VIII. LORD ACTON’S LIST OF THE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

Every one has heard of Lord Avebury’s (Sir John Lubbock’s) Hundred Best Books, not every one of Lord Acton’s. It is the privilege of the Pall Mall Magazine [225] to publish this latter list, the final impression as to reading of one of the most scholarly men that England has known in our time. The list in question is, as it were, an omitted chapter of a book that was one of the successes of its year—The Letters of Lord Acton to Miss Mary Gladstone—published by Mr. George Allen. That series of letters made very pleasant reading. They showed Lord Acton not as a Dryasdust, but as a very human personage indeed, with sympathies invariably in the right place.

Nor can his literary interests be said to have been restricted, for he read history and biography with avidity, and probably knew more of theology than any other layman of modern times. In imaginative literature, however, his critical instinct was perhaps less keen. He called Heine “a bad second to Schiller in poetry,” which is absurd; and he thought George Eliot the greatest of modern novelists. In arriving at the latter judgment he had the excuse of personal friendship and admiration for a woman whose splendid intellectual gifts were undeniable.

In one letter we find Lord Acton discussing with Miss Gladstone the eternal question of the hundred best books. Sir John Lubbock had complained to her of the lack of a guide or supreme authority on the choice of books. Lord Acton had replied that, “although he had something to learn on the graver side of human knowledge,” Sir John would execute his own scheme better than almost anybody. We all know that Sir John Lubbock attempted this at a lecture delivered at the Great Ormond Street Working Men’s College; that that lecture has been reprinted again and again in a book entitled The Pleasures of Life, and that the publishers have sold more than two hundred thousand copies—a kind of success that might almost make some of our popular novelists turn green with envy. Later on in the correspondence Lord Acton quoted one of the popes, who said that “fifty books would include every good idea in the world.” “But,” continued Lord Acton, “literature has doubled since then, and it would be hard to do without a hundred.”

Lord Acton was possessed of the happy thought that he would like some of his friends and acquaintances each to name his ideal hundred best books—as for example Bishop Lightfoot, Dean Church, Dean Stanley, Canon Liddon, Professor Max Muller, Mr. J. R. Lowell, Professor E. A. Freeman, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. John Morley, Sir Henry Maine, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, Cardinal Newman, Mr. Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Professor Goldwin Smith, Mr. R. H. Hutton, Mr. Mark Pattison, and Mr. J. A. Symonds. Strange to say, he thought there would be a surprising agreement between these writers as to which were the hundred best books. I am all but certain, however, that there would not have been more than twenty books in common between rival schools of thought—the secular and the ecclesiastical—between, let us say, Mr. John Morley and Cardinal Newman. But it is probable that not one of these eminent men would have furnished a list with any similarity whatever to the remainder. Each would have written down his own hundred favourites, and herein may be admitted is an evidence of the futility of all such attempts. The best books are the books that have helped us most to see life in all its complex bearings, and each individual needs a particular kind of mental food quite unlike the diet that best stimulates his neighbour. Writing more than a year later, Lord Acton said that he had just drawn out a list of recommended authors for his son, as being the company he would like him to keep; but this list is not available—it is not the one before me. That was compiled yet another twelve months afterwards, when we find Lord Acton sending to Miss Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) his own ideal “hundred best books.” This list is now printed for the first time. Evidently Miss Gladstone remonstrated with her friend over the character of the list; but Lord Acton defended it as being in his judgment really the hundred best books, apart from works on physical science—that it treated of principles that every thoughtful man ought to understand, and was calculated, in fact, to give one a clear view of the various forces that make history. “We are not considering,” he adds, “what will suit an untutored savage or an illiterate peasant woman, who would never come to an end of the Imitation.”

However, here is Lord Acton’s list, which Mrs. Drew has been kind enough to place in the hands of the Editor of the Pall Mall Magazine. I give also Lord Acton’s comment with which it opens, and I add in footnotes one or two facts about each of the authors:

* * * * *

“In answer to the question: Which are the hundred best books in the world?

“Supposing any English youth, whose education is finished, who knows common things, and is not training for a profession.

