1 Mi/ Gfornell Unittetattg Bjthraqj Jitlfata, Jfan fork FROM THE BENNO LOEWY LIBRARY COLLECTED BY BENNO LOEWY 1854-1919 BEQUEATHED TO CORNELL UNIVERSITY uUE ">R 7 1948 J R t APR 4 1951 felf- Cornell University Library Z1003 .H31 Choice of books, and other literary piec olin 3 1924 029 541 863 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029541863 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS OTHEK LITEEAEY PIECES THE CHOICE OF BOOKS OTHER LITERARY PIECES FEEDEEIC ^JIAEEISON LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO. 1886 Y\\ UN IV IK b o II. Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh. PREFACE. This volume consists of essays and lectures, written at various times during the last twenty years, which I have been often urged to arrange in permanent form. It deals solely with books, art, and history — not with politics, philosophy, or religion ; nor does it touch on any controversy but the perennial problems presented to us by literature and the study of the Past. One-third of the volume is new. The larger part of the essay on Books, and the whole of that on St. Bernard, are now printed for the first time : those on Carlyle and on the French Kevolution have not been previously published in England. The other essays have appeared here in the places and at the dates noted in the Table of Contents. And I have to thank the proprietors of the various publications there mentioned for the courtesy with which I am permitted to use them. All have been revised, and some partly re- written. VI PREFACE. Five of these pieces, in their first shape, were given as lectures to a popular audience ; and the colloquial manner has not been expunged from their more mature form. 1 All of them are now addressed, not so much to the critic and the student, as to the "general reader," who has my chief sympathies. He often needs guid- ance in the vast multiplicity of literature, and in sort- ing the materials offered him to study. And my aim has been the humble one to popularise a few accepted judgments as to typical books, men, and epochs. The Choice of Books, the subject of about one-fifth of the present volume, has been in my thoughts for many years. And much of the first essay is taken from a series of Letters on Home Beading (still in the condition of MSS. penes me) intended as an annotated catalogue of selected books in four great departments of study. They were written long ago for the use of a very young lady, who now (let me add) encourages me to give them to a wider circle of readers, and so often aids me with suggestions from her ripe judg- ment. What is now printed, it will be seen, deals in a regular way with familiar poetry alone ; some notes on other branches of reading will be found in the whole of the volume. One day I hope to fill up this sketch. 1 Part of the essay on reading, that on London, and the last three essays were spoken at the London Institution. PREFACE. Vll But a complete selection of books is the work of a lifetime, even if it be designed on a very simple scale, and intended for readers of moderate leisure. 1 1 Since these pages were in type, Mr. Butler has published his excellent prose version of the Paradiso (p. 50), and Mr. Ormsby his admirable translation of Don Quixote (p. 58). CONTENTS. The Choice of Books {Partly from Fortnightly Review, page April 1879)— Chapter I. How to Read 1 II. Poets of the Old "World ... 26 „ III. Poets of the Modern "World . . 48 ,, IV. The Misuse of Books .... 74 Culture : A Dialogue {Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1867) 97 Past and Present : a Letter to Me. Ruskin {Fort- nightly Review, July 1876) 121 The Romance ' of the Peerage : Lothair {Fortnightly Review, June 1870) 147 Froude's Life of Carlyle {The North American Review, January 1885) 175 The Life of George Eliot {Fortnightly Review, March 1885) . . .203 Historic London {Macmillan's Magazine, April 1884) . 233 Opening of the Courts of Justice {The Times, Dec. 1882) 259 A Plea for the Tower of London ( The Times, JulylSSS) 275 The iEsTHETE {Pall Mall Gazette, May 1882) . . 291 At Burlington House {Pall Mall Gazette, May 1882) . 301 Bernard of Clairvaux : A Type of the Twelfth Century (1863) 311 A Pew Words about the Eighteenth Century {The Nineteenth Century, March 1883) .... 351 Histories of the French Revolution {The North American Review, October 1883) .... 391 A Few "Words about the Nineteenth Century {The Fortnightly Review, April 1882) .... 417 . I. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. CHAPTER I. HOW TO READ. It is the fashion for those who have any connection with letters to expatiate on the infinite blessings of literature, and the miraculous achievements of the press : to extol, as a gift above price, the taste for study and the love of reading. Far be it from me to gainsay the inestimable value of good books, or to discourage any man from reading the best ; but I often think that we forget that other side to this glorious view of literature — the misuse of books, the debilitat- ing waste of brain in aimless, promiscuous, vapid reading, or even, it may be, in the poisonous inhala- tion of mere literary garbage and bad men's worst thoughts. For what can a book be more than the man who wrote it 1 The brightest genius seldom puts the best of his own soul into his printed page; and some famous men have certainly put the worst of theirs. Yet are all men desirable companions, much less B 2 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. teachers, able to give us advice, even of those who get reputation and command a hearing 1 To put out of the question that writing which is positively bad, are we not, amidst the multiplicity of books and of writers, in continual danger of being drawn off by what is stimulating rather than solid, by curiosity after something accidentally notorious, by what has no intelligible thing to recommend it, except that it is new ? Now, to stuff our minds with what is simply trivial, simply curious, or that which at best has but a low nutritive power, this is to close our minds to what is solid and enlarging, and spiritually sustaining. Whether our neglect of the great books comes from our not reading at all, or from an incorrigible habit of reading the little books, it ends in just the same thing. And that thing is ignorance of all the greater literature of the world. To neglect all the abiding parts of knowledge for the sake of the evanescent parts is really to know nothing worth knowing. It is in the end the same, whether we do not use our minds for serious study at all, or whether we exhaust them by an impotent voracity for desultory "informa- tion"— a thing as fruitful as whistling. Of the two evils I prefer the former. At least, in that case, the mind is healthy and open. It is not gorged and' enfeebled by excess in that which cannot nourish, much less enlarge and beautify our nature. But there is much more than this. Even to those who resolutely avoid the idleness of reading what is trivial, a difficulty is presented— a difficulty every day THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 3 increasing by virtue even of our abundance of books. What are the subjects, what are the class of books we are to read, in what order, with what connection, to what ultimate use or object? Even those who are resolved to read the better books are embarrassed by a field of choice practically boundless. The longest life, the greatest industry, joined to the most power- ful memory, would not suffice to make us profit from a hundredth part of the world of books before us. If the great Newton said that he seemed to have been all his life gathering a few shells on the shore, whilst a boundless ocean of truth still lay beyond and un- known to him, how much more to each of us must the sea of literature be a pathless immensity beyond our powers of vision or of reach — an immensity in which industry itself is useless without judgment, method, discipline ; where it is of infinite importance what we can learn and remember, and of utterly no importance what we may have once looked at or heard of. Alas ! the most of our reading leaves as little mark even in our own education as the foam that gathers round the