there would not have been more than twenty books in common between rival schools of thought—the secular and the ecclesiastical—between, let us say, Mr. John Morley and Cardinal Newman. But it is probable that not one of these eminent men would have furnished a list with any similarity whatever to the remainder. Each would have written down his own hundred favourites, and herein may be admitted is an evidence of the futility of all such attempts. The best books are the books that have helped us most to see life in all its complex bearings, and each individual needs a particular kind of mental food quite unlike the diet that best stimulates his neighbour. Writing more than a year later, Lord Acton said that he had just drawn out a list of recommended authors for his son, as being the company he would like him to keep; but this list is not available—it is not the one before me. That was compiled yet another twelve months afterwards, when we find Lord Acton sending to Miss Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) his own ideal “hundred best books.” This list is now printed for the first time. Evidently Miss Gladstone remonstrated with her friend over the
character of the list; but Lord Acton defended it as being in his judgment really the hundred best books, apart from works on physical science—that it treated of principles that every thoughtful man ought to understand, and was calculated, in fact, to give one a clear view of the various forces that make history. “We are not considering,” he adds, “what will suit an untutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman, who would never come to an end of the Imitation.”
However, here is Lord Acton’s list, which Mrs. Drew has been kind enough to place in the hands of the Editor of the Pall Mall Magazine. I give also Lord Acton’s comment with which it opens, and I add in footnotes one or two facts about each of the authors:
* * * * *
“In answer to the question: Which are the hundred best books in the world?
“Supposing any English youth, whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not training for a profession.
“To perfect his mind and open windows in every direction, to raise him to the level of his age so that he may know the (20 or 30) forces that have made our world what it is and still reign over it, to guard him against surprises and against the constant sources of error within,
to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides, to give force and fullness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are wrong, to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent; so that each book, thoroughly taken in, shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of him—this list is submitted”:—
1. Plato—Laws—Steinhart’s Introduction. [230a]
2. Aristotle—Politics—Susemihl’s Commentary. [230b]