Books and authors

Books and Authors
By Robert Lynd
Delight, the parent of so many virtues.
Coleridge.
Let us enjoy, whenever we have an opportunity, the delight of admiration, and perform the duties of reverence.
Landor.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons New York & London The Knickerbocker Press 1923
Copyright, 1923 by Robert Lynd
Made in the United States of America
To H. M. TOMLINSON
To write books about books has been spoken of as though it were a parasitic industry. Undoubtedly, books about books are among the least necessary of books. The world delighted in songs and epics and histories for centuries before it paused to attend to a literary critic. Even to-day, when men engage in the eternal discussion of the books with which they would like to be left on a desert island, I do not think a vote is ever given to a volume of criticism. The poet, the essayist, the novelist, the biographer, the philosopher, are all safe among the world’s best authors: the critic must be content if he is given a place among the second-best. He is not a contributor to the hundred best books; the most that he can claim is that no collection of the thousand best books would be complete without him. Certainly, it is difficult to imagine a well-chosen library of a thousand books without a volume or two of literary criticism.
This may be because a thousand supremely good books have not yet been written—a melancholy reflection when we think of all the ink and paper that have been used since authorship began. I think, however, it is also partly due to the fact that as human society becomes civilised, books become more and more a necessary part of the environment of men and women, so that we may say that on the whole it is more natural for a civilised man to write a book about books than a book about birds or butterflies. In a highly-developed civilisation, literature inevitably takes literature as part of its subject-matter as it takes every other great human interest. Even the historian ends by admitting authors among his characters along with statesmen and soldiers, and in general literature we have poems on poets, essays on essayists, biographies of biographers, criticisms of critics, and novels about novelists. Writing about writers, indeed, has become in our day an all but universal practice, and it seems to me to stand in no more need of defence than writing about tramps or travellers, about business-men or burglars.