The Best Hundred Books/Mr. Ruskin on the Choice of Books
Mr. Ruskin on the Choice of Books.
MR. RUSKIN subsequently sent us the following letter, which deals generally with the subject of the choice of the books, and also gives his reasons for some of the "blottesque" emendations in the foregoing list:—
Sir,—Several points have been left out of consideration both by you and by Sir John Lubbock, in your recent inquiries and advices concerning books. Especially Sir John, in his charming description of the pleasures of reading for the nineteenth century, leaves curiously out of mention its miseries; and among the various answers sent to the Pall Mall I find nobody laying down, to begin with, any one canon or test by which a good book is to be known from a bad one.
Neither does it seem to enter into the respondent minds to ask, in any case, whom, or what the book is to be good for—young people or old, sick or strong, innocent or worldly—to make the giddy sober, or the grave gay. Above all, they do not distinguish between books for the labourer and the schoolman; and the idea that any well-conducted mortal life could find leisure enough to read a hundred books would have kept me wholly silent on the matter, but that I was fain, when you sent me Sir John's list, to strike out, for my own pupils' sake, the books I would forbid them to be plagued with.
For, of all the plagues that afflict mortality, the venom of a bad book to weak people, and the charms of a foolish one to simple people, are without question the deadliest; and they are so far from being redeemed by the too imperfect work of the best writers, that I never would wish to see a child taught to read at all, unless the other conditions of its education were alike gentle and judicious.
And to put the matter into anything like tractable order at all, you must first separate the scholar from the public. A well-trained gentleman should, of course, know the literature of his own country, and half-a-dozen classics thoroughly, glancing at what else he likes; but, unless he wishes to travel or to receive strangers, there is no need for his troubling himself with the languages or literature of modern Europe. I know French pretty well myself. I never recollect the gender of anything, and don't know more than the present indicative of any verb; but with a dictionary I can read a novel,—and the result is my wasting a great deal of time over Scribe, Dumas, and Gaboriau, and becoming a weaker and more foolish person in all manner of ways therefore. French scientific books are, however, out and out the best in the world; and, of course, if a man is to be scientific, he should know both French and Italian. The best German books should at once be translated into French, for the world's sake, by the French Academy;—Mr. Lowell is altogether right in pointing out that nobody with respect for his eyesight can read them in the original.
I have no doubt there is a great deal of literature in the East, in which people who live in the East, or travel there, may be rightly interested. I have read three or four pages of the translation of the Koran, and never want to read any more; the Arabian Nights many times over, and much wish, now, I had been better employed.
As for advice to scholars in general, I do not see how any modest scholar could venture to advise another. Every man has his own field, and can only by his own sense discover what is good for him in it. I will venture, however, to protest, somewhat sharply, against Sir John's permission to read any book fast. To do anything fast—that is to say at a greater rate than hat at which it can be done well—is a folly: but of all follies reading fast is the least excusable. You miss the points of a book by doing so, and misunderstand the rest.
Leaving the scholar to his discretion, and turning to the public, they fall at first into the broad classes of workers and idlers. The whole body of modern circulating library literature is produced for the amusement of the families so daintily pictured in Punch—mama lying on a sofa showing her pretty feet—and the children delightfully teazing the governess, and nurse, and maid, and footman—the close of the day consisting of state-dinner and reception. And Sir John recommends this kind of people to read Homer, Dante, and Epictetus! Surely the most beneficent and innocent of all books yet produced for them is the Book of Nonsense, with its corollary carols?—inimitable and refreshing, and perfect in rhythm. I really don't know any author to whom I am half so grateful, for my idle self, as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.
Then there used to be Andersen! but he has been minced up, and washed up, and squeezed up, and rolled out, till one knows him no more. Nobody names him, of the omnilegent judges: but a pure edition of him, gaily illustrated, would be a treasure anywhere—perhaps even to the workers, whom it is hard to please.
But I did not begin this talk to recommend anything, but to ask you to give me room to answer questions, of which I receive many by letter, why I effaced such and such books from Sir John's list.
1. Grote's History of Greece.—Because there is probably no commercial establishment, between Charing-cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not write a better one, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it.
2. Confessions of St. Augustine.—Because religious people nearly always think too much about themselves; and there are many saints whom it is much more desirable to know the history of. St. Patrick to begin with—especially in present times.
3. John Stuart Mill—Sir John Lubbock ought to have known that his day was over.
4. Charles Kingsley.—Because his sentiment is false and his tragedy frightful. People who buy cheap clothes are not punished in real life by catching fevers; social inequalities are not to be redressed by tailors falling in love with bishops' daughters, or gamekeepers with squires'; and the story of "Hypatia" is the most ghastly in Christian tradition, and should for ever have been left in silence.
5. Darwin.—Because it is every man's duty to know what he is, and not to think of the embryo he was, nor the skeleton that he shall be. Because also, Darwin has a mortal fascination for all vainly curious and idly speculative persons, and has collected, in the train of him, every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a dim comet wagging its useless tail of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast stars.
6. Gibbon—Primarily, none but the malignant and the weak study the Decline and Fall either of State or organism. Dissolution and putrescence are alike common and unclean in all things; any wretch or simpleton may observe for himself, and experience himself, the processes of ruin; but good men study and wise men describe, oaly the growth and standing of things,—not their decay.
For the rest, Gibbon's is the worst English that was ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit: his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.
7. Voltaire—His work is, in comparison with good literature, what nitric acid is to wine, and sulphuretted hydrogen to air. Literary chemists cannot but take account of the sting and stench of him; but he has no place in the library of a thoughtful scholar. Every man of sense knows more of the world than Voltaire can tell him; and what he wishes to express of such knowledge he will say without a snarl.
I cannot here enter into another very grave and wide question which neither the Pall Mall nor its respondents ask, respecting literature for the young, but will merely point out one total want in the present confused supply of it—that of intelligible books on natural history. I chanced at breakfast the other day, to wish I knew something of the biography of a shrimp, the rather that I was under the impression of having seen jumping shrimps on a sandy shore express great satisfaction in their life.
My shelves are loaded with books on natural history, but I could find nothing about shrimps except that "they swim in the water, or lie upon the sand in shoals, and are taken in multitudes for the table."
MR. SWINBURNE.
Sir,—I must apologize for the inevitable discourtesy of delay in answering your letter. judging from what I have seen, that any man's or woman's opinion on the relative value of a hundred books of all kinds which he or she might select as the most precious to humanity in general could itself be of any value to any one not concerned in the diagnosis of that man's or woman's morbid development of intellectual presumption and moral audacity. I send you, therefore, simply the list of a student whose reading has lain mainly, though by no means exclusively, in the line of imaginative or creative literature.
There are names which I have not taken upon myself to insert, as assuredly I should not have taken upon myself to reject them, of whose claims to a foremost place I should be sorry to be thought ignorant. It would be superfluous, I presume, for any educated Englishman to say that he does not question the pre-eminence of such names as Bacon and Darwin; but the only possible value of any man's special opinion, it seems to me, must depend, with regard to such writers as these, on the knowledge to be gained only by especial, if not exclusive, study.
I need only add (and, indeed, perhaps I need not add) that after the first two or three entries this list does not give my estimate of the greatness of the names included by the perhaps inevitably chaotic or heterogeneous arrangement, which I have not leisure to remedy or reform.
I am not sure that you may think "selections" from various volumes of ballads or other lyric poetry (25, 27) accurately definable or classifiable as books having an individual vitality of their own. But, as I cannot help thinking some of these waifs and strays worthy to be ranked among the most precious treasures of our own or any language, I could not properly refrain from entering them on my register. In some cases my "selections" would be large, in others very small but very precious. You will see that I have included no living names, and will, therefore, not be surprised that those of Lord Tennyson and M. Leconte de Lisle—to mention none but these two pre-eminent contemporaries—should be wanting. Some entries in any list, I presume, must seem frivolous or eccentric or perverse to readers of different tastes, and many omissions in mine may probably be attributed to pure ignorance as much as to want of taste.—Yours very truly, A. C. Swinburne.
