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The “Five-foot Shelf” Reconsidered by ADAM KIRSCH Illustrations by Tom Mosser

“On or about december, 1910,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “human character changed.” Woolf was not referring to a specific event so much as to a new cultural climate, a new way of looking at the world, that would be- come known as mod- ernism. When he finished his introduction to the Har- vard Classics in March of that same year, could hardly have guessed that such a change was just over the horizon. Yet it is tempting to think that his “five-foot shelf” of books, chosen as a record of the “progress of man…from the earliest historical times to the close of the nineteenth century,” was meant as a time cap- sule from that era just about to end. In 50 volumes

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we have a record made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a of what President museum display-case of the “world’s best books,” but as a Eliot’s America, portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no par- and his Harvard, ticular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set thought best in of six courses: “The of Civilization,” “ and Phi- their own her- losophy,” “,” “Science,” “Politics,” and “Criticism of Lit- itage—a monu- erature and the Fine Arts.” But in a more profound sense, the les- ment from a more son taught by the Harvard Classics is “Progress”—progress in humane and con- each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human fident time. It race as a whole. Eliot’s introduction expresses complete faith in is surprisingly the “intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civi- easy, even today, lization,” “the upward tendency of the human race.” to find a com- Eliot’s life was spent in the cultivation of that tendency. He plete set of the built up Harvard into one of the world’s great universities, vastly Harvard Clas- expanded its student body, course o≠erings, and faculty, and be- sics in good came a sort of public oracle on questions of education. He was condition. At one of the most e≠ective evangelists for what the Victorian poet least one is and critic called “sweetness and light.” Samuel usually for sale Eliot Morison, in Three Centuries of Harvard, describes Eliot as a rep- on eBay, the In- resentative of “the best of his age—that forward-looking half- ternet auction century before the World War, when democracy seemed capable site, for $300 or so, of putting all crooked ways straight—the age of reason and of ac- a bargain at $6 a tion, of accomplishment and of hope.” book. The supply, from But already in 1936, when Morison wrote, Eliot’s variety of attics or private libraries optimism seemed sadly obsolete. Today we are proudly alert to around the country, seems end- the blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress. less—a tribute to the Three thinkers whose names appear nowhere in the Harvard success of the pub- Classics—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—have taught us a new, lisher, P.F. Collier, who more suspicious kind of reading, in which an author’s motives sold some 350,000 sets are to be questioned, within 20 years of the series’ initial probed, overturned. publication. The Classics, in In fact, though the series bears the Harvard name, it was a commercial enterprise from the beginning. In February 1909, Eliot was preparing to retire from the presidency of Harvard after 40 years. Two editors from Collier, Norman Hapgood and William Patten, had read a speech Eliot delivered to an audi- ence of working men, in which he declared that a five-foot shelf of books could provide “a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.” Now they approached Eliot with a proposition: he would pick the titles to fill up that shelf, and Collier would publish them as a series. At their very first interview, Hapgood and Patten con- vinced Eliot to say yes. He enlisted professor of English William A. Neilson, later the president of Smith College, to act as his as- sistant, and secured the approval of the Board of Overseers for the series’ name. Eliot and Neilson worked for a year, the for- mer deciding “what should be included, and what should be excluded,” while the latter was responsible for “introductions and notes” and the “choice among di≠erent editions of the same work.” By the time publication began, in 1910, Eliot’s celebrity had turned the series into a media event, and earned Collier valuable free publicity. The question of what the series should in- clude and exclude called forth articles and letters to the editor across the country. In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot

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particular, cry out for such questioning. The series is author- matics.” But the trumpet-call is sounded by , in the less—there is only an editor, conducting his chorus of texts. preface to his Instauratio Magna. Bacon denies “that the inquisition Yet the way those texts are selected and arranged of nature is in any part interdicted and forbid- speaks volumes—literally. To take an obvious den….the divine philosopher declares that ‘it is example, the total exclusion of female au- the glory of God to conceal a thing, but it is thors would be impossible today; at the the glory of the King to find a thing out.’ time, it would hardly have been noticed. Even as though the divine nature took But the series’ more profound limita- pleasure in the innocent and kindly tions can be found in its treatment sport of children playing at hide and of science, , and litera- seek, and vouchsafed of his kind- ture—the most interesting and ness and goodness to admit the substantial of Eliot’s six “courses.” human spirit for his playfellow at In these areas, the Harvard Clas- that game.” sics serve as an index to just Bacon’s confidence in the power how much the world really has of human reason is authorized by changed since 1910. a touching faith that science and religion go hand in hand. This Perhaps the most consequen- view of science, so di≠erent from tial di≠erence between Eliot’s time the secular positivism of the twenti- and our own has to do with science, a eth century, can be found everywhere in the subject dear to Eliot, a chemist at MIT when Harvard Classics. Newton and Faraday were he was called to the presidency of Harvard. In very religious men, and even Darwin writes re- his inaugural lecture, he adamantly refused to spectfully about the divine. Yet as we approach make any choice between “mathematics or clas- 1910, we can already see this confidence souring into sics, science or metaphysics,” and the series fol- arrogance. T. H. Huxley, in his 1880 “Science lows the same precept. It contains no textbooks; and Culture,” sounds the more familiar note of our rather, in keeping with his policy of using own day: the overweening certainty that scientific unabridged original texts, Eliot included treatises knowledge is the only knowledge. He condescends in which major scientific discoveries were an- to the Christian Middle Ages, gives a pat on the nounced—Harvey on the circulation of the blood, head to classical education, but admits no doubt Pasteur on the germ theory—or educational works about where the future lies: the modern “scientific by genuine scientists, like Faraday’s The Forces of ‘criticism of life’ presents itself to us with Matter. With laudable if excessive enthusiasm, di≠erent credentials from any other.” Eliot gave two of his 50 volumes to Darwin, for At the same time, the language of science The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. And was growing completely estranged from that of the volume of “Famous Prefaces” contains the forewords “the republic of letters.” Already in 1910, Eliot writes that to Copernicus’s Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies and Newton’s “it was hard to make up an adequate representation of the sci- Principia Mathematica. entific thought of the nineteenth century,” because “the discov- Clearly, this is not a basis for a complete scientific education, erers’ original papers...have naturally been expressed in tech- nor was it intended to be. The Classics provide something nical language.” And it is inconceivable that the scientific smaller but rarer—a humanistic appreciation of science. They advances of the twentieth century could be represented by orig- bring to life a period when science was still, in William Har- inal documents. We are condemned to live in the age of C.P. vey’s phrase, a “department of the republic of letters.” In our Snow’s “two cultures.” own time, we see science victorious, the acknowledged ruler of Even more important, we are no longer so certain that science human destiny; in the Harvard Classics we find the more in- is purely a benefit to mankind. The hideous evils of the twenti- In science, philosophy, and literature, the Harvard Classics serve as an index to how much the world really has changed since 1910.

spiring spectacle of science militant, the proud, embattled ra- eth century—world wars, concentration camps, atomic tionality that fought against ignorance and superstition for bombs—were made possible by technological advance; the ba- centuries. nality of modern culture is a product of miraculous technologies: We can hear this note already, though tentatively, in Coperni- radio and television. And it remains to be seen whether the cus, who resolves that “I should no longer through fear refuse to frenzy of industry will make the earth uninhabitable through give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathe- pollution and despoliation. In power and self-regard, science

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Eliot’s Elect: The Harvard Classics, 1910

