CLASSIFICATION OF BOOKS.
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:--
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken
Or like stout Cortes when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.”