The multitude of books impresses on us the shortness of human life, and immortality never seems more desirable and necessary than in the presence of a library.
The national library of France contains about three million books and the British Museum requires forty miles of shelves to accommodate its two million volumes. The room which contains the card catalogue of the nine hundred thousand books of the Boston Public Library is as large as the entire space of many a village library.
According to the purposes for which they have been written books may be divided broadly into three classes. In the first place we have books intended to convey information. This class is very numerous as it includes histories, biographies, travels, text books and works on technical subjects.
The second class comprises those written to amuse, and consists mainly of works of fiction. This is also numerous, for it constitutes the chief mental nourishment of the greater number of readers. It is estimated that novels form fully three-fourths of the books issued by circulating libraries.
The last class is composed of books written to inspire, to which belong works of the sacred writers and of the great poets. Such books are comparatively few in number, but they include much of the noblest work of the noblest men whom the world has known.
These three divisions are not separated by hard and fast lines; Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, for example, at once entertains, informs and inspires, while, fortunately for us all, the number of books that amuse and at the same time instruct is sufficient to supply pleasure and profit for the longest life and the most varied tastes.
There is of course still another class of books that are no books, works of this kind far outnumber all the others put together, and it requires constant care in order to avoid them.
“Throw away none of your time,” says Lord Chesterfield, “upon those trivial futile books, published for the amusement of idle and ignorant readers; such sort of books swarm and buzz about one every day; flop them away,—they have no sting.”
Ruskin calls attention to the difference between books written to render thought permanent such as great poems and histories, books of all time he calls them, and books written merely for the hour, the useful or pleasant talk of some person you cannot otherwise converse with, such as travels and novels which he says are not books at all but merely letters or newspapers in print.
“A book,” he says, “is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing; and written, not with the view of mere communication, but of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would—the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, you would; you write instead; that is mere conveyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. The author has something to say which he perceives to be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, manifest to him:—this is the piece of true knowledge, or sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him to seize. He would fain set it down forever; engrave it on rock, if he could; saying, ‘This is the best of me; ... this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.’ That is his ‘writing’; it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. That is a ‘Book’.”
DeQuincey has made a very famous division of books, which I quote at length because though often referred to, it is seldom seen in its entirety. He says: “There is the literature of knowledge and there is the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move. The first is a rudder; the second, an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks, ultimately it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy.
“Remotely, it may travel towards an object seated in what Lord Bacon calls dry light; but, proximately, it does and must operate, else it ceases to be a literature of power, on and through that humid light which clothes itself in the mists and glittering iris of human passions, desire and genial emotions.
“Men have so little reflected on the higher functions of literature, as to find it a paradox if one should describe it as a mean or subordinate purpose of books to give information. But this is a paradox only in the sense which makes it honorable to be paradoxical. Whenever we talk in ordinary language of seeking information, or gaining knowledge, we understand the words as connected with something of absolute novelty. But it is the grandeur of all truth, which can occupy a very high place in human interests, that it is never absolutely novel in the meanest minds; it exists eternally by way of germ or latent principle in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never planted. To be capable of transplantation is the immediate criterion of a truth that ranges on a lower scale. Besides which, there is a rarer thing than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What is the effect, for instance, upon society, of children? By the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiar modes of admiration, which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence, and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest in the sight of heaven—the frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance, the innocence which symbolizes the heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly, are kept up in perpetual remembrance, and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same nature is answered by the higher literature, viz:—the literature of power.
“What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery-book? Something new—something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, that is exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to mysterious altitudes above the earth. All the steps of knowledge, from first to last, carry you further on the same plane, but could never raise you one foot above your ancient level of earth: whereas the very first step in power is a flight—is an ascending movement into another element where earth is forgotten.”
The verdict of time is never wrong. Books that delighted generations of men have done so because of real merit and these are the books that have embodied the life thought of great men. Shallow books no matter how brilliant they may be are short-lived. The best thoughts of the best men endure in books that are true to human experience irrespective of the century in which they were written. An author is great in proportion as he perceives the universally true in life.
The books which do us good are the sincere books, those which are true in the highest sense of the word which give noble and cheerful ideas of life, which make us respect human nature, books written by men who have a helpful message for their fellow strugglers.
There are books which mark epochs in the progress of the world just as the discovery of America and the invention of printing do, and the reading of a book sometimes marks an epoch in life. Great is the joy of meeting a real book by a thoughtful man. Keats wrote on first looking into Chapman’s Homer:—