The Book-lover

Every scholar is familiar with Lord Bacon’s classification of books, – some “to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.” Coleridge’s classification of the various kinds of readers is perhaps not quite so well known. He said that some readers are like jelly-bags, – they let pass away all that is pure and good, and retain only what is impure and refuse. Another class he typified by a sponge; these are they whose minds suck all up, and give it back again, only a little dirtier. Others, again, he likened to an hour-glass, and their reading to the sand which runs in and out, and leaves no trace behind. And still others he compared to the slave in the Golconda mines, who retains the gold and the gem, and casts aside the dust and the dross. Charles C. Colton, the author of “Lacon,” says there are three kinds of readers: first, those who read to think, – and they are rare; second, those who read to write, – and they are common; third, those who read to talk, – and they form the great majority. And Goethe, the greatest name in German literature, makes still a different classification: some readers, he tells us, enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy, and enjoy while they judge.

In these days, when, so far as reading-matter is concerned, we are overburdened with an embarrassment of riches, we cannot afford to read, even in the books which we have chosen as ours, those things which have no relationship to our studies, which do not concern us, and which are sure to be forgotten as soon as read. The art of reading, says Philip Gilbert Hamerton in his admirable essay on “The Intellectual Life,” “is to skip judiciously. The art is to skip all that does not concern us, whilst missing nothing that we really need. No external guidance can teach this; for nobody but ourselves can guess what the needs of our intellect may be. But let us select with decisive firmness, independently of other people’s advice, independently of the authority of custom.” And Charles F. Richardson, referring to the same subject, remarks: “The art of skipping is, in a word, the art of noting and shunning that which is bad, or frivolous, or misleading, or unsuitable for one’s individual needs. If you are convinced that the book or the chapter is bad, you cannot drop it too quickly. If it is simply idle and foolish, put it away on that account, – unless you are properly seeking amusement from idleness and frivolity. If it is something deceitful and disingenuous, your task is not so easy; but your conscience will give you warning, and the sharp examination which should follow will tell you that you are in poor literary company.”

CHAPTER III

On the Value and Use of LibrariesAll round the room my silent servants wait, —My friends in every season, bright and dimAngels and seraphimCome down and murmur to me, sweet and low,And spirits of the skies all come and goEarly and late;From the old world’s divine and distant date,From the sublimer few,Down to the poet who but yester-eveSang sweet and made us grieve,All come, assembling here in order due.And here I dwell with Poesy, my mate,With Erato and all her vernal sighs,Great Clio with her victories elate,Or pale Urania’s deep and starry eyes.Bryan Waller Procter.

A LIBRARY is the scholar’s workshop. To the teacher or professional man, a collection of good books is as necessary as a kit of tools to a carpenter. And yet I am aware that many persons are engaged in teaching, who have neither a library of their own, nor access to any other collection of books suitable to their use. There are others who, having every opportunity to secure the best of books, – with a public library near at hand offering them the free use of works most valuable to them, – yet make no effort to profit by these advantages. They care nothing for any books save the text-books indispensable to their profession, and for these only so far as necessity obliges them to do so. The libraries of many persons calling themselves teachers consist solely of school-books, many of which have been presented them by accommodating book-agents, “for examination with a view to introduction.” And yet we hear such teachers talk learnedly about the introduction of English literature into the common schools of the country, and the necessity of cultivating among the children a wholesome love and taste for reading. If inquiry were made, we might discover that by a study of English literature these teachers understand some memoriter exercises in Shaw’s “Manual” or Brooke’s “Primer,” and that, as to good reading, some there are who are entertained more deeply by Peck’s “Bad Boy” than by Shakspeare’s “Merchant of Venice.” Talk not about directing and cultivating the reading-tastes of your pupils until you have successfully directed and cultivated your own! And the first step towards doing this is the selection and purchase of a library for yourself, which shall be all your own. A very few books will do, if they are of the right kind; and they must be yours. A borrowed book is but a cheap pleasure, an unappreciated and unsatisfactory tool. To know the true value of books, and to derive any satisfactory benefit from them, you must first feel the sweet delight of buying them, – you must know the preciousness of possession.

