remarks. I am not. All that precedes is a mere preliminary to what
follows. I want to regard the case of the man who has given the
English system a fair trial and found it futile. Thus, we wait on
chance in England. We wait for love to arrive. Suppose it doesn't
arrive? Where is the English system then? Assume that a man in a
position to marry reaches thirty-five or forty without having fallen
in love. Why should he not try the French system for a change? Any
marriage is better than none at all. Naturally, in England, he
couldn't go up to the Chosen Fair and announce: "I am not precisely in
love with you, but will you marry me?" He would put it differently.
And she would understand. And do you think she would refuse?
VI
BOOKS
THE PHYSICAL SIDE
The chief interest of many of my readers is avowedly books; they may,
they probably do, profess other interests, but they are primarily
"bookmen," and when one is a bookman one is a bookman during about
twenty-three and three-quarter hours in every day. Now, bookmen are
capable of understanding things about books which cannot be put into
words; they are not like mere subscribers to circulating libraries;
for them a book is not just a book--it is a _book_. If these lines
should happen to catch the eye of any persons not bookmen, such
persons may imagine that I am writing nonsense; but I trust that the
bookmen will comprehend me. And I venture, then, to offer a few
reflections upon an aspect of modern bookishness that is becoming
more and more "actual" as the enterprise of publishers and the
beneficent effects of education grow and increase together. I refer to
"popular editions" of classics.
Now, I am very grateful to the devisers of cheap and handy editions.
The first book I ever bought was the first volume of the first modern
series of presentable and really cheap reprints, namely, Macaulay's
"Warren Hastings," in "Cassell's National Library" (sixpence, in
cloth). That foundation stone of my library has unfortunately
disappeared beneath the successive deposits, but another volume of the
same series, F.T. Palgrave's "Visions of England" (an otherwise scarce
book), still remains to me through the vicissitudes of seventeen years
of sale, purchase, and exchange, and I would not care to part with it.
I have over two hundred volumes of that inestimable and incomparable
series, "The Temple Classics," besides several hundred assorted
volumes of various other series. And when I heard of the new
"Everyman's Library," projected by that benefactor of bookmen, Mr.
J.M. Dent, my first impassioned act was to sit down and write a
postcard to my bookseller ordering George Finlay's "The Byzantine
Empire," a work which has waited sixty years for popular recognition.
So that I cannot be said to be really antagonistic to cheap reprints.
Strong in this consciousness, I beg to state that cheap and handy
reprints are "all very well in their way"--which is a manner of saying
that they are not the Alpha and Omega of bookishness. By expending L20
yearly during the next five years a man might collect, in cheap and
handy reprints, all that was worth having in classic English
literature. But I for one would not be willing to regard such a
library as a real library. I would regard it as only a cheap edition
of a library. There would be something about it that would arouse in
me a certain benevolent disdain, even though every volume was well
printed on good paper and inoffensively bound. Why? Well, although it
is my profession in life to say what I feel in plain words, I do not
know that in this connection I _can_ say what I feel in plain words. I
have to rely on a sympathetic comprehension of my attitude in the
bookish breasts of my readers.
In the first place, I have an instinctive antipathy to a "series." I
do not want "The Golden Legend" and "The Essays of Elia" uniformed
alike in a regiment of books. It makes me think of conscription and
barracks. Even the noblest series of reprints ever planned (not at all
cheap, either, nor heterogeneous in matter), the Tudor Translations,
faintly annoys me in the mass. Its appearances in a series seems to me
to rob a book of something very delicate and subtle in the aroma of
its individuality--something which, it being inexplicable, I will not
try to explain.
In the second place, most cheap and handy reprints are small in size.
They may be typographically excellent, with large type and opaque
paper; they may be convenient to handle; they may be surpassingly
suitable for the pocket and the very thing for travel; they may save
precious space where shelf-room is limited; but they are small in
size. And there is, as regards most literature, a distinct moral value
in size. Do I carry my audience with me? I hope so. Let "Paradise
Lost" be so produced that you can put it in your waistcoat pocket, and
it is no more "Paradise Lost." Milton needs a solid octavo form, with
stoutish paper and long primer type. I have "Walpole's Letters" in
Newnes's "Thin Paper Classics," a marvellous volume of near nine
hundred pages, with a portrait and a good index and a beautiful
binding, for three and six, and I am exceedingly indebted to Messrs.
Newnes for creating that volume. It was sheer genius on their part to
do so. I get charming sensations from it, but sensations not so
charming as I should get from Mrs. Paget Toynbee's many-volumed and
grandiose edition, even aside from Mrs. Toynbee's erudite notes and
the extra letters which she has been able to print. The same letter in
Mrs. Toynbee's edition would have a higher aesthetic and moral value
for me than in the "editionlet" of Messrs. Newnes. The one cheap
series which satisfies my desire for size is Macmillan's "Library of
English Classics," in which I have the "Travels" of that mythical
personage, Sir John Mandeville. But it is only in paying for it that
you know this edition to be cheap, for it measures nine inches by six
inches by two inches.
