By ERNEST RHYS One of the practical expedients in the original plan was to divide the volumes into separate secions, as Biography, Fiction, History, Belles-lettres, Poetry, Philosophy, Romance, and so forth; with a shelf for Young People. The largest slice of this huge provision of nearly a thousand volumes is, as a matter of course, given to the tyrranous demands of fiction. But in carrying out the scheme, publishers and editors contrived to keep in mind that books, like men and women, have their elective affinities. The present volume, for instance, will be found to have its companion books, both in the same class and not less significantly in other sections. With that idea too, movels like Walter Scott's Ivanhoe nd Fortunes of Nigel, Lytton's Harold, and Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, have been used as pioneers of history and treated as a sort of holiday history books. For in our day history is tending to grow more documentary and less literary; and 'the historian who is a stylist,' as one of our contributors, the late Thomas Seccombe, said, 'will soon be regarded as a kind of Phoenix.' As for history, Everyman's Library has been eclectic enough to choose it historians from every school in turn, including Gibbon, Grote, Finlay, Macaulay, Motley and Prescott, while among earlier books may be found the Venerable Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. On the classic shelf too, there is a Livy in an admirable translation by Canon Roberts, and Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Herodotus are not forgotten. "You only, O Books,' said Richard de Bury, 'are liberal and independent; you give to all who ask.' The variety of authors old and new, the wisdom and wit at the disposal of Every in his own Library, may even, at times, seem all but embarrassing. In the Essays, for instance, he may turn to Dick Steele in The Spectator and learn how Cleomira dances, when the elegance of her motion is unimaginable and 'her eyes are chastised with the simplicity and innocence of her thoughts.' Or he may take A Centruy of Essays, as a key to a whole roomful of the English Essayists, from Bacon to Addison, Elia to Augustine Birrell. These are the golden gossips of literature, the writers who learnt the delightful art of talking on paper. Or again, the reader, who has the right spirit and looks on all literature as a great adventure may dive back into the classics, and in Plato's Phaedrus read how every soul is divided into three parts (like Caesar's Gaul). The Poets next, and he may turn to the finest critic of Victorian times, Matthew Arnold, as their showman, and find in his essay on Maurice de Guerin a clue to the "magical power of poetry,' as in Shakespear, with his
The winds of March with beauty. Hazlitt's Table Talk may help us again to discover the relationship of author to author, which is another form of the Friendship of Books. His incomparable essay, 'On Going a Journey,' is a capital prelude to Coleridge's Biographia Literaria; and so throughout the long labyrinth of the Library shelves one can follow the magic clue in prose and verse that leads to the hidden treasure. In that way a reader becomes his critic and Doctor of Letters, and may turn to a Byron review in Macaulay's Essays as a prelude to the three volumes of Bryon's own poems, remembering that the poet whom Europe loved more than England did was, as Macaulay said, 'the beginning, the middle and the end of all his own poetry.' This brings us to the provoking reflection that it is the obvious authors and the books most easy to reprint which have been the signal successes out of the many hundreds in the series, for Everyman is distinctly proverbial in his tastes. He likes best of all an old author who has worn well or a comparatively new author who has gained something like newpaper motoriety. In attempting to lead him on from the good books that are known to those that are less known, the publishers may have at times been even too adventurous. But the elect reader is or ought to be a party to his conspiracy of books and bookmen. He can make it possible, by his help and his co-operative zest, to add still more authors, old and new. 'Infinite riches in a little room,' as the saying is, will be the reward of every citizen who helps year by year to build the City of Books. With such a belief in its possibilities the old Chief (J. M. Dent) threw himself into the enterprise. With the Zeal of a true book-lover, he thought that books might be alive and productive as dragons' teeth, which, being 'sown up and down the land, might chance to spring up armed men.' That is a great idea, and it means a fighting campaign in which every new reader who buys a volume, counts as a recruit.
Their sure foundation in the heart of man . . . From Homer the great Thunderer, to the voice That roas alond the bed of Jewish song . . . Shall speak as Powers for ever to be hallowed! |