You plead poverty, – the insufficiency of your salary? But do you not spend for other things, entirely unnecessary, much more every year than the cost of a few books? The immediate outlay need not be large, the returns which you will realize will be great in proportion to your good judgment and earnestness. Not only will the possession of a good library add to your means of enjoyment and increase your capacity for doing good, it may, if you are worldly-minded, – and we all are, – put you in the way of occupying a more desirable position and earning a more satisfactory reward for your labors.

There are two kinds of books that you will need in your library: first, those which are purely professional, and are in the strictest sense the tools of your craft; second, those which belong to your chosen department of literature, and are to be regarded as your friends, companions, and counsellors. I cannot, of course, dictate to you what these books shall be. The lists given in the chapters which follow this are designed simply as suggestive aids. But in a library of fifty or even thirty well-chosen volumes you may possess infinite riches, and means for a lifetime of enjoyment; while, on the other hand, if your selection is injudicious, you may expend thousands of dollars for a collection of the odds and ends of literature, which will be only an incumbrance and a hindrance to you.

“I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning of his due and wise provision for his household,” says John Ruskin, “to obtain as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, serviceable, and steadily – however slowly – increasing series of books for use through life; making his little library, of all the furniture in his room, the most studied and decorative piece; every volume having its assigned place, like a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest and strictest lessons to the children of the house being how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or dog’s-ears.”17

And Henry Ward Beecher emphasizes the same thing, remarking that, among the early ambitions to be excited in clerks, workmen, journeymen, and indeed among all that are struggling up in life from nothing to something, the most important is that of forming and continually adding to a library of good books. “A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.”

“How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?” asks another enthusiastic lover of books, already quoted. “If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad, – a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves by their books… We talk of food for the mind, as of food for the body: now, a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it! Though there have been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end than most men’s dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity: for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.”

“The truest owner of a library,” says the author of “Hesperides,” “is he who has bought each book for the love he bears to it, – who is happy and content to say, ‘Here are my jewels, my choicest material possessions!’ – who is proud to crown such assertion thus: ‘I am content that this library shall represent the use of the talents given me by Heaven!’ That man’s library, though not commensurate with his love for books, will demonstrate what he has been able to accomplish with his resources; it will denote economy of living, eagerness to possess the particles that compose his library, and quick watchfulness to seize them when means and opportunities serve. Such a man has built a temple, of which each brick has been the subject of curious and acute intelligent examination and appreciation before it has been placed in the sacred building.”

“Every man should have a library!” exclaims William Axon. “The works of the grandest masters of literature may now be procured at prices that place them within the reach almost of the very poorest, and we may all put Parnassian singing-birds into our chambers to cheer us with the sweetness of their songs. And when we have got our little library we may look proudly at Shakspeare and Bacon and Bunyan, as they stand in our bookcase with other noble spirits, and one or two of whom the world knows nothing, but whose worth we have often tested. These may cheer and enlighten us, may inspire us with higher aims and aspirations, may make us, if we use them rightly, wiser and better men.”18

Good old George Dyer, the friend of the poet Southey, as learned as he was benevolent, was wont to say: “Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed, may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use.” “Any library is an attraction,” says the venerable A. Bronson Alcott; and Victor Hugo writes —

“A library implies an act of faith,

Which generations still in darkness hid

Sign in their night in witness of the dawn.”

John Bright, the great English statesman and reformer, in a speech at the opening of the Birmingham Free Library a short time ago, remarked: “You may have in a house costly pictures and costly ornaments, and a great variety of decoration; yet, so far as my judgment goes, I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you can give me in the way of decoration which the highest art can supply. The only subject of lamentation is – one feels that always, I think, in the presence of a library – that life is too short, and I am afraid I must say also that our industry is so far deficient that we seem to have no hope of a full enjoyment of the ample repast that is spread before us. In the houses of the humble a little library, in my opinion, is a most precious possession.”

Jean Paul Richter, it is said, was always melancholy in a large library, because it reminded him of his ignorance.