“To perfect his mind and open windows in every direction, to raise him to the level of his age so that he may know the (20 or 30) forces that have made our world what it is and still reign over it, to guard him against surprises and against the constant sources of error within, to supply him both with the strongest stimulants and the surest guides, to give force and fullness and clearness and sincerity and independence and elevation and generosity and serenity to his mind, that he may know the method and law of the process by which error is conquered and truth is won, discerning knowledge from probability and prejudice from belief, that he may learn to master what he rejects as fully as what he adopts, that he may understand the origin as well as the strength and vitality of systems and the better motive of men who are wrong, to steel him against the charm of literary beauty and talent; so that each book, thoroughly taken in, shall be the beginning of a new life, and shall make a new man of him—this list is submitted”:—

1. Plato—Laws—Steinhart’s Introduction. [230a]

2. Aristotle—Politics—Susemihl’s Commentary. [230b]

3. Epictetus—Encheiridion—Commentary of Simplicius. [230c]

4. St. Augustine—Letters. [230d]

5. St. Vincent’s Commonitorium. [231a]

6. Hugo of S. Victor—De Sacramentis. [231b]

7. St. Bonaventura—Breviloquium. [231c]

8. St. Thomas Aquinas—Summa contra Gentiles. [231d]

9. Dante—Divina Commedia. [232a]

10. Raymund of Sabunde—Theologia Naturalis. [232b]

11. Nicholas of Cusa—Concordantia Catholica. [232c]

12. Edward Reuss—The Bible. [232d]

13. Pascal’s Pensées—Havet’s Edition. [233a]

14. Malebranche, De la Recherche de la Vérité. [233b]

15. Baader—Speculative Dogmatik. [233c]

16. Molitor—Philosophie der Geschichte. [233d]

17. Astié—Esprit de Vinet. [233e]

18. Pünjer—Geschichte der Religions-philosophie. [234a]

19. Rothe—Theologische Ethik. [234b]

20. Martensen—Die Christliche Ethik. [234c]

21. Oettingen—Moralstatistik. [234d]

22. Hartmann—Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. [234e]

23. Leibniz—Letters edited by Klopp. [235a]

24. Brandis—Geschichte der Philosophie. [235b]

25. Fischer—Franz Bacon. [235c]

26. Zeller—Neuere Deutsche Philosophie. [235d]

27. Bartholomess—Doctrines Religieuses de la Philosophie Moderns. [236a]

28. Guyon—Morale Anglaise. [236b]

29. Ritschl—Entstehung der Altkatholischen Kirche. [236c]

30. Loening—Geschichte des Kirchenrechts. [236d]

31. Baur—Vorlesungen über Dogmengeschichte. [237a]

32. Fénelon—Correspondence. [237b]

33. Newman’s Theory of Development. [237c]

34. Mozley’s University Sermons. [237d]

35. Schneckenburger—Vergleichende Darstellung. [238a]

36. Hundeshagen—Kirckenvorfassungsgeschichte. [238b]

37. Schweizer—Protestantische Centraldogmen. [238c]

38. Gass—Geschichte der Lutherischen Dogmatik. [238d]

39. Cart—Histoire du Mouvement Religieux dans le Canton de Vaud. [238e]

40. Blondel—De la Primauté. [239a]

41. Le Blanc de Beaulieu—Theses. [239b]

42. Thiersch.—Vorlesungen über Katholizismus. [239c]

43. Möhler—Neue Untersuchungen. [239d]

44. Scherer—Mélanges de Critique Religieuse. [240a]

45. Hooker—Ecclesiastical Polity. [240b]

46. Weingarten—Revolutionskirchen Englands. [240c]

47. Kliefoth—Acht Bücher von der Kirche. [240d]

48. Laurent—Etudés de l’Histoire de l’Humanitè. [240e]

49. Ferrari—Rèvolutions de l’ltalie. [241a]

50. Lange—Geschichte des Materialismus. [241b]

51. Guicciardini—Ricordi Politici. [241c]

52. Duperron—Ambassades. [241d]

53. Richelieu—Testament Politique. [242a]

54. Harrington’s Writings. [242b]

55. Mignet—Négotiations de la Succession d’Espagne. [242c]

56. Rousseau—Considérations sur la Pologne. [243a]

57. Foncin—Ministère de Turgot. [243b]

58. Burke’s Correspondence. [243c]

59. Las Cases—Mémorial de Ste. Hélène. [243d]

60. Holtzendorff—Systematische Rechtsenzyklopädie. [244a]

61. Jhering—Geist des Römischen Rechts. [244b]

62. Geib—Strafrecht. [244c]

63. Maine—Ancient Law. [245a]

64. Gierke—Genossenschaftsrecht. [245b]

65. Stahl—Philosophie des Rechts. [245c]

66. Gentz—Briefwechsel mit Adam Müller. [246a]

67. Vollgraff—Polignosie. [246b]

68. Frantz—Kritik aller Parteien. [246c]

