This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the figure of Horace—short and fat, according to Suetonius—in the fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
II
A correspondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that “the love of God was like a generous roast of beef—you could cut and come again.” That must be the first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on reading “Moll Flanders.” If only her son had known that immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want “Tristram Shandy” and “Tom Jones,” two or three of Scott's, Gogol's “Dead Souls,” “David Copperfield,” “Evan Harrington,” “The Brothers Karamazoff,” “Père Goriot,” “War and Peace,” “The Three Musketeers,” all of Hardy's, “Treasure Island,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “Silas Marner,” “Don Quixote,” the “Cloister and the Hearth,” “Esmond”—no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left behind.
The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, “Rise of the Dutch Republic” (4) put in my boat, please, and—yes, Carlyle's “French Revolution” (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw in Green's “Short History” (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for there only is the real Samuel revealed “wart and all”). I should like to take “Elia” and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice between the “Bible in Spain,” “The Romany Rye,” “Lavengro,” and “Wild Wales.” But I rejoice when I find that “Lavengro” (10) is in the boat.
I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is Wordsworth (11) contra mundum, I have no doubt. He is the man who will “soothe and heal and bless.” My last selection shall be given to a work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's “Voyages” and the “Voyage of the Beagle,” and while I am balancing their claims the “Beagle” (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