1. Shakspeare.
2. Æschylus.
3. Selections from the Bible: comprising Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel: the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, the Gospel and the First Epistle of St. John, and the Epistle of St. James.
4. Homer.
5. Sophocles.
6. Aristophanes.
7. Pindar.
8. Lucretius.
9. Catullus.
10. Dante.
11. Chaucer.
12. Villon.
13. Marlowe.
14. Webster.
15. Molière.
16. Rabelais.
17. Epictetus.
18. Mill on Liberty.
19. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám (Fitzgerald's 1st version, 1859).
20. Milton.
21. Shelley.
22. Victor Hugo
23. Landor
24. Boccaccio.
25. Ballads of North England and Scotland (from Percy, Scott, Motherwell, and other selections).
26. Sir Philip Sidney (Astrophel and Stella).
27. Selections from the lyric poetry of the are of Shakspeare (England's Helicon, &c.)
28. Charles Lamb.
29. Boswell's Life of Johnson.
Select Works (30–50):
30. Coleridge (verse and prose.)
31. Scott (prose and verse.)
32. Blake.
33. Wordsworth.
34. Spenser.
35. Keats.
36. Mrs. Browning.
37. Burns.
38. Byron—"Don Juan." Cant. I.–VIII., XI.–XVI. inclusive, and "Vision of Judgment."
39. Balzac.
40. Dickens.
41. Thackeray.
42. Swift.
43. Ben Jonson.
44. Beaumont and Fletcher.
45. Ford.
46. Dekker.
47. Tourneur,
48. Marston.
49. Middleton.
50. Rossetti.
51. Theocritus.
52. Story of the Volsungs and the Niblungs.
53. The Saga of Burnt Njal.
54. Lockhart's Life of Scott.
55. Autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
56. Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
57. Ariosto.
Select Works (58–100).
58. Donne.
59. Massinger.
60. Congreve.
61. Vanbrugh.
62. Dryden.
63. Pope.
64. Defoe.
65. Goldsmith,
66. Fielding.
67. Sterne.
68. Sheridan.
69. Butler (excerpts from ("Hudibras" and "Remains.")
70. Collins.
71. Grey.
72. Herrick.
73. Suckling.
74. Prior.
75. *Omitted by Mr. Swinburne.
76. Drayton.
77. George Herbert,
78. Crashaw.
79. Randolph.
80. Wither.
81. La Fontaine.
82. Voltaire.
83. Diderot.
84. Chamfort (Maxims).
85. Beaumarchais.
86. Stendhal.
87. Dumas.
88. Jane Austen.
89. Charlotte Brontë.
90. Emily Brontë (verse and prose).
91. Leigh Hunt.
92. Hood.
93. Mrs. Gaskell.
94. George Eliot.
95. Campbell.
96. Musset.
97. Macaulay.
98. Crabbe.
99. Meinhold (English translation).
100. Early English metrical romances, from the collections of Weber, Ritson and Wright.
* Mr. Swinburne subsequently supplied this omission in the following letter:—
Sir—As I find I have omitted one of my hundred, I am inclined to supply the gap with the name of Etherege, who, as I have just been reminded by a far wider and deeper student of English literature than myself, was the founder—among us—of the pure comedy of manners, as opposed to the Shakspearian comedy of fancy and the Jonsonian comedy of humour; and who was certainly a great master of style and dialogue.—Yours very truly,
MR. WILLIAM MORRIS.
Sir,—I answer your letter with much pleasure. Like my friend Mr. Swinburne, I do not pretend to prescribe reading for other people: the list I give you is of books which have profoundly impressed myself: I hope I shall be acquitted of egotism or conceit for having ventured to add a few notes to the list; in some cases I felt explanation was necessary; in all, it seemed to me that my opinion could be of no value unless it were given quite frankly; so I ask your readers to accept my list and notes as a confession such as might chance to fall from me in friendly conversation; and, after all, these are matters about which one must have an opinion, though it may, I feel too well, be sometimes prudent to conceal it.
My list seems a short one, but it includes a huge mass of reading. Also there is a kind of book which I think might be excluded in such lists, or at least put in a quite separate one. Such books are rather tools than books: one reads them for a definite purpose, for extracting information from them of some special kind. Among such books I should include works on philosophy, economics, and modern or critical history. I by no means intend to undervalue such books, but they are not, to my mind, works of art; their manner may be good, or even excellent, but it is not essential to them; their matter is a question of fact, not of taste. My list comprises only what I consider works of art.—I am, Sir, yours obediently,List.
| 1 | Hebrew Bible (excluding some twice done parts and some pieces of mere Jewish ecclesiasticism) | These books are of the kind which Mazzini called "Bibles;" they cannot always be measured by a literary standard, but to me are far more important than any literature. They are in no sense the work of individuals, but have grown up from the very hearts of the people.Some other books further down share in the nature of these "Bibles;" I have marked them with a star.* |
| 2 | Homer | |
| 3 | Hesiod | |
| 4 | The Edda (including some of the other early old Norse romantic genealogical poems) | |
| 5 | Beowulf | |
| 6 | Mahabharata | |
| 7 | Collections of folk tales, headed by Grimm and the Norse ones | |
| 8 | Irish and Welsh traditional poems | |
| *9 | Herodotus | Real ancient imaginative works. I have left out others of which (to confess and be hanged) I know little or nothing. The greater part of the Latins I should call sham classics. I suppose that they have some good literary qualities; but I cannot help thinking that it is difficult to find out how much. I suspect superstition and authority have influenced them till it has become a mere matter of convention. Of course I admit the archæological value of some of them, especially Virgil and Ovid. |
| 10 | Plato | |
| 11 | Æschylus | |
| 12 | Sophocles | |
| 13 | Aristophanes | |
| 14 | Theocritus | |
| 15 | Lucretius | |
| 16 | Catullus | |
| 17 | Plutarch's Lives | |
| 18* | Heimskringla (the tales of the Norse Kings) | Uncritical or traditional history: almost all these books are admirable pieces of tale-telling: some of them rise into the dignity of prose epics, so to say, especially in parts. Note, for instance, the last battle of Olaf Tryggvason in Heimskringla; and the great rally of the rebels of Ghent in Froissart. |
| 19* | Some half-dozen of the best Icelandic Sagas | |
| 20 | The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle | |
| 21 | William of Malmsbury | |
| 22 | Froissart | |
| 23 | Anglo-Saxon lyrical pieces (like the Ruin and the Exile) | Mediæval poetry. I am sorry to say that I can only read even old German with great difficulty and labour; so I miss much good mediæval poetry—Hans Sachs, for instance. |
| 24 | Dante | |
| 25 | Chaucer | |
| 26 | Piers Plowman | |
| 27* | Nibelungennot | |
| 28* | The Danish and Scotch English Border ballads | |
| 29 | ||
| 30 | Omar Khayyám (though I don't know how much of the charm of this lovely poem is due to Fitzgerald, the translator) | |
| 31 | Other Arab and Persion poetry | |
| 32 | Renard the Fox | |
| 33 | A few of the best rhymed romances | |
| 34* | The Morte d'Arthur (Malory's). I know this is an ill digested collection of fragments, but some of the best of the books it is made from (Lancelot is the best of them) are so long and so cumbered with unnecessary matter that one is thankful to Mallory after all.) | Mediæval story-books. |
| 35 | The Thousand and One Nights. | |
| 36 | Boccaccio's Decameron. | |
| 37 | The Mabinogion. | |
| 38 | Shakespeare | Modern poets. I omit those of this generation whether dead or alive. Goethe and Heine I cannot read, since I don't know German and they cannot be translated. I hope I shall escape Boycotting at the hands of my countrymen for leaving out Milton; but the union in his works of cold classicalism with Puritanism (the two things which I hate most in the world) repels me so that I cannot read him. |
| 39 | Blake (the part of him which a mortal can understand) | |
| 40 | Coleridge | |
| 41 | Shelley | |
| 42 | Keats | |
| 43 | Byron | |
| 44 | Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress | Modern fiction. I should like to say here that I yield to no one, not even Ruskin, in my love and admiration for Scott; also that to my mind of the novelists of our generation Dickens is immeasurably ahead, |
| 45 | Defoe: Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, Captain Singleton, Voyage round the World | |
| 46 | Scott's novels (except the one or two which he wrote when he was hardly alive) | |
| 47 | Dumas the elder (his good novels) | |
| 48 | Victor Hugo (his novels) | |
| 49 | Dickens | |
| 50 | George Borrow (Lavengro and Romany Rye) | |
| 51 | Sir Thomas More's Utopia | I don't know how to class these works. |
| 52 | Ruskin's Works (especially the ethical and politico-economical parts of them | |
| 53 | Thomas Carlyle's Works | |
| 54 | Grimm's Teutonic Mythology |
Though this last book is of the nature of the "tools" above-mentioned, it is so crammed with the material for imagination, and has in itself such a flavour of imagination, that I feel bound to put it down.
