APPENDIX P 575 



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

 terity" is no single entity, and the "posterity" of one age has no neces- 

 sary sympathy with the judgments of the " posterity" that preceded it by a 

 few centuries. Montaigne, in a very amusing and, on the whole, sound 

 essay on training children, mentions with pride that when young he read 

 Ovid instead of wasting his time on " 'King Arthur/ 'Lancelot du Lake/ 

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

 wherein youth doth commonly amuse itself." Of course the trashy books 

 which he had specially in mind were the romances which Cervantes not 

 long afterward destroyed at a stroke. But Malory's book and others were 

 then extant; and yet Montaigne, in full accord with the educated taste of 

 his day, saw in them nothing that was not ridiculous. His choice of Ovid 

 as representing a culture and wisdom immeasurably greater and more 

 serious shows how much the judgment of the "posterity" of the sixteenth 

 century differed from that of the nineteenth, in which the highest literary 

 thought was deeply influenced by the legends of Arthur's knights and 

 hardly at all by anything Ovid wrote. Dante offers an even more strik- 

 ing instance. If "posterity's" judgment could ever be accepted as final, 

 it would seem to be when delivered by a man like Dante in speaking of 

 the men of his own calling who had been dead from one to two thousand 

 years. Well, Dante gives a list of the six greatest poets. One of them, 

 he modestly mentions, is himself, and he was quite right. Then come 

 Virgil and Homer, and then Horace, Ovid, and Lucan! Nowadays 

 we simply could not understand such a choice, which omits the mighty 

 Greek dramatists (with whom in the same canto Dante shows his ac- 

 quaintance), and includes one poet whose works come about in the class 

 of the "Columbiad." 



With such an example before us, let us be modest about dogmatizing 

 overmuch. The ingenuity exercised in choosing the "Hundred Best 

 Books" is all right if accepted as a mere amusement, giving something 

 of the pleasure derived from a missing-word puzzle. But it does not 

 mean much more. There are very many thousands of good books; some 

 of them meet one man's needs, some another's; and any list of such books 

 should simply be accepted as meeting a given individual's needs under 

 given conditions of time and surroundings. 



KHARTOUM, March 15, 1910. 



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 English Verse " is a good anthology 

 as good as many other anthologies as long as it confines itself to the verse of British 

 authors. But it would have been far better to exclude American authors entirely; for 

 the choice of the American verse included in the volume, compared in quantity and 

 quality with the corresponding 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. 



