The Hundred Worst Books and They That Wrote Them(英译汉赏析4).doc

The Hundred Worst Books and They That Wrote Them As it has been found possible to tabulate, to the satisfaction of some people at least, the worlds Hundred Best Books, so, twenty years ago, it might have been possible to enumerate and set down the hundred least worthy that had then appeared under the imprint of reputable publishers. The enormous output since that time, however, has made such a task impossible in a literal senses. Even the most patient and plodding student, tabulating for his doctorate degree, would sink appalled before the herculean task of selecting the hundred worst from the thousands sufficiently poor. The causes for this unprecedented eruption of inferior literature have been several, and the invention of the American typewriting machine is surely not the least of them. When one of the first of these machines was shown to George Eliot by an Oxford professor, she exclaimed with prophetic fervor: Ah, I can see that it will be responsible for many a bad book, and we have poor ones enough as it is. There can be no doubt, that the mere facilitating of the mechanical labor of authorship has induced many young people who were otherwise unemployed to try their hands at literature, and only too often they have produced what other idle youngsters like themselves found readable enough. A class of ephemeral fiction has resulted which might well be called that of the stenographers school, consisting of novels made by the almost unassisted efforts of the machines. The great increase of publishing firms, many of which are frankly and solely interested in satisfying the lowest element of the reading public, has had, no doubt, much to do with this plague of books which, rated at nothing, would be overestimated. But it seems probable that the public library, despite many a good turn it has done for culture, is even more guilty in this general debauching of public taste. People will read a great many more novels borrowed from a public library than they wou