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Anticipations Chapter 7 Part 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter seven B of Anticipations. This is a LibriVox recording.
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  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
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  Speaker 1: by Christopher Taylor, Anticipations by H. G. Wells, Chapter seven B.
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  Speaker 1: These things, if they were merely the grievances of the study,
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  Speaker 1: might very well rest there, But they must be recognized
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  Speaker 1: here because the intellectual decline of the published literature of
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  Speaker 1: the English language. Using the word to cover all sorts
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  Speaker 1: of books involves finally the decline of the language, and
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  Speaker 1: of all the spacious political possibilities that go with the
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  Speaker 1: wide extension of a language. Conceivably, if in the coming
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  Speaker 1: years a deliberate attempt were made to provide sound instruction
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  Speaker 1: in English to all who sought it, and to all
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  Speaker 1: within the control of English speaking governments, if honor and
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  Speaker 1: emolument were given to literary men instead of being left
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  Speaker 1: to them to most indelicately, and if the present sordid
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  Speaker 1: trade of publishing were so lifted as to bring the
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  Speaker 1: whole literature, the whole science, and all the contemporary thought
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  Speaker 1: of the world, not some selection of the world's literature,
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  Speaker 1: not some obsolete encyclopedia sold meanly and basely to choke
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  Speaker 1: hungry minds. But a real publication of all that has
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  Speaker 1: been and is being done within the reach of each
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  Speaker 1: man's need and desire, who had the franchise of the tongue.
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  Speaker 1: Then by the year two thousand, I would prophesy that
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  Speaker 1: the whole functional body of human society would read, and
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  Speaker 1: perhaps even write and speak our language. And not only that,
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  Speaker 1: but it might be the prevalent in everyday language of
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  Speaker 1: Scandinavia and Denmark and Holland, of all Africa, all North America,
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  Speaker 1: of the Pacific coasts, of Asia, and of India, the
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  Speaker 1: universal international language, and in a fair way to be
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  Speaker 1: the universal language of mankind. But such an enterprise demands
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  Speaker 1: a resolve and intelligence beyond all the immediate signs of
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  Speaker 1: the times. It implies a veritable renascence of intellectual life
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  Speaker 1: among the English speaking peoples. The probabilities of such a
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  Speaker 1: renaissance will be more conveniently discussed at a later stage
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  Speaker 1: when we attempt to draw a broad outline of the
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  Speaker 1: struggle for worldwide descendancy that the coming years will see.
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  Speaker 1: But here it is clear that upon the probability of
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  Speaker 1: such a renaissance depends the extension of the language, and
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  Speaker 1: not only that, but the preservation of that military and
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  Speaker 1: naval efficiency upon which, in this world of resolute aggression,
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  Speaker 1: the existence of the English speaking communities finally depends. French
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  Speaker 1: and German will certainly be aggregating languages during the greater
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  Speaker 1: portion of the coming years of the two I am
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  Speaker 1: inclined to think French will spread further than German. There
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  Speaker 1: is a disposition in the world which the French share,
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  Speaker 1: to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French derive.
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  Speaker 1: So far as I can gather from the facts that
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  Speaker 1: the French were beaten by the Germans in eighteen seventy,
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  Speaker 1: and that they do not breed with the abandon of
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  Speaker 1: rabbits or negroes, these are considerations that affect the dissemination
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  Speaker 1: of French very little. The French which reading public is
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  Speaker 1: something different and very much larger than the existing French
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  Speaker 1: political system. The number of books published in French is
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  Speaker 1: greater than that published in English. There is a critical
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  Speaker 1: reception for a work published in French. That is one
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  Speaker 1: of the few things worth a writer's having, and the
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  Speaker 1: French translators are the most alert and efficient in the world.
