APPENDIX F 519 



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 Xeno- 

 phon 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 jEneid 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 stand-point. 

 So with the poets and novelists. It is a mere matter of personal taste 

 whether one prefers giving a separate volume to Burns or to Wordsworth 

 or to Browning; it certainly represents no principle of selection. "I 

 Promessi Sposi" is a good novel; to exclude in its favor "Vanity Fair," 

 "Anna Karenina," "Les Miserables," "The Scarlet Letter," or hun- 

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

 taste, but not otherwise. Mr. Eliot's volumes of miscellaneous essays, 

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

 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 merely 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 Bible, 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 limit was passed there would be the widest 

 divergence of choice, according to the individuality of the man making 



* Even this may represent too much optimism on my part. In Ingres's picture on 

 the crowning of Homer, the foreground is occupied by the figures of those whom the 

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

 include half a dozen Frenchmen 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 his face is permitted to peek 

 through. 