I should note that I have by no means intended to put down these books in their order of merit or importance, even in their own divisions.
Our circle of literary authorities would not have been complete without the opinion of some eminent woman of letters. Here, then, is the answer we received from one of the most learned and accomplished women of the time:—
LADY DILKE (MRS. MARK PATTISON).
Sir,—You ask me to send you a list of books on the lines indicated by Sir John Lubbock in his recent lecture at the Working Men's College, but allow me to say that in printing make some very excellent criticisms on the wisdom of "placing before working men, or any men whatever, such a vast and heterogeneous course of study," and with these criticisms I entirely agree. To be in a position to properly understand and appreciate the works on Sir John's list, I undertake to say that one must have spent at least thirty years in preparatory study, and have had the command of, say, something more than a thousand other volumes. And I would ask, further, is this list to be considered simply as a list of literary masterpieces, or is it to present us with a general scheme of knowledge? Any list of books constructed with a view to the realization of such an ideal as the latter would be a very complicated affair, to be rewritten, too, with each succeeding year. If, on the other hand, we are only citing masterpieces of literature and making fancy libraries which may illustrate the extent and catholicity of our own tastes, our task is easier, and on the rough lines laid down by my friend Sir John Lubbock, we may put together a very pretty one.
In order to spare your space, I will not, however, proceed to recapitulate the great names, such as Homer, Dante, Vergil, Shakspeare, &c., which are down on Sir John's list, and about which there can be no question; I will only mention a few books which seem to me (taking European letters only into consideration) to cry for notice, and which might profitably replace the works of Southey, Longfellow, Emerson, Bulwer Lytton, and others of minor note to whom Sir John has given equal place. I would add Epictetus and Boethius to the non-Christian moralists, and St. François de Sales's "Traité de l'Amour de Dieu" to the books on devotion; to the Classics, Pliny's Letters; under history I would mention De Commines' "Memoirs," Clarendon's "Rebellion," Schiller's "Thirty Years' War;" Hobbes's "Leviathan" should not be forgotten in Philosophy, and, making a subdivision for Political Philosophy, I would cite Machiavel's "Prince," Bodin's "Republic," Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity," Montesquieu's "Considérations sur la Grandeur et la Décadence des Romains," Bolingbroke, and Mdme. de Staël's "L'Allemagne." The famous "Familiar Colloquies" of Erasmus should surely find a place under Literature, nor should Tasso, Petrarch, Leopardi, Boccaccio, be forgotten. Racine, Mdme. de Sevigné, Le Sage ("Gil Blas"), La Bruyère, and La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau ("Confessions"), and Mrs. Craven's "Le Récit d'une Sœur," are as typical illustrations of the French genius as Molière. No readers of German can omit to make acquaintance with some of Schiller's plays and with Lessing's "Laokoon;" while among the English poets I would claim notice for Chaucer, for Dryden ("The Hind and Panther"), for Gray ("Elegy" and Sonnet), and for Collins ("Ode to the Passions"). Walton's Lives must not be forgotten, nor Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," and among the essayists surely Bacon, De Quincey, and Charles Lamb must have a place. Ruskin's "Crown of Wild Olive" and "Sesame and Lilies," Pater's "Marius the Epicurean," may also be added under this head, and no list of modern fiction which omits Spielhagen ("Problematische Naturen "), Hugo ("Notre Dame de Paris," "Les Travailleurs de la Mer"), and Balzac ("La Recherche de l'Absolu," "Eugénie Grandet," and "Peau de Chagrin") can be reckoned complete.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
IV.—Novelists, Actors, Playwrights.
WE give the authorities who fall under this head in alphabetical order:—
MISS BRADDON.
Dear Sir,—In reply to your letter of the 13th inst., I beg to say that my reading has been for the most part so desultory, and so much less in amount than I could have wished, that I feel myself in no way qualified to advise others what they should read or avoid reading.
I can, however, tell you the authors whose books have given me most pleasure:—
In Fiction—Dickens, Bulwer, Scott, Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charles Reade, George Eliot, and Wilkie Collins; Balzac and Daudet; Von Hillern, Marlitt, and Auerbach.
In Poetry—Chaucer, Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; Heine. All other poets in a lesser degree and at a distance from these.
In General Literature—Bacon's Essays, Milton's Prose Works, Jeremy Taylor, Addison, Steele, De Quincey, Jeffrey, Macaulay's Essays, Southey's Commonplace Book, Buckle's Miscellanies, Carlyle's Miscellanies; Voltaire, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, Janin, Renan, Augier, Sardou, Molière.
In History—Gibbon, Hume, Macaulay, Carlyle, Lord Mahon, Froude, and Grote; Michelet, Sismondi, Lamartine, Voltaire.
In Metaphysics—Professor Jowett's Plato, Victor Cousin. Of Goethe's "Faust" I have been a devoted student, but could not struggle through "Wilhelm Meister."
Perhaps one quarter of the time I have been able to give to reading in the course of a very busy life has been spent upon the Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews.—I am, dear Sir, faithfully yours,
MR. BURNAND.
My dear Sir,—How can I suggest any better reading than Happy Thoughts," "About Buying a Horse, "The Modern Sandford and Merton," "Strapmore," "One and Three," and "More Happy Thoughts "?—Yours truly,
P.S.—I should recommend "The Grammar of Assent," and all Cardinal Newman's works. His lectures on "Catholicism in England " are masterpieces.
MR. WILKIE COLLINS.
Sir,—You have proposed that I should recommend to inexperienced readers some of the books which are necessary for a liberal education; and you have kindly sent a list of works drawn out by Sir John Lubbock with this object in view, and recently published in your journal.
I am sincerely sensible of the compliment to myself which is implied in your suggestion; but I am at the same time afraid that you have addressed yourself to the wrong man. Let me own the truth. I add one more to the number of reckless people who astonish Sir John Lubbock by devoting little care to the selection of what they read. I pick up the literature that happens to fall in my way, and live upon it as well as I can—like the sparrows who are picking up the crumbs outside my window while I write. If I may still quote my experience of myself, let me add that I have never got any good out of a book unless the book interested me in the first instance. When I find that reading becomes an effort instead of a pleasure, I shut up the volume, respecting the eminent author, and admiring my enviable fellow-creatures who have succeeded where I have failed. These sentiments have been especially lively in me (to give an example) when I have laid aside in despair "Clarissa Harlowe," "La Nouvelle Héloise," the plays of Ben Jonson, Burke on "The Sublime and Beautiful," Hallam's "Middle Ages," and Roscoe's "Life of Leo the Tenth.". Is a person with this good reason to blush for himself (if he was only young enough to do it) the right sort of person to produce a list of books for readers in search of a liberal education? You will agree with me that he is capable of seriously recommending Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," as the best book of travels that has ever been written, and Byron's "Childe Harold" as the grandest poem which the world has seen since the first publication of "Paradise Lost."