“A library may be regarded as the solemn chamber in which a man can take counsel of all that have been wise and great and good and glorious amongst the men that have gone before him,” said George Dawson, also at Birmingham. “If we come down for a moment and look at the bare and immediate utilities of a library, we find that here a man gets himself ready for his calling, arms himself for his profession, finds out the facts that are to determine his trade, prepares himself for his examination. The utilities of it are endless and priceless. It is, too, a place of pastime; for man has no amusement more innocent, more sweet, more gracious, more elevating, and more fortifying than he can find in a library. If he be fond of books, his fondness will discipline him as well as amuse him… A library is the strengthener of all that is great in life, and the repeller of what is petty and mean; and half the gossip of society would perish if the books that are truly worth reading were read… When we look through the houses of a large part of the middle classes of this country, we find there everything but what there ought most to be. There are no books in them worth talking of. If a question arises of geography, they have no atlases. If the question be when a great man was born, they cannot help you. They can give you a gorgeous bed, with four posts, marvellous adornments, luxurious hangings, and lacquered shams all round; they can give you dinners ad nauseam, and wine that one can, or cannot, honestly praise. But useful books are almost the last things that are to be found there; and when the mind is empty of those things that books can alone fill it with, then the seven devils of pettiness, frivolity, fashionableness, gentility, scandal, small slander, and the chronicling of small beer come in and take possession. Half this nonsense would be dropped if men would only understand the elevating influences of their communing constantly with the lofty thoughts and high resolves of men of old times.”

The author of “Dreamthorpe,” filled with love and enthusiasm, discourses thus: “I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden’s roses yet lingers in it, while it vibrates only to the world’s first brood of nightingales and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre, – the stage is time; the play is the play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariot wheels of conquerors! I hiss, or cry ‘Bravo,’ when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shout with Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Assyrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, – Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob’s guile, Esau’s face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph’s splendid funeral procession, – all these things I find within the boards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopled world, – what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham’s flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah’s camels. O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know you all? Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the dead converse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king’s court can boast such company? What school of philosophy, such wisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan’s pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than did ever Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library; but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees.”

CHAPTER IV

Books for every Scholar

These books of mine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however much the pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them; they are on actual service. – Southey.

TO assist teachers and scholars, and those who aspire to become such, in making judicious selection of world-famous books for their libraries, I submit the following list, which includes the greater part of all that is the very best and the most enduring in our language. It is not intended to embrace professional works, nor works suited merely for students of specialties. The books named are such as will grace the library of any scholar, no matter what his profession or his preferences; they are books which every teacher ought to know; they are books of which no one can ever feel ashamed. “The first thing naturally, when one enters a scholar’s study or library,” says Holmes, “is to look at his books. One gets a notion very speedily of his tastes and the range of his pursuits by a glance round his book-shelves.” And, take my word for it, if you want a library of which you will be proud, you cannot be too careful as to the character of the books you put in it.

POETRY

Chaucer’s Poetical Works, or, if not the complete works, at least the “Canterbury Tales.” In speaking of the great works in English Poetry, it is natural to mention Chaucer first, although, as a general rule, he should be one of the last read. “It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.” – Dryden.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, not to be read through, but in selections. “We can scarcely comprehend how a perusal of the Faerie Queene can fail to insure to the true believer a succession of halcyon days.” – Hazlitt.

The Works of William Shakspeare. The following editions of Shakspeare have been issued within the present century: The first Variorum (1813); The Variorum (1821); Singer’s (10 vols. 1826); Knight’s (8 vols. 1841); Collier’s (8 vols. 1844); Verplanck’s (3 vols. 1847); Hudson’s (11 vols. 1857); Dyce’s (6 vols. 1867); Mary Cowden Clarke’s (2 vols. 1860); R. G. White’s (12 vols. 1862); Clark and Wright’s (9 vols. 1866); The Leopold Edition (1 vol. 1877); The Harvard Edition (20 vols. 1881); The Variorum ( – vols. 1871 – ); Rolfe’s School Shakspeare (1872-81); Hudson’s School Shakspeare. “Above all poets, the mysterious dual of hard sense and empyrean fancy.” – Lord Lytton.

Ben Jonson’s Dramatic and Poetical Works, to be read also in selections. “O rare Ben Jonson!”