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  Speaker 1: One has only to see a Parisian bookshop and to
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  Speaker 1: recall an English one to realize the as yet unattainable
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  Speaker 1: standing of French. The serried ranks of lemon colored volumes
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  Speaker 1: in the former have the whole range of human thought
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  Speaker 1: and interest. There are no taboos and no limits. You
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  Speaker 1: have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency
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  Speaker 1: to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I
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  Speaker 1: remember my amazement to discover three copies of a translation
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  Speaker 1: of that most wonderful book The Principles of Psychology of
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  Speaker 1: Professor William James, in a shop at the Avenue d'epera,
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  Speaker 1: three copies of a book that I have never seen
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  Speaker 1: anywhere in England outside my own house. And I am
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  Speaker 1: an attentive student of bookshop windows, and the French books
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  Speaker 1: are all so pleasant in the page, and so cheap
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  Speaker 1: they are for a people that buys to read. One
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  Speaker 1: thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach me
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  Speaker 1: downs of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels,
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  Speaker 1: still more horribly illustrated, the exasperating pointless variety in size
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  Speaker 1: and thickness of its books. The general effect of the
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  Speaker 1: English book is that it is something sold by a
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  Speaker 1: dealer in bric a brac. Honestly sorry, the thing is
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  Speaker 1: a book, but who has done his best to remedy
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  Speaker 1: it anyhow? And all the English shopful is either brand
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  Speaker 1: new fiction or illustrated travel of buns with a grand
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  Speaker 1: Lama type, or gilded versions of the classic of pastimes
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  Speaker 1: done up to give away, while the French bookshop reeks
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  Speaker 1: of contemporary intellectual life. These things count for French as
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  Speaker 1: against English now, and they will count for infinitely more
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  Speaker 1: in the coming years and over. German also, French has
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  Speaker 1: many advantages. In spite of the numerica preponderance of books
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  Speaker 1: published in Germany. It is doubtful if the German reader
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  Speaker 1: has quite such a Catholic feast before him as the
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  Speaker 1: reader of French. There is a mass of German fiction,
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  Speaker 1: probably as uninteresting to a foreigner as popular English and
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  Speaker 1: American romance. And German compared with French, is an unattractive language, unmelodious, unwieldy,
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  Speaker 1: and cursed with a hideous and blinding lettering that the
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  Speaker 1: German is too patriotic to sacrifice. There has been in
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  Speaker 1: Germany a more powerful parallel to what one may call
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  Speaker 1: the honest Saxon movement among the English, that queer mental
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  Speaker 1: twist that moves men to call an otherwise undistinguished preface
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  Speaker 1: a foreword and find a pleasurable advantage over their fellow
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  Speaker 1: creatures in a familiarity with eftsoons. This tendency in German
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  Speaker 1: has done much to arrest the simplification of idiom and
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  Speaker 1: check the development of new words of classical origin. In particular,
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  Speaker 1: it is stood in the way of the international use
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  Speaker 1: of scientific terms. The Englishmen, the Frenchmen, and the Italian
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  Speaker 1: have a certain community of technical, scientific and philosophical phraseology,
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  Speaker 1: and it is frequently easier for an Englishman with some
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  Speaker 1: special knowledge of his subject to read and appreciate a
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  Speaker 1: subtle and technical work in French than it is for
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  Speaker 1: him to fully enter into the popular matter of the
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  Speaker 1: same tongue. Moreover, the technicalities of these peoples, being not
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  Speaker 1: so immediately and constantly brought into contrast and contact with
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  Speaker 1: their Latin or Greek roots as they would be if
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  Speaker 1: they were derived, as are so many patriotic German technicalities
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  Speaker 1: from native roots, are free to qualify and develop a
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  Speaker 1: final meaning distinct from their original intention. In the growing
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  Speaker 1: and changing body of science. This counts for much. The
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  Speaker 1: indigenous German technicality remains clumsy and compromised by its everyday
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  Speaker 1: relations to the end of time. It drags a lengthening
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  Speaker 1: chain of unsuitable associations and the shade of meaning, the
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  Speaker 1: limited qualification that a Frenchman or Englishman can attain with
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  Speaker 1: a mere twist of them sentence, the German must either
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  Speaker 1: abandon or laboriously overstate with some colossal wormcast of parenthesis. Moreover,
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  Speaker 1: against the German tongue, there are hostile frontiers. There are
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  Speaker 1: hostile people who fear German preponderance and who have set
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  Speaker 1: their hearts against its use. In Romania and among the
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  Speaker 1: slav Bohemian and Hungarian peoples. French attacks German in the
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  Speaker 1: flank and has as clear a prospect of predominance. These
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  Speaker 1: two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict. They will
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  Speaker 1: perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe
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  Speaker 1: and perhaps of the world, in a great urban region
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  Speaker 1: that will arise about the Rhine. Politically, this region lies
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  Speaker 1: now in six independent states, but economically it must become
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  Speaker 1: one in the next fifty years, it will almost certainly
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  Speaker 1: be the greatest urban region in all the world, except
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  Speaker 1: that which will arise in the eastern states of North
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  Speaker 1: America and that which may arise somewhere about Hankow. It
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  Speaker 1: will stretch from Lille to Kiel. It will drive extensions
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  Speaker 1: along the Rhine Valley into Switzerland, and flinging an arm
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  Speaker 1: along the Maldau to Prague. It will be the industrial
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  Speaker 1: capital of the Old World. Paris will be its west end,
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  Speaker 1: and it will stretch a spider's web of railways and
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  Speaker 1: great roads of the new sort over the whole continent.