After this confession, if I nevertheless venture to offer a few suggestions, will you trust my honesty, even while you doubt my discretion? In any case, the tomb of literature is close by you. You can give me decent burial in the waste-paper basket.
To begin with, What is a liberal education? If I stood at my house door, and put that question to the first ten intelligent-looking persons who passed by, I believe I should receive ten answers all at variance one with the other. My own ideas cordially recognize any system of education the direct tendency of which is to make us better Christians. Looking over Sir John Lubbock's list from this point of view—that is to say, assuming that the production of a good citizen represents the most valuable result of a liberal education—I submit that the best book which your correspondent has recommended is "The Vicar of Wakefield"—and of the many excellent schoolmasters (judging them by their works) in whose capacity for useful teaching he believes, the two in whom I, for my part, most implicitly trust are Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. Holding these extraordinary opinions, if you asked me to pick out a biographical work for general reading, I should choose (after Boswell's supremely great book, of course), Lockhart's "Life of Scott." Let the general reader follow my advice, and he will find himself not only introduced to the greatest genius that has ever written novels, but provided with the example of a man modest, just, generous, resolute, and merciful; a man whose very faults and failings have been transformed into virtues through the noble atonement that he offered, at the peril and the sacrifice of his life.
Let me not forget that the question of literary value must also be considered in recommending books, for this good reason, that positive literary value means positive literary attraction to the general reader. In this connection I have in my mind the most perfect letters in the English language when I introduce the enviable persons who have not yet read it to Moore's "Life of Byron." Again, if any voices crying in the literary wilderness ask me what travels it may be well to read, I do justice to the charm of an admirable style, presenting the results of true and vivid observation, when I mention the names of Beckford and Kinglake. Get Beckford's "Italy, Spain, and Portugal;" and, beginning towards the end of the book, whet your appetite by reading the "Excursion to the Monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha," In Kinglake's case, "Eothen" is the title, and the cheap edition of the book is within everybody's reach. Kane (in "Arctic Explorations") and Mr. George Melville (in "The Lena Delta") are neither of them consummate masters of the English language; but they possess the rate and admirable gift of being able to make other people see what they have seen themselves. When you meet with travellers who are unable to do this, you will get nothing out of them but weariness of spirit. Shut up their books.
Keeping clear of living writers, may I recommend one or two works of fiction, on the chance that they may not have been mentioned, with a word of useful comment perhaps, in other lists?
Read, my good public, Mrs. Inchbald's "Simple Story," in which you will find the character of a young woman who is made interesting even by her faults—a rare triumph, I can tell you, in our art. Read Marryat's "Peter Simple" and "Midshipman Easy," and enjoy true humour and masterly knowledge of human nature. Let my dear lost friend, Charles Reade, seize on your interest, and never allow it to drop from beginning to end in "Hard Cash." Let Dumas keep you up all night over "Monte Cristo," and Balzac draw tears that honour him and honour you in "Père Goriot." Last, not least, do justice to a greater writer, shamefully neglected at the present time in England and America alike, who invented the sea story, and created the immortal character of "Leather Stocking." Read "The Pilot" and "Jack Tier;" read "The Deerslayer" and "The Pathfinder," and I believe you will be almost as grateful to Fenimore Cooper as I am.
It is time to have done. If I attempted to enumerate all the books that I might honestly recommend, I should employ as many secretaries as Napoleon the Great, and I should find nobody bold enough to read me to the end. As it is, some critical persons may object that there runs all through this letter the prejudice that might have been anticipated in a writer of what heavy people call "light literature." No, Sir. My prejudice is in favour of the only useful books that I know of—books in all departments of literature which invite the general reader, as distinguished from books that repel him. If it is answered that profitable reading is a matter of duty first and a matter of pleasure afterwards, let me shelter myself under the authority of Doctor Johnson. Never mind what I say—hear him (Boswell, vol. ii., page 213, ed. 1859):—"I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good."
I first read those admirable words (in an earlier edition of Boswell) when I was a boy at school. What a consolation they were to me when I could not learn my lesson! What consolation they may still offer to bigger boys, in the same predicament, among books recommended to them by the highest authorities!—Believe me. Sir. faithfully yours,MR. HENRY IRVING.
My dear Sir,—In reply to your courteous request I should say—Before a hundred books commend me first to the study of two—the Bible and Shakspeare.—Obediently yours,
MRS. LYNN LINTON.
My dear Sir,—I should add to your list:—
"Pilgrim's Progress."
Green's "History of the English People."
Herbert Spencer (every word).
Lecky—and all Darwin.
Carlyle's full works (no selection) and George Eliot's.
Miss Austen.
Bates's and Wallace's and Livingstone's Travels.
Laing's "Travels in Norway."
Kinglake's "Eothen " and History of the Crimean War."
and to French literature Dumas (the elder), G. Sand, and Balzac, if the reader be a man. But, indeedm the wealth of what ought to be read by any one claiming to understand the best authors is almost unbounded. I have not answered you very satisfactorily. At this moment I am in a very network of occupation, and I am like a creature half strangled for want of time rather than of breath.—I am, faithfully yours,
MR. JAMES PAYN.
Dear Sir,—I have a great respect for Sir John Lubbock, but I do not agree with him as to systematic reading. When a particular object has to be attained reading cannot be too special; there is an enormous waste of intelligence through a neglect of this fact; but otherwise reading should "come by nature." When I look through the list of books you send me I cannot help saying to myself, "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig." There is no more common mistake in these days than the education of people beyond their wits.—Yours truly,
V.—The Advice of the Churches.
SEVERAL correspondents in the course of the publication of these letters wrote to remonstrate with us for not yet having included among our judges any professedly spiritual advisers. "Many of us," said one of these correspondents, "would rather not fill up the theological corners of our libraries from Sir John Lubbock's selection, and it would be interesting to know the opinion of the Archbishops and Bishops, and what they read." So it would; but bishops are busy men, and have almost as little time to read, we expect, as journalists. With archdeacons it is happily different, and we give an interesting letter from a dignitary of the Church of England, who is equally popular as an author and as a preacher.
CARDINAL NEWMAN.
Cardinal Newman is sensible of the compliment paid him by the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in asking of him a list of classical English authors, but is obliged to decline it, as feeling that he is not equal to the task.
ARCHDEACON FARRAR.
Sir,—In obedience to your request I drew up a list of "the Best Hundred Books" some time ago. not think it worth while to send it, because it does not differ essentially from several of those which you have already printed.
Nearly all your correspondents mention the names of authors rather than of books; but the lists would have been more interesting if you had rigidly confined us to the choice of single treatises.
By "the Best Hundred Books" I suppose that you mean those which are of the most permanent and intrinsic worth to us at the present time, not those which we happen to like best or to read most frequently. Many of the best books ever written have perished of their own success. They have rendered themselves unnecessary by becoming a part of the universal heritage of thought and knowledge. Such books, for instance, as Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus Calestium Orbium" in science, or Luther's "Commentary on the Galatians" in theology, or Kant's "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" in philosophy, are types of books which have created an epoch, but which your correspondents do not mention because (I suppose) they have so completely achieved the work for which they were intended. The paradoxes of yesterday become the commonplaces of to-morrow.
There are five great sources of human knowledge—nature, conscience, history, experience—and all those inspired utterances of genius and intuition, whether Jewish or Ethnic, which make us see the things that are and see them as they are. by "the Best Hundred Books" those which are most necessary for a complete culture, it would be necessary to include various histories, biographies, and books of science which are relatively indispensable because they record the facts, or explain the phenomena, which are essential to our highest education.
