are of the size of those in the original editions.
INTRODUCTION
A BOOK is judged by its peers. In the presence of the greater works of authors there is no room for personal criticism; they constitute in themselves the perpetual mind of the race, and dispense with any private view. The eye rests on these hundred titles of books famous in English literature, as it reads a physical map by peak, river and coast, and sees in miniature the intellectual conformation of a nation. A different selection would only mean another point of view; some minor features might be replaced by others of similar subordination; but the mass of imagination and learning, the mind-achievement of the English race, is as unchangeable as a mountain landscape. Perspective thrusts its unconscious judgment upon the organs of sight, also; if Gower is thin with distance and the clump of the Elizabethans shows crowded with low spurs, the eye is not therefore deceived by the large pettiness of the foreground with its more numerous and distinct details. The mass governs. Darwin appeals to Milton; Shelley is judged by Pope, and Hawthorne by Congreve.
These books must of necessity be national books; for fame, which is essentially the highest gift of which man has the giving, cannot be conferred except by a public voice. Fame dwells upon the lips of men. It is not that memorable books must all be people's books, though the greatest are such—the Book of Common Prayer, the Bible, Shakespeare; but those which embody some rare intellectual power, or illuminate some seldom visited tract of the spirit, or merely display some peculiar taste in learning or pastime, must yet have something racial in them, something public, to secure their hold against the detaching power of time; they must be English books, not in tongue only, but body and soul. They are not less the books of a nation because they are remote, superfine, uncommon. Such are the books of the poets—the Faërie Queene; books of the nobles—Arcadia; books of the scholar—the Anatomy of Melancholy. These books open the national genius as truly, kind by kind, as books of knowledge exhibit the nation's advancement in learning, stage by stage, when new sciences are brought to the birth. The Wealth of Nations, Locke's Essay, Blackstone's Commentaries, are not merely the product of private minds. They are landmarks of English intellect; and more, since they pass insensibly into the power of civilization in the land, feeding the general mind. The limited appeal that many classics made in their age, and still make, indicates lack of development in particular persons; but however numerous such individuals may be, in whatever majorities they may mass, the mind of the race, once having flowered, has flowered with the vigor of the stock. The Compleat Angler finds a rustic breast under much staid cloth; Pepys was never at a loss for a gossip since his seals were broken, and Donne evokes his fellow-eccentric whose hermitage is the scholar's bosom; but whether the charm work on few or on many is indifferent, for whom they affect, they affect through consanguinity. The books of a nation are those which are appropriate to its genius and embody its variations amid the changes of time; even its sports, like Euphues, are itself; and the works which denote the evolution of its civilized life in fructifying progress, whose increasing diversities are yet held in the higher harmony of one race, one temperament, one destiny, are without metaphor its Sibylline books, and true oracles of empire.
It is a sign of race in literature that a book can spare what is private to its author, and comes at last to forgo his earth-life altogether. This is obvious of works of knowledge, since positive truth gains nothing from personality, but feels it as an alloy; and a wise analysis will affirm the same of all long-lived books. Works of science are charters of nature, and submit to no human caprice; and, in a similar way, works of imagination, which are to the inward world of the spirit what works of science are to the natural universe, are charters of the soul, and borrow nothing from the hand that wrote them. How deciduous such books are of the private life needs only to be stated to be allowed. They cast biography from them like the cloak of the ascending prophet. An author is not rightly to be reckoned among immortals until he has been forgotten as a man, and become a shade in human memory, the myth of his own work. The anecdote lingering in the Mermaid Tavern is cocoon-stuff, and left for waste; time spiritualizes the soul it released in Shakespeare, and the speedier the change, so much the purer is the warrant of a life above death in the minds of men. The loneliness of antique names is the austerity of fame, and only therewith do Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, seem nobly clad and among equals; the nude figure of Shelley at Oxford is symbolical and prophetic of this disencumberment of mortality, the freed soul of the poet,—like Bion, a divine form. Not to speak of those greatest works, the Prayer Book, the Bible, which seem so impersonal in origin as to be the creation of the English tongue itself and the genius of language adoring God; nor of Hakluyt or Clarendon, whose books are all men's actions; how little do the most isolated and seclusive authors, Surrey, Collins, Keats, perpetuate except the pure poet! In these hundred famous books there are few valued for aught more than they contain in themselves, or which require any other light to read them by than what they bring with them; they are rather hampered than helped by the recollection of their authors' careers. Sidney adds lustre to the Arcadia; an exception among men, in this as in all other ways, by virtue of that something supereminent in him which dazzled his own age. But who else of famous authors is greater in his life than in his book? It is the book that gives significance to the man, not the man to the book. These authors would gain by oblivion of themselves, and that in proportion to their greatness, thereby being at once removed into the impersonal region of man's permanent spirit and of art. The exceptions are only seemingly such; it is Johnson's thought and the style of a great mind that preserve Boswell, not his human grossness; and in Pepys it is the mundane and every-day immortality of human nature, this permanently curious and impertinent world, not his own scandal and peepings, that yield him allowance in libraries. In all books to which a nation stands heir, it is man that survives,—the aspect of an epoch, the phase of a religion, the mood of a generation, the taste, sentiment, thought, pursuit, entertainment, of a historic and diversified people. There is nothing accidental in the fact that of these hundred books forty-six bear no author's name upon the title-page; nor is this due merely to the eldest style of printing, as with Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Langland; nor to the inclusion of works by several hands—the Book of Common Prayer, the Mirror for Magistrates, the Tatler, the Spectator, the Reliques, the Federalist; nor to the use of initials, as in the case of Donne and Mrs. Browning. The characteristic is constant. It is interesting to note the names thus self-suppressed: Sackville, Spenser, Bacon, Burton, Browne, Walton, Butler, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Gray, Franklin, Goldsmith, Sterne, Smollett, Sheridan, White, Wordsworth, Irving, Austen, Scott, Lamb, Cooper, Carlyle, Emerson, Brontë, Lowell, Tennyson, George Eliot, Fitzgerald.