I: The Autobiography of ; The Journal of John XXV: Essay and Autobiography, by ; In- Woolman; Some Fruits of Solitude, by . augural Address as Lord Rector of Edinburgh University, Character- istics, and Essay on Scott, by . II: The , Phædo, and , by ; The Golden Sayings of ; The of . XXVI: Continental : Calderon, Corneille, Lessing, Molière, Racine, Schiller. III: The and The , by Francis Bacon; Areopagit- ica and Tractate on Education, by ; Religio Medici, by Sir XXVII: English Essays: Cowley, Swift, Johnson, Smith, Hazlitt, Co- . leridge, Hunt, Sidney, Jonson, Lamb, De Quincey, Addison, Steele, Defoe, Hume, Shelley, Macaulay. IV: The Complete Poems of John Milton. XXVIII: English and American Essays: Thackeray, Newman, Ruskin, V: Essays and English Traits, by . Freeman, Poe, Lowell, Arnold, Bagehot, Huxley, Stevenson, Thoreau, Channing. VI: The Poems of . XXIX: The Voyage of the Beagle, by . VII: The Confessions of Saint Augustine; The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis. XXX: Scientific Papers—Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy: Faraday, Lord Kelvin, Geikie, Helmholtz, Newcomb. VIII: Nine Greek : Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies, and , by Æschlylus; Œdipus the King and XXXI: The Autobiography of . Antigone, by ; Hippolytus and The Bacchæ, by ; , by . XXXII: Essays—French, German, Italian: Montaigne, Renan, Schiller, Kant, Mazzini, Sainte-Beuve, Lessing. IX: The Letters and The Treatises on Friendship and Old Age of Ci- cero; The Letters of Pliny. XXXIII: Ancient and Elizabethan Voyages and Travels: , , Sir Francis Drake, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter X: , by . Raleigh.

XI: The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. XXXIV: Descartes, , Rousseau, and Hobbes.

XII: ’s Lives of Themistocles, Pericles, Aristides, Alcibiades, XXXV: Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed. Coriolanus, Demosthenes, , Cæsar, and Antony. XXXVI: Machiavelli, More, and Luther. XIII: The Æneid, by . XXXVII: English Philosophers: Locke, Berkeley, Hume. XIV: , by Cervantes. XXXVIII: Scientific Papers—Physiology, Medicine, Surgery: Paré, XV: The Pilgrim’s Progress, by ; The Lives of Donne and Harvey, Jenner, Holmes, Pasteur, Lister, Lyell. Herbert, by . XXXIX: Prefaces to Famous Books: Caxton, Raleigh, , XVI: Stories from the Arabian Nights. Heminge and Condell, Fielding, Whitman, Spenser, Calvin, Bacon, Dryden, Johnson, Taine, Wordsworth, Copernicus, Goethe, Hugo, XVII: Folk-Lore and Fable: Æsop’s Fables; Grimm’s Household Tales; Newton. Tales from . XL, XLI, XLII: An Anthology of English (embracing upwards XVIII: Modern English Drama: All for Love, by ; The of 200 authors). School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan; She Stoops to Con- quer, by ; , by ; A Blot XLIII: American Historical Documents, containing 40 important in the ’Scutcheon, by ; , by . documents, such as Cabot’s Voyage, Columbus’s Letter, First Char- ter of Virginia, Mayflower Compact, Cornwallis’s Proposal of Surren- XIX: Faust, Hermann and Dorothea, and Egmont, by Goethe; Doctor der, Washington’s First Inaugural, , Lincoln’s First Faustus, by . Inaugural, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural.

XX: The , by Dante. XLIV and XLV: Comparative and Hymns.

XXI: I Promessi Sposi, by . XLVI and XLVII: Elizabethan Dramas: Shakespeare, Beaumont, Jon- son, Fletcher, Webster, Dekker, Massinger. XXII: The of . XLVIII: Pascal’s Thoughts, Letters, and Minor Works. XXIII: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. XLIX: Popular Epics and Sagas: English, French, Norse, Irish XXIV: Essays by : On Taste; On the Sublime and Beau- tiful; Reflections on the French Revolution; A Letter to a Noble Lord. L: Dr. Eliot’s Introduction, the Index, and Reading Course.

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continues to progress. But in moral terms, the Harvard Clas- sics may have caught science at the peak of its Icarus flight, a height never to be regained.