But if all the books of the world were in a blaze the first twelve which I should snatch out of the flames would be the Bible, the "Imitatio Christi," Homer, Æschylus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Virgil, Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, Wordsworth.
Of living writers I would save first the works of Tennyson, Browning, and Ruskin.—Yours obediently,
To the letter of this representative Churchman we are glad to be able to add the advice of two equally representative Nonconformists:—
THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION.
Sir,—Sir John Lubbock's catalogue of books will meet the reauirements of men of education and leisure, For persons of less complete education and leisure a humbler and shorter list may be acceptable. I subjoin my own choice for such as can obtain access to them, setting them down as they occur, without classification:—Green's "History of England," Professor Bryce's "History of the Holy Roman Empire," Emerson's twelve essays on "Society and Solitude," Helps's "Friends in Council," "Companions of My Solitude," and "Organization of Common Life," Boswell's "Johnson," Marcus Aurelius's translation of Plato's "Laws," Cowper's translation of Homer's "Odyssey," Mozley on "Miracles," Longfellow's "Dante," Plutarch's "Lives," Milton's prose works, Evelyn's "Diary," Pepys's Diary," Michelet's "History of France," Merovingian Era," Thierry's " Norman Conquest," Robertson's and Prescott's "Mexico" and "Peru," Strickland's "Queens of England," "Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson," Charles Lamb's "Elia," Montaigne's "Essays," St. Simon's " Memoirs of the Reign of of Louis XIV.," Molière's plays, Bossuet's "Funeral Orations," Shakspeare's plays, and specially his sonnets, R. Burns's poems, Coleridge's poems, Matthew Arnold's poems, Mrs. Browning's poems, Crabbe's poems, Bishop Hall's "Meditations," William Tyndale's works, Sir W. Dawson's "Chain of Life " and "Fossil Men," Sydney Smith's essays, E. Thring's "Theory and Practice of Teaching," Whately's "Cautions for the Times," Newman's "Parochial Sermons," MacCulloch's "Illustrations of the Attributes of God from Physical Nature," Burnet's "History of his own Times," Whewell's "Foundations of Morals," Sir Walter Scott's Life (3), Wraxall's "Memoirs," L. Morris's "Epic of Hades," Thackeray's "Roundabout Papers," Basil Hail's "Voyages and Travels," Bacon's Essays, Huc's "Travels in Tartary," Pascal's "Provincial Letters," Sir W. Muir's "Life of Mohammed," "The Spectator," John Forster's (Foster) "Essays" and his Biography by Ryland, Meyrick on "The Necessity of Dogma," Henry Rogers on "Eclipse of Faith," F. D. Maurice's "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy," Goldwin Smith on Rational Religion. Add to these an occasional course of reading in the Church Times, the Guardian, the Record, the Rock, the Watchman[1], the Nonconformist, the Inguirer, and the Freethinker, in order to see how diligently our contemporaries endeavour not to understand but to misrepresent each other; and by the aid of the books above mentioned I think the unlearned reader will find enough to instruct, amuse, and astonish him both in England and elsewhere.—I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
THE PRESIDENT OF THE BAPTIST UNION.
Dear Sir,—You have addressed me as the President of the Baptist Union. I am not sure, however, that I should carry all or the greater number of my brother Baptists with me in any specification I might make. In such matters there is liberty of opinion among us, and considerable divergence.
Allow me to point out that in the list as now published in the Contemporary Review by Sir John Lubbock there are many differences from that to which you have given currency. Three differences are almost all in the direction of your correspondents' criticisms. Thus the Bible now heads the list, and, in fact, there seems little to improve, on the whole, save by way of addition. Several of the Eastern books mentioned would be of true service to but few, We are all more or less conscientiously disposed to rate those books most highly which have most deeply influenced ourselves. We happened to read them at a specially susceptible period of our lives, and they are more to us than other books, not only through what they are in themselves, but through what they have suggested. For myself, I would say that three books not in the lists have, on the whole, done more for me than almost any others, excepting the few great masterpieces that have become a part of the intellectual life of every thoughtful man. These three are—(1) John Foster's Essays (surely not John Forster's, as printed in my friend Mr. Edward White's letter, a very different man); (2) Jonathan Edwards's "On the Freedom of the Will;" and (3) Stanley's "Life of Dr. Arnold." At a later period I find more in Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philosopliy " than in any metaphysical work I had read—certainly more than in that of Lewes's, which Sir John Lubbock mentions. On a general review of the list, I may venture to remark:—
1. In theology, I would omit Wake's "Apostolic Fathers," and add Augustine's "City of God;" also Butler's "Sermons on Human Nature" to his "Analogy." As an "epoch-making book" I would also mention Anselm's "Cur Deus Homo." The theological part of the list is in truth very scanty, nor have I much to add to it, save that in my judgment Baxter's "Saints' Rest" (in an unabridged, unaltered form) is worthy to be placed beside Jeremy Taylor's "Holy Living and Holy Dying;" and Charnock's posthumous discourses on "The Existence and Attributes of God" have always seemed to me the very flower of Puritan divinity.
2. In the Classical list there is little to add. There should be more of Plato—say the "Protagoras" and "Phædrus," with, of course, the "Apology of Socrates" as a supplement to the "Phædo." To the "De Corona" of Demosthenes I would add other orations, notably that "Against Leptines." Also the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus might be taken without its two companions, so making room for the whole "Œdipus" trilogy of Sophocles. To the "Medea" of Euripides why not add the "Alkestis" and the "Hecuba"? Aristophanes we should at least have the "Clouds," if not the "Birds" and Frogs."
The Latin list is scanty, and I would add to it considerably more of Tacitus—at least the Agricola and Annals I.—even if some of Livy had to be taken off. I see that Sir J. Lubbock gives all Horace and no Juvenal. I may be peculiar, but I would willingly exchange all the Satires and Epodes of the former for three or four of the Satires of the latter. The realism (to use the modern phrase) of Juvenal is less offensive than the corruptness of Horace.
3. The modern list is admirable. Only in history why recommend Green's "Short History of England," at least to any who can get his noble "History of the English People?" As I have said, I would omit Lewes' "History of Philosophy," replacing it by Maurice; and would add Dean Milman's "History of Christianity" (the early period). There is not a single ecclesiastical history on the list. In biography, again, the catalogue seems defective. I would add Johnson's "Lives of the Poets," Walton's Lives, Stanley's "Life of Arnold," and Carlyle's "John Sterling." Among essayists I would suggest Carlyle (select essays, and lectures on "Heroes"), also, as I have said, John Foster and certainly Charles Lamb. For Emerson's Essays I would substitute his "Society and Solitude," and would limit the Macaulay list to about half-a-dozen. Mill on "Liberty" should also be included.
In Poetry I would add Milton's "Il Penseroso"—this, however, may be included in Sir John Lubbock's mention of the "shorter poems"—and "Paradise Regained." Wordsworth I would read; "not restricting the choice to Mr. Arnold's selection," and if room were thereby overfilled I would willingly give up "Thalaba" and "Kehama," with the rest of Southey's works. Then to Gray Cowper ought certainly to be added. Nor would I willingly surrender "Childe Harold;" although to part with all the rest of Byron would cause no pang.
The choice of fiction seems good, although here agreement can hardly be expected between any two readers. For instance, I should prefer "Mansfield Park" to "Pride and Prejudice"; I think "Esmond" Thackeray's masterpiece; and would add "Silas Marner" to "Adam Bede." It is wise, I think, to omit all living authors.—Faithfully yours,
VI.—Universities and Public Schools.
Among those to whom we applied for such advice as might help the rising generation to choose its reading more wisely we naturally included some of the leading men in our seminaries of true religion and sound learning. We give first the letters we received from the head masters of the two principal public schools.
