When men had few
books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
survived until our day.
In certain respects the years do our weeding for us. In our youth we
admire the verses which answer our mood; as we grow older we like those
better which speak to our experience; at last we come to look only upon
that as poetry which appeals to that original nature in us which is
deeper than all moods and wiser than all experience. Before a man is
forty he has broken many idols, and the milestones of his intellectual
progress are the gravestones of dead and buried enthusiasms of his
dethroned gods.
There are certain books which it is necessary to read; but they are very
few. Looking at the matter from an aesthetic point of view, merely, I
should say that thus far one man had been able to use types so
universal, and to draw figures so cosmopolitan, that they are equally
true in all languages and equally acceptable to the whole Indo-European
branch, at least, of the human family.
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