94. De Candolle—Histoire des Sciences et des Savants. [253b]
95. Darwin—Origin of Species. [253c]
96. Littré—Fragments de Philosophie. [253d]
97. Cournot—Enchaînements des Idées fondamentales. [253e]
98. Monatschriften der wissenschaftlichen Vereine. [254]
This list, written in 1883 in Miss Gladstone’s (Mrs. Drew’s) Diary, must always have an interest in the history of the human mind.
But my readers will, I imagine, for the most part, agree with me that there are others besides untutored savages and illiterate peasant women to whom such a list is entirely impracticable. It indicates the enormous preference which on the whole Lord Acton gave to the Literature of Knowledge over the Literature of Power, to use De Quincey’s famous distinction. With the exception of Dante’s Divine Comedy there is practically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy is here, and high thought.
Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato and Pascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all among the world’s immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by finding the least important book of a well-known author—as for example Rousseau’s Poland instead of the Confessions and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection instead of the Poems or the Biographia Literaria. Think of an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that he despised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the Memorial of St. Helena of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon’s exile, but in preference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon.
Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, at others a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is a fascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought the noblest mental equipment for life’s work. At the best, it is true, it would represent but one half of life. But then Lord Acton recognized this when he asked that
men should be “steeled against the charm of literary beauty and talent,” and he was assuming in any case that all the books in aesthetic literature, the best poetry and the best history had already been read, as he undoubtedly had read them.