And in the third place, when one buys series, one only partially
chooses one's books; they are mainly chosen for one by the publisher.
And even if they are not chosen for one by the publisher, they are
suggested _to_ one by the publisher. Not so does the genuine bookman
form his library. The genuine bookman begins by having specific
desires. His study of authorities gives him a demand, and the demand
forces him to find the supply. He does not let the supply create the
demand. Such a state of affairs would be almost humiliating, almost
like the _parvenu_ who calls in the wholesale furnisher and decorator
to provide him with a home. A library must be, primarily, the
expression of the owner's personality.
Let me assert again that I am strongly in favour of cheap series of
reprints. Their influence though not the very finest, is undisputably
good. They are as great a boon as cheap bread. They are indispensable
where money or space is limited, and in travelling. They decidedly
help to educate a taste for books that are neither cheap nor handy;
and the most luxurious collectors may not afford to ignore them
entirely. But they have their limitations, their disadvantages. They
cannot form the backbone of a "proper" library. They make, however,
admirable embroidery to a library. My own would look rather plain if
it was stripped of them.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BOOK-BUYING
For some considerable time I have been living, as regards books, with
the minimum of comfort and decency--with, in fact, the bare
necessaries of life, such necessaries being, in my case, sundry
dictionaries, Boswell, an atlas, Wordsworth, an encyclopaedia,
Shakespere, Whitaker, some De Maupassant, a poetical anthology,
Verlaine, Baudelaire, a natural history of my native county, an old
directory of my native town, Sir Thomas Browne, Poe, Walpole's
Letters, and a book of memoirs that I will not name. A curious list,
you will say. Well, never mind! We do not all care to eat beefsteak
and chip potatoes off an oak table, with a foaming quart to the right
hand. We have our idiosyncrasies. The point is that I existed on the
bare necessaries of life (very healthy--doctors say) for a long time.
And then, just lately, I summoned energy and caused fifteen hundred
volumes to be transported to me; and I arranged them on shelves; and
I re-arranged them on shelves; and I left them to arrange themselves
on shelves.
Well, you know, the way that I walk up and down in front of these
volumes, whose faces I had half-forgotten, is perfectly infantile. It
is like the way of a child at a menagerie. There, in its cage, is that
1839 edition of Shelley, edited by Mrs. Shelley, that I once nearly
sold to the British Museum because the Keeper of Printed Books thought
he hadn't got a copy--only he had! And there, in a cage by himself,
because of his terrible hugeness, is the 1652 Paris edition of
Montaigne's Essays. And so I might continue, and so I would continue,
were it not essential that I come to my argument.
Do you suppose that the presence of these books, after our long
separation, is making me read more than I did? Do you suppose I am
engaged in looking up my favourite passages? Not a bit. The other
evening I had a long tram journey, and, before starting, I tried to
select a book to take with me. I couldn't find one to suit just the
tram-mood. As I had to _catch_ the tram I was obliged to settle on
something, and in the end I went off with nothing more original than
"Hamlet," which I am really too familiar with.... Then I bought an
evening paper, and read it all through, including advertisements. So I
said to myself: "This is a nice result of all my trouble to resume
company with some of my books!" However, as I have long since ceased
to be surprised at the eccentric manner in which human nature refuses
to act as one would have expected it to act, I was able to keep calm
and unashamed during this extraordinary experience. And I am still
walking up and down in front of my books and enjoying them without
reading them.
I wish to argue that a great deal of cant is talked (and written)
about reading. Papers such as the "Anthenaeum," which nevertheless I
peruse with joy from end to end every week, can scarcely notice a new
edition of a classic without expressing, in a grieved and pessimistic
tone, the fear that more people buy these agreeable editions than read
them. And if it is so? What then? Are we only to buy the books that we
read? The question has merely to be thus bluntly put, and it answers
itself. All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole
lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have
never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have
hundreds such. My eye rests on the works of Berkeley in three volumes,
with a preface by the Right Honourable Arthur James Balfour. I cannot
conceive the circumstances under which I shall ever read Berkeley; but
I do not regret having bought him in a good edition, and I would buy
him again if I had him not; for when I look at him some of his virtue
passes into me; I am the better for him. A certain aroma of philosophy
informs my soul, and I am less crude than I should otherwise be. This
is not fancy, but fact.
Taking Berkeley simply as an instance, I will utilise him a little
further. I ought to have read Berkeley, you say; just as I ought to
have read Spenser, Ben Jonson, George Eliot, Victor Hugo. Not at all.