69. De Maistre—Considérations sur la France. [246d]

70. Donoso Cortès—Ecrits Politiques. [247a]

71. Périn—De la Richesse dans les Societes Chretiennes. [247b]

72. Le Play—La Réforme Sociale. [247c]

73. Riehl—Die Bürgerliche Sociale. [247d]

74. Sismondi—Etudes sur les Constitutions des Peuples Libres. [248a]

75. Rossi—Cours du Droit Constitutionnel. [248b]

76. Barante—Vie de Royer Collard. [248c]

77. Duvergier de Hauranne—Histoire du Gouvernement Parlementaire. [249a]

78. Madison—Debates of the Congress of Confederation. [249b]

79. Hamilton—The Federalist. [249c]

80. Calhoun—Essay on Government. [249d]

81. Dumont—Sophismes Anarchiques. [250a]

82. Quinet—La Révolution Française. [250b]

83. Stein—Sozialismus in Frankreich. [250c]

84. Lassalle—System der Erworbenen Rechte. [251a]

85. Thonissen—Le Socialisme depuis l’Antiquité. [251b]

86. Considérant—Destines Sociale. [251c]

87. Roscher—Nationalökonomik. [251d]

89. Mill—System of Logic. [251e]

90. Coleridge—Aids to Reflection. [252a]

91. Radowitz—Fragmente. [252b]

92. Gioberti—Pensieri. [252c]

93. Humboldt—Kosmos. [253a]

94. De Candolle—Histoire des Sciences et des Savants. [253b]

95. Darwin—Origin of Species. [253c]

96. Littré—Fragments de Philosophie. [253d]

97. Cournot—Enchaînements des Idées fondamentales. [253e]

98. Monatschriften der wissenschaftlichen Vereine. [254]

This list, written in 1883 in Miss Gladstone’s (Mrs. Drew’s) Diary, must always have an interest in the history of the human mind.

But my readers will, I imagine, for the most part, agree with me that there are others besides untutored savages and illiterate peasant women to whom such a list is entirely impracticable. It indicates the enormous preference which on the whole Lord Acton gave to the Literature of Knowledge over the Literature of Power, to use De Quincey’s famous distinction. With the exception of Dante’s Divine Comedy there is practically not a single book that has any title whatever to a place in the Literature of Power, a literature which many of us think the only thing in the world of books worth consideration. Great philosophy is here, and high thought. Who would for a moment wish to disparage St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, or Aquinas the Angelic? Plato and Pascal, Malebranche and Fenelon, Bossuet and Machiavelli are all among the world’s immortals. Yet now and again we are bewildered by finding the least important book of a well-known author—as for example Rousseau’s Poland instead of the Confessions and Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection instead of the Poems or the Biographia Literaria. Think of an historian whose ideal of historical work was so high that he despised all who worked only from printed documents, selecting the Memorial of St. Helena of Las Casas in preference not only to a hundred-and-one similar compilations concerning Napoleon’s exile, but in preference to Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon.

Sometimes Lord Acton names a theologian who is absolutely out-of-date, at others a philosopher who is in the same case. But on the whole it is a fascinating list as an index to what a well-trained mind thought the noblest mental equipment for life’s work. At the best, it is true, it would represent but one half of life. But then Lord Acton recognized this when he asked that men should be “steeled against the charm of literary beauty and talent,” and he was assuming in any case that all the books in aesthetic literature, the best poetry and the best history had already been read, as he undoubtedly had read them.

“The charm of literary beauty and talent!” There is the whole question. Nothing really matters for the average man, so far as books are concerned, but this charm, and I am criticizing Lord Acton’s list for the average man. The student who has got beyond it need not worry himself about classified lists. He may read his Plato, and Aristotle, his Pascal and Newman, his Christian apologists and German theologians, as he wills; or he may read in some other quite different direction. Guidance is impossible to a mind at such a stage of cultivation as Lord Acton had in view.

