EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
By ERNEST RHYS
VICTOR HUGO said a Library was "an act of faith," and some unknown essayist spoke of one so beautiful, so perfect, so harmonious in all its parts, that he who made it was smitten with a passion. In that faith the promoters of Everyman's Library planned it out originally on a large scale; and their idea in so doing was to make it conform as far as possible to a perfect scheme. However, perfection is a thing to be aimed at and not to be achieved in this difficult world; and since the first volumes appeared some fifteen years ago, there have been many interruptions. A great war has come and gone; and even the City of Books has felt something like a world commotion. Only in recent years is the series getting back into its old stride and looking forward to complete its original scheme of a Thousand Volumes. One of the practical expedients in that original plan was to divide the volumes into sections, as Biography, Fiction, History, Belles Lettres, Poetry, Romance and so forth; with a compartment for young people, and last, and not least, one of Reference Books. Beside the dictionaries and encyclopaedias to be expected in that section, there was a special set of literary and historical atlases. One of these atlases dealing with Europe, we may recall, was directly affected by the disturbance of frontiers during the war; and the maps have been completely revised in consequence, so as to chart the New Europe which we hope will now preserve its peace under the auspices of the League of Nations set up at Geneva,
That is only one small item, however, in a library list which runs to over seven hundred and sixty volumes. The largest slice of this huge provision is, as a matter of course, given to the tyrannous demands of fiction. But in carrying out the scheme the directors and editors contrived to keep in mind that books like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books both in the same section and even more significantly in othei sections. With that idea too, novels like Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Fortunes of Nigel, Lytton's Harold, and Dickens's Tale of Two Cities have been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday history books. History itself in our day is tending to grow more documentary and less literary; and "the historian who is a stylist," as one of our contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, "will soon be regarded as a kind of Phoenix." But in the history department of Everyman's Library we have been eclectic enough to choose our history men from every school in turn. We have Grote, Gibbon, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley, Prescott; we have among earlier books the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and we have just completed a Livy in six volumes in an admirable new translation by Canon Roberts.
"You only, Books," said Richard de Bury, "are liberal and independent; you give to all who ask." The delightful variety the wisdom and the wit which are at the disposal of Everyman in his own library may well, at times, seem to him a little embarrassing. He may turn to Dick Steele in the Spectator and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her motion is unimaginable and "her eyes are chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts." He may turn to Plato's Phædrus and read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Cæsar's Gaul). He may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin the perfect key to what is there called the "magical power of poetry." It is Shakespeare, with his
"daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty;"
it is Wordsworth, with his
"voice . . . heard
In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird.
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides;"
or Keats, with his
". . . . moving waters at their priest-like task
Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores."
William Hazlitt's" Table Talk," among the volumes of Essays, may help to show the relationship of one author to another, which is another form of the Friendship of Books. His incomparable essay in that volume, "On Going a Journey," forms a capital prelude to Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" and to his and Wordsworth's poems. In the same way one may turn to the review of Moore's Life of Byron in Macaulay's Essays as a prelude to the three volumes of Byron's own poems, remembering that the poet whom Europe loved more than England did was as Macaulay said: "the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry." This brings us to the provoking reflection that it is the obvious authors and the books most easy to reprint which have been the signal successes out of the seven hundred odd in the series, for Everyman is distinctly proverbial in his tastes. He likes best of all an old author who has worn well or a comparatively new author who has gained something like news paper notoriety. In attempting to lead him on from the good books that are known to those that are less known, the publishers may have at times been too adventurous. The Chief himself (as a mere editor may say) has been much more than an ordinary book-producer in this critical enterprise. He has thrown himself into it with the zeal of a book-lover and indeed of one who, like Milton, thought that books might be as alive and productive as dragons' teeth, which, being "sown up and down the land, might chance to spring up armed men."