There is no "ought" about it. If the mass of obtainable first-class
literature were, as it was perhaps a century ago, not too large to be
assimilated by a man of ordinary limited leisure _in_ his leisure and
during the first half of his life, then possibly there might be an
"ought" about it. But the mass has grown unmanageable, even by those
robust professional readers who can "grapple with whole libraries."
And I am not a professional reader. I am a writer, just as I might be
a hotel-keeper, a solicitor, a doctor, a grocer, or an earthenware
manufacturer. I read in my scanty spare time, and I don't read in all
my spare time, either. I have other distractions. I read what I feel
inclined to read, and I am conscious of no duty to finish a book that
I don't care to finish. I read in my leisure, not from a sense of
duty, not to improve myself, but solely because it gives me pleasure
to read. Sometimes it takes me a month to get through one book. I
expect my case is quite an average case. But am I going to fetter my
buying to my reading? Not exactly! I want to have lots of books on my
shelves because I know they are good, because I know they would amuse
me, because I like to look at them, and because one day I might have a
caprice to read them. (Berkeley, even thy turn may come!) In short, I
want them because I want them. And shall I be deterred from possessing
them by the fear of some sequestered and singular person, some person
who has read vastly but who doesn't know the difference between a J.S.
Muria cigar and an R.P. Muria, strolling in and bullying me with the
dreadful query: "_Sir, do you read your books?_"
Therefore I say: In buying a book, be influenced by two considerations
only. Are you reasonably sure that it is a good book? Have you a
desire to possess it? Do not be influenced by the probability or the
improbability of your reading it. After all, one does read a certain
proportion of what one buys. And further, instinct counts. The man who
spends half a crown on Stubbs's "Early Plantagenets" instead of going
into the Gaiety pit to see "The Spring Chicken," will probably be the
sort of man who can suck goodness out of Stubbs's "Early Plantagenets"
years before he bestirs himself to read it.
VII
SUCCESS
CANDID REMARKS
There are times when the whole free and enlightened Press of the
United Kingdom seems to become strangely interested in the subject of
"success," of getting on in life. We are passing through such a period
now. It would be difficult to name the prominent journalists who have
not lately written, in some form or another, about success. Most
singular phenomenon of all, Dr. Emil Reich has left Plato, duchesses,
and Claridge's Hotel, in order to instruct the million readers of a
morning paper in the principles of success! What the million readers
thought of the Doctor's stirring and strenuous sentences I will not
imagine; but I know what I thought, as a plain man. After taking due
cognizance of his airy play with the "constants" and "variables" of
success, after watching him treat "energetics" (his wonderful new
name for the "science" of success) as though because he had made it
end in "ics" it resembled mathematics, I thought that the sublime and
venerable art of mystification could no further go. If my
fellow-pilgrim through this vale of woe, the average young man who
arrives at Waterloo at 9.40 every morning with a cigarette in his
mouth and a second-class season over his heart and vague aspirations
in his soul, was half as mystified as I was, he has probably ere this
decided that the science of success has all the disadvantages of
algebra without any of the advantages of cricket, and that he may as
well leave it alone lest evil should befall him. On the off-chance
that he has come as yet to no decision about the science of success, I
am determined to deal with the subject in a disturbingly candid
manner. I feel that it is as dangerous to tell the truth about success
as it is to tell the truth about the United States; but being
thoroughly accustomed to the whistle of bullets round my head, I will
nevertheless try.
Most writers on success are, through sheer goodness of heart, wickedly
disingenuous. For the basis of their argument is that nearly any one
who gives his mind to it can achieve success. This is, to put it
briefly, untrue. The very central idea of success is separation from
the multitude of plain men; it is perhaps the only idea common to all
the various sorts of success--differentiation from the crowd. To
address the population at large, and tell it how to separate itself
from itself, is merely silly. I am now, of course, using the word
success in its ordinary sense. If human nature were more perfect than
it is, success in life would mean an intimate knowledge of one's self
and the achievement of a philosophic inward calm, and such a goal
might well be reached by the majority of mortals. But to us success
signifies something else. It may be divided into four branches: (1)
Distinction in pure or applied science. This is the least gross of all
forms of success as we regard it, for it frequently implies poverty,
and it does not by any means always imply fame. (2) Distinction in the
arts. Fame and adulation are usually implied in this, though they do
not commonly bring riches with them. (3) Direct influence and power
over the material lives of other men; that is to say, distinction in
politics, national or local. (4) Success in amassing money. This last
is the commonest and easiest. Most forms of success will fall under
one of these heads. Are they possible to that renowned and
much-flattered person, the man in the street? They are not, and well
you know it, all you professors of the science of success! Only a
small minority of us can even become rich.
