'f^ 



THE -PKiSKiN LIHRARV" 527 



icrlain people care for, and therefore what they ought to have, as 

 there is no harm in such collections ; though, personally, I doubt 

 whether there is much good, either, in this "'tidbit" style of 

 literature. 



Let me repeat that Mr. Eliot's list is a good list, and that my 

 protest is nierely against the belief that it is possible to make any 

 list of the kind which shall be more than a list as good as many 

 scores or many hundreds of others. Aside from personal taste, we 

 must take into account national tastes and the general change in 

 taste from century to century. There are four books so pre- 

 eminent — the liihle, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante — that I 

 suppose there would be a general consensus of opinion among the 

 cultivated men of all nationalities in putting them foremost;^ but 

 as soon as this narrow liniit was passed there woultl be the wildest 

 divergence of choice, according to the individuality of the man 

 making the choice, to the country in which he dwelt, and the 

 century in which he lived. An Englishman, a Frenchman, a 

 German, an Italian, would draw up totally different lists, simply 

 because each nuist necessarily be the child of his own nation. - 



We are apt to speak of the judgment of " posterity " as final ; 

 but '• posterity " is no single entity, and the " posterity " of one 

 age has no necessarv svmpathy with the judgments of the 

 "posteritv"" that preceded it by a few centuries. Montaigne, in a 

 verv amusing and, on the whole, sound essay on training children, 

 mentions with pride that when young he read Ovid instead of 

 wasting his tinie on " ' King Arthur,' ' Lancelot du Lake,' . . . and 

 such idle time-consuming and wit-besotting trash of books, wherein 

 youth doth connnonly aumse itself." Of course the trashy books 

 which he had specially in mind were the romances which Cervantes 



' Evi'ii this may rein •scuL too much o[>timism on ru}" part. In Inj^ies's iiit-tuie 

 on the crowning' of Homer, the foreground is occupied by the figures of those wlioni 

 the French artist conscientiously believed to be the greatest modern men of letters. 

 Thi'v include half a dozen Frencluncu — only one of whom would probably have been 

 included by a painter of some other nation — and Shakespeare, although reluctantly 

 admitted, is put modestly behind another figure, and only a part of iiis face is 

 l>erniitted to peek through. 



- The .same would be true, altiiough of course to a less extent, of an American, 

 an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, in spite of the fact that all speak 

 substantially the same language. I am entirely iiware that if I made an anthology 

 of poems I should include a great uiany American poems — like Whittier's "Snow- 

 Bound," "Ichabod," and " Laus Deo" ; like Lowell's "Commemoration Ode" and 

 ' Biglow Papers " — which could not mean to an Englishman what they mean to 

 me. In the same way, such an English anthology as the "Oxford Book of 

 Englisli Verse " is a good anthology — as good as many other anthologies — as long 

 as it confines itself to the verse of Hritish authors. But it would liave been far 

 better to exclude American authors entirely ; for the choice of the American verse 

 inclmbd in the volume, compared in quantity and quality with the correspond- 

 ing British verse of the same period which is selected, makes it impossible to 

 treat the book seriously, if it is regarded as a compendium of the authors of both 

 countries. 