Only minds at a more primitive stage of culture than this most learned and most accomplished man seemed able to conceive of, could be bettered by advice as to reading. Given, indeed, contact with some superior mind, which out of its rich equipment of culture should advise as to the books that might be most profitably read, I could imagine advice being helpful. It would be of no value, it is true, to an untutored savage or illiterate peasant, but to a youth fresh from school-books and much modern fiction, to a young girl about to enter upon life in its more serious aspects, it would be immensely serviceable. It was of such as these that Mr. Ruskin thought when he wrote of “King’s Treasures” in Sesame and Lilies, and the same idea was doubtless in Sir John Lubbock’s mind when he lectured on the “Hundred Best Books.” But Lord Avebury’s list had its limitations, it seems to me, for any one who has an interest in good literature and guidance to the reading thereof. To give “Scott” as one book and “Shakspere” as another was I suggest to shirk much responsibility of selection. Scott is a whole library, Shakspere is yet another. One may give “Keats” or “Shelley” because they are more limited in quantity. Even to name novels by Charles Kingsley and Bulwer Lytton in this select hundred was to demonstrate to men of this generation that Lord Avebury being of an earlier one had a bias in favour of the books that we are all outgrowing. To include Mill’s Logic is to ignore the Time Spirit acting on philosophy; to include Tennyson’s Idylls its action on poetry. Mill and Tennyson will always live in literature but not I think by these books.

But the fact is that there is no possibility of naming the hundred best books. No one could quarrel with Lord Avebury if he had named these as his hundred own favourites among the books of the world. Still, it might have been his hundred; it could not possibly have been any one else’s hundred because every man of education must make his own choice. No! the naming of the hundred best books for any large, general audience is quite impossible. All that is possible in such a connexion is to state emphatically that there are very few books that are equally suitable to every kind of intellect. Temperament as well as intellectual endowment make for so much in reading. Take, for example, the Imitation of Christ. George Eliot, although not a Christian, found it soul-satisfying. Thackeray, as I think a more robust intellect, found it well nigh as mischievous as did Eugene Sue, whose anathematizations in his novel The Wandering Jew are remembered by all. Other books that have been the outcome of piety of mind leave less room for difference of opinion. Surely Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, make an universal appeal. That universal appeal is the point at which alone guidance is possible. There are great books that can be read only by the few, but surely the very greatest appeal alike to the educated and the illiterate, to the man of rich intellectual endowment and to the man to whom all processes of reasoning are incomprehensible. Hamlet is a wonderful test of this quality. It “holds the boards” at the small provincial theatre, it is enacted by Mr. Crummles to an illiterate peasantry, and it is performed by the greatest actor to the most select city audience. It is made the subject of study by learned commentators. It is world-embracing.

Are there in the English language, including translations, a hundred books that stand the test as Hamlet stands it? No two men would make the same list of books that answer to this demand of an universal appeal, and obviously each nation must make its own list. Mine is for English boys and girls just growing into manhood and womanhood, or for those who have had no educational advantages in early years. I exclude living writers, and I give the hundred in four groups.

POETRY.

1. The Bible. [260a]

2. The Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang. [260b]

3. The Iliad, translated by Lang, Leaf and Myers.

4. Aeschylus, translated by George Warr. [261a]

5. Sophocles, translated by J. S. Phillimore.

6. Euripides, translated by Gilbert Murray.

7. Virgil, translated by Dryden. [261b]

8. Catullus, translated by Theodore Martin. [261c]

9. Horace, translated by Theodore Martin. [261d]

10. Dante, translated by Cary. [262a]

11. Shakspere, Hamlet. [262b]

12. Chaucer, Canterbury Tales. [262c]

13. FitzGerald, Omar Khayyám. [263a]

14. Goethe, Faust. [263b]

15. Shelley. [263c]

16. Byron. [263d]

17. Wordsworth. [264a]

18. Keats. [264b]

19. Burns. [264c]

20. Coleridge. [264d]

21. Cowper. [264e]

22. Crabbe. [265a]

23. Tennyson. [265b]

24. Browning. [265c]

25. Milton. [265d]

FICTION.

