To discern weeds and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance.
What a sifting there must be among them some day, as the volumes continue to accumulate—the mediocre cast aside to make room for the meritorious! Will there not eventually be some invention to preserve old books, an enamel for musty tomes, as wood is vulcanized or bodies are embalmed? Or must many works now existing in numerous volumes be reduced to extracts to find shelf-room for them all?
But to those who may be anxious regarding the accumulation of books, De Merrier offers this consolation: “The indefatigable hand of the grocers, the druggists, the butter merchants, etc., destroy as many books and brochures daily as are printed; the paper-gatherers come next; and all these hands, happily destructive, preserve the equilibrium. Without them the mass of printed paper would increase to an inconvenient degree, and in the end chase all the proprietors and tenants out of their houses. The same proportion is to be observed between the making of books and their decomposition as between life and death—a balm I address to those that the multitude of books worries or grieves.”
What works will survive, and what books shall we read? “If the writers of the brazen age are most suggestive to thee, confine thyself to them, and leave those of the Augustan age to dust and the bookworms,” says the transcendentalist of Walden. “Something like the woodland sounds,” the same author observes, “will be heard to echo through the leaves of a good book. Sometimes I hear the fresh emphatic note of the oven-bird and am tempted to turn many pages; sometimes the hurried chuckling sound of the squirrel when he dives into the wall.” “In science read by preference the newest works; in literature the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. New books revive and redecorate old ideas; old books suggest and invigorate new ideas,” says Bulwer. For knowledge of the world and literature, for polished grace of diction, for elevated and refined thought, and for the rhythm of beautiful prose, Bulwer might have called attention to his own essays, individual in the language. The publisher is yet to be thanked who will present Life, Literature, and Manners in a worthy and convenient form.
We read and learn and forget from the classics and the modern novelist as well. I sometimes wonder how posterity will regard the great writers of the present generation—whether Holmes will hold a more exalted place a century hence, or the Scarlet Letter fade. Will a mightier Shakespeare rise, and a sweeter Tennyson sing? And instead of sending posterity to Addison and Goldsmith for beautiful style, will the twenty-first century mentor refer the reader to a Spectator of an age that is yet to dawn?
The multitude of books one should read! It takes one’s breath away to think of the titles. They are as innumerable as the buttercups of the meadow. Think of them! the miles and leagues of folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos, 16, 18, 24, and 32 mos. on every conceivable subject that are sent out every year! The rows and rows of shelves, fathoms deep, of old books in numberless editions, cut and uncut, in cloth, parchment, sheep, pigskin, and calf, reposing in the book-stalls and libraries! Books grave and gay, comic and serious, storehouses of knowledge that are constantly shifting hands; others precious beyond price that are buried out of sight, their beautiful thoughts unread! The tons and tons of printed pages, in poetry and prose, awake and asleep in the public and private libraries of the great cities! They are as clover-tops in a field.
“The best hundred books!” Who shall single them out from the mighty multitude? It is like attempting to name the most beautiful flower, the most lovely woman—no one may know them all, and every one has his preferences. In life, art, and the study of literature it is at best a difficult question to point out the right way, as there are numerous considerations which require to be left largely to the discrimination of the person most concerned.
To decide on the merits of a work one may not take another’s opinion; one must needs read, mark, and digest it for himself. The reader who blindly submits to the dictum of another rarely does so to advantage. Far better to please one’s self and scout the arbiters. Every person should form his own estimate of the merits or demerits of a work. When Robert Buchanan terms the author of such exquisite verse as Les Tâches Jaunes, and such finished prose as La Morte Amoureuse “a hair-dresser’s dummy of a stylist,” how is one to be governed in the choice of his reading, save from the standpoint of his own taste! Because Sir Oracle admires Gil Blas and the Pantagruel, is no reason why you should do so, and because a Taine may proclaim Pope a purloiner and a mere juggler of phrase it does not necessarily follow that the Essay on Man is not one of the brightest jewels of the language. Wisest is he who maps out his own course of study and reading. The predication of others can not make that pleasing to him which is in utter variance to his tastes and sympathies. “A literary judgment is generally supposed to be formed by canons of criticism,” remarks Van Dyke, “but the canons are generally individual canons, and the criticism is but the synonym of a preference.”
Often the bell-wether leads the flock astray. Carlyle would have had A Midsummer Night’s Dream written in prose, and declared that Tennyson wrote in verse because the schoolmaster had taught him it was great to do so, and had thus been turned from the true path for a man. Emerson was always interested in Hawthorne’s fine personality, but could not appreciate his writings, while, equally strange, the author of the exquisite Prose Idyls extols the labored Recreations of North. Holmes “never felt to appreciate Irving as the majority look upon him,” and thinks the Sketch-Book “an overrated affair.” Fitzgerald did not like In Memoriam, The Princess, or The Idyls, and wished there were nothing after the 1842 volume. In Memoriam has the air, he says, of being evolved by a poetical machine of the very highest order. Voltaire thought the Æneid the most beautiful monument which remains to us of all antiquity. Peignot, in his erudite Traité du Choix des Livres, terms the Georgics the most perfect poem of antiquity, thereby echoing the opinion of Montaigne, who pronounced it “the most accomplished peece of worke of Poesie.”