The Book-lover

Aristophanes. The translation by John Hookham Frere is admirable. “We might apply to the pieces of Aristophanes the motto of a pleasant and acute adventurer in Goethe: ‘Mad, but clever.’” – A. W. Schlegel.

Virgil’s Æneid. The best known translations of Virgil are Dryden’s (1697), Christopher Pitt’s (1740), John Conington’s (1870), William Morris’s (1876). Your choice among these will lie between the last two. “Virgil is far below Homer; yet Virgil has genius enough to be two men.” – Lord Lytton.

Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Satires. There are excellent translations by Conington, Lord Lytton, and T. Martin. “There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, … but who will yet show you that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura.” – Ibid.

Dante’s Divina Commedia. Translated by Longfellow. “The finest narrative poem of modern times.” – Macaulay.

Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Bayard Taylor. “What constitutes Goethe’s glory is, that in the nineteenth century he did produce an epic poem – I mean a poem in which genuine gods act and speak.” – H. A. Taine.

Of the best poetry written in the modern foreign tongues, you will have no difficulty in finding excellent translations. There are good English editions of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso; of Calderon and Camoens; of Molière, Corneille, Racine, and Victor Hugo; and of Goethe and Schiller. And to make your collection complete for all the purposes of a scholar, you will want Longfellow’s “Poets and Poetry of Europe,” containing translations of the best short poems written in the modern European languages.

Of modern poetry, John Ruskin advises beginners to “keep to Scott, Wordsworth, Keats, Crabbe, Tennyson, the two Brownings, Lowell, Longfellow, and Coventry Patmore, whose ‘Angel in the House’ is a most finished piece of writing, and the sweetest analysis we possess of quiet modern domestic feeling… Cast Coleridge at once aside as sickly and useless; and Shelley as shallow and verbose; Byron, until your taste is fully formed, and you are able to discern the magnificence in him from the wrong. Never read bad or common poetry, nor write any poetry yourself; there is, perhaps, rather too much than too little in the world already.”

Says Frederic Harrison: “I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as for Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakspeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry, the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled… The busy world may fairly reserve the lesser lights for the time when it knows the greatest well… Nor shall we forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologues, and maxims which have come down to us from distant ages of man’s history, – the old idyls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages, of the East; the fables of the old and the new world; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the ‘Morte d’Arthur’; the ‘Arabian Nights;’ the ballads of the early nations of Europe.”

PROSE

In the following list I shall endeavor to name only the truly great and time-abiding books, – books to be used not simply as tools, but for the “building up of a lofty character,” the turning of the soul inward upon itself, concentrating its forces, and fitting it for greater and stronger achievements. They embody the best thoughts of the best thinkers; and almost any one of them, if properly read and “energized upon,” will furnish food for study, and meditation, and mind-growth, enough for the best of us.

Essays, etc

The Works of Lord Bacon. (Popular edition.) “He seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration, that had been in many ages.” – Ben Jonson.

Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne. “One of the most beautiful prose poems in the language.” – Lord Lytton.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. Byron says that “if the reader has patience to go through the ‘Anatomy of Melancholy,’ he will be more improved for literary conversation than by the perusal of any twenty other works with which I am acquainted.”

Montaigne’s Essays. (Best edition.) “Montaigne comes in for a large share of the scholar’s regard; opened anywhere, his page is sensible, marrowy, quotable.” – A. Bronson Alcott.

Areopagitica, by John Milton. “A sublime treatise, which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes.” – Macaulay.

The Spectator. “The talk of Addison and Steele is the brightest and easiest talk that was ever put in print.” – John Richard Green.

Burke’s Orations and Political Essays. “In amplitude of comprehension and richness of imagination, Burke was superior to every orator, ancient or modern.” – Lord Macaulay.

Webster’s Best Speeches. “But after all is said, we come back to the simple statement that he was a very great man; intellectually, one of the greatest men of his age.” – Henry Cabot Lodge.