keel of a passing boat ! For myself, I am inclined to think the most useful help to reading is to know what we should not read, what we can keep out from that small cleared spot in the overgrown jungle of "information," the corner which we can call our ordered patch of fruit-bearing knowledge. The incessant accumulation of fresh books must hinder any real knowledge of the old ; for the multiplicity of volumes becomes a bar upon our use of any. In 4 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. literature especially does it hold — that we cannot see the wood for the trees. How shall we choose our books 1 Which are the best, the eternal, indispensable books'! To all to whom reading is something more than a refined idle- ness these questions recur, bringing with them the sense of bewilderment ; and a still, small voice within us is for ever crying out for some guide across the Slough of Despond of an illimitable and ever-swelling literature. How many a man stands beside it, as uncertain of his pathway as the Pilgrim, when he who dreamed the immortal dream heard him " break out with a lamentable cry ; saying, what shall I do ? " And this, which comes home to all of us at times, presses hardest upon those who have lost the oppor- tunity of systematic education, who have to educate themselves, or who seek to guide the education of their young people. Systematic reading is but little in favour even amongst studious men ; in a true sense it is hardly possible for women. A comprehensive course of home study, and a guide to books, fit for the highest education of women, is yet a blank page remaining to be filled. Generations of men of culture have laboured to organise a system of reading and materials appropriate for the methodical education of men in academic lines. Teaching equal in mental calibre to any that is open to men in universities, yet modified for the needs of those who must study at home, remains in the dim pages of that melancholy volume entitled Libri valde desiderati. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 5 I do not aspire to fill one of those blank pages ; but I long to speak a word or two, as the Pilgrim did to Neighbour Pliable, upon the glories that await those who will pass through the narrow wicket-gate. On this, if one can find anything useful to say, it may be chiefly from the memory of the waste labour and pitiful stumbling in the dark, which fill up so much of the travail that one is fain to call one's own education. "We who have wandered in the wastes so long, and lost so much of our lives in our wandering, may at least offer warnings to younger wayfarers, as men who in thorny paths have borne the heat and burden of the day might give a clue to their journey to those who have yet a morning and a noon. As I look back and think of those cataracts of printed stuff which honest compositors set up, meaning, let us trust, no harm, and which at least found them in daily bread, — printed stuff which I and the rest of us, to our in- finitely small profit, have consumed with our eyes, not even making an honest living of it, but much impairing our substance, — I could almost reckon the printing press as amongst the scourges of mankind. I am grown a wiser and a sadder man, importunate, like that Ancient Mariner, to tell each blithe wedding guest the tale of his shipwreck on the infinite sea of printers' ink, as one escaped by mercy and grace from the region where there is water, water every- where, and not a drop to drink. A man of power, who has got more from books than most of his contemporaries, once said : " Form 6 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. a habit of reading, do not mind what you read, the reading of better books will come when you have a habit of reading the inferior." We need not accept this obiter dictum of Lord Sherbrooke. A habit of reading idly debilitates and corrupts the mind for all wholesome reading; the habit of reading wisely is one of the most difficult habits to acquire, needing strong resolution and infinite pains ; and reading for mere reading's sake, instead of for the sake of the good we gain from reading, is one of the worst and com- monest and most unwholesome habits we have. And so our inimitable humorist has made delightful fun of the solid books, — which no gentleman's library should be without, — the Humes, Gibbons, Adam Smiths, which, he says, are not books at all, and prefers some "kind-hearted play-book," or at times the Town and County Magazine. Poor Lamb has not a little to answer for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical dung-heaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous. Why do we still suffer the traditional hypocrisy about the dignity of litera- ture — literature I mean, in the gross, which includes about equal parts of what is useful and what is use- less 1 Why are books as books, writers as writers, readers as readers, meritorious, apart from any good in them, or anything that we can get from them? Why do we pride ourselves on our powers of absorb- ing print, as our grandfathers did on their gifts in imbibing port, when we know that there is a mode of THE CHOICE OP BOOKS. 7 absorbing print which makes it impossible that we can ever learn anything good out of books ? Our stately Milton said in a passage which is one of the watchwords of the English race, "as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book." But has he not also said that he would " have a vigilant eye how Bookes demeane themselves, as well as men ; and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors"? . . . Yes ! they do kill the good book who deliver up their few and precious hours of reading to the trivial book ; they make it dead for them ; they do what lies in them to destroy " the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life;" they "spill that season'd life of man preserved and stor'd up in Bookes." For in the wilderness of books most men, certainly all busy men, must strictly choose. If they saturate their minds with the idler books, the " good book," which Milton calls "an immortality rather than a life," is dead to them : it is a book sealed up and buried. It is most right that in the great republic of letters there should be freedom of intercourse and a spirit of equality. Every reader who holds a book in his hand is free of the inmost minds of men past and present ; their lives both within and without the pale of their uttered thoughts are unveiled to him; he needs no introduction to the greatest ; he stands on no ceremony with them ; he may, if he be so minded, scribble "doggrel" on his Shelley, or he may kick 8 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Lord Byron, if he please, into a corner. He hears Burke perorate, and Johnson dogmatise, and Scott tell his border tales, and Wordsworth muse on the hillside, without the leave of any man, or the pay- ment of any toll. In the republic of letters there are no privileged orders or places reserved. Every man who has written a book," even the diligent Mr. Whit- aker, is in one sense an author; "a book's a book although there's nothing in't;" and every man who can decipher a penny journal is in one sense a reader. And your " general reader," like the gravedigger in Hamlet, is hail-fellow with all the mighty dead ; he pats the skull of the jester ; batters the cheek of lord, lady, or courtier; and uses "imperious Csesar'' to teach boys the Latin declensions. But this noble equality of all writers — of all writers and of all readers — has a perilous side to it. It is apt to make us indiscriminate in the books we read, and somewhat contemptuous of the mighty men of the past. Men who are most observant as to the friends they make, or the conversation they share, are care- lessness itself as to the books to whom they entrust themselves, and the printed language with which they saturate their minds. Yet can any friendship or society be more important to us than that of the books which form so large a part of our minds and even of our characters ? Do we in real life take any pleasant fellow to our homes and chat with some agreeable rascal by our firesides, we who will take up any pleasant fellow's printed memoirs, we