On the Choice of Books

by Thomas Carlyle

The thing was passed on Saturday night, and on Monday morning Rous came and said, "We cannot carry on the affair any longer, and we remit it into the hands of your Highness." Oliver in that way became Protector a second time.

I give you this as an instance that Oliver felt that the Parliament that had been dismissed had been perfectly right with regard to Chancery, and that there was no doubt of the propriety of abolishing Chancery, or reforming it in some kind of way. He considered it, and this is what he did. He assembled sixty of the wisest lawyers to be found in England. Happily, there were men great in the law—men who valued the laws as much as anybody does now, I suppose. (A laugh.) Oliver said to them, "Go and examine this thing, and in the name of God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it. You will see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison to everybody." Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six weeks—there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches, and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand—they got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was reconstituted and remodelled, and so it has lasted to our time. It had become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer.

That is an instance of the manner in which things were done when a Dictatorship prevailed in the country, and that was what the Dictator did. Upon the whole, I do not think that, in general, out of common history books, you will ever get into the real history of this country, or anything particular which it would beseem you to know. You may read very ingenious and very clever books by men whom it would be the height of insolence in me to do any other thing than express my respect for. But their position is essentially sceptical. Man is unhappily in that condition that he will make only a temporary explanation of anything, and you will not be able, if you are like the man, to understand how this island came to be what it is. You will not find it recorded in books. You will find recorded in books a jumble of tumults, disastrous ineptitudes, and all that kind of thing. But to get what you want you will have to look into side sources, and inquire in all directions.

I remember getting Collins' Peerage to read—a very poor peerage as a work of genius, but an excellent book for diligence and fidelity—I was writing on Oliver Cromwell at the time. (Applause.) I could get no biographical dictionary, and I thought the peerage book would help me, at least tell me whether people were old or young; and about all persons concerned in the actions about which I wrote. I got a great deal of help out of poor Collins. He was a diligent and dark London bookseller of about a hundred years ago, who compiled out of all kinds of treasury chests, archives, books that were authentic, and out of all kinds of things out of which he could get the information he wanted. He was a very meritorious man. I not only found the solution of anything I wanted there, but I began gradually to perceive this immense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history to look out for and read for—if he has not found it—it was that the kings of England all the way from the Norman Conquest down to the times of Charles I. had appointed, so far as they knew, those who deserved to be appointed, peers. They were all Royal men, with minds full of justice and valour and humanity, and all kinds of qualities that are good for men to have who ought to rule over others. Then their genealogy was remarkable—and there is a great deal more in genealogies than is generally believed at present.

I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that it goes for a great deal—the hereditary principle in Government as in other things; and it must be recognised so soon as there is any fixity in things.

You will remark that if at any time the genealogy of a peerage fails—if the man that actually holds the peerage is a fool in these earnest striking times, the man gets into mischief and gets into treason—he gets himself extinguished altogether, in fact. (Laughter.)

From these documents of old Collins it seems that a peer conducts himself in a solemn, good, pious, manly kind of way when he takes leave of life, and when he has hospitable habits, and is valiant in his procedure throughout; and that in general a King, with a noble approximation to what was right, had nominated this man, saying "Come you to me, sir; come out of the common level of the people, where you are liable to be trampled upon; come here and take a district of country and make it into your own image more or less; be a king under me, and understand that that is your function." I say this is the most divine thing that a human being can do to other human beings, and no kind of being whatever has so much of the character of God Almighty's Divine Government as that thing we see that went all over England, and that is the grand soul of England's history.

It is historically true that down to the time of Charles I., it was not understood that any man was made a peer without having a merit in him to constitute him a proper subject for a peerage. In Charles I.'s time it grew to be known or said that if a man was by birth a gentleman, and was worth £10,000 a-year, and bestowed his gifts up and down among courtiers, he could be made a peer. Under Charles II. it went on with still more rapidity, and has been going on with ever increasing velocity until we see the perfect break-neck pace at which they are now going. (A laugh.) And now a peerage is a paltry kind of thing to what it was in these old times, I could go into a great many more details about things of that sort, but I must turn to another branch of the subject.

One remark more about your reading. I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of books—in all books, if you take it in a wide sense—you will find that there is a division of good books and bad books—there is a good kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you are all ill acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea that people have that if they are reading any book—that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all. I entirely call that in question. I even venture to deny it. (Laughter and cheers.) It would be much safer and better would he have no concern with books at all than with some of them. You know these are my views. There are a number, an increasing number, of books that are decidedly to him not useful. (Hear.) But he will learn also that a certain number of books were written by a supreme, noble kind of people—not a very great number—but a great number adhere more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men's souls—divided into sheep and goats. (Laughter and applause.) Some of them are calculated to be of very great advantage in teaching—in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others are going down, down, doing more and more, wilder and wilder mischief.

And for the rest, in regard to all your studies here, and whatever you may learn, you are to remember that the object is not particular knowledge—that you are going to get higher in technical perfections, and all that sort of thing. There is a higher aim lies at the rear of all that, especially among those who are intended for literary, for speaking pursuits—the sacred profession. You are ever to bear in mind that there lies behind that the acquisition of what may be called wisdom—namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all the objects that come round about you, and the habit of behaving with justice and wisdom. In short, great is wisdom—great is the value of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated. The highest achievement of man—"Blessed is he that getteth understanding." And that, I believe, occasionally may be missed very easily; but never more easily than now, I think. If that is a failure, all is a failure. However, I will not touch further upon that matter.