THE HEAD MASTER OF ETON.
Dr. E. Warre wrote to us as follows:—
It seems hardly worth while to write over again the names of works which have already found a place on Sir John Lubbock's list, but I have jotted some names which strike me as absent from it. Taking the divisions of your classification as I. to IX., I have numbered them accordingly in the list which I enclose.
I see that Sir John Lubbock excludes living authors from his list:—
| I. | Bouddha. (B. de St. Hilaire.) |
| II. | Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V. |
| Stanley's "Jewish Church." | |
| Ewald's "History of Israel." | |
| F. W. Robertson's Sermons and Lectures on Epistle to Corinthians. | |
| III. | Xenophon's Hellenica," "De Rep. Atheniensium," "Œconomicus." |
| Cicero's "Pro Archiâ," "Pro Murena," "Pro Cluentio." | |
| Juvenal's "Sat.," I., III., X., XIV. | |
| Tacitus's "Agricola." | |
| Odd Translations of Classics. | |
| Jowett's "Plato;" Thucydides; "Politics" of Aristotle; Church and Brodribb's Tacitus; Worsley's "Odyssey." | |
| N. B.—"Guide to the Choice of Classical Books," by J. B. Mayor (Cambridge), will be found most useful. | |
| VI. | Hallam's "Middle Ages," "History of Literature," "Constitutional History." |
| Green's "History of the English People." | |
| Macaulay's "History of England." | |
| Stanhope's "Reign of Queen Anne." | |
| Stanhope's "Life of Pitt." | |
| Lecky's "History of England," 18th Century. | |
| Carlyle's "Frederick the Great." | |
| Thiers's "Consulat et l'Empire." | |
| Napier's "Peninsular War." | |
| Hooper's "Waterloo." | |
| VIII. | L'Abbé Huc's "China and Thibet." |
| Palgrave's "Arabia." | |
| IX. | Gray's Poems and Letters. |
THE HEAD MASTER OF HARROW,
Dr. J. E. C. Welldon, in sending us his list, prefaced it with the following remarks:—
I wish to apologize for my delay in replying to your courteous request of the 12th inst. I have been absent from home until to-day. You will do society a great service if by drawing attention to the best books of all the ages you can succeed in making young people believe there is something very much better worth reading than the newspapers and magazines of to-day. Without any thought of improving the lists of 100 books which have been sent you by so many distinguished people, I have tried to think how I should answer a boy's question if he were to ask me at any point of his school life what books it were best worth while to read before the end (let me say) of his thirtieth year.
The Bible
Marcus Aurelius |
"Meditations" |
Aristotle |
"Ethics" |
St. Augustine |
"Confessions" |
Thomas à Kempis |
"Imitation" |
Pascal |
"Pensées" |
Butler |
"Analogy" |
Jeremy Taylor |
"Holy Living" "Holy Dying" |
Bunyan |
"Pilgrim's Progress" |
Hooker |
"Ecclesiastical Polity" |
Aristotle |
"Politics" |
Plato |
"Phædo" "Republic" |
Demosthenes |
"De Coronâ" |
Plutarch
Horace
Homer
Virgil |
"Æneid" |
Æschylus |
"Prometheus" "House of Atreus" Trilogy |
Sophocles |
"Œdipus" Trilogy |
Euripides |
"Alcestis" "Medea" |
Aristophanes |
"The Knights" "Frogs" "Clouds" |
Herodotus
Thucydides
Tacitus |
"Germania" "Agricola" |
Gibbon |
"Decline and Fall" |
Hume |
"England" |
Grote |
"Greece" |
Mommsen |
"Rome" |
|
Macaulay
|
Carlyle |
"Sartor Resartus" "French Revolution" |
Bacon |
"Novum Organum" |
Darwin |
"Origin of Species" |
Adam Smith |
"Wealth of Nations" (Selection) |
Locke |
"Conduct of the Understanding" |
Burke |
Select Works |
|
Addison
|
|
Montaigne
|
Cook |
"Voyages" |
Darwin |
"Naturalist on the Beagle" |
|
Arabian Nights
|
Cervantes |
"Don Quixote" |
|
Shakespeare
|
|
Milton
|
|
Dante
|
|
Wordsworth
|
Goldsmith |
"Vicar of Wakefield" |
Swift |
"Gulliver's Travels" |
Defore |
"Robinson Crusoe" |
Boswell |
"Johnson" |
|
Molière
|
|
Sheridan
|
Goethe |
"Faust," Part I. |
Tennyson |
"In Memoriam" |
|
Keats
|
Lessing |
"Laocoon" |
Ruskin |
"Stones of Venice" |
Thackeray |
Selections from |
Dickens |
Selections from„ |
Miss Austen |
Selections from„ |
Scott |
All |
PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER (Oxford).
A few years ago I became entangled in a long correspondence about the Hundred Greatest Men of the World, and the recollection of this has made me rather nervous in answering your questions as to the Hundred Best Books. The process by which we tried to find out the Hundred Greatest Men of the World was this. An American gentleman, whose name I forget, drew up a long list of all names that could possibly claim to be in the first flight. That list was sent to all sorts of people in Europe and America who, were supposed to be qualified judges, each in his own department. They marked those whom they considered the true Senior Wranglers of the whole world, and by casting up the votes recorded for each candidate a splendid class list was drawn up, the outcome of three thousand years of natural selection. You can see the result of all this labour in "The Portrait Collection of the Hundred Greatest Men," published by Sampson Low and Co., 1879. The portraits were reproduced from fine and rare engravings, biographies were added, and each company of the "Greatest Men " was introduced by some literary Lord Chamberlain, the poets by Matthew Arnold, the artists by Taine, the founders of religion by M. M., the theologians and reformers by E. Renan, the philosophers by Noah Porter, and the whole noble army by Waldo Emerson.
As the makers of books are chiefly found in the divisions of poets, founders of religion, and philosophers, I send you our list, which will enable you to see how far it agrees with that of Sir John Lubbock's:—
1. Poets.
Homer
Pindar
Æschylus
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Menander
Lucretius
Virgil
Dante
Rabelais
Cervantes
Shakspeare
Milton
Molière
Goethe
Scott
2. Religious Leaders.
Moses
Zoroaster
Confucius
Buddha
Mahomet
St. Paul
St. Augustine
St. Bernhard
St. Francis
Erasmus
Luther
Calvin
Loyola
Bossuet
Wesley
3. Philosophers.
Pythagoras
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
St. Thomas Aquinas
Bacon
Descartes
Spinoza
John Locke
Leibniz
Berkeley
Hume
Kant
If I were to tell you what I really think of the Hundred Best Books, I am afraid you would call me the greatest literary heretic or an utter ignoramus. I know few books, if any, which I should call good from beginning to end. Take the greatest poet of antiquity, and if I am to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I must say that there are long passages even in Homer which seem to me extremely tedious. Take the greatest, or at all events one of the greatest, poets of our century, and again I must confess that not a few of Goethe's writings seem to me not worth a second reading. There are gems in the most famous, there are gems in the least known of poets, but there is not a single poet, so far as I know, who has not written too much, and who could claim a place for all his works in what may be called a Library of World Literature.
The passages, and in many cases the whole poems too, which I should really place on those historic shelves are those which I can read again and again, wondering more and more every time how a man could have written them. That happens to me not only in going over Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe, but likewise in reading Heine, or Eichendorff, or Rückert, or a poem so utterly unknown as "The Doctor," by the author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns." The same amazement comes over me when reading Spinoza's "Ethics"—nay, even in studying Panini's Grammar of Sanskrit-a work, to my mind, without an equal anywhere—nay, I am not afraid to say so, truly miraculous; for the more I study it the less do I understand how one man could have composed it. I know I shall never hear the last of this; but you want my honest opinion, and as such I give it you. Of course, if we have any object in reading books beyond the mere delight which they give us, works artistically most imperfect may claim their place among the best books of the world. What can be more tedious than the Vedas, and yet what can be more interesting, if once we know that it is the first word spoken by the Aryan man? What can be more repellant than Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," and yet what can be more fascinating, if once we know that it is the last word spoken by the Aryan man?
