Books That Have Helped Well-Known People
WE published on October 2211d a symposium of some of the best minds of the day on the subject of what books had been of the greatest value to them. We would repeat what we then said, that our desire is by no means to swell the present spate of gossip about distinguished persons, but rather to serve the cause of good reading. The opinion of those who have made a mark upon the public life of their day concerning the books that have helped them to do so, is obviously useful knowledge. That is not our excuse, but our ample justification, for publishing this information.
Sir Auckland Geddes writes : "You ask me to put on the back of the post card the names of three books which have most influenced me in my career. I find it impossible to reply. I cannot now disentangle the influences which have moulded my thought. I do not suppose that any book which I have ever read has been without some influence, and I should imagine that those which have most affected my career have at some critical moment influenced my mood in a way which, even at the time, I necessarily failed to recognize." Sir John Reith says.: "The Bible is the first, but there are so many competitors for the other two places, prose and verse, classical and modern, that I cannot possibly differentiate." Lords Meath and Sydenham have clear-cut views on the question. They both put the Bible first : after that book the former elects for Dr. Smiles's Self-Help and Duty, and the latter for "The plays attributed to Shakespeare" and Sir John Seeley's Works. Sir William Orpen gives : (1) The Bible ; (2) Heine's Florentine Nights ; (8) Life of Benvenuto by Addington Symonds. Sir Reginald Bloomfield's list is : (1) The Republic of Plato ; (2) Ethics of Aristotle ; (3) Lessing's Laocoon. Sir William Beveridge writes : "To be allowed a choice of three books only is no good to me. If you want the first three which I wrote down in a list of • seven, they are : Erezehon Revisited and the Synoptic Gospels, both as studies of character, and Huxley's Lay Sermons and Essays for a vie* of life and science. The other four at -present are : (1) Plato's Symposium and Republic ; (2) Middlem arch ; (3) Wordsworth's Collected Poems ; (4) The Egoist. Sir Basil Zaharoff's favourite books are : (1) Erckmann-Chatrian's L'Anti Fritz ; (2) Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii ; (3) Dickens's David Coppetfield.
Miss Evelyn Underhill writes that she is doubtful about the books that have influenced her most, having varied so much in her tastes and interests from time to time, but that on the whole she would say that they were : (1) St. Augustine's _Confessions, or perhaps Plotinus (she is not sure which of these two to choose) ; (2) Dante's Paradiso ; (3) The Mystical Element of . Religion, by Baron •Von Hugel. Sir Flinders Petrie asks what kind of influence we mean. "If conduct : (1) The Bible ; (2) Epietetus ; (3) Hypatia. If intelligence : (1) Herodotus ; (2) Nineveh ; (3) Travels in Central Arabia. If work : (1) Words and Places ; (2) Records of the Past; (3) Miller's Chemistry." Sir Percy Sykes, as might be expected from a traveller,. says that Yule's Marco Polo has influenced him first and foremost ; then Curzon's Persia and the Persian Problem, and, finally, the Hakluyt Society's publications. Colonel Howard-Bury, of Everest fame, says that the photographs in Sir Martin Conway's Travelling in the Karakorum first fired him, when at Eton, towards exploration. His second influence- was Kipling's Jungle Books. Miss Sedgwick (Mrs. Basil de Selincourt) was influenced by (1) Tolstoy's La Guerre et La Paix ; (2) The Religious Aspect of Philosophy ; .(3) Quaker Strongholds., Professor Sayee's chosen volumes are (1) Hegel's Philosophy and History ; (2) Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine ; (3) Rawlinson's Herodotus. "But it was the Arabian Nights," he adds, "read to me before I could read myself, which influenced my earliest thoughts."
Dr. Sarolea says that the three books which have most profoundly influenced him are : (1) Essays of Emerson, "which has made me into an incurable optimist" ; (2) The Anna Karenina of Tolstoy, ".which has revealed to me the meaning of literary art as a recreation of life and an anatomy of the soul " ; (3) The Chinese Grammar of Father Perny, "which first disclosed to me the secret of China and discovered to me the oldest and not least fascinating of human civilizations." Sir Oswald Stoll *rites "Three 'books would not fill the bill. The following are entitled to the credit or discredit with which you ask me to endow them : (1) John Locke on The Human Understanding and his Letters on Monetary Worm; (2) The Works of Herbert Spencer ; (3) Conant's Principles of Money and Banking ; (4) Shakespeare and Tennyson ; (5) The New Testament ; (6) Whately's Logic and Rhetoric ; (7) Attempts to read myself." Sir John Martin Harvey writes : "Books have not influenced what you are pleased to call my career so much as men and things, such as (1) The spectacle of the Lyceum under Irving ; (2) a fine collection of objets d'art ; (3) a stately country house ; ;(4) the inexorable walk of Cecil Rhodes ; (5) the sight of Carriere's sculptured Head of Mounet Sully as Oedipus—an inspired moment ; (6) perhaps Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell, but not in the way he intended it."
Lord Riddell's choice is Best on Evidence, Mill's Logic, and Shakespeare.
Mr. Ralph Blumenfeld, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Express, writes : "No book or books that I can recall have most influenced my career. The three books I liked best in my youth and re-read often are Pilgrim's Progress, Vanity Fair, and Don Quixote." Sir Theodore Cook's choice is : Book III. of The Odes of Horace, Shelley's Poems, Thackeray's Esntond.
Canon Hannay (" George A. Birmingham ") writes : "I- have had no career, but if you substitute the word .` life,' I should say (leaving out of account the Bible and the Prayer Book) : (1) Butler's Analogy ; (2)• Westcott's On St. John's Writings ; (8) Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology (Is this a book '1)." Mr. E. V. Lucas says our question is not fair, and that it is almost impossible to answer accurately, but suggests (1) Wanley's Wonders of this Little World ; (2) Lamb's Essays ; (3) Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary. Mr. Harold Begbie writes ; "It is impossible, I find, to narrow down the influence of literature to three books. All that I can say is this, that Carlyle was the main influence in my youth ; Matthew Arnold the chief influence in any early manhood, and that always I have found a supreme 'happiness in Wordsworth and Robert Browning." Sir Gilbert Parker selects (1) The Bible ; (2) Shakespeare.; and- (3) The Confessions of St. Augustine ; and Mrs. Flora Annie Steele, Mrs: Gatty's -Parables from Nature, Carpenter's Mental Physiology, and The Autobiography of Baker.
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