If time has made Eliot’s notion of science seem doubt- ful, the limitations of the Harvard Classics in the area of phi- losophy must have been glaring even in 1910. Aristotle and Aquinas are entirely absent, thus leaving out the major intellec- tual influences of 1,500 years of Western history. Of modern philosophers, Leibniz and Hegel are absent; Descartes and Kant are each represented by a single short work. Only the English empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies are well-represented, and even here the choices are sometimes bewildering: Locke’s Some Thoughts on Education, but not his major works on human understanding and on govern- ment; only one unrepresentative chapter of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Berkeley and Hume fare best of all, and Mill is almost exces- sively favored—Eliot makes room not just for On Liberty but for his Autobiography. The common theme in these selections and omissions is a set- tled distrust of abstract thought; in every case, Eliot prefers auto- to speculation. It is not clear whether this reflects the editor’s own disbelief in the value of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology, or simply a doubt in the capacity of the reader to un- derstand such subjects. (It is worth remembering that the major philosophical contribution of Eliot’s Harvard was pragmatism, the doctrine that whatever works, is right.) Whatever the reason, the idea of phi- losophy that one takes away from the Harvard Classics is direly lim- Crito, and the Phaedo—along with the aphorisms of Epictetus and ited. The intellec- the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Together, the Platonic dia- tual wonder that logues tell the story of Socrates’ martyrdom: his condemnation Plato called the ori- by the assembly of Athens, his refusal to flee judgment, and his gin of philosophy resolute drinking of the hemlock. It is one of the great moral leg- has little place ends of the West, and certainly deserves a place in the series. here. Instead, Yet by choosing only these works, and placing them alongside the series the much narrower stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, uses phi- the series encourages us to read it simply as a legend—to make losophy Socrates an example of heroism, while ignoring what he hero- to teach a ically defended. It is like reading the parts of the Gospels deal- particular manly ing with the Passion, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. ethic, a stoical How di≠erent Plato would appear if, instead of Epictetus and toughness in the Marcus Aurelius, this volume contained the Symposium, the Re- conduct of life. public, and the Phaedrus, with their teachings about love and poli- In a good exam- tics. Then we could see beyond Socrates the symbol to Plato the ple of the power of context, the philosopher. editors manage to make Plato But Eliot values philosophy when it tells a real story with prac- himself seem merely a teacher of tical applications, providing symbols of manliness on which read- stoicism. Volume 2 contains three ers of the Harvard Classics could pattern themselves. (In his excel- Platonic works—the Apology, the lent book Manhood at Harvard, Kim Townsend has shown that the The common theme in these selections and omissions is a settled distrust of abstract thought.

