“The charm of literary beauty and talent!” There is the whole question. Nothing really matters for the average man, so far as books are concerned, but this charm, and I am criticizing Lord Acton’s list for the average man. The student who has got beyond it need not worry himself about classified lists. He may read his Plato, and Aristotle, his Pascal and Newman, his Christian apologists and German theologians, as he wills; or he may read in some other quite different direction. Guidance is impossible to a mind at such a stage of cultivation as Lord Acton had in view.
Only minds at a more primitive stage of culture than this most learned and most accomplished man seemed able to conceive of, could be bettered by advice as to reading. Given, indeed, contact with some superior mind, which out of its rich equipment of culture should advise
as to the books that might be most profitably read, I could imagine advice being helpful. It would be of no value, it is true, to an untutored savage or illiterate peasant, but to a youth fresh from school-books and much modern fiction, to a young girl about to enter upon life in its more serious aspects, it would be immensely serviceable. It was of such as these that Mr. Ruskin thought when he wrote of “King’s Treasures” in Sesame and Lilies, and the same idea was doubtless in Sir John Lubbock’s mind when he lectured on the “Hundred Best Books.” But Lord Avebury’s list had its limitations, it seems to me, for any one who has an interest in good literature and guidance to the reading thereof. To give “Scott” as one book and “Shakspere” as another was I suggest to shirk much responsibility of selection. Scott is a whole library, Shakspere is yet another. One may give “Keats” or “Shelley” because they are more limited in quantity. Even to name novels by Charles Kingsley and Bulwer Lytton in this select hundred was to demonstrate to men of this generation that Lord Avebury being of an earlier one had a bias in favour of the books
that we are all outgrowing. To include Mill’s Logic is to ignore the Time Spirit acting on philosophy; to include Tennyson’s Idylls its action on poetry. Mill and Tennyson will always live in literature but not I think by these books.
But the fact is that there is no possibility of naming the hundred best books. No one could quarrel with Lord Avebury if he had named these as his hundred own favourites among the books of the world. Still, it might have been his hundred; it could not possibly have been any one else’s hundred because every man of education must make his own choice. No! the naming of the hundred best books for any large, general audience is quite impossible. All that is possible in such a connexion is to state emphatically that there are very few books that are equally suitable to every kind of intellect. Temperament as well as intellectual endowment make for so much in reading. Take, for example, the Imitation of Christ. George Eliot, although not a Christian, found it soul-satisfying. Thackeray, as I think a more robust intellect, found it well nigh as mischievous as did Eugene Sue, whose
anathematizations in his novel The Wandering Jew are remembered by all. Other books that have been the outcome of piety of mind leave less room for difference of opinion. Surely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, make an universal appeal. That universal appeal is the point at which alone guidance is possible. There are great books that can be read only by the few, but surely the very greatest appeal alike to the educated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intellectual endowment and to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are incomprehensible. Hamlet is a wonderful test of this quality. It “holds the boards” at the small provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr. Crummles to an illiterate peasantry, and it is performed by the greatest actor to the most select city audience. It is made the subject of study by learned commentators. It is world-embracing.
Are there in the English language, including translations, a hundred books that stand the test as Hamlet stands it? No two men would make the same list of books that answer to this demand of an universal appeal, and obviously each nation
must make its own list. Mine is for English boys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those who have had no educational advantages in early years. I exclude living writers, and I give the hundred in four groups.
POETRY.
1. The Bible. [260a]