Happily, while it is true that success in its common acceptation is,
by its very essence, impossible to the majority, there is an
accompanying truth which adjusts the balance; to wit, that the
majority do not desire success. This may seem a bold saying, but it is
in accordance with the facts. Conceive the man in the street suddenly,
by some miracle, invested with political power, and, of course, under
the obligation to use it. He would be so upset, worried, wearied, and
exasperated at the end of a week that he would be ready to give the
eyes out of his head in order to get rid of it. As for success in
science or in art, the average person's interest in such matters is so
slight, compared with that of the man of science or the artist, that
he cannot be said to have an interest in them. And supposing that
distinction in them were thrust upon him he would rapidly lose that
distinction by simple indifference and neglect. The average person
certainly wants some money, and the average person does not usually
rest until he has got as much as is needed for the satisfaction of his
instinctive needs. He will move the heaven and earth of his
environment to earn sufficient money for marriage in the "station" to
which he has been accustomed; and precisely at that point his genuine
desire for money will cease to be active. The average man has this in
common with the most exceptional genius, that his career in its main
contours is governed by his instincts. The average man flourishes and
finds his ease in an atmosphere of peaceful routine. Men destined for
success flourish and find their ease in an atmosphere of collision and
disturbance. The two temperaments are diverse. Naturally the average
man dreams vaguely, upon occasion; he dreams how nice it would be to
be famous and rich. We all dream vaguely upon such things. But to
dream vaguely is not to desire. I often tell myself that I would give
anything to be the equal of Cinquevalli, the juggler, or to be the
captain of the largest Atlantic liner. But the reflective part of me
tells me that my yearning to emulate these astonishing personages is
not a genuine desire, and that its realization would not increase my
happiness.
To obtain a passably true notion of what happens to the mass of
mankind in its progress from the cradle to the grave, one must not
attempt to survey a whole nation, nor even a great metropolis, nor
even a very big city like Manchester or Liverpool. These panoramas are
so immense and confusing that they defeat the observing eye. It is
better to take a small town of, say, twenty or thirty thousand
inhabitants--such a town as most of us know, more or less intimately.
The extremely few individuals whose instincts mark them out to take
part in the struggle for success can be identified at once. For the
first thing they do is to leave the town. The air of the town is not
bracing enough for them. Their nostrils dilate for something keener.
Those who are left form a microcosm which is representative enough of
the world at large. Between the ages of thirty and forty they begin to
sort themselves out. In their own sphere they take their places. A
dozen or so politicians form the town council and rule the town. Half
a dozen business men stand for the town's commercial activity and its
wealth. A few others teach science and art, or are locally known as
botanists, geologists, amateurs of music, or amateurs of some other
art. These are the distinguished, and it will be perceived that they
cannot be more numerous than they are. What of the rest? Have they
struggled for success and been beaten? Not they. Do they, as they grow
old, resemble disappointed men? Not they. They have fulfilled
themselves modestly. They have got what they genuinely tried to get.
They have never even gone near the outskirts of the battle for
success. But they have not failed. The number of failures is
surprisingly small. You see a shabby, disappointed, ageing man flit
down the main street, and someone replies to your inquiry: "That's
So-and-so, one of life's failures, poor fellow!" And the very tone in
which the words are uttered proves the excessive rarity of the real
failure. It goes without saying that the case of the handful who have
left the town in search of the Success with the capital S has a
tremendous interest of curiosity for the mass who remain. I will
consider it.
THE SUCCESSFUL AND THE UNSUCCESSFUL
Having boldly stated that success is not, and cannot be, within grasp
of the majority, I now proceed to state, as regards the minority, that
they do not achieve it in the manner in which they are commonly
supposed to achieve it. And I may add an expression of my thankfulness
that they do not. The popular delusion is that success is attained by
what I may call the "Benjamin Franklin" method. Franklin was a very
great man; he united in his character a set of splendid qualities as
various, in their different ways, as those possessed by Leonardo da
Vinci. I have an immense admiration for him. But his Autobiography
does make me angry. His Autobiography is understood to be a classic,
and if you say a word against it in the United States you are apt to
get killed. I do not, however, contemplate an immediate visit to the
United States, and I shall venture to assert that Benjamin Franklin's
Autobiography is a detestable book and a misleading book. I can recall
only two other volumes which I would more willingly revile. One is
_Samuel Budgett: The Successful Merchant_, and the other is _From Log
Cabin to White House_, being the history of President Garfield. Such
books may impose on boys, and it is conceivable that they do not harm
boys (Franklin, by the way, began his Autobiography in the form of a
letter to his son), but the grown man who can support them without
nausea ought to go and see a doctor, for there is something wrong with
him.