Polyglot Readers Could Enjoy The Best Of European Literature

By Author: Shirley Green
Total Articles: 129
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Life is now treated in fiction by every race but our own with singular candour... Everywhere in Europe a novel is looked upon now as an impersonal work, from which the writer, as a mere observer, stands aloof, neither blaming nor applauding ... novelists have determined to disdain nothing and to repudiate nothing which is common to humanity,

Here Gosse rehearsed the principles of Zola's manifesto Le Roman experimental (1880) which insisted on a novelist's duty to be 'impersonal', 'nothing more than a court clerk, who forbids himself to judge or conclude' but 'simply exposes what he has seen' in order to argue that, on the Continent, they were the accepted literary currency. Which was hardly the case, of course; when Samuel Smith lobbied for Vizetelly's prosecution, he directed the Home Secretary to Germany's ban on La Terre. But more importantly, Gosse's complaint that English fiction was unfashionably reticent stood at odds with his prior claim that Heinemann would be able to Replica Omega filter out anything offensive from the Library's selection of the best ...
... in foreign fiction. If the European standard was Zola's, and Zola in English was illegal, then the implication was that only cultivated, polyglot readers like Gosse could enjoy the best of European literature; the common reader had only to 'hope' for 'masterpieces' mild enough to allow translation.

Acquiescent as this was, Heinemann's International Library went still further in its adherence to the terms of the Vizetelly rulings. Because linguistic competence was an index of class as the legal exemption of Zola in French signalled Heinemann sought to circumvent the cultural stigma of publishing for mono-glots, which Vizetelly's hostile reception had so comprehensively exposed. For one thing, the linguistic range of the International Library list lowered the Omega Seamaster Replica Watches likelihood that anybody would order its audience to educate itself sufficiently to be able to read the original texts: where France was the main source for Vizetelly's translated titles, Heinemann selected Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish and Russian novels. And in case ignorance of these languages was still considered an unsatisfactory excuse for reading an English translation, the series preface offered an extra alibi to Heinemann's customers, which portrayed their purpose as being very far from 'catching up what indecency [they] could'. Thanks to Gosse's promise that the International Library was 'a series of spiritual Baedekers and Murrays', 'a guide to the inner geography of Europe' (iii), his implied reader was no smut-seeker, but rather a respectable member of the emerging middle-class market for Continental tourism. The series preface began:

Rarely indeed [do] we turn aside to learn something of the interior life of those other countries the exterior scenery of which is often so familiar to us. We climb the Alps, but are content to know nothing of the pastoral romances of Switzerland. We steam in out of the picturesque fjords of Norway, but never guess what deep speculation into life and morals is made by [its] novelists... We stroll across the courts of the Alhambra, we are listlessly rowed upon Venetian canals and Lombard lakes, we hasten by night through the roaring factories of Belgium; but we never pause to inquire whether there is now flourishing a Spanish, an Italian, a Flemish school of fiction.