Edmund Gosse finds Tristram Shandy dull; Bulwer asserts that only writers the most practiced could safely venture an occasional restrained imitation of its frolicsome zoneless graces. Possibly Horace Walpole comes nearer the mark in referring to it as a very insipid and tedious performance, though he might have defined it as a remarkable work on obstetrics.
Skipping Don Quixote and the Vicar of Wakefield, and not having read Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Jane Eyre, My Novel, Rob Roy, The Three Musketeers, The Scarlet Letter, Charles O’Malley, and how many others! La Harpe terms Tom Jones “the foremost novel of the world” (le premier roman du monde). So, I believe, does Lowell. Wilkie Collins, shortly before his death, gave the honor to The Antiquary. The same renowned critic (La Harpe), considered the Divine Comedy “a stupidly barbarous amplification” (une amplification stupidement barbare); Mézières, another French critic, thinks it deserves to be termed “the epopee of Christian peoples” (elle mérite d’être appelée l’épopée des peuples chrétiens).
“We read the Paradise Lost as a task,” growls Dr. Johnson. “Nay, rather as a celestial recreation,” whispers Lamb. “I would forgive a man for not reading Milton,” Lamb naïvely adds, “but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the divine chit-chat of Cowper.” Again, though I myself may see much to praise but less to please in Paradise Lost, infinitely preferring Lycidas, the Allegro, and the Penseroso, I may, nevertheless, admire Lamb; and though I may recognize the worth of Mézières, I may dislike the Divine Comedy. All of us may not care for the Pilgrim’s Progress or Hudibras; and some may prefer Cellini’s or Rousseau’s autobiography to Boswell’s biography,—it is not always so easy to read and admire the books one should read and admire from another’s standpoint.
What two persons look at things precisely the same? Human thought and human opinion are as varied as the expression of the human face. “There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity,” observes Montaigne. “An opinion,” says the sparkling author of Bachelor Bluff, “is simply an angle of reflection, or the facet which one’s individuality presents to a subject, measuring not the whole or many parts of it, but the dimensions of the reflecting surface. It is something, perhaps, if the reflection within its limits is a true one.” There are particular writers that, never widely popular, will always have their particular admirers, and we all of us have our special subjects or predilections that we wish to know most about, or are most interested in.
“L’histoire c’est mo gibier en matière des liures, ou la poësie que i’ayme d’vne particulière inclinatio” (history is my game in the chase for books, or poetry, which I especially dote upon), again observes Montaigne. Montaigne is so quaint he should be mused over in an old edition; it is like gathering mushrooms from an old pasture on a hazy autumn day. Plainly, it is out of the question to read everything even on a single subject, and many good books are practically unattainable. The Book-Worm, perched upon his ladder with a duodecimo in one hand, a quarto under his arm, and a folio between his knees, has at least four sealed volumes. Each person will read preferably such books as are in keeping with his tastes and line of thought, though he will greatly stimulate and enlarge his thought by also reading books diametrically opposed to his taste. The somewhat prosy mind will be benefited by familiarity with the poets; the super-poetic is improved by the balance and adjustment to be found in the study of works of reason and criticism.
But even then we may not read “the best hundred books” of some one else’s choosing. “We are happy from possessing what we like, not from possessing what others like,” La Rochefoucauld remarks; and his maxim is pertinent to the library. Tastes will ever differ in books and in bindings, in epics and in lyrics. Many nice people one knows, but one has not the time, neither does one care to make bosom friends of them all. Or, to cite Goldsmith, “Though fond of many acquaintances, I desire an intimacy only with a few.” Seldom do we admire in age that which captivates us in youth, and that which moves us in one mood may not appeal to us in another.
The most omnivorous book-worm can read comparatively little. Those who read slowly and digest what they read—if there is time in life to read slowly—may read still less. There is much in Bulwer’s sentence: “Reading without purpose is sauntering, not exercise. More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye. A cottage garden gives honey to the bee, a king’s garden none to the butterfly.”
A happy remark with reference to the best-hundred-books controversy is that credited to Herman Merivale-“those books which everybody says everybody else must read, but never reads himself.” “We praise that which is praised much more than that which is praisable,” is a pithy saying of La Bruyère. Charles Lamb included in his catalogue of “books which are no books generally all those volumes which ‘no gentleman’s library should be without.’” The author of that delicious anonymity, A Club of One (A. P. Russell), the failure to read which should send the delinquent to Coventry, is more of a philosopher than many of the professed literary law-givers. It is true he presents a list of his favorite books, but the list numbers considerably over two hundred, and these are delicately suggested, and not dictated in a perfunctory way; I have no doubt he has since added two hundred more. He must have read and remembered ten times a hundred to write the volume in question, and ransacked whole libraries to compose the companion volumes, Library Notes and In a Club Corner, veritable mines of sparkling sayings, sententious precepts, and literary anecdote.
Dana and Johnson have selected Fifty Perfect Poems with excellent judgment, no doubt, though who was responsible for the insertion of numbers forty-three and fifty is not stated in the preface. The Elegy, the Ode on a Grecian Urn, The Lotus Eaters, and a half-dozen other selections every one must have included in a similar collection. But beyond this dozen or so of immortal poems that by no possibility might be omitted, it is safe to say that almost any other anthologist would have gathered Chrysanthema totally different—so varied are individual tastes both in poetry and prose. The fifty best poems and the hundred best books to Dobson may not be the hundred best books and the fifty best poems to Gosse or Lang. The marvel is how Johnson and Dana could agree.
The scholar and the student who live for their books, the author, the man of elegant leisure, or the bibliophile may be benefited by a very large library, and share their benefits with the world; though there is often no little truth in what Gérard de Nerval said of the latter in a perverted sense of the term: “A serious bibliophile does not share his books; he does not even read them himself for fear of fatiguing them.”