The Orations of Demosthenes. A good translation is that of Kennedy in Bohn’s Classical Library.

Cicero’s Orations; also Cicero’s Offices, Old Age, Friendship, etc.

Plutarch’s Lives. Arthur Hugh Clough’s revision of Dryden’s Plutarch. “Without Plutarch, no library were complete.” – A. Bronson Alcott.

The Six Chief Lives from Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, edited by Matthew Arnold.

Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. “Scarcely since the days of Homer has the feat been equalled; indeed, in many senses, this also is a kind of heroic poem.” – Carlyle.

Charles Lamb’s Essays. “People never weary of reading Charles Lamb.” – Alexander Smith.

Carlyle’s Works. “No man of his generation has done as much to stimulate thought.” – Alfred Guernsey.

Macaulay’s Essays. “I confess to a fondness for books of this kind.” – H. A. Taine.

Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects. “Models of style and clear-cut thought.” – Anon.

The Works of Washington Irving. “In the department of pure literature the earliest classic writer of America.”

The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, by Oliver Wendell Holmes. “Something more than an essayist; he is contemplative, discursive, poetical, thoughtful, philosophical, amusing, imaginative, tender – never didactic.” – Mackenzie.

Emerson’s Essays. “A diction at once so rich and so homely as his, I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like home-spun cloth-of-gold.” – J. R. Lowell.

FICTION

The novel, in its best form, I regard as one of the most powerful engines of civilization ever invented.

Sir John Herschel.

Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them, – almost all women; a vast number of clever, hard-headed men, judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers, as well as young boys and sweet girls, and their kind, tender mothers.

W. M. Thackeray.

Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe. “‘Robinson Crusoe’ contains (not for boys, but for men) more religion, more philosophy, more psychology, more political economy, more anthropology, than are found in many elaborate treatises on these special subjects.” – F. Harrison.

Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Cervantes. “The work of Cervantes is the greatest in the world after Homer’s Iliad, speaking of it, I mean, as a work of entertainment.” – Dr. Johnson.

Gulliver’s Travels, by Dean Swift. “Not so indispensable, but yet the having him is much to be rejoiced in.” – R. Chambers.

The Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith. “The blotting out of the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ from most minds, would be more grievous than to know that the island of Borneo had sunk in the sea.” – Ibid.

The Waverley Novels. If not all, at least the following: Ivanhoe; The Talisman; Kenilworth; The Monastery; The Abbot; Old Mortality; The Antiquary; Guy Mannering; The Bride of Lammermoor; The Heart of Midlothian.

Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales.

Dickens’s Novels. Not all, but the following: David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Nicholas Nickleby; Old Curiosity Shop; Oliver Twist; and The Pickwick Papers.

Thackeray’s Novels. Vanity Fair; Pendennis; The Newcomes; The Virginians; Henry Esmond.

George Eliot’s Novels. Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Romola; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda.

Corinne, by Madame de Staël.

Telemachus, by Fénelon. (Hawkesworth’s translation.)

Tom Jones, by Fielding. “We read his books as we drink a pure, wholesome, and rough wine, which cheers and fortifies us, and which wants nothing but bouquet.” – H. A. Taine.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, by Goethe. (Carlyle’s translation.)

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novels. The Scarlet Letter; The Marble Faun; The Blithedale Romance; The House of Seven Gables.

Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.

Hypatia and Alton Locke, by Charles Kingsley.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Mrs. Stowe. “We have seen an American woman write a novel of which a million copies were sold in all languages, and which had one merit, of speaking to the universal heart, and was read with equal interest to three audiences, namely, in the parlor, in the kitchen, and in the nursery of every house.” – Emerson.

Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain.

Bulwer-Lytton’s Novels. The Caxtons; My Novel; Zanoni; The Last of the Barons; Harold; The Last Days of Pompeii.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.