You see the best books are not the best books for everybody. Some of the best, say Michael Angelo's Sonnets, are appreciated by a very small circle of friends indeed. But take the most famous writers, those whose names you would find on every list of the "Best Books," and you will see that what is called gold by one critic is called rubbish by another. Aristotle's name would hardly be absent from any list of world literature; yet this is what Hobbes, one of the strongest and keenest intellects that England has ever produced, writes of him: "I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which now is called Aristotle's Metaphysics, nor more repugnant to government than that much that he hath said in his Politics, nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics."
If a man like Hobbes speaks thus of Aristotle, what right have I to do what you ask me to do, and to leave in or to leave out the very first name on Sir John Lubbock's list of the Classics of the World—namely, that of Aristotle? I pray thee, have me excused.
PROFESSOR J. S. BLACKIE (Edinburgh).
No man, it appears to me, can tell another what he ought to read. A man's reading, to be of any value, must depend on his power of assimilation; and that again depends on his tendencies, his capacities, his surroundings, and his opportunities. But a man may reasonably say to another that there are certain epochs in the history of the race so significant, certain men as the creature forces in those epochs so prominent, and certain types, aspects, and attitudes of physical nature so eloquent with divine wisdom, that to be ignorant of them shows a man to be of a narrow, isolated nature, cut off from all those streams of moral and intellectual wealth which the past is ever pouring into the veins of the present, and with which the powers of the physical world are constantly stimulating the unblunted sense; and there are certain books which may be named as the best helps towards sharing in this wealth, though, of course, it is not the particular book but the subject of the book that is important; and if a man only comes face to face with a great subject or a great personality, it is of little consequence through what channel or channels he arrives at the result. But in attempting to frame such a list as that put forth by Sir John Lubbock, it is also of the utmost importance to keep in view what sort of persons we are favouring with our advice; and here I see two altogether different classes of readers, those who have large leisure and have gone through a regular process of severe intellectual discipline, and those who can only redeem a few hours daily, if so much, to fill up the gaps left in the hasty architecture of their early attempt at self-culture. To this latter class belong a great number of young men who in our busy centres of trade and commerce are found to associate themselves into clubs or unions for the sake of moral and intellectual improvement. This is the class to which advice of the kind that has been offered is likely to be most useful; those on a higher platform are more able to shape a course for themselves; and I shall accordingly omit in the list which I append not a few names of the highest significance which are practically beyond the reach of the class to which I allude. To a political student on the highest platform, of course, Aristotle and Thucydides are supreme authorities; but it would be unreasonable to expect that the mass of intelligent young men in our great cities, untrained in intellectual gymnastics, and unfurnished with scholarly aids, should set themselves systematically to grapple with severe thinkers of this type. Metaphysics and metaphysical theology I have excluded from similar practical considerations. All attempts of the finite mind to take the measure of the infinite must always be more or less unsatisfactory; and whatever good may accrue to a certain class of thinkers from the study of Spinoza, Hegel, and Herbert Spencer, it is wiser to remit the great majority of thoughtful persons to the healthy instincts of such broadly human poets as Homer, Shakspeare, Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, and especially also to the Book of Job, and to those of the Psalms of David, such as the xix., the ciii, the civ., and the cvii., which are most broadly human and least specially Jewish in their range and in their tone.
I.—History and Biography
The Bible.
Homer.
Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians.
Max Von Duncker's History of the Ancient World.
Plutarch's Lives.
Herodotus.
History of Greece—Grote or Curtius.
History of Rome—Arnold or Mommsen.
Menzel's History of the Germans.
Green's History of the English People.
Life of Charlemagne.
Life of Pope Hildebrand.
The Crusades.
Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics.
Prescott's Mexico and Peru.
Prescott's„ Ferdinand and Isabella.
Italy, by Professor Spalding.
Chronicles of Froissart.
The Normans—Freeman and Thierry.
Motley's Dutch Republic.
Life of Gustavus Adolphus.
The French Revolution—Thiers, Carlyle, Alison.
Bourrienne's Life of Napoleon.
Wellington's Peninsular Campaign.
Southey's Life of Nelson.
America—Bancroft.
The Stuart Rising of 1745, by Robert Chambers.
Carlyle's Life of Cromwell.
Forster's Statesmen of the Commonwealth.
Life of Dr.Arnold—Stanley.
Life of Dr. Norman Macleod.
Life of Baron Bunsen.
Neander's Church History.
Life of Luther.
History of Scottish Covenanters, Dodd's.
Dean Stanley's Jewish Church.
Milman's Latin Christianity.
II.—Religion and Morals
The Bible.
Socrates in Plato and Xenophon.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Meditations.
Epictetus, Seneca.
The Hitopadesa and Dialogues of Krishna.
St. Augustine's Confessions.
Jeremy Tavlor.
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
James Martineau.
Æsop's Fables.
III.—Poetry and Fiction
Homer.
Virgil.
Dante.
The Niebelungen Lay.
The Morte d'Arthur.
Chaucer.
Shakspeare.
Spenser.
Goethe—Faust, Meister, and Eckermann's Conversations.
Milton.
Pope.
Cowper.
Campbell.
Wordsworth.
Walter Scott.
Burns.
Charles Lamb.
Dean Swift, "Tale of a Tub," "Gulliver's Travels."
Tennyson.
Browning.
Don Quixote.
Goldsmith, "Vicar of Wakefield."
George Eliot.
"Robinson Crusoe."
Andersen's Fairy Tales, "Mother Bunch," Grimm's Household Stories, Popular Songs and Ballads, specially Scotch, English, Irish, and German.
IV.—Fine Arts.
Fergusson's History of Architecture.
Ruskin.
Tyrwhitt.
V.—Politics and Political Economy.
De Tocqueville.
John Stuart Mill.
Fawcett.
Laveleye.
Adam Smith.
Cornewall Lewis.
Lord Brougham.
Sir J. Lubbock.
VI.—Science and Philology.
J. G. Wood's Books on Natural History.
White's Natural History of Selborne.
Geology: Hugh Miller, Ramsay, Geikie, Ansted.
Botany: General Elements of British.
Science of Language, Trench and Farrar, Max Müller, Taylor's Words and Places.
VII.—Voyages & Travels
in every variety; specially the old collection.
VII.—Librarians.
THE old race of librarians who knew only the outsides of books has happily passed away. Librarians in these days are keenly alive to the educational side of their functions, and the following letters from some of the leading librarians in the country will therefore have a peculiar value.
THE PRINCIPAL LIBRARIAN OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
Dear Sir,—You will find it difficult to guide young people in their reading by merely forming a list of good books. Literature has many branches, each of which has its "best books." Let a young choose his line of study, and he will find no difficulty in discovering the best authority in it. The result of several persons putting down the titles of books they considered "best reading" would be an interesting but very imperfect bibliography of as many sections of literature. But fuller and better information is already obtainable from printed works—each department having special bibliographies. A choice selection of them is placed in the Museum Reading-room, and a list of them has been printed. A very useful guide to books in English is supplied by a work published in New York, entitled "The Best Reading," by A. B. Perkins, 8vo, 1877. The books are classified in the form of an index to subjects. "The English Catalogue," with indexes for periods of years from 1837, published by Sampson Low and Co., is also extremely useful for ascertaining what has been written on any particular subject. But the beginner should be advised to read histories of the literature of his own and other countries—as Hallam's "Introduction to the Literature of Europe," Joseph Warton's "History of English Poetry," Craik's "History of English Literature," Taine's History, and others of the same class. These would give him a survey of the field, and would quicken his taste for what was naturally most congenial to him. Excuse me if in these general remarks I have evaded doing what you specially desired.—Yours faithfully,
THE LIBRARIAN OF THE LONDON LIBRARY
Mr. R. Harrison wrote to us as follows:—
Unfortunately, I did not read Sir John Lubbock's lecture or address recently delivered on the subject of books, but I have seen the list of books that he appears to think would form an adequate collection for a man of culture to keep near him for the purpose of study and intellectual refreshment. The selection in some respects is very good, but I venture to say that it is not adequate o the requirements of the majority of thinking men in the present day. It cannot fairly be said that a hundred books, including the ancient classical writers in the original tongues, would be fully appreciated by men who had not spent previous years in the reading of untold volumes in the acquisition of the ancient languages.
