23 The Choice of Books

Since the printing press was brought into general use early in the sixteenth century, books have multiplied without number. Every week - at the present day - the leading publishers of the world announce either new books on fresh topics or new editions of old classics. Anyone who has browsed in a public library must have been struck with the long, stupendous rows of shelves, packed with books while the jackets of the latest arrivals in the showcase of a respectable bookshop perplex him with the endless diversity of subjects on which people of all nations think and write. Indeed, books on all manners of topics under the sun are brought out with so much rapidity that neither reader can keep pace with their authors nor can libraries find room for them. The reason why there has been a glut of books in recent times is not far to seek. First, modern life is infinitely more varied than the life of our forefathers. We moderns take interest in a hundred different subjects from Einsteins Theory of Relativity to soap-making, from Shakespeare to cricket. Secondly, while the ancient teachers of men, before the days of printing, used to communicate their thoughts mostly in informal table-talks or long edifying dialogues, we wonders rush into print and commit to writing our ideas on life and its manifold phases almost as they crowd our ninds. Art is long, life is short. So said Horace bng ago. Not even ye most voracious reader with Macaulays capacious memory and |? f-ssion for books can read -a whole librar/. Select he must;

otherwise he would soon lose his way between the ever-expanding shelves of books. Indeed; there is no getting away from the fact that of the books that accumulate every month in a large public library, some are good while others are bad. Therefore, thegrain must be picked from the chaff. Attempts at selection of the best books have been made by great men like Lord Avebury as well as by certain Book Clubs recently started in England and elsewhere. But both efforts, however useful and even laudable, fall far short of the ideal. The Selection Committees of Book Clubs like The Book Society under the chairmanship of Mr. Hugh Walpole, who never forget the Horatian maxim, send out every month the book of their choice to the different members, struggling for the right sort of literature. Such clubs make in fact a collective attempt at selecting the most effective book of the hour. But their efforts are confined mostly within the range of the modern literature. To those, them, whom the ancients like Plato interest more than the moderns like Bertrand Russell, they are often of little use. Again, collective judgment, however sound, may not always appeal to individual tastes. The choice of books depends chiefly on ones private tastes as well as powers of understanding. If the problems of death and immortality interest you more, you may turn to Platos Phaedoor Sir Oliver Lodges The Edge of the Unknown, in spite of what a Book Club might recommend. The one approaches them from the metaphysical, the other from the spiritualistic point of view. If the baffling behaviour of money and perplexing problems of banking and foreign trade have a greater attraction for you, you might read with profit the discussions of eminent economists like Marshall and Bagehot, Bastable and Withers. Detective fiction like Sherlock Holmes by Conan Doyle appeals to certain temperaments far more strongly than a piece of serious literary criticism like Coleridges Lectures on Shakespeare or Bradleys Shakespearean Tragedy. But truth might in certain moods appear stranger than fiction! And then one might dip into Gibbons brilliant picturesque account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The student of comparative literature contrast Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron and Keats - the greater romantics of England in the nineteenth Century - with Victor Hugo and Lamartien, Goethe and Schiller of the Continent and seeks to find out the deeper and broader principles of literary evolution. But a scientist working in the laboratory, is immersed in facts; neither Homers epics nor Wordsworths lyrics have any value for him, he repeats his experiments and observes facts with the regularity of a clock, constantly checking them in the light of his predecessors conclusion as recorded in the periodical literature like The Physical Review of America, or The Philosophical Magazine of England. To the student, then who has fixed tastes, a special training and an intellectual equipment of a definite order, the choice of books is not a very difficult problem; a botanist, a zoologist or a classical scholar who has specialised in Latin or Persian knows his job quite well. But to the average man of culture who has not developed tastes for any technical subject, theChoice of book is often quite as difficult as that of pearls. Put & graduate of a University, ours or foreign, in the midst of a mass of books of general interest, usually labelled as General Literature, and he is oftener than not at his wits end. All books, says Ruskin, are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time. There good books for the hour and good ones for all time; had books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. Ruskin develops the contrast further when he says that while certain books are a mere conveyance or multiplication of voice, there are others that are full of inspiration. Applying this principle of classification to modern English literature, we may well suggest that interesting novels like Hutchinsons If Winter Comes and thrilling travel-books like Smythes The

Kangchenjunga Adventure belong to the former class, while Man and Superman and Manfields The Tragedy of Nan belong to the latter. Great books are not produced in the library; they are not begotten by other books. They are inspired and so they compel attention. The Meditation of Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustines Confessions, Thomas A Kempiss Imitation of Christ are great books in Ruskins sense of the phrase. Each of these inspired thinkers seems to say to his readers: This is the best to me; for the best, I ate and drank and slept, loved and hated like another; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory. Each of these great books puts new life into us, for each is founded on intimate, vital experience, on the souls life and death experiments with truth. In the hour of spiritual need, we turn to them for strength; they are as ballast to the unbalanced soul. The wise selector of books will do well to remember another useful distinction between two types of literature, emphasised by yet another famous English critic. De Quincey distinguishes the literature of knowledge from the literature of power. The function of the first, says he, is to teach; the function of the second is to mover. the first appeals straight to the understanding while the second appeals to a higher reason but always, as De Quincey adds,

through affections of pleasure and sympathy. A book on Botany or Geology or any other branch of science is a book of knowledge. With the passing of years, the older scientists and, with them, their books of knowledge are superseded by their successors and their greater storehouses of information. But books like Homers Iliad, Miltons Paradise Lost and Shakespeares Hamlet, which constitute the literature of power, are always read alike with pleasure and profit. They never grow stale, therefore, they never bore. Art is eternal: so is a book of power. A well-chosen book is the best companion in solitude. Every person, whatever the sphere of his life, longs in moments for solitude. Even the busiest broker of the Stock Exchange is sometimes tired of multitude and provoked into thinking on the ultimate problems of life. If you have lost a friend whom you loved dearly, you may take up In Memoriam which Tennyson wrote on the death of his friend, Hallam, and be assured of both heaven and the souls immortality. Again, if the Italian conquest of Abyssinia or the unwarrantable Japanese attack on China fills your mind with despair and tempts you to take a low view of human nature, you may retire into solitude with a volume of essays by Emerson or Carlyle and rise once again to the heights beyond heights of spiritual glory. Let not the rage of the day determine the choice of books. The sentimental novels of Marie Corelli or the sensational pages, of Edgar Wallace were some of the best sellers in their day. But neither the one nor the other can inspire. A Wallace or a Corelli can at best fill up the blanks of a mind in its vacuity. Milton got not more than 10 for his Paradise Lost and more than one publisher of London declined Carlyles Sartor Resartus. Learning has gained, says Fuller, most by those books by which printers have lost. A great book is always a great friend to him that knows how to choose it.