who delight THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 9 in the agreeable rascal when he is cut up into pages and bound in calf 1 If any person given to reading were honestly to keep a register of all the printed stuff that he or she consumes in a year — all the idle tales of which the very names and the story are forgotten in a week, the bookmaker's prattle about nothing at so much a sheet, the fugitive trifling about silly things and empty people, the memoirs of the unmemorable, and lives of those who never really lived at all — of what a moun- tain of rubbish would it be the catalogue ! Exercises for the eye and the memory, as mechanical as if we set ourselves to learn the names, ages, and family histories of every one who lives in our own street, the flirtations of their maiden aunts, and the circum- stances surrounding the birth of their grandmother's first baby. It is impossible to give any method to our reading till we get nerve enough to reject. The most exclu- sive and careful amongst us will (in literature) take boon companions out of the street, as easily as an idler in a tavern. " I came across such and such a book that I never heard mentioned," says one, "and found it curious, though entirely worthless." "I strayed on a volume by I know not whom, on a subject for which I never cared." And so on. There are curious and worthless creatures enough in any pot-house all day long ; and there is incessant talk in omnibus, train, or street by we know not whom, about we care not what. Yet if a printer and a 10 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. bookseller can be induced to make this gabble as immortal as print and publication can make it, then it straightway is literature, and in due time it becomes " curious." I have no intention to moralise or to indulge in a homily against the reading of what is deliberately evil. There is not so much need for this now, and I am not discoursing on the whole duty of man. I take that part of our reading which by itself is no doubt harmless, entertaining, and even gently instruc- tive. But of this enormous mass of literature how much deserves to be chosen out, to be preferred to all the great books of the world, to be set apart for those precious hours which are all that the most of us can give to solid reading 1 The vast proportion of books are books that we shall never be able to read. A serious percentage of books are not worth reading at all. The really vital books for us we also know to be a very trifling portion of the whole. And yet we act as if every book were as good as any other, as if it were merely a question of order which we take up first, as if any book were good enough for us, and as if all were alike honourable, precious, and satisfying. Alas ! books cannot be more than the men who write them ; and as a fair proportion of the human race now write books, with motives and objects as various as human activity, books, as books, are entitled h priori, until their value is proved, to the same attention and respect as houses, steam-engines, pictures, fiddles, bonnets, and other products of THE CHOICE OP BOOKS. 1 1 human industry. In the shelves of those libraries which are our pride, libraries public or private, circu- lating or very stationary, are to be found those great books of the world rari nantes in gurgite vasto, those books which are truly " the precious life-blood of a master spirit." But the very familiarity which their mighty fame has bred in us makes us indifferent ; we grow weary of what every one is supposed to have read; and we take down something which looks a little eccentric, some worthless book on the mere ground that we never heard of it before. Thus the difficulties of literature are in their way as great as those of the world, the obstacles to finding the right friends are as great, the peril is as great of being lost in a Babel of -voices and an ever-changing mass of beings. Books are not wiser than men, the true books are not easier to find than the true men, the bad books or the vulgar books are not less obtrusive and not less ubiquitous than the bad or vulgar men are everywhere ; the art of right reading is as long and difficult to learn as the art of right living. Those who are on good terms with the first author they meet, run as much risk as men who , surrender their time to the first passer in the street ; for to be open to every book is for the most part to gain as little as possible from any. A man aimlessly wandering about in a crowded city is of all men the most lonely ; so he who takes up only the books that he " comes across " is pretty certain to meet but few that are worth knowing. 12 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Now this danger is one to which we are specially- exposed in this age. Our high -pressure life of emergencies, our whirling industrial organisation or disorganisation have brought us in this (as in most things) their peculiar difficulties and drawbacks. In almost everything vast opportunities and gigantic means of multiplying our products bring with them new perils and troubles which are often at first neglected. Our huge cities, where wealth is piled up and the requirements and appliances of life extended beyond the dreams of our forefathers, seem to breed in themselves new forms of squalor, disease, blights, or risks to life such as we are yet unable to master. So the enormous multiplicity of modern books is not altogether favourable to the knowing of the best. I listen with mixed satisfaction to the pseans that they chant over the works which issue from the press each day : how the books poured forth from Pater- noster Row might in a few years be built into a pyramid that would fill the dome of St. Paul's. How in this mountain of literature am I to find the really useful book 1 How, when I have found it, and found its value, am I to get others to read it 1 How am I to keep my head clear in the torrent and din of works, all of which distract my attention, most of which promise me something, whilst so few fulfil that promise ? The Nile is the source of the Egyptian's bread, and without it he perishes of hunger. But the Nile may be rather too liberal in his flood, and then the Egyptian runs imminent risk of drowning. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 13 And thus there never was a time, at least during the last two hundred years, when the difficulties in the way of making an efficient use of hooks were greater than they are to-day, when the obstacles were more real between readers and the right books to read, when it was practically so troublesome to find out that which it is of vital importance to know ; and that not by the dearth, but by the plethora of printed matter. For it comes to nearly the same thing whether we are actually debarred by physical impossibility from get- ting the right book into our hand, or whether we are choked off from the right book by the obtrusive crowd of the wrong books; so that it needs a strong character and a resolute system of reading to keep the head cool in the storm of literature around us. We read nowadays in the market-place — I would rather say in some large steam factory of letter-press, where damp sheets of new print whirl round us per- petually — if it be not rather some noisy book -fair where literary showmen tempt us with performing dolls, and the gongs of rival booths are stunning our ears from morn till night. Contrast with this pande- monium of Leipsic and Paternoster Row the sublime picture of our Milton in his early retirement at Hor- ton, when, musing over his coming flight to the epic heaven, practising his pinions, as he tells Diodati, he consumed five years of solitude in reading the ancient writers— " Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita, libri." Who now reads the ancient writers 1 Who syste- 14 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. matically reads the great writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked out as classics : typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas! the Paradise Lost is lost again to us beneath an inundation of graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married his great aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other. We read a perfect library about the Paradise Lost, but the Paradise Lost itself we do not read. I am not presumptuous enough to assert that the larger part of modern literature is not worth reading in itself, that the prose is not readable, entertaining, one may say highly instructive. Nor do I pretend that the verses which we read so zealously in place of Milton's are not good verses. On the contrary, I think them sweetly conceived, as musical and as graceful as the verse of any age in our history. A great deal of our modern literature is such that it is exceedingly difficult to resist it, and it is undeniable that it gives us real information. It seems perhaps unreasonable to many, to assert that a decent read- able book which gives us actual instruction can be otherwise than a useful companion, and a solid gain. Possibly many people are ready to cry out upon me as an obscurantist for venturing to doubt a genial confidence in all literature simply as such. But the question which weighs upon me with such really THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 15 crushing urgency is this : What are the books that in our little remnant of reading time it is most vital for us to know ? For the true use of books is of such sacred value to us that to be simply entertained is to cease to be taught, elevated, inspired by books ; merely to gather information of a chance kind is to close the mind to knowledge of the urgent kind. Every book that we take up without a purpose is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a pur- pose — every bit of stray information which we cram into our heads without any sense of its importance, is for the most part a bit of the most useful informa- tion driven out of our heads and choked off from our minds. It is so certain that information, i.e. the knowledge, the stored thoughts and observations of mankind, is now grown to proportions so utterly incalculable and prodigious, that even the learned whose lives are given to study can but pick up some crumbs that fall from the table of truth. They delve and tend but a plot in that vast and teeming kingdom, whilst those whom active life leaves with but a few cramped hours of study can hardly come to know the very vastness of the field before them, or how infinitesimally small is the corner they can traverse at the best. We know all is not of equal value. We know that books differ in value as much as diamonds differ from the sand on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat. We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books — very much in all kinds— is trivial, enervating, 16 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. inane, even noxious. And thus, where we have in- finite opportunities of wasting our efforts to no end, of fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit without satisfying it, there, I can- not but think, the very infinity of opportunities is robbing us of the actual power of using them. And thus I come often, in my less hopeful moods, to watch the remorseless cataract of daily literature which thunders over the remnants of the past, as if it were a fresh impediment to the men of our day in the way of systematic knowledge and consistent powers of thought, as if it were destined one day to overwhelm the great inheritance of mankind in prose and verse. I remember, when I was a very young man at college, that a youth, in no spirit of paradox, but out of plenary conviction, undertook to maintain before a body of serious students, the astounding proposition that the invention of printing had been one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen mankind. He argued that exclusive reliance on printed matter had destroyed the higher method of oral teaching, the dissemination of thought by the spoken word to the attentive ear. He insisted that the formation of a vast literary class looking to the making of books as a means of making money, rather than as a social duty, had multiplied books for the sake of the writers rather than for the sake of the readers; that the reliance on books as a cheap and common resource had done much to weaken the powers of memory ; that it destroyed the craving for a general culture of THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 17 taste, and the need of artistic expression in all the surroundings of life. And he argued, lastly, that the sudden multiplication of all kinds of printed matter had been fatal to the orderly arrangement of thought, and had hindered a system of knowledge and a scheme of education. I am far from sharing this immature view. Of course I hold the invention of printing to have been one of the most momentous facts in the whole history of man. Without it universal social progress, true democratic enlightenment, and the education of the people would have been impossible, or very slow, even if the cultured few, as is likely, could have advanced the knowledge of mankind without it. We place G-utemberg amongst the small list of the unique and special benefactors of mankind, in the sacred choir of those whose work transformed the conditions of life, whose work, once done, could never be repeated. And no doubt the things which our ardent friend regarded as so fatal a disturbance of society were all inevitable and necessary, part of the great revolution of mind through which men grew out of the mediaeval incompleteness to a richer conception of life and of the world. Yet there is a sense in which this boyish anathema against printing may become true to us by our own fault. We may create for ourselves these very evils. For the art of printing has not been a gift wholly unmixed with evils ; it must be used wisely if it is to be a boon to man at all ; it entails on us heavy re- C 18 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. sponsibilities, resolution to use it with judgment and self-control, and the will to resist its temptations and its perils. Indeed, we may easily so act that we may make it a clog on the progress of the human mind, a real curse and not a boon. The power of flying at will through space would probably extinguish civilisa- tion and society, for it would release us from the wholesome bondage of place and rest. The power of hearing every word that had ever been uttered on this planet would annihilate thought, as the power of knowing all recorded facts by the process of turning a handle would annihilate true science. Our human faculties and our mental forces are not enlarged simply by multiplying our materials of knowledge and our facilities for communication. Telephones, microphones, pantoscopes, steam-presses, and ubiquity- engines in general may, after all, leave the poor human brain panting and throbbing under the strain of its appliances, no bigger and no stronger than the brains of the men who heard Moses speak, and saw Aristotle and Archimedes pondering over a few worn rolls of crabbed manuscript. Until some new Gutem- berg or Watt can invent a machine for magnifying the human mind, every fresh apparatus for multiply- ing its work is a fresh strain on the mind, a new realm for it to order and to rule. And so, I say it most confidently, the first intel- lectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 19 organise our knowledge, to systematise our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the im- mortal thoughts of the greatest — this is a necessity, unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of know- ledge, to know nothing. To read the first hook we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good. But this warns me that I am entering on a subject which is far too big and solemn. It is plain that to organise our knowledge, even to systematise our read- ing, to make a working selection of books for general study, really implies a complete scheme of education. A scheme of education ultimately implies a system of philosophy, a view of man's duty and powers as a moral and social being — a religion. Before a problem so great as this, on which readers have such different ideas and wants, and differ so profoundly on the very premisses from which we start, before such a problem as a