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  Speaker 1: Even when the coal field industries of the plain give
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  Speaker 1: place to the industrial application of mountain borne electricity, this
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  Speaker 1: great city region will remain, I believe, in its present
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  Speaker 1: position at the seaport end of the great Plain of
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  Speaker 1: the Old World. Considerations of transit will keep it where
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  Speaker 1: it has grown, and electricity will be brought to it
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  Speaker 1: in mighty cables from the torrents of the central European
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  Speaker 1: mountain mass. Its westward port may be Bordeaux or Milford Haven,
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  Speaker 1: or even some port in the southwest of Ireland, unless
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  Speaker 1: which is very unlikely, the velocity of secure Sea travel
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  Speaker 1: can be increased beyond that of land locomotion. I do
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  Speaker 1: not see how this great region is to unify itself
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  Speaker 1: without some linguistic compromise. The Germanization of the French speaking
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  Speaker 1: peoples by force is too ridiculous a suggestion to entertain,
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  Speaker 1: almost inevitably, with travel, with transport communications, with every condition
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  Speaker 1: of human convenience insisting upon it, formally or informally, a
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  Speaker 1: bilingual compromise will come into operation. And to my mind
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  Speaker 1: at least the chances seem even that French will emerge
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  Speaker 1: on the upper hand, unless indeed, that great renascence of
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  Speaker 1: the English speaking people should, after all, so overwhelmingly occur
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  Speaker 1: as to force this European city to be tri lingual
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  Speaker 1: and prepare the way by which the whole world may
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  Speaker 1: at last speak together in one tongue. These are the
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  Speaker 1: aggregating tongues. I do not think that any other tongues
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  Speaker 1: than these are quite likely to hold their own in
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  Speaker 1: the coming time. Italian may flourish in the city of
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  Speaker 1: the Po Valley, but only with French beside it. Spanish
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  Speaker 1: and Russian are mighty languages, but without a reading public,
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  Speaker 1: how can they prevail? And what prospect of reading public
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  Speaker 1: has either they are are I believe already judged by
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  Speaker 1: a D two thousand, all these languages will be tending
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  Speaker 1: more and more to be the second tongues of bilingual communities,
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  Speaker 1: with French or English or less probably German winning the
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  Speaker 1: upper hand. But when one turns to China there are
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  Speaker 1: the strangest possibilities. It is in Eastern Asia alone that
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  Speaker 1: there seems to be any possibility of a synthesis sufficiently
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  Speaker 1: great to maintain itself arising outside of and independently of
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  Speaker 1: the interlocked system of mechanically sustained societies that is developing
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  Speaker 1: out of medieval Christendom. Throughout Eastern Asia, there is still,
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  Speaker 1: no doubt a vast wilderness of languages. But over them
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  Speaker 1: all rides the Chinese writing, and very strong, strong enough
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  Speaker 1: to be very gravely considered, is the possibility of that
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  Speaker 1: writing taking up an orthodox association of sounds and becoming
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  Speaker 1: a world speech. The Japanese written language, the language of
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  Speaker 1: Japanese literature, tends to assimilate itself to Chinese, and fresh
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  Speaker 1: Chinese words and expressions are continually taking root in Japan.
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  Speaker 1: The Japanese are a people quite abnormal and incalculable, with
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  Speaker 1: a touch of romance, a conception of honor, a quality
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  Speaker 1: of imagination, and a clearness of intelligence that renders possible
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  Speaker 1: for them things inconceivable of any other existing nation. I
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  Speaker 1: may be the slave of prospective effects. But when I
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  Speaker 1: turn my mind from the pettifogging muddle of the English
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  Speaker 1: House of Commons, for example, that magnified vestry that is
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  Speaker 1: so proud of itself as a club, When I turn
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  Speaker 1: from that to this race a brave and smiling people, abruptly,
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  Speaker 1: destiny begins drawing with a bolder hand. Suppose the Japanese
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  Speaker 1: were to make up their minds to accelerate whatever process
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  Speaker 1: of synthesis were possible in China. Suppose, after all, I
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  Speaker 1: am not the victim of atmospheric refraction, and they are
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  Speaker 1: indeed as gallant and bold and intelligent as my baseless
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  Speaker 1: conception of them would have them be. They would almost
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  Speaker 1: certainly find cooperative elements among the educated Chinese. But this
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  Speaker 1: is no doubt the lesser probability in front and rear
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  Speaker 1: of China. The English language stands. It has the start
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  Speaker 1: of all other languages, the mechanical advantage, the position. And
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  Speaker 1: if only we who think and write, and translate, and
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  Speaker 1: print and put forth can make it worth the world's having.
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  Speaker 1: In Douve, Chapter seven B recording by Christopher Taylor,