The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles - Arnold Bennett

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life into which it enters. But the maximum of pleasure can only be obtained by regular effort, and regular effort implies the organisation of that effort. Open-air walking is a glorious exercise; it is the walking itself which is glorious. Nevertheless, when setting out for walking exercise, the sane man generally has a subsidiary aim in view. He says to himself either that he will reach a given point, or that he will progress at a given speed for a given distance, or that he will remain on his feet for a given time. He organises his effort, partly in order that he may combine some other advantage with the advantage of walking, but principally in order to be sure that the effort shall be an adequate effort. The same with reading. Your paramount aim in poring over literature is to enjoy, but you will not fully achieve that aim unless you have also a subsidiary aim which necessitates the measurement of your energy. Your subsidiary aim may be æsthetic, moral, political, religious, scientific, erudite; you may devote yourself to a man, a topic, an epoch, a nation, a branch of literature, an idea—you have the widest latitude in the choice of an objective; but a definite objective you must have. In my earlier remarks as to method in reading, I advocated, without insisting on, regular hours for study. But I both advocate and insist on the fixing of a date for the accomplishment of an allotted task. As an instance, it is not enough to say: "I will inform myself completely as to the Lake School." It is necessary to say: "I will inform myself completely as to the Lake School before I am a year older." Without this precautionary steeling of the resolution the risk of a humiliating collapse into futility is enormously magnified.

      My third counsel is: Buy a library. It is obvious that you cannot read unless you have books. I began by urging the constant purchase of books— any books of approved quality, without reference to their immediate bearing upon your particular case. The moment has now come to inform you plainly that a bookman is, amongst other things, a man who possesses many books. A man who does not possess many books is not a bookman. For years literary authorities have been favouring the literary public with wondrously selected lists of "the best books"—the best novels, the best histories, the best poems, the best works of philosophy—or the hundred best or the fifty best of all sorts. The fatal disadvantage of such lists is that they leave out large quantities of literature which is admittedly first-class. The bookman cannot content himself with a selected library. He wants, as a minimum, a library reasonably complete in all departments. With such a basis acquired, he can afterwards wander into those special byways of book-buying which happen to suit his special predilections. Every Englishman who is interested in any branch of his native literature, and who respects himself, ought to own a comprehensive and inclusive library of English literature, in comely and adequate editions. You may suppose that this counsel is a counsel of perfection. It is not. Mark Pattison laid down a rule that he who desired the name of book-lover must spend five per cent. of his income on books. The proposal does not seem extravagant, but even on a smaller percentage than five the average reader of these pages may become the owner, in a comparatively short space of time, of a reasonably complete English library, by which I mean a library containing the complete works of the supreme geniuses, representative important works of all the first-class men in all departments, and specimen works of all the men of the second rank whose reputation is really a living reputation to-day. The scheme for a library, which I now present, begins before Chaucer and ends with George Gissing, and I am fairly sure that the majority of people will be startled at the total inexpensiveness of it. So far as I am aware, no such scheme has ever been printed before.

      Chapter XI

       Table of Contents

      For the purposes of book-buying, I divide English literature, not strictly into historical epochs, but into three periods which, while scarcely arbitrary from the historical point of view, have nevertheless been calculated according to the space which they will occupy on the shelves and to the demands which they will make on the purse:

      I. From the beginning to John Dryden, or roughly, to the end of the seventeenth century.

      II. From William Congreve to Jane Austen, or roughly, the eighteenth century.

      III. From Sir Walter Scott to the last deceased author who is recognised as a classic, or roughly, the nineteenth century.

      Period III. will bulk the largest and cost the most; not necessarily because it contains more absolutely great books than the other periods (though in my opinion it does), but because it is nearest to us, and therefore fullest of interest for us.

      I have not confined my choice to books of purely literary interest— that is to say, to works which are primarily works of literary art. Literature is the vehicle of philosophy, science, morals, religion, and history; and a library which aspires to be complete must comprise, in addition to imaginative works, all these branches of intellectual activity. Comprising all these branches, it cannot avoid comprising works of which the purely literary interest is almost nil.

      On the other hand, I have excluded from consideration:—

      i. Works whose sole importance is that they form a link in the chain of development. For example, nearly all the productions of authors between Chaucer and the beginning of the Elizabethan period, such as Gower, Hoccleve, and Skelton, whose works, for sufficient reason, are read only by professors and students who mean to be professors.

      ii. Works not originally written in English, such as the works of that very great philosopher Roger Bacon, of whom this isle ought to be prouder than it is. To this rule, however, I have been constrained to make a few exceptions. Sir Thomas More's Utopia was written in Latin, but one does not easily conceive a library to be complete without it. And could one exclude Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, the masterpiece of the greatest physicist that the world has ever seen? The law of gravity ought to have, and does have, a powerful sentimental interest for us.

      iii. Translations from foreign literature into English.

      Here, then, are the lists for the first period:

      PROSE WRITERS

      £ s. d.

       Bede, Ecclesiastical History: Temple Classics 0 1 6 Sir Thomas Malory, Morte d'Arthur: Everyman's Library (4 vols.) 0 4 0 Sir Thomas More, Utopia: Scott Library 0 1 0 George Cavendish, Life of Cardinal Wolsey: New Universal Library 0 1 0 Richard Hakluyt, Voyages: Everyman's Library (8 vols.) 0 8 0 Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity: Everyman's Library (2 vols.) 0 2 0 FRANCIS BACON, Works: Newnes's Thin-paper Classics 0 2 0 Thomas Dekker, Gull's Horn-Book: King's Classics 0 1 6 Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Autobiography: Scott Library 0 1 0 John Selden, Table-Talk: New Universal Library 0 1 0 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: New Universal Library 0 1 0 James Howell, Familiar Letters: Temple Classics (3 vols.) 0 4 6 SIR THOMAS BROWNE, Religio Medici, etc.: Everyman's Library 0 1 0 Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Holy Dying: Temple Classics (3 vols.) 0 4 6 Izaak Walton, Compleat Angler: Everyman's Library 0 1 0 JOHN BUNYAN, Pilgrim's Progress: World's Classics 0 1 0 Sir William Temple, Essay on Gardens of Epicurus: King's Classics 0 1 6 John Evelyn, Diary: Everyman's Library (2 vols.) 0 2 0 Samuel Pepys, Diary: Everyman's Library (2 vols.) 0 2 0 £2 1 6

      The principal omission from the above list is The Paston Letters, which I should probably have included had the enterprise of publishers been sufficient to put an edition on the market at a cheap price. Other omissions include the works of Caxton and Wyclif, and such books as Camden's Britannia, Ascham's Schoolmaster, and Fuller's Worthies, whose lack of first-rate value as literature is not adequately compensated by their historical interest. As to the Bible, in the first place it is a translation, and in the second I assume that you already possess a copy.

      POETS.

      £ s. d.

       Beowulf, Routledge's London Library 0 2 6 GEOFFREY CHAUCER, Works: Globe Edition 0 3 6 Nicolas Udall, Ralph Roister-Doister: Temple Dramatists 0 1 0 EDMUND SPENSER,

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