general theory of education, I prefer to pause. I will keep silence even from good words. I have chosen my own part, and adopted my own teacher. But to ask men to adopt the education of Auguste Comte, is almost to ask them to adopt Positivism itself. Nor will I enlarge on the matter for thought, for foreboding, almost for despair, that is presented to us by the fact of our familiar literary ways and our 20 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. recognised literary profession. That things infinitely trifling in themselves : men, events, societies, pheno- mena, in no way otherwise more valuable than the myriad other things which flit around us like the sparrows on the housetop, should be glorified, magni- fied, and perpetuated, set under a literary microscope and focussed in the blaze of a literary magic-lantern — not for what they are in themselves, but solely to amuse and excite the world by showing how it can be done — all this is to me so amazing, so heart-breaking, that I forbear now to treat it, as I cannot say all that I would. The Choice of Books is really the choice of our education, of a moral and intellectual ideal, of the whole duty of man. But though I shrink from any so high a theme, a few words are needed to indicate my general point of view in the matter. In the first place, when we speak about books, let us avoid the extravagance of expecting too much from books, the pedant's habit of extolling books as synony- mous with education. Books are no more education than laws are virtue ; and just as profligacy is easy within the strict limits of law, a boundless knowledge of books may be found with a narrow education. A man may be, as the poet saith, " deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself." We need to know in order that we may feel rightly, and act wisely. The thirst after truth itself may be pushed to a degree where indulgence enfeebles our sympathies and unnerves us in action. Of all men perhaps the book-lover needs THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 21 most to be reminded that man's business here is to know for the sake of living, not to live for the sake of knowing. A healthy mode of reading would follow the lines of a sound education. And the first canon of a sound education is to make it the instrument to perfect the whole nature and character. Its aims are comprehen- sive, not special ; they regard life as a whole, not mental curiosity ; they have to give us, not so much materials, as capacities. So that, however moderate and limited the opportunity for education, in its way it should be always more or less symmetrical and balanced, appealing equally in turn to the three grand intellectual elements — imagination, memory, reflec- tion : and so having something to give us in poetry, in history, in science and in philosophy. And thus our reading will be sadly one-sided, however voluminous it be, if it entirely close to us any of the great types and ideals which the creative instinct of man has produced, if it shut out from us either the ancient world, or other European poetry, as important almost as our own. When our reading, however deep, runs wholly into "pockets," and ex- hausts itself in the literature of one age, one country, one type, then we may be sure that it is tending to narrow or deform our minds. And the more it leads us into curious byways and nurtures us into indiffer- ence for the beaten highways of the world, the sooner we shall end, if we be not specialists and students by profession, in ceasing to treat our books as the com- 22 THE CHOICE OP BOOKS. panions and solace of our lifetime, and in using them as the instruments of a refined sort of self-indulgence. A wise education, and so judicious reading, should leave no great type of thought, no dominant phase of human nature, wholly a blank. Whether our reading be great or small, so far as it goes, it should be general. If our lives admit of but a short space for reading, all the more reason that, so far as may be, it "should remind us of the vast expanse of human thought, and the wonderful variety of human nature. To read, and yet so to read, that we see nothing but a corner of literature, the loose fringe, or flats and wastes of letters, and by reading only deepen our natural belief that this island is the hub of the universe, and the nineteenth century the only age worth notice, all this is really to call in the aid of books to thicken and harden our untaught prejudices. Be it imagination, memory, or reflection that we address — that is, in poetry, history, science or philosophy, our first duty is to aim at knowing something at least of the best, at getting some definite idea of the mighty realm whose outer rim we are permitted to approach. But how are we to know the best ; how are we to gain this definite idea of the vast world of letters 1 There are some who appear to suppose that the " best " are known only to experts in an esoteric way, who may reveal to inquirers what schoolboys and betting-men describe as "tips." There are no "tips'' in literature; the "best" authors are never dark horses ; we need no " crammers " and " coaches " to THK CHOICE OF BOOKS. 23 thrust us into the presence of the great writers of all time. " Crammers " will only lead us wrong. It is a thing far easier and more common than many imagine, to discover the best. It needs no research, no learning, and is only misguided by recondite infor- mation. The world has long ago closed the great assize of letters, and judged the first places every- where. In such a matter the judgment of the world, guided and informed by a long succession of accom- plished critics, is almost unerring. When some Zoilus finds blemishes in Homer, and prefers, it may be, the work of some Apollonius of his own discovering, we only laugh. There may be doubts about the third and the fourth rank; but the first and the second are hardly open to discussion. The gates which lead to the Elysian fields may slowly wheel back on their adamantine hinges to admit now and then some new and chosen modern. But the company of the masters of those who know, and in especial degree of the great poets, is a roll long closed and complete, and they who are of it hold ever peaceful converse together. Hence we may find it a useful maxim that, if our reading be utterly closed to the great poems of the world, there is something amiss with our reading. If you find Milton, Dante, Calderon, Goethe, so much " Hebrew-Greek " to you ; if your Homer and Virgil, your Moliere and Scott, rest year after year undis- turbed on their shelves beside your school trigo- nometry and your old college text-books ; if you have never opened the Cid, the Nibelungen, Crusoe, and 24 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Don Quixote since you were a boy, and are wont to leave the Bible and the Imitation for some wet Sunday afternoon — know, friend, that your reading can do you little real good. Your mental digestion is ruined or sadly out of order. No doubt, to thousands of intelligent educated men who call themselves readers, the reading through a Canto of The Purgatorio, or a Book of the Paradise Lost, is a task as irksome as it would be to decipher an ill-written manuscript in a language that is almost forgotten. But, although we are not to be always reading epics, and are chiefly in the mood for slighter things, to be absolutely unable to read Milton or Dante with enjoyment, is to be in a very bad way. Aristophanes, Theocritus, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Moliere are often as light as the driven foam ; but they are not light enough for the general reader. Their humour is too bright and lovely for the groundlings. They are, alas! "classics," some- what apart from our everyday ways ; they are not " banal " enough for us ; and so for us they slumber "unknown in a long night,'' just because they are immortal poets, and are not scribblers of to-day. When will men understand that the reading of great books is a faculty to be acquired, not a natural gift, at least not to those who are spoiled by our current education and habits of lif e ? Ceci tuera cela, the last great poet might have said of the first circu- lating library. An insatiable appetite for new novels makes it as hard to read a masterpiece as it seems to a Parisian boulevardier to live in a quiet country. