526 APPENDIX F 



any list of good books with any other list of good books in the 

 sense of saying that one list is " better" or " worse " than another. 

 Of course a list may be made up of worthless or noxious books ; 

 but there are so many thousands of good books that no list of 

 small size is worth considering if it purports to give the "best" 

 books. There is no such thing as the hundred best books, or the 

 best five-foot library ; but there can be drawn up a very large 

 number of lists, each of which shall contain a hundred good book.- 



or fill a good five-foot library. This is, I am sure, all that 

 Mr. Eliot has tried to do. His is in most respects an excellent 

 list, but it is of course in no sense a list of the best books for all 

 people, or for all places and times. The cjuestion is largely one 

 of the personal ecjuation. Some of the books which Mr. Eliot 

 includes I would not put in a five-foot library, nor yet in a fifty- 

 foot library ; and he includes various good books which are at 

 least no better than many thousands (I speak literally) which he 

 leaves out. This is of no conse(}uence so long as it is frankly 

 conceded that any such list must represent only the individuaPs 

 personal preferences, that it is merely a list oi' good books, and 

 that there can be no such thing as a list of the best books. It 

 would be useless even to attempt to make a list with such pre- 

 tensions unless the library were to extend to many thousand 

 volumes, for there are many voluminous writers, most of whose 

 writings no educated man ought to be willing to spare. For 

 instance, Mr. Eliot evidently does not care for history; at least, he 

 includes no historians as such Now, personally, I would not 

 include, as Mr. Eliot does, third or fourth rate plays, such as those 

 of Dryden, Shelley, Browning, and Byron (whose greatness as 

 poets does not rest on such an exceedingly slender foundation as 

 these dramas supply), and at the same time completely omit 

 Gibbon and Thucydides, or even Xenophon and Napier. Macaulay 

 and Scott are practically omitted from Mr. Eliot's list ; they are 

 the two nineteenth-century authors that I should most regret to 

 lose. Mr. Eliot includes the .Eneid and leaves out the Iliad ; to 

 my mind this is like including Pope and leaving out Shakespeare. 

 In the same way, Emerson's " English Traits " is included and 

 Holmes's "Autocrat" excluded — an incomprehensible choice from 

 my standpoint. So with the poets and novelists. It is a mere 

 matter of personal taste whether one prefers giving a separate 

 volume to 13urns or to Wordsworth or to Browning ; it certainly 

 represents no principle of selection. " I Fromessi Sposi " is a 

 good novel ; to exclude in its favour " V^anitv Fair," " Anna 

 Karenina," " Les Miserables," " The Scarlet Letter," or hundreds 

 of other novels, is entirely excusable as a mere matter of personal 

 taste, but not otherwise. Mr. Eliofs volumes of miscellaneous 

 essays, " Famous Prefaces" and the like, are undoubtedly just what 