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rhetoric of manliness dominated Eliot’s Harvard, from the class- mental teachings of vital concern for modern democracies.” But room to the football field [see “The Manly Ideal,” November-De- there is no volume for Chaucer, a far more democratic spirit than cember 1966, page 25].) Thus Augustine’s Confessions is present, but Milton, possibly because the Canterbury Tales o≠ers fictional char- not his City of God. Locke on education is well worth reading—it is acters, not paraphrasable “teachings.” marvelous to see how he applies his theory of the association of And what is genuinely vital in the literature of the eighteenth ideas to the problem of getting a child to have regular bowel move- and nineteenth centuries is largely absent. The volume of “Modern ments—but not at the expense of his treatises on government and English Drama” is composed largely of inert verse plays, such as psychology. And the radically disturbing thinkers of the nine- Byron’s Manfred, which were never intended for the stage; the only teenth century—Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—were European in the series, rather inexplicably, is Manzoni’s I either unknown or unwelcome to Eliot. One begins to suspect, Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)—a selection chalked up to “the perhaps unfairly, that his ideal work of philosophy is Benjamin taste of his youth” by Eliot’s biographer. There is something obvi- Franklin’s Autobiography, included in the ously flawed about a criterion that ad- very first volume of the series: a book mits Richard Henry Dana’s moderately that shows a man overcoming obstacles, Your Harvard Classics interesting memoir, Two Years Before the doing useful work, going to bed early, Mast, because it is “fact,” but has no place and rising healthy, wealthy, and wise. What books would you choose for a for Moby Dick, because it is “fiction.” twenty-first century Harvard Classics? Finally, there is the question of lit- Harvard Magazine invites readers to submit Thus it is in the field of literature that erature. Many of the literary selections in lists of 10 books, excluding the following ti- it becomes most tempting to play the the Harvard Classics are indisputable— tles and authors, deemed likely consensus game of re-editing the Harvard Classics. no one would put together such a series choices: Bible, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad-Gita, To replace Dana with Melville, Manzoni without including the Odyssey, the , Koran, Homer, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, with Tolstoy, and “Modern English the Divine Comedy, and the plays of Shake- , Sophocles, Euripides, Aristo- Drama” with Ibsen, Strindberg, and speare (though, in fact, Eliot selected only phanes, Virgil, Dante, Machiavelli, Mon- Chekhov; to find room for Lawrence, four of these). In the traditional genres of taigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Kafka—this epic and verse drama, the Harvard Clas- Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Goethe, would be the most important step to- sics does an estimable job. Hegel, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Marx, ward updating the series for 2001. A The problem begins in the eighteenth Freud, Einstein. Submit responses via our new Harvard Classics would have to century, with the rise of the novel as the website, www.harvard-magazine.com, or by recognize that literature is a part of ed- major literary form. Eliot stated quite mail or e-mail. A future issue will report re- ucation, and perhaps the most impor- reasonably that the series would include sults of this informal survey. tant part. no fiction from the nineteenth century, But immediately, other corrections “partly because of its great bulk, and partly because it is easily and additions to mind. In 1910, the series included Adam accessible.” (This gap was partially remedied in 1917 when he Smith; in 2001 we would have to add Karl Marx. We would edited a separate 20-volume supplement, the Harvard Classics doubtless keep The Origin of Species, but perhaps The Voyage of the Shelf of Fiction—a worthy but conventional and very limited se- Beagle could be replaced by a twentieth-century equivalent like lection.) Yet the e≠ect of eliminating the novel from the Harvard J.D. Watson’s The Double Helix. Freud would be indispensable—if Classics, while including other kinds of fiction, is to severely un- not as the successor to Harvey and Jenner, then as the heir of balance the whole series. Plato and Goethe. Up from Slavery would make a good replace- Indeed, it seems that imaginative literature, as a category, did ment for the journals of the Quakers and not seem entirely reputable to Eliot. Homer, Dante, and Shake- William Penn; Thoreau could share space in the volume now de- speare are classics and therefore inevitable; but wherever there is voted to Emerson. The sententious Cicero could make room for more leeway in the selection, the series tends to favor childish the disillusioned Tacitus. works of adventure and fantasy. The Thousand and One Nights and a And so on, endlessly, until we have inflated the five-foot shelf volume of fairy tales are fine reading, but they have the e≠ect of to the size of Widener Library. It would hardly be worthwhile making the imagination seem a juvenile thing, a holiday from the simply to point to what’s missing from the Harvard Classics of serious business of life. Perhaps it is for a similar reason that 1910, since a Harvard Classics of 2001 would soon look just as in- Eliot includes the Odyssey, the picaresque story of travels and adequate. And perhaps it would be impossible, today, to present monsters, and omits the Iliad, the brutal chronicle of vanity, am- any group of books as an essential library, when the very idea of bition, and war. cultural authority is so bitterly disputed—in the university as Similarly, when Eliot is enthusiastic about poems it is because well as outside it. President Eliot’s “five-foot-shelf” survives, not they have what might be called “real-world applications.” Poetry, as a definitive canon, but as an inspiring testimony to his faith in like philosophy, is valued mainly as another vehicle of uplift and the possibility of democratic education without the loss of high toughness; it is a record of humanity’s “gradually developed ethi- standards. If we scrutinize it today for its shortcomings, we are cal means of purifying [the] sentiments and controlling [the] only paying it the tribute of applying our own standards, the passions.” As he writes in his introduction, “the poems of John products of a darker and more skeptical age. Milton and Robert Burns are given in full; because the works of these two very unlike poets contain social, religious and govern- Adam Kirsch ’97 is a poet and critic living in New York City.

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