John Halifax, Gentleman, by Mrs. Craik.

This list might be readily extended; but I forbear, resolved rather to omit some meritorious works than to include any that are unworthy of the best companionship.

I close this chapter with Leigh Hunt’s pleasant word-picture descriptive of his own library: “Sitting last winter among my books, and walled round with all the comfort and protection which they and my fireside could afford me, – to wit, a table of high-piled books at my back, my writing-desk on one side of me, some shelves on the other, and the feeling of the warm fire at my feet, – I began to consider how I loved the authors of those books; how I loved them too, not only for the imaginative pleasures they afforded me, but for their making me love the very books themselves, and delight to be in contact with them. I looked sideways at my Spenser, my Theocritus, and my Arabian Nights; then above them at my Italian Poets; then behind me at my Dryden and Pope, my Romances, and my Boccaccio; then on my left side at my Chaucer, who lay on my writing-desk; and thought how natural it was in Charles Lamb to give a kiss to an old folio, as I once saw him do to Chapman’s Homer… I entrench myself in my books, equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables; if a melancholy thought is importunate, I give another glance at my Spenser. When I speak of being in contact with my books, I mean it literally. I like to be able to lean my head against them… The very perusal of the backs is a ‘discipline of humanity.’ There Mr. Southey takes his place again with an old Radical friend; there Jeremy Collier is at peace with Dryden; there the lion, Martin Luther, lies down with the Quaker lamb, Sewell; there Guzman d’Alfarache thinks himself fit company for Sir Charles Grandison, and has his claims admitted… Nothing, while I live and think, can deprive me of my value for such treasures. I can help the appreciation of them while I last, and love them till I die; and perhaps I may chance, some quiet day, to lay my over-beating temples on a book, and so have the death I most envy.”

CHAPTER V

What Books Shall Young Folks Read?

THE greatest problem presented to the consideration of parents and teachers now-a-days is how properly to regulate and direct the reading of the children. There is no scarcity of reading-matter. The poorest child may have free access to books and papers, more than he can read. The publication of periodicals and cheap books especially designed to meet the tastes of young people has developed into an enterprise of vast proportions. Every day, millions of pages of reading matter designed for children are printed and scattered broadcast over the land. But unlimited opportunities often prove to be a damage and a detriment; and over-abundance, rather than scarcity, is to be deplored. As a general rule, the books read by young people are not such as lead to studious habits, or induce correct ideas of right living. They are intended simply to amuse; there are no elements of strength in them, leading up to a noble manhood. I doubt if in the future it can be said of any great statesman or scholar that his tastes had been formed, and his energies directed and sustained, through the influence of his early reading; but rather that he had attained success, and whatever of true nobility there is in him, in spite of such influence.

This was not always so. The experience of a few well-known scholars will illustrate. “From my infancy,” says Benjamin Franklin, “I was passionately fond of reading, and all the money that came into my hands was laid out in the purchasing of books. I was very fond of voyages. My first acquisition was Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections. They were small chapmen’s books, and cheap; forty volumes in all. My father’s little library consisted chiefly of books in polemic divinity, most of which I read. I have often regretted that at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was resolved I should not be bred to divinity. There was among them Plutarch’s Lives, which I read abundantly, and I still think the time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of Defoe’s called ‘An Essay on Projects,’ and another of Dr. Mather’s, called ‘An Essay to Do Good,’ which perhaps gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life. This bookish inclination at length determined my father to make me a printer… I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded, and signed the indenture when I was yet but twelve years old… I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon, and clean. Often I sat up in my chamber the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and to be returned in the morning, lest it should be found missing… About this time I met with an odd volume of the ‘Spectator.’ I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished if possible to imitate it. With that view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiments in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared my ‘Spectator’ with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them…

“Now it was, that, being on some occasions made ashamed of my ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed learning when at school, I took Cocker’s book on Arithmetic, and went through the whole by myself with the greatest ease. I also read Seller’s and Sturny’s book on Navigation, which made me acquainted with the little geometry it contains; but I never proceeded far in that science. I read about this time ‘Locke on the Human Understanding,’ and the ‘Art of Thinking,’ by Messrs. de Port Royal.

