HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 24, 27 July 1929, Page 21

HUNDRED BEST BOOKS

(By "Sextus Redux.")

JHE DISCOVERY'S LIBRARY

LITERATURE FOR EXILES

The Antarctic exploring ship Discovery's company of twentysix persons is allowed'only a hundred books. The choice proved a difficult but pleasant exercise to tho literary-minded. The '' Encyclopaedia Britannica" and "Oxford Dictionary" were the first choice. Poetry, drama, and philosophy are represented by seven books, including Shakespeare and Shaw's "Saint Joan." Twenty-four volumes relate to history and travel, among which Polar exploration preponderates. Eight volumes cover popular science, while tlie fictioE section comprises fifty-three volumes, mainly modern. Sir Douglas Mawsou and liis little band of explorers are soon to sail from London on the Polar ship Discovery for the far Antarctic in a venture that must mean, a long sojourn for all the company away from civilisation in the loneliest regions of tho world. It was therefore a happy thought on the part of the presiding genius at the heart of things who dispenses to tho remoter peoples of the Empire a daily ration of news to cable out so interesting an item as that which heads this column. The only pity is that he does not tell us a little more, after whetting our curiosity, about the hundred books for the twenty-six persons aboard the Discovery. No doubt it was "a difficult but pleasant exercise for tho literary-mind-ed" to make tho selection. What the "literary-minded" hero would like to know is what! books were actually chosen, apart from the two or throe mentioned. "Who were the poets and playwrights beside Shakespeare and Shaw and what the fifty-three volumes of fiction, "mainly modern"? Again, who was it did tho choosing? "Was it a committee of the men going on the expedition, or did the members of the party distrust their own taste and go outside to consult the professional, critic and commission the expert connoisseur of literature to concoct them a "pemmican" library' or concentrated pabulum for the mind, just as the scientific dietetieians do it for the body on these Polar enterprises? We may never know and can only conjecture. To make a start with the " Encyclopaedia Britannica" and the "Oxford Dictionary" is certainly to establish' a solid foundation, even if these , two iudispensables servo merely for the settlement of arguments which are bound to ariso when men are "crimped, cabined, and confined" aboard a tiny vessel in the vast void of stormy ocean. But we must conclude that it is the Concise Oxford that is meant, for the major work would need a Byrd party to handle it.

What books tho Byrd party actually ■took with them has not been stated by Mr. Russell Chveu in his entertaining wireless stories from the Par South, but he speaks of the inon lying in their bunks during the long coid of tho winter night and reading, so we must conclude there must be a fairly substantial library "down there" in "Little America" to go round, for one can hardly imagine the averago American reading the same book over and over again. No doubt thero will be "The Famous Fifty Volumes of Dr. Eliot's Five-foot Shelf of Books," as they are advertised in the American papers, "The Harvard Classics," "The.Most Famous Library in the World" in these terms: Do you know Dr. Eliot's rive-foot Shelf of Books? If not, send for tho interesting book called "Fifteen Minutes a Day." It is absolutely free to any reader of this page who wants it. Your narao and address on tho coupon will bring it by return mail. Do not delay. The time to act is NOW I WHAT ROBINSON CRUSOE HAD. It is tantalising not to know what the men with Mawson and Byrd will bo reading, and from memory one cannot state what Scott and Bhacklcton took with them in the way of books, if they ever happened to mention it in their stories. We do know what Robinson Crusoe got offl the wreck to read, and that was—he mentions them as an after-thought— : Three very wood Bibles, which enmo lo mo in my cargo from England, and wlileh I had packed up among my things; some Portuguese) books also, and among them two or three popish prayer books and several others, all which I carefully secured. There were also some books on navigation and pen, ink, and paper, so Eobinson. was not so badly off. But he makes no boast of his reading. It seems to have been chance that started him at all, or Providence, as he puts it. He was feeling very ill, no doubt, with some form of malarial fever. Now as the apprehension of the return of my distemper terrified me very much, it occurred to my thought that tho Brazilians take no physic but their tobacco for almost all distempers; and I had a piece of a roll of tobacco in one of tho ( chests, which was quite cured and some also that was green and not quite cured. I went, directed by Heaven, no doubt; for in thig chest I found a cure both for soul and body. I opened the chest and found what I looked for, viz., the tobacco; and as the few books I had saved lay there too, I took out one of the Bibles which I mentioned before and which to this time I had not found leisure or so much as inclination to look into. , . '. Robinson takes the tobacco in various forms to cure his distemper, chewing the green leaf and steeping it in rum, resolving to take a dose of the ■tincture, and holding his nose over the smoke of the burning weed. In the interval of this operation, I took up the Bible and began to read; but my head was too much disturbed with the tobacco to bear reading, at least that time; only, havlnc opened tho book casually, the first words that occurred to ma were tlie.se: "Call on mo in the day of trouble and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." This in Bobinson's diary was 2Sth •Tune. On 3rd July ho was so much better that he was able to reflect on his deliverance. This touched my heart very much, and immediately I knelt down and gave God thanks a iii my "covery from my sickness. In the morning I look- the Biblo, and, beginning at the I\ew Testament, I began seriously to read it, and imposed on myself to read awhile every morning and every night, not tying myself to the number of chapters, but aa long as my thoughts should engage me. ... Crusoe was not so badly off, as we have said. If he had only one book— we rule out the others as being at least not literature—he had the one best book or the best ono book in all the world of print. Put yourself in Crusoe's place, reader, and allow yourself .just one volume, what would you choose? Would it not be, even in this godless century and religious considerations apart, the Bible? What else in one volume is there to equal it from any point of view, whether you be "literary-minded" or just a plain, simple citizen? There never was such universality in one volume elsewhere, no matter in what language or literature. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Hilton, Don Quixote, Goethe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, any single novel of any of the world's great novelists—nothing could bo so satisfying in the long run of exilo as the Bible. Probably this very fact explaiap its omission from the. list in. the