Would it not be sufficient for the ordinary reader of our day to use what Shakspeare used for obtaining a knowledge of the mind of the ancients? If North's translation of Plutarch served our great dramatist in the production of his classical plays, would not the modest volumes of Collins's "Ancient Classics for English Readers" adequately convey to the ordinary modern reader the form and substance of ancient thought? Why should he pore over books that he never can thoroughly enjoy unless he be a second Porson? In recommending books to an ordinary reader, I would add to Collins's "Ancient Classics" Whewell's "Platonic Dialogues" and Jowett's translation of Plato. Homer he should read in old Chapman's version, and, adopting Sir John Lubbock's list generally, I would suggest the "Agricola" of Tacitus as more interesting than the "Germania," and one of the many good English versions of the "Agamemnon" of Æschylus as sufficient for the division of Greek dramatists. Under "Epic Poetry" Sir John has placed Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." I confess I would rather recommend Tennyson's "Idylls of the King." With regard to Eastern poetry, I imagine that an ordinary Englishman would learn more of its spirit and character from Omar Khayyam's "Rubáiyat," translated into English by Fitzgerald, and Edwin Arnold's work, the "Light of Asia," and others, than he would from the interminable "Mahabaratha" and "Ramayana," even when epitomized. I take the liberty of adding to Sir John Lubbock's list the names of a few other books without reading which no man can be held to have a competent knowledge of even English literature:—
History (Ancient).
Milman's History of Early Christianity and of Latin Christianity.
Histories of Rome by Dr. Arnold, Merivale, and Mommsen.
Histories of Greece by Thirlwall and Grote.
History (Modern).
Freeman's Norman Conquest, and other works.
Hallam's Works.
Stubbs's Constitutional History.
Froude's History of England.
Macaulay's England.
Stanhope (or Mahon's) England.
Lecky's Eighteenth Century.
McCarthy's Our Own Times.
Travels.
Marco Polo, by Yule.
Hakluyt Society's Publications.
Arctic Voyages (many).
African Explorations (many).
Philosophy.
Herbert Spencer's Works.
Poetry and General Literature.
Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrimage.
Ben Jonson's Works.
Butler's Hudibras.
Young—Jas. Thomson—Colins—Gray—Burns—Cowper—Coleridge—Byron—Moore—Shelley—Campbell—Keats.
Essayists.
Bacon.
Sir Thomas Browne.
Thomas Fuller.
Charles Lamb.
Fiction.
Don Quixote (of which many English translations exist).
Gil Blas.
Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews.
Other books might be named which people will read if they have the leisure, but the above-named I think are indispensable.
VIII.—The Publishers and Booksellers.
NO class of people's opinion on the best books would be more interesting than that of the publishers. How much of all the literature that they present to the world do they genuinely think worth the world's acceptance? Frank answers here are hardly to be expected, and our readers will not be surprised at the fewness of the letters given under this head.
MR. A. BLACK.
Dear Sir,—To draw up a detailed list of books suitable for a liberal education is not an easy task in itself, and in some senses of doubtful advantage. It may be useful, however, to make a sketch of the field of reading to be occupied by those who desire to acquire a more or less complete store of knowledge, and the following may be submitted:—
1. History.—This subject may be divided into two great epochs, ancient, ranging from early Persian history to the fall of the Roman Empire, and modern, from then till now. There are unfortunately no single works devoted to these epochs in their entirety, and they are much wanted.
2. Philosophy.—A history of mental philosophy from ancient to modern times should be sufficient to give the reader a general knowledge of this branch of science, and prove whether he has a taste for the special study of metaphysics, psychology, ethics, and logic.
3. Religion.—There is no digest of this great subject in a popular and accessible form, and the reader must confine himself to the books of the religious teachers themselves—the Bible, the Koran, &c.
4. Natural Science.—This division of knowledge is very much broken up, and can only be overtaken by the
ordinary reader by means of the primers and handbooks on geology, physical geography, astronomy, electricity, physiology, zoology, botany, &c.
5. Literary Style.—For a digest of the principal writings in prose and verse the reader must turn to the histories of the literatures of the different countries, and select those works which are there pronounced to be of standard value. The outstanding authors, such as Dante, Shakspeare, Goethe, &c., cannot be overlooked, and those of a lower grade may be left to the free selection of the reader according to his tastes.
6. Literary Entertainment.—Besides those of the five great English novelists there are many works of fiction and humour that might fitly be classed under this heading, but whose recommendation depends entirely on the taste of the reader, who should here have his own way.
The key to the above classification will be found in such a work as the "Encyclopædia Britannica."—I am, &c.,
A partner in one of the best-known London publishing firms wrote to us as follows:—
I see that in the list of books which Sir John Lubbock drew up he has excluded all books by living authors. No doubt he felt some delicacy in either mentioning or omitting the names of writers who were his personal friends. Sir John Lubbock's delicacy of feeling detracts from the value of his teaching, and a man who assumes the position of a public instructor ought to be able to put personal feelings altogether aside. The result of this limitations is, for instance, that in Sir John Lubbock's list Hume's is the only History of England recommended, and Tennyson's name is omitted from the list of poets whom it is desirable to read. It seems to me that to draw up a list of writers so mutilated as this is worse than useless. If, however, Sir John Lubbock felt some difficulty in mentioning the names of living writers, you will easily see that it would be impossible for me to do so, as I should be under the imputation of puffing my own wares, depreciating those of other people.
Mr. Galpin (of Messrs. Cassell and Co., Limited) wrote, on the other hand, that he "cannot do better than send you an extract of about one hundred of the volumes which we propose to produce in our 'National Library,' which is being received on all hands with extraordinary enthusiasm."
A BOOKSELLER'S OPINION.
Mr. Bernard Quaritch, the famous bookseller in Piccadilly, wrote to us as follows:—
Sir John's "working man" is an ideal creature; I have known many working men, but none of them could have digested such a feast as he has prepared for them.
Our "working men," to compete successfully with their foreign rivals in France, Belgium, Germany, and in America, should have a good scientific and artistic training before they enjoy the pleasure of reading Plato and the "Mahabharata." I am a freethinker, yet I constantly recommend to my son, who hopes to be my successor, the reading of the Bible (not on Sir John's list), and even the study of the "Lives of the Saints of the Roman Church." The thorough knowledge of both is necessary for a man who wishes to understand the history of painting, and to enjoy the masterpieces of the great artists.
Sir John leaves out the Bible, Euclid, and Herschel.
In my younger days I had no books whatever beyond my school books. Arrived in London, in 1842, I joined a literary institution in Leicester-square, and read all their historical works. To read fiction I had no time. A friend of mine read novels all night long, and was one morning found dead in his bed.
I do not hold with voracious reading; let young men read and reflect, also take notes of what they have read.
Another omission on Sir John's list is "Owen Jones's Grammar of Ornament," and kindred technical works.
Let young men study Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, the Arts, Geology, Mineralogy, &c. Culvier's "Animal Kingdom," by Griffith, 16 vols., 8vo, would come in as a recreation.
- ↑ A correspondent points out that Mr. White sems not to follow his own advice, for the Watchman has been extinct for more than a year.