“While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English Grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), having at the end of it two little sketches on the ‘Arts of Rhetoric and Logic,’ the latter finishing with a dispute in the Socratic method. And soon after, I procured Xenophon’s ‘Memorable Things of Socrates,’ wherein there are many examples of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropped my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer.”19

Hugh Miller, that most admirable Scotchman and self-made man, relates a similar experience: “During my sixth year I spelled my way through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon the highest form in the dame’s school as a member of the Bible class. But all the while the process of learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended; when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives, – the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books; and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; – the other Scripture stories followed, – in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of birch bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works: Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances, the useful-knowledge books, had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the ‘youthhood;’ and so, from my rudimental books – books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind – I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children’s books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which, in the only true translation extant, – for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be, – I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power and at how early an age true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child’s book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire page, which, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side…

“In process of time, I devoured, besides these genial works, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the ‘judgment chapter’ in Howie’s Scotch Worthies, Byron’s Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook’s Voyages, all the volumes were now absent, save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes, – Mrs. Radcliffe’s ‘Mysteries of Udolpho,’ – was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books, – among the rest, a curious little volume entitled ‘The Miracles of Nature and Art,’ to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the ‘Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,’ – a work interesting from the circumstance that, though it bore another name on its titlepage, it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellences of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy, – Flavel’s Works, and Henry’s Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the titlepage away, and blind Jameson’s volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphtali, The Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let Loose… Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyages were my special favorites. I perused with avidity the Voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts, and fight battles.”20

William and Robert Chambers, the founders of the great publishing-house of W. & R. Chambers, Edinburgh, were self-educated men. “At little above fourteen years of age,” writes William, “I was thrown on my own resources. From necessity, not less than from choice, I resolved at all hazards to make the weekly four shillings serve for everything. I cannot remember entertaining the slightest despondency on the subject… I made such attempts as were at all practicable, while an apprentice, to remedy the defects of my education at school. Nothing in that way could be done in the shop, for there reading was proscribed. But, allowed to take home a book for study, I gladly availed myself of the privilege. The mornings in summer, when light cost nothing, were my chief reliance. Fatigued with trudging about, I was not naturally inclined to rise; but on this and some other points I overruled the will, and forced myself to rise at five o’clock, and have a spell at reading until it was time to think of moving off, – my brother, when he was with me, doing the same. In this way I made some progress in French, with the pronunciation of which I was already familiar from the speech of the French prisoners of war at Peebles. I likewise dipped into several books of solid worth, – such as Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations,’ Locke’s ‘Human Understanding,’ Paley’s ‘Moral Philosophy,’ and Blair’s ‘Belles-Lettres,’ – fixing the leading facts and theories in my memory by a note-book for the purpose. In another book I kept for years an accurate account of my expenses, not allowing a single halfpenny to escape record.”

And Robert, the younger brother, confirms the story, with even more accurate attention to details. “My brother William and I,” he says, “lived in lodgings together. Our room and bed cost three shillings a week… I used to be in great distress for want of fire. I could not afford either that or a candle myself; so I have often sat by my landlady’s kitchen fire, – if fire it could be called, which was only a little heap of embers, – reading Horace and conning my dictionary by a light which required me to hold the books almost close to the grate. What a miserable winter that was! Yet I cannot help feeling proud of my trials at that time. My brother and I – he then between fifteen and sixteen, I between thirteen and fourteen – had made a resolution together that we would exercise the last degree of self-denial. My brother actually saved money out of his income. I remember seeing him take five-and-twenty shillings out of a closed box which he kept to receive his savings; and that was the spare money of only a twelvemonth.”21