The broad and various nationality of English literature is a condition precedent to greatness, and underlies its mighty fortune. Its chief glory is its continuity, by which it exceeds the moderns, and must, with ages, surpass antiquity. Literary genius has been so unfailing in the English race that men of this blood live in the error that literature, like light and air, is a common element in the life of populations. Literature is really the work of selected nations, and with them is not a constant product. Many nations have no literature, and in fertile nations there are barren centuries. The splendid perpetuity of Greek literature, which covered two thousand years, was yet broken by lean ages, by periods of desert dearth. In the English, beginning from Chaucer (as is just, since he is our Homer, whatever ages went before Troy or Canterbury), there have been reigns without a poet; and Greek example might prepare the mind for Alexandrian and Byzantine periods in the future, were it not for the grand combinations of world-colonies and world-contacts which open new perspectives of time for which the mind, as part of its faith in life, requires destinies as large. The gaps, however, were greatest at the beginning, and grow less. One soil, one government, one evenly unfolded civilization—long life in the settled and peaceful land—contribute to this continuity of literature in the English; but its explanation lies in the integrity of English nurture, and this is essentially the same in all persons of English blood. Homer was not more truly the school of Greece than the Bible has been the school of the English. It has overcome all external change in form, rule and institution, fused conventicle and cathedral, and in dissolving separate and narrow bonds of union has proved the greatest bond of all, and become like a tie of blood. English piety is of one stock, and through every book of holy living where its treasures are laid up, there blows the breath of one Spirit. Herbert and Bunyan are peers of a faith undivided in the hearts of their countrymen. It does not change, but is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. On the secular side, also, English nurture has been of the like simple strain. The instinct of adventure, English derring-do, has never failed. Holinshed and Hakluyt were its chroniclers of old; and from the Morte d'Arthur to Sidney, from the Red-Cross Knight to Ivanhoe, from Shakespeare's Henry to Tennyson's Grenville, genius has not ceased to stream upon it, a broad river of light. The Word of God fed English piety; English daring was fed upon the deeds of men. Hear Shakespeare's Henry: "Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct and the government of my affairs." The English Plutarch is written on the earth's face. Its battles have named the lands and seas of all the world; but, as was said of English piety, from Harold to Cromwell, from the first Conqueror to Wellington, from the Black Prince to Gordon, English daring—the strength of the yeoman, the breath of the noble—is of one stock. Race lasts; those who are born in the eyrie find eagles' food. This has planted iron resolution and all-hazarding courage in epic-drama and battle-ode, and, as in the old riddle, feeds on what it fed. English literature is brave, martial, and brings forth men-children. It has the clarion strength of empire; like Taillefer at Hastings, Drayton and Tennyson still lead the charge at Agincourt and Balaclava. As Shakespeare's Henry was nourished, so was the English spirit in all ages bred. This integrity of English nurture, seen in these two great modes of life turned toward God in the soul and toward the world in action, is as plainly to be discerned in details as in these generalities; and to state only one other broad aspect of the facts governing the continuity of literary genius in the English, but one that goes to the foundations, the condition that both vivifies and controls that genius in law, metaphysics, science, in all political writing, whether history, theory, or discussion, as well as in the creative and artistic modes of its development, is freedom. The freedom of England, which is the parent of its greatness in all ways, is as old in the race as fear of God and love of peril; and, through its manifold and primary operation in English nurture, is the true continuer of its literature.
A second grand trait of English literature that is writ large on these title-pages, is its enormous assimilative power. So great is this that he who would know English must be a scholar in all literatures, and that with no shallow learning. The old figure of the torch handed down from nation to nation, as the type of man's higher life, gives up its full meaning only to the student, and to him it may come to seem that the torch is all and the hand that bears it dust and ashes; often he finds in its light only the color of his own studies, and names it Greek, Semitic, Hindu, and looks on English, French and Latin as mere carriers of the flame. In so old a symbol there must be profound truth, and it conveys the sense of antiquity in life, of the deathlessness of civilization, and something also of its superhuman origin—the divine gift of fire transmitted from above; but civilization is more than an inheritance, it is a power; and truth is always more than it was; and wherever the torch is lit, its light is the burning of a living race of men. The dependence of the present on the past, of a younger on an older people, of one nation on another, is often misinterpreted and misleads; life cannot be given, but only knowledge, example, direction—influence, but not essence; and the impact of one literature upon another, or of an old historic culture upon a new and ungrown people, is more external than is commonly represented. The genius of a nation born to greatness is irresistible, it remains itself, it does not become another. The Greeks conquered Rome, men say, through the mind; and Rome conquered the barbarians through the mind; but in Gibbon who finds Greece? and the mind of Europe does not bear the ruling stamp of either Byzantine or Italian Rome. In the narrowly temporal and personal view, even under the overwhelming might of Greece, Virgil remained, what Tennyson calls him, "Roman Virgil"; and in the other capital instance of apparently all-conquering literary power, under the truth that went forth from Judea into all lands, Dante remained Italian and Milton English. Yet in these three poets, whose names are synonyms of their countries, the assimilated element is so great that their minds might be said to have been educated abroad.