Discovery' 3 library; it is taken for granted as being included in any collection. WHAT NEXT AFTER THE BIBLE? But suppose the exile or the prisoner or the patient in hospital, for they are alike in being the captives of circumstance, were allowed more than a single volume; say it ■were five—the average of the Discovery of a hundred volumes to 26 men working out at a fraction less than five, which shows the fallacy of averages, because one man could read the whole hundred —what would be the second choice, and so on in succession on a system of preferential voting. Hero is where the difference in taste and choice would eomo in so strongly. It is indeed "a difficult, but pleasant exercise" for "the literary-minded." Quot homines, tot sententiae, every man his own opinion. Probably the same man would not make the same choice at different periods of life. One can speak froni experience. As a young man in the year of his majority, the present writer went out to work on a small farm on the edge of the bush, in the backblocks in those days. There was scant room in the swag for any books at all, and the call was too sudden to make a deliberate selection from what little store the exigencies of fate had left. Five books were taken. They were: The Bible; Virgil, in an edition published by Pierre Didot, of Paris, in the sixth year of the French Republic; Dante's "Inferno," in the Temple Classics, with original and translation on opposite pages; "Gulliver's Travels" and Milton's "Shorter Poems" in the same series. It was a curious choice, no doubt, but it served. In the six months on the bush farm there was not much Jeisure, for the boss was a driver, but one managed to get through the best part-of the Old Testament—it was more in keeping with the rural life than the New would have been; Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics; some cantos of Dante; most of Milton, and all Gulliver. One can never remember to have enjoyed reading so much, nor especially to have appreciated Virgil and Milton in (heir pictures of the country so poignantly. READING IN PALESTINE. ■The war was the-great period of'exile for most men. AVhat did soldiers need, if they read at all? Nobody seems to have said much about it in the literature of the time, so far as one can gather, not having read "All Quiet on the Western Front." For ourselves, wo can speak, not of France, but of the Eastern Front, whore things were a good deal quieter, but where books were further away. This time in the Land of Pharaoh, and later in the Holy Land on the way up to Jerusalem and beyond past tho Jordan and the Sea of Galilee, to Damascus and remoter Syria, the Bible was represented by the New Testament, not one of it, but several in different languages, for there is no better way of picking up tho rudiments of a foreign toiigue than through the' Bible. It was in this way-that wo learnt enough Spanish to deal with thoso ancient Hebrews in Jerusalem who came from Spain and Portugal several centuries ago on banishment by Ferdinand and Isabella, and settled once more in their older fatherland in Jerusalem,, a-nd still speak the Spanish of their ancestors. Arabic, as spoken in Palestine and Syria, was ■"rationalised" by a German handbook, a "Muloula-Spraehfuh-rer,',' stilt extant in fragment}!, picked up at Junction. Station on ilio retreat of the Turks with their German Allies back from Gaza to beyond Jerusalem. But these and Murray's Guido were put to tho base and material purposes of everyday life in a straugo country. Tho Bibloi should have played a bigger and better part in the land of its origin, but, queerly enough, it was "The Arabian Nights" that seemed to harmonise more sympathetically with tho scene. This was in Lauo's translation, Bonn's Library, in four volumes, and it lasted through this campaign and tho next, which took the conquerors out of Palestine into Syria, and up to Horns on the Orontes and on to Aleppo. How pleasant it was to read of the Caliph of Bagdad, and thoso merchants who had travelled all along this country, up and down, in and out of Egypt, as one lay under the shade of the olives at tho feet of the Judaean Hills, looking across the Plain of Sharon to the white towers of Kamleh 011 the horizon. The little library was augmented from tho hurried spoils of camps at Nablus, as the advancing columns passed northward, and again from tho wrecks of German motor transport strewn along the Plain of Megiddo, and from an abandoned headquarters train at the railway station at Semakh on the south shore of tho Sea of Galilee. It was at Scmakh that one picked up a German novel by an author named AVilly, if memory serves rightly, about life in Dresden and Leipzig, it was a sad story,'and left that feeling of depression which often falls, one fancies, on a reader of Continental fiction. It was the same with an Italian translation of a novel by Khoda Broughton, read in hospital, so. tho trouble must lie in the sombre hues of these languages as much at least as in the matter or the philosophy. But this is.far away from the Discovery and her precious argosy of a hundred volumes. Tho connection lies in the literature of the exile, often not of his own choosing. But if the choice is possible, let it fall on strong, substantial, sustaining stuff, as meaty in its matter and manner as penimican, for a little has to go a very long way. The very conditions of exile and its limitations lead to an appreciation of books and the men who write them. Add the pen, ink, and paper that even Crusoe had, and nobody need ask any more. J