1. The Arabian Nights Entertainment. [266a]

2. Don Quixote, by Cervantes. [266b]

3. Pilgrim’s Progress, by Bunyan. [266c]

4. Robinson Crusoe, by Defoe. [266d]

5. Gulliver’s Travels, by Swift. [267a]

6. Clarissa, by Richardson. [267b]

7. Tom Jones, by Fielding. [267c]

8. Rasselas, by Johnson. [267d]

9. Vicar of Wakefield, by Goldsmith. [268a]

10. Sentimental Journey, by Sterne. [268b]

11. Nightmare Abbey, by Peacock. [268c]

12. Kenilworth, by Walter Scott. [268d]

13. Père Goriot, by Balzac. [268e]

14. The Three Musketeers, by Dumas. [269a]

15. Vanity Fair, by Thackeray. [269b]

16. Villette, by Charlotte Brontë. [269c]

17. David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens. [269d]

18. Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope. [269e]

19. Boccaccio’s Decameron. [269f]

20. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. [270a]

21. The Cloister and the Hearth, by Charles Reade. [270b]

22. Les Misèrables, by Victor Hugo. [270c]

23. Cranford, by Mrs. Gaskell. [270d]

24. Consuelo, by George Sand. [270e]

25. Charles O’Malley, by Charles Lever. [270f]

MISCELLANEOUS.HISTORY, ESSAYS, ETC.

1. Macaulay, History of England. [271a]

2. Carlyle, Past and Present. [271b]

3. Motley, Dutch Republic. [271c]

4. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [271d]

5. Plutarch’s Lives. [272a]

6. Montaigne’s Essays. [272b]

7. Richard Steele, Essays. [272c]

8. Lamb, Essays of Elia. [272d]

9. De Quincey, Opium Eater. [272e]

10. Hazlitt, Essays. [273a]

11. Borrow, Lavengro. [273b]

12. Emerson, Representative Men. [273c]

13. Landor, Imaginary Conversations. [273d]

14. Arnold, Essays in Criticism. [273e]

15. Herodotus, Macaulay’s Translation. [273f]

16. Howell’s Familiar Letters. [274a]

17. Buckle’s History of Civilization. [274b]

18. Tacitus, Church and Brodribb’s Translation. [274c]

19. Mitford’s Our Village. [274d]

20. Green’s Short History of the English People. [274e]

21. Taine, Ancient Régime. [275a]

22. Bourrienne, Napoleon. [275b]

23. Tocqueville, Democracy in America. [275c]

24. Walton, Compleat Angler. [275d]

25 White, Natural History of Selbourne. [276a]

BIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL.

1. Boswell’s Johnson. [276b]

2. Lockhart’s Scott. [276c]

3. Pepys’s Diary. [276d]

4. Walpole’s Letters. [277a]

5. The Memoirs of Count de Gramont. [277b]

6. Gray’s Letters. [277c]

7. Southey’s Nelson. [277d]

8. Moore’s Byron. [277e]

9. Hogg’s Shelley. [278a]

10. Rousseau’s Confessions. [278b]

11. Froude’s Carlyle. [278c]

12. Rogers’s Table Talk. [279a]

13. Confessions of St. Augustine. [279b]

14. Amiel’s Journal. [279c]

15. Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. [279d]

16. Lewes’s Life of Goethe. [279e]

17. Sime’s Life of Lessing. [280a]

18. Franklin’s Autobiography. [280b]

19. Greville’s Memoirs. [280c]

20. Forster’s Life of Dickens. [280d]

21. Madame D’Arblay’s Diary. [280e]

22. Newman’s Apologia. [281a]

23. The Paston Letters. [281b]

24. Cellini’s Autobiography. [281c]

25. Browne’s Religio Medici. [281d]

My readers for the most part have read every one of these books. I throw out this list as a tentative effort in the direction of suggesting a hundred books with which to start a library. The young student will find much to amuse, and certainly nothing here to bore him. These books will not make him a prig, as Mr. James Payn said that Lord Avebury’s list would make him a prig. They will make the dull man less dull, the bright man brighter. Here is good, cheerful, robust reading for boy and girl, for man and woman. There are many sins of omission, but none of commission. Our young friend will add to this list fast enough, but there is nothing in it that he may not read with profit. These books, I repeat, make an universal appeal. The learned man may enjoy them, the unlearned may enjoy them also. They are, as Hamlet is, of universal interest. Devotion to science will not impair a taste for them, nor will zest for abstract speculations. Not even those who are “better skilled in grammar than in poetry” can fail to appreciate. These hundred books will in the main be the hundred best books of many of my readers who are quite capable of selecting for themselves. One last word of advice. Let not the young reader buy large quantities of books at once or be beguiled into subscribing for some cheap series which will save him the trouble of selecting. He may buy many books from such cheap series afterwards, but not his first hundred, I think. These should be acquired through much saving, and purchased with great thought and deliberation. The purchase of a book should become to the young book-lover a most solemn function.

Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London