Page:Lubbock - The Best Hundred Books (1886).pdf/33

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A few years ago I became entangled in a long correspondence about the Hundred Greatest Men of the World, and the recollection of this has made me rather nervous in answering your questions as to the Hundred Best Books. The process by which we tried to find out the Hundred Greatest Men of the World was this. An American gentleman, whose name I forget, drew up a long list of all names that could possibly claim to be in the first flight. That list was sent to all sorts of people in Europe and America who, were supposed to be qualified judges, each in his own department. They marked those whom they considered the true Senior Wranglers of the whole world, and by casting up the votes recorded for each candidate a splendid class list was drawn up, the outcome of three thousand years of natural selection. You can see the result of all this labour in "The Portrait Collection of the Hundred Greatest Men," published by Sampson Low and Co., 1879. The portraits were reproduced from fine and rare engravings, biographies were added, and each company of the "Greatest Men " was introduced by some literary Lord Chamberlain, the poets by Matthew Arnold, the artists by Taine, the founders of religion by M. M., the theologians and reformers by E. Renan, the philosophers by Noah Porter, and the whole noble army by Waldo Emerson.

As the makers of books are chiefly found in the divisions of poets, founders of religion, and philosophers, I send you our list, which will enable you to see how far it agrees with that of Sir John Lubbock's:—

Homer

Pindar

Æschylus

Sophocles

Euripides

Aristophanes

Menander

Lucretius

Virgil

Dante

Rabelais

Cervantes

Shakspeare

Milton

Molière

Goethe

Scott

Moses

Zoroaster

Confucius

Buddha

Mahomet

St. Paul

St. Augustine

St. Bernhard

St. Francis

Erasmus

Luther

Calvin

Loyola

Bossuet

Wesley

Pythagoras

Socrates

Plato

Aristotle

St. Thomas Aquinas

Bacon

Descartes

Spinoza

John Locke

Leibniz

Berkeley

Hume

Kant

If I were to tell you what I really think of the Hundred Best Books, I am afraid you would call me the greatest literary heretic or an utter ignoramus. I know few books, if any, which I should call good from beginning to end. Take the greatest poet of antiquity, and if I am to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, I must say that there are long passages even in Homer which seem to me extremely tedious. Take the greatest, or at all events one of the greatest, poets of our century, and again I must confess that not a few of Goethe's writings seem to me not worth a second reading. There are gems in the most famous, there are gems in the least known of poets, but there is not a single poet, so far as I know, who has not written too much, and who could claim a place for all his works in what may be called a Library of World Literature.

The passages, and in many cases the whole poems too, which I should really place on those historic shelves are those which I can read again and again, wondering more and more every time how a man could have written them. That happens to me not only in going over Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, and Goethe, but likewise in reading Heine, or Eichendorff, or Rückert, or a poem so utterly unknown as "The Doctor," by the author of "Fo'c's'le Yarns." The same amazement comes over me when reading Spinoza's "Ethics"—nay, even in studying Panini's Grammar of Sanskrit-a work, to my mind, without an equal anywhere—nay, I am not afraid to say so, truly miraculous; for the more I study it the less do I understand how one man could have composed it. I know I shall never hear the last of this; but you want my honest opinion, and as such I give it you. Of course, if we have any object in reading books beyond the mere delight which they give us, works artistically most imperfect may claim their place among the best books of the world. What can be more tedious than the Vedas, and yet what can be more interesting, if once we know that it is the first word spoken by the Aryan man? What can be more repellant than Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," and yet what can be more fascinating, if once we know that it is the last word spoken by the Aryan man?

You see the best books are not the best books for everybody. Some of the best, say Michael Angelo's Sonnets, are appreciated by a very small circle of friends indeed. But take the most famous writers, those whose names you would find on every list of the "Best Books," and you will see that what is called gold by one critic is called rubbish by another. Aristotle's name would hardly be absent from any list of world literature; yet this is what Hobbes, one of the strongest and keenest intellects that England has ever produced, writes of him: "I believe that scarce anything can be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which now is called