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 25 Until a man can truly enjoy a draft of clear water bubbling from a mountain side, his taste is in an un- wholesome state. And so he who finds the Heliconian spring insipid should look to the state of his nerves. Putting aside the iced air of the difficult mountain tops of epic, tragedy, or psalm, there are some simple pieces which may serve as an unerring test of a healthy or a vicious taste for imaginative work. If the Cid, the Vita Nuova, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's Sonnets, and Lycidas pall on a man ; if he care not for Malory's Morte d' Arthur and the Red Cross Knight; if he thinks Crusoe and the Vicar books for the young; if he thrill not with The Ode to the West Wind, and The Ode to a Grecian Urn; if he have no stomach for Christabelle or the lines written on The Wye above Tintern Abbey, he should fall on his knees and pray for a cleanlier and quieter spirit. The intellectual system of most of us in these days needs "to purge and to live cleanly.'' Only by a course of treatment shall we bring our minds to feel at peace with the grand pure works of the world, something we ought all to know of the masterpieces of antiquity, and of the other nations of Europe. To understand a great national poet, such as Dante, Calderon, Corneille, or Goethe, is to know other types of human civilisation in ways which a library of histories does not sufficiently teach. The great master- pieces of the world are thus, quite apart from they charm and solace they give us, the master instruments of a solid education. CHAPTEE II. POETS OF THE OLD WORLD. I PASS from all systems of education — from thought of social duty, from meditation on the profession of letters — to more general and lighter topics. I will deal now only with the easier side of reading, with matter on which there is some common agreement in the world. I am very far from meaning that our whole time spent with books is to be given to study. Far from it. I put the poetic and emotional side of litera- ture as the most needed for daily use. I take the books that seek to rouse the imagination, to stir up feeling, touch the heart — the books of art, of fancy, of ideals, such as reflect the delight and aroma of life. And here how does the trivial, provided it is the new, that which stares at us in the advertising columns of the day, crowd out the immortal poetry and pathos of the human race, vitiating our taste for those exquisite pieces which are a household word, and weakening our mental relish for the eternal works of genius ! Old Homer is the very fountain-head of pure poetic enjoyment, of all that is spontaneous, THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 27 simple, native, and dignified in life. He takes us into the ambrosial world of heroes, of human vigour, of purity, of grace. He is the eternal type of the poet. In him, alone of the poets, a national life is trans- figured, ■wholly beautiful, complete, and happy : where care, doubt, decay are as yet unborn. Here is the secular Eden of the natural man — man not yet fallen or ashamed. All later poetry paints an ideal world, conceived by"a sustained effort of invention. Homer paints a world which he saw. Most men and women can say that they have read Homer, just as most of us can say that we have studied Johnson's Dictionary. But how few of us take him up, time after time, with fresh delight ! How few have even read the entire Iliad and Odyssey through ! Whether in the resounding lines of the old Greek, as fresh and ever-stirring as the waves that tumble on the seashore, filling the soul with satisfying silent wonder at its restless unison ; whether in the quaint lines of Chapman, or the clarion couplets of Pope, or the closer versions of Cowper, Lord Derby, of Philip "Worsley, or in the new prose version, Homer is always fresh and rich. 1 And yet how seldom does 1 Homer lias exercised a greater variety of translators than any other author whatever. Of them all I prefer Lord Derby's Iliad, and Philip Worsley's Odyssey. Children usually begin their Homer through Pope, which has certainly the ring and fire of a poem, though it is not Homer's. Lord Derby preserves something 'of the dignity of the Iliad, which is essential to it j and Worsley preserves much of the fairy-tale charm of the Odyssey. His Iliad, completed by Conington, is almost a mis- 28 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. one find a friend spellbound over the Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow, through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which will listen to Pinafore for three hundred nights, and will read M. Zola's seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer just as it will read about a cuneiform inscription, and will crowd to see a few pots which probably came from the neighbourhood of Troy. But to Homer and the primeval type of heroic man in his simple joyousness the cultured generation is really dead, as completely as some spoiled beauty of the ballroom is blind to the bloom of the heather or the waving of the daffodils in a glade. take. Chapman, poet as lie is, is rather archaic for ordinary readers, and too loose for scholarly readers. Cowper is rather monotonous. The rest are rather experiments than results. To English hexameters there are euphonic obstacles which seem to be insuperable. The first line of the Iliad has thirty letters, of which twelve only are consonants. The first line of Evange- line has fifty-four letters, of which thirty-six are consonants. Thus, whilst a Greek in pronouncing his hexameter has twelve hard sounds to form, the Englishman has thirty-six, or exactly three times as many. Of the prose translations, that of Mr. Andrew Lang and his friends is as perfect as prose translation of verse can be. It necessarily loses the movement, the lilt, and the subtle charm of the verse. Flaxman's designs will be of great help in enjoy- ing Homer, and also what E. Coleridge, Grote, Gladstone, M. Arnold, and Symonds have written. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 29 It is a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One knows — at least every schoolboy has known — that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumpeted out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse ; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets ; that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit even more than the first — and yet we find ourselves (we are all alike) painfully pshawing over some new and uncut barley-sugar in rhyme, which a man in the street asked us if we had read, or it may be some learned lucubration about the site of Troy by some one we chanced to meet at dinner. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind, how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human imagination. To ask a man or woman who spends half a lifetime in sucking magazines and new poems to read a book of Homer, would be like asking a butcher's boy to whistle " Adelaida." The noises and sights and talk, the whirl and volatility of life around us, are too strong for us. A society which is for ever gossiping in a sort of perpetual "drum" loses the very faculty of caring for anything but " early copies" and the last tale out. Thus, like the tares in the noble parable of the Sower, a perpetual chatter about books chokes the seed which is sown in the greatest books of the world. 30 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. I speak of Homer, but fifty other great poets and creators of eternal beauty would serve my argument. What Homer is to epic, that is iEschylus to the tragic art — the first immortal type. In majesty and mass of pathos the Agamemnon remains still without a rival in tragedy. The universality and inexhaustible versatility of our own Shakespeare are unique in all literature. But the very richness of his qualities detracts from the symmetry and directness of the dramatic impression. For this reason neither is Lear, nor Othello, nor Macbeth, nor Hamlet (each supreme as an imaginative creation) so typically perfect a tragedy as the Agamemnon. In each of the four there are slight incidents which we could spare with- out any evident loss. The Agamemnon alone of tragedies has the absolute perfection of a statue by Pheidias. The intense crescendo of the catastrophe, the absolute concentration of interest, the statuesque unity of the grouping, the mysterious halo of religion with which the ancient legend sanctified the drama, are qualities denied to any modern. 