Christopher Marlowe’s Dramatic Works, especially “Tamburlaine,” “Doctor Faustus,” and “The Jew of Malta.” “He had in him all those brave translunary things which the first poets did have.” – Drayton.

Beaumont and Fletcher, and especially “The Faithful Shepherdess,” a play “very characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity, indecency, and absurdity.” – Hallam.

John Webster’s Tragedies. “To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit: this only a Webster can do.” – Charles Lamb.

George Herbert’s Poems. “In George Herbert there is poetry, and enough to spare; it is the household bread of his existence.” – Géorge Macdonald.

Milton’s Poetical Works. The “Paradise Lost” was mentioned in the former list; but you cannot well do without his shorter poems also. “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him.” – Charles Lamb.

Pope’s Poetical Works. “Come we now to Pope, that prince of sayers of acute and exquisite things.” – Robert Chambers.

Dryden’s Poems. “Dryden is even better than Pope. He has immense masculine energies.” – Ibid.

Goldsmith’s Select Poems. “No one like Goldsmith knew how to be at once natural and exquisite, innocent and wise, a man and still a child.” – Edward Dowden.

The Poems of Robert Burns. “Burns should be my stand-by of a winter night.” – J. H. Morse.

Wordsworth’s Select Poems. “Nearest of all modern writers to Shakspeare and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own.” – Coleridge.

the Poems of Sir Walter Scott. “Walter Scott ranks in imaginative power hardly below any writer save Homer and Shakspeare.” – Goldwin Smith.

The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. “Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’ is, as far as I know, the greatest poem which the century has produced in any language.” – Ruskin.

Coleridge’s Select Poems. “The Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” and “Genevieve.” “These might be bound up in a volume of twenty pages, but they should be bound in pure gold.” – Stopford Brooke.

The Poems of John Keats. “No one else in English poetry, save Shakspeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection of loveliness.” – Matthew Arnold.

The Christian Year, by John Keble. “I am not a churchman, – I don’t believe in planting oaks in flower-pots, – but such a poem as ‘The Rosebud’ makes one a proselyte to the culture it grows from.” – Dr. Holmes.

Tennyson’s Poems. “Tennyson is a born poet, that is, a builder of airy palaces and imaginary castles; he has chosen amongst all forms the most elegant, ornate, exquisite.” – M. Taine.

Longfellow’s Poetical Works. “In the pure, amiable, home-like qualities that reach the heart and captivate the ear, no one places Longfellow second.” – The Critic.

Bryant’s Poetical Works. “The great characteristics of Bryant’s poetry are its strong common-sense, its absolute sanity, and its inexhaustible imagination.” – R. H. Stoddard.

The Poems of John G. Whittier. “The lyric poet of America, his poems are in the broadest sense national.” – Anon.

In addition to the works named above, there are several collections of short poems and selections of poetry invaluable to the student. They are “infinite riches in little room.” I name —

Bryant’s Library of Poetry and Song.Emerson’s Parnassus.Ward’s English Poets.Piatt’s American Poetry and Art.Appleton’s Library of British Poetry.Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

“A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain,” says Lord Macaulay, “has been translated into our own tongue. I would not dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe; but I would console those who have not time to make themselves linguists by assuring them that, by means of their own mother tongue, they may obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of the age of Charles the Fifth, to treasures surpassing those which were possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melanchthon.”

I name some of the treasures which you may thus acquire —

Homer’s Iliad. Of this work, without which no scholar’s library is complete, many translations have been made. The most notable are George Chapman’s (1611), Pope’s (1715), Tickell’s (1715), Cowper’s (1781), Lord Derby’s (1867), Bryant’s (1870). Americans will, of course, prefer Bryant’s translation; but Derby’s is more poetical, and the greatest scholars award the palm of merit to Chapman. Says Lowell: “Chapman has made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished out of Homer.”

Æschylus. “Prometheus Bound” has been rendered into English verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “Agamemnon” has been translated by Dean Milman, and the entire seven tragedies by Dean Potter. “The ‘Prometheus’ is a poem of the like dignity and scope as the Book of Job, or the Norse Edda.” – Emerson.