Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
The books are everywhere. There are as many in the north room and in the
parlor--is drawing-room a more appropriate name than parlor?--as in the
library; the gun-room at the top of the house, which incidentally has
the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other
rooms; and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just
because they have not much relevance to one another, this being one of
the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode. But the books
have overflowed into all the other rooms too.
I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered.
Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in
laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person,
and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's
besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls "the mad pride of
intellectuality," taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does
not like the same kind of books. Of course there are books which a man
or woman uses as instruments of a profession--law books, medical books,
cookery books, and the like. I am not speaking of these, for they are
not properly "books" at all; they come in the category of time-tables,
telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life. I
am speaking of books that are meant to be read. Personally, granted that
these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand
that they all submit is that of being interesting. If the book is not
interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of
cases it gives scant benefit to the reader. Of course any reader ought
to cultivate his or her taste so that good books will appeal to it, and
that trash won't. But after this point has once been reached, the needs
of each reader must be met in a fashion that will appeal to those needs.
Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more than
by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the
pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked
reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.
Of course each individual is apt to have some special tastes in which
he cannot expect that any but a few friends will share. Now, I am very
proud of my big-game library. I suppose there must be many big-game
libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive
than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in
this country. Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century,
and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous
hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation
of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian. It is
only very occasionally that I meet any one who cares for any of these
books. On the other hand, I expect to find many friends who will turn
naturally to some of the old or the new books of poetry or romance or
history to which we of the household habitually turn. Let me add that
ours is in no sense a collector's library. Each book was procured
because some one of the family wished to read it. We could never afford
to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much
interested in their insides.
Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and
my answer is, poetry and novels--including short stories under the
head of novels. I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern
poetry. If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek
dramatists, he should be sorry. He ought to read interesting books on
history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really
good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever
written in prose or verse. Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides
and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin,
Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke--why! there are scores and scores
of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as
the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value. The same thing
is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant,
and of volumes like Sutherland's "Growth of the Moral Instinct," or
Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies--here again I am not trying to
class books together, or measure one by another, or enumerate one in a
thousand of those worth reading, but just to indicate that any man or
woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or
other of serious thought, scientific or historical or philosophical or
economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to
read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers.
I do not for a minute mean that the statesman ought not to read a great
many different books of this character, just as every one else should
read them. But, in the final event, the statesman, and the publicist,
and the reformer, and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of
what is good in old things, all need more than anything else to know
human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find
this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great
imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.
The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to
try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best
thinkers. This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of
the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library. It is all right
for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good
books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get
many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of
particular books which in that particular year and on that particular
trip he would like to read. But there is no such thing as a hundred
books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for
one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library
which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different
occasions extending over a number of years. Milton is best for one mood
and Pope for another. Because a man likes Whitman or Browning or Lowell
he should not feel himself debarred from Tennyson or Kipling or Korner
or Heine or the Bard of the Dimbovitza. Tolstoy's novels are good at one
time and those of Sienkiewicz at another; and he is fortunate who can
relish "Salammbo" and "Tom Brown" and the "Two Admirals" and "Quentin
Durward" and "Artemus Ward" and the "Ingoldsby Legends" and "Pickwick"
and "Vanity Fair." Why, there are hundreds of books like these, each one
of which, if really read, really assimilated, by the person to whom
it happens to appeal, will enable that person quite unconsciously to
furnish himself with much ammunition which he will find of use in the
battle of life.
A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular
time. But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of
them are sealed to some men and some are sealed to others; and some stir
the soul at some given point of a man's life and yet convey no message
at other times. The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs
without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs
should be. He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not
like. Yet at the same time he must avoid that most unpleasant of all
the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere
individual, and perhaps unfortunate, idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride.
I happen to be devoted to Macbeth, whereas I very seldom read Hamlet
(though I like parts of it). Now I am humbly and sincerely conscious
that this is a demerit in me and not in Hamlet; and yet it would not do
me any good to pretend that I like Hamlet as much as Macbeth when, as
a matter of fact, I don't. I am very fond of simple epics and of ballad
poetry, from the Nibelungenlied and the Roland song through "Chevy
Chase" and "Patrick Spens" and "Twa Corbies" to Scott's poems and
Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf" and "Othere." On the other hand, I
don't care to read dramas as a rule; I cannot read them with enjoyment
unless they appeal to me very strongly. They must almost be AEschylus
or Euripides, Goethe or Moliere, in order that I may not feel after
finishing them a sense of virtuous pride in having achieved a task. Now
I would be the first to deny that even the most delightful old English
ballad should be put on a par with any one of scores of dramatic
works by authors whom I have not mentioned; I know that each of these
dramatists has written what is of more worth than the ballad; only, I
enjoy the ballad, and I don't enjoy the drama; and therefore the ballad
is better for me, and this fact is not altered by the other fact that
my own shortcomings are to blame in the matter. I still read a number of
Scott's novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss
Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul.
But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste
I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time--and,
moreover, they are very kind, and never pity me in too offensive a
manner for not reading her myself.
Aside from the masters of literature, there are all kinds of books which
one person will find delightful, and which he certainly ought not
to surrender just because nobody else is able to find as much in the
beloved volume. There is on our book-shelves a little pre-Victorian
novel or tale called "The Semi-Attached Couple." It is told with much
humor; it is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk; and to me
it is altogether delightful. But outside the members of my own family
I have never met a human being who had even heard of it, and I don't
suppose I ever shall meet one. I often enjoy a story by some living
author so much that I write to tell him so--or to tell her so; and at
least half the time I regret my action, because it encourages the writer
to believe that the public shares my views, and he then finds that the
public doesn't.
Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore
Hill; but children are better than books. Sagamore Hill is one of three
neighboring houses in which small cousins spent very happy years of
childhood. In the three houses there were at one time sixteen of these
small cousins, all told, and once we ranged them in order of size and
took their photograph. There are many kinds of success in life worth
having. It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful
business man, or railroad man, or farmer, or a successful lawyer or
doctor; or a writer, or a President, or a ranchman, or the colonel of
a fighting regiment, or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for
unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things
go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and
achievement lose their importance by comparison. It may be true that
he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not
worth reaching. And as for a life deliberately devoted to pleasure as
an end--why, the greatest happiness is the happiness that comes as a
by-product of striving to do what must be done, even though sorrow is
met in the doing. There is a bit of homely philosophy, quoted by Squire
Bill Widener, of Widener's Valley, Virginia, which sums up one's duty in
life: "Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are."
The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city
small enough so that one can get out into the country. When our own