1 1 Of all the translations of the Agamemnon, I prefer that of Mr. E. D. A. Morshead, which seems to me by its union of accurate version with poetic vigour to stand in the front rank of English verse translation. Milman's version is the work of a poet, but not so completely master of the Greek ; Mr. R. Brown- ing's is also the work of a poet and a scholar, but its uncouth- ness is not the rugged majesty of iEschylus. The Agamemnon is at times stormy in diction ; it is never queer. Miss Swanwick's beautiful translation has been published with Flaxman's designs. If Flaxman's genius is not so much in harmony with iEschylus as with Homer, he is quite at his best in the Agamemnon. THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 31 If the seven surviving dramas of iEschylus had followed into black night the other sixty-three, which we have lost, we should probably regard (Edipus the King of Sophocles as the type of the pure drama. And, in the exquisite tenderness and nobility of soul of the Antigone and the (Edipus at Colonus, Sophocles reaches a note of pathos, wherein ^Eschylus himself had inferior, and Shakespeare alone an equal mastery. 1 So, too, in comedy, Aristophanes is the eternal type. Inexhaustible fancy, the wildest humour, the keenest wit, the subtlest eye for character, combine in him with perennial inventiveness and exquisite melody. Demagogy, Presumption, Pedantry, every phase of extravagance and affectation, pass in turns across a stage which reaches from boisterous farce to splendid lyric poetry. The Phallic license of this ungovern- able jester — a license without limit and, in familiar literature, without a match, is less a matter of vice or obscenity, than of social, local, and even religious convention. 2 1 Mr. E. D. A. Morshead has been as successful with the (Edipus King of Sophocles as with the Trilogy of JEschylus. Professor Lewis Campbell's translation of Sophocles is most elegant and, with the accuracy of a scholar, gives us something of the grace and lyric charm of Sophocles. 2 It is singular that of this poet, in many respects the most Shakespearean of all the ancients, some of the best translations exist. Together they undoubtedly enable us to enter into the true Aristophanic spirit. The free version of Hookham Frere is almost as good as any translation in verse of an untranslat- able ancient can be. Those of Cumberland and T. Mitchell have spirit, and the recent versions by B. B. Rogers have 32 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. Greece gave us the model and eternal type of written language, not only in epic, tragic, and comic poetry, but in imaginative prose, and in pure lyric. We come upon those marvellous fragments of Alcman, Alcseus, Sappho, and Tyrtseus, rescued for us by the diligent love of scholars, with the same sense of acute regret that we first see some head,' trunk, or limb of the golden age of Greek sculpture unearthed from beneath a pile of rubbish. The history of mankind records few such irreparable losses as the lyrics of Greece, of which almost every line that is saved seems a faultless gem of art. It gives us a striking impres- sion of the poetic fertility of Greece, when we remem- ber that, from Homer to Longus, we have at least thirteen centuries of almost unbroken productiveness. No other literature has any continuous record so vast, nor any other language such an unbroken life. 1 accuracy as well as spirit. Altogether we have an adequate rendering of some eight or nine of these masterpieces. One who will read the commentaries of Mitchell, Frere, Rogers, and the illustrations given us by Symonds and Mahaffy will get a living idea of this, the older comedy, the most amazing avatar of the pure Attic genius. 1 Of Pindar and Theocritus we now possess prose versions, as perfect, I believe, as any prose version of a poet can be. Mr. E. Myers' recent translation of Pindar, and Mr. Lang's trans- lation of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, preserve for us some-' thing even of the form of the original. I am wont to look on Mr. Lang's Theocritus, in particular, as a towr -de- force in translation at present without a rival. He has caught, although using prose, the music and lilt of the Greek verse. His version of the Pharmaeeutria, of the Epithalamium, of the Adonis, suggests a metrical melody as plainly as does the English version THE CHOICE OF BOOKS 33 Here, as elsewhere and so often, Mr. Symonds is an unerring guide ; and they who will study with care his versions and illustrations may at least come to know how great is our loss in the disappearance of the works of which these are but the remnant and the fragments. One of the most perfect of all trans- lations is the quaint version of the Daphnis and Ohloe of Longus, by old Amyot, improved by P. L. Courier. It is amongst the problems of history that this most Pagan, most Hellenic, and most romantic of pastorals, was contemporary with the "City of God;" was composed at a time when Christianity had long been the official religion of Greece, when Christendom was torn into segments by rival heresies and sects, and of the Psalms. The excellent translation in verse by Mr. C. S. Calverley does not retain the music at all. Nor can I read patiently the verse translations of Pindar. There is no com- plete English version of the Poetas Lyrici of Greece ;, but there are translations of some beautiful Fragments by Frere, Dean Milman, Lord Derby, J. A. Symonds, father and son, Professor Conington, and many others. Those of Milman can almost be read as poetry. The immortal Fragments of Sappho have, exer- cised the art of a long line of translators from Catullus to Bossetti and Mr. Symonds — all, alas ! in vain. The greatest recorded genius amongst women has left us those dazzling lines, which of all human poetry have been the most intensely searched, the most fondly remembered. But they remain essentially Greek ; no other tongue can tell their fiery tale. Chapman has given us Hesiod as well as Homer, and Marlowe and Chapman a variation on Musseus. Frere has attempted to recall Theognis to life. But the metrical versions of these Greek lyrics, the most exquisitely artless,, and yet the most magically graceful in the world, are little more, at the best, than scholarly exercises of a learned leisure. D 34 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. when the warlike barbarians of the North had already- plunged into chaos large portions of the Empire. The Hellenic genius of beauty, after twelve centuries of incessant energy, may be heard in this, its last song ; unheeding revolutions and battles alike in thought, in society, and in life. Passing from Greece to Italy, there is a great poetic void. There is no Roman Homer. Such Iliad as Rome has, must be sought for in Livy. The legends and lays which he built into the foundations of his resplendent story remain still traceable, just as, on the Capitol hill to this day, we see masses of peperino and red tufa, where the Tabularium serves as base- ment to the Renaissance Palace which Michael Arigelo raised for the Senator. That great imperial race did not embody its life as a whole in any national poem. The .ZEneid of Virgil was the almost academic equiva- lent of a national epic. It bears to the Iliad some such relation as the Polymcte of Corneille bears to the Agamemnon of iEschylus. Yet so touching are its episodes, so heroic its plan and conception, so con- summate the form, so profound its influence over later generations of men, that it must for ever hold a place in the eternal poetry of mankind. 