so regrettable if the
Britannica's criticisms were cosmopolitan in character, or if its standard of judgment was a purely literary one. But the criteria of the Encyclopædia's editors are, in the main, moral and puritanical. Authors are judged not so much by their literary and artistic merits as by their bourgeois virtue, their respectability and inoffensiveness. Consequently it is not even the truly great writers of Great Britain who are recommended the most highly, but those middle-class literary idols who teach moral lessons and whose purpose it is to uplift mankind. The Presbyterian complex, so evident throughout the Encyclopædia's critiques, finds in literature a fertile field for operation.
Because of the limitations of space, I shall
confine myself in this chapter to modern literature. I have, however, inspected the manner in which the older literature is set forth in the Encyclopædia Britannica; and there, as elsewhere, is discernible the same provincialism, the same theological point of view, the same flamboyant exaggeration of English writers, the same neglect of foreign genius. As a reference book the Britannica is chauvinistic, distorted, inadequate, disproportioned, and woefully behind the times. Despite the fact that the Eleventh Edition is supposed to have been brought up to date, few recent writers are included, and those few are largely second-rate writers of Great Britain.