1 1 The translation of Virgil is a problem even more perplex- ing than that of Homer. Glorious John treated his epic with even less regard for the original than Pope, and with far less grace and dignity. The .ffineid is hardly tolerable in the racy couplets which give point to Absolom and Achitophel. Mr. Conington's attempt to turn the iEneid into the rhyme of Marmion is a sad waste of ingenuity ; nor does Mr. Morris mend THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 35 The other poetry of Some is chiefly didactic, moral, or social. Eome has no tragedy except in her history, no comedy that is not more than half Greek. Horace, Ovid, Catullus, we read for their inimitable witchery of phrase; Juvenal, Plautus, and Terence, we read for their insight into men ; Lucretius for his wonderful force of meditation, so strangely in antici- pation of modern thought. But the genius of Roman poetry is wrapt up in its form. It is hardly com- municable at all except in the original words. Trans- lations of it are vain exercises of ingenuity. Horace remains to this day the type of the un- translatable. Such wit, grace, sense, fire, and affec- tion never took such perfect form — the perfect form of some gem of Athens, or some coin of Syracuse — save in those irrecoverable lyrics, where Sappho and Alcaeus, they tell us, clothed yet richer thoughts in even rarer words. 1 matters by turning it into a "marry-come-up," "my merry men all" kind of ballad. The majesty, the distinction, the symmetry of Virgil evaporate in both ; more than in Dryden, who, at any rate, was a master of the English language and of the rhymed couplet. Mr. Conington's excellent prose version does not retain, hardly seeks to retain, any echo of the music, any trace of the mien of the mighty Roman. It is useful to those who need help in reading Virgil, hut it is not such a veritable version as Mr. Lang has given us of Homer and Theocritus, and Dr. Carlyle of the Inferno, or Amyot of Daphnis and Chloe. There is but one way in which what used to be called the "English reader" can enjoy his Virgil, and that way is to learn Latin enough to read him, and I earnestly counsel him so to do. x Since Horace, by common consent, is untranslatable, the 36 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. It is a melancholy thought that, with all our new apparatus of scholarship and antiquarian research, the present generation has less vital hold on ancient poetry than our forefathers had. We read it less, quote it less, care for it less than of old. The ped- antry of collators and grammarians, the mechanic routine of the examination system, have almost quenched that noble zest in the classics which was meat and drink to them of old, to Fox, Johnson, Addison, or Milton. Our boys at university and school are ground between the upper and the nether millstone of interminable "passes," "Little-goes," and "Finals;" so that to a prize boy at Eton or Baliol his classical authors are no longer a glorious field of enjoyment and of thought — but what a cricket ground translations of him, as might be expected, are innumerable. Where Milton and Pope did not succeed, and where many a poet has failed, the prize is not within the reach of mortal man. Lord Derby's shots, perhaps of all, come nearest the bull's-eye. Some odes of Mr. Conington. are readable ; he succeeds far better with Horace than with Virgil. On the whole, perhaps, the English reader, who will study the commentary and version of Sir Theodore Martin, will get some definite idea of one of the most interesting figures in the whole range of letters, of the most modern and most familiar of the ancients. Mr. Munro and Mr. Robinson Ellis have given us editions of Lucretius and of Catullus, which are an honour to English scholarship. The admirable prose version of Lucretius by Mr. Munro is chiefly of service to the student. The poetic power of the great philosopher-poet is seen only in skeleton. Mr. Ellis' crabbed verse translation of Catullus is mainly useful as a speci- men of what a translation should not be. Scholars have an incurable way with them, of pelting us with queer uncommon phrases which have a meaning perhaps identical with the THE CHOICE OP BOOKS. 37 is to a professional bowler, a monotonous hunting- ground for a good " average" and gate-money. A rational choice of books would restore to us the healthy use of the great classics of antiquity. Most of us find that true sympathy with our classics begins only then, when our academic study of them is wholly at an end. The college prizeman and the college tutor cannot read a chorus in the Trilogy but what his mind instinctively wanders on optatives, choriambi, and that happy conjecture of Smelfungus in the antistrophe. A less constant thumbing of glossaries and commentaries is needful to those who would enjoy. But even to those to whom the originals are quite or almost closed, a conception of the ancient authors original words, but which together produce a grotesque effect, wholly out of harmony with the poem translated. How can lines such as — " Late-won loosener of the wary girdle," or — (< Pray unbody him only nose for ever," represent the airy notes of the most fantastic of the Latin poets, pouring forth his song like the lark on the wing ? Or, again, can such a line as — " The race is to Ate glued," represent the majestic terror of iEschylus ? In spite of Marlowe, Pope, Dryden, and Rowe, who have all tried their hands on the Latin poets, it may be doubted if any translation of them in verse can give any part of their genius, unless it be of the Satires and the Comedies, of which spirited and readable versions, or rather paraphrases, exist. But better than translations are such admirable commentaries on the classics, as those of Sellar, Symonds, F. Myers, Simcox, Theodore Martin, Conington, Ellis, and Munro. 38 THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. is an indispensable condition of rational education. A clear idea of their subjects, methods, form, and genius, is within the power of all systematic readers. Our own generation has multiplied the resources by which they may be made familiar. All such resources have their value ; a combination of them can give us something, though all together cannot give us the whole. A curious profusion of translation, in prose and in verse, singular critical insight, and unwearied zeal to present antiquity to us as a whole, is the special service of our own age. Painting, poetry, music, the stage, are all working to the same end. So that, with all that art, criticism, and translation can do, the unlearned, if they seek it diligently, may find the entrance, at least, into the portico of Athene. It is the age of accurate translation. The present generation has produced a complete library of versions of the great classics, chiefly in prose, partly in verse, more faithful, true, and scholarly than anything ever produced before. It is the photographic age of trans- lation ; and all that the art of sun-pictures has done for the recording of ancient buildings, and more than that, the art of literal translation has done for the understanding of ancient poetry. A complete trans- lation of a great poem is, of course, an impossible thing. The finest translation is at best but a copy of a part ; it gives us more or less crudely some element of the original ; the colour, the light and shade, the glow, are not there, lost as completely as they are THE CHOICE OF BOOKS. 39 in a photograph. But in the large photograph — say of the Sistine Madonna — the lines and the composi- tion are there, as no human hand ever drew them. And so, in a fine translation, the thought survives. One method gives us one element, another method some fresh element, and together we may get some real impression of the mighty whole. Now, when some of us may have partly lost touch of the original, and some may never have acquired it, the use of translations, especially the use of varied translations, may give us much. In the very front rank come, for verse, Morshead's Trilogy of -ov"'EiKropos iTnrod&fioio. " 2 That immense and varied mass of legend had its religious as well as its secular side. The Lives of the Saints, of which the Golden Legend is the cream, contains, in the theological domain, the same interminable series of romances, usually wearisome, 1 po