I’ve seen their “Libertas”-becrested spines scattered among the classics in used book stores, but had never paid much attention to them. They are the Harvard Classics, and I guess they’re something of a cultural institution, or at least were a few generations ago. They are the work of Harvard president Charles William Eliot (1834-1926). Eliot had remarked that “a five-foot shelf would hold books enough to give in the course of years a good substitute for a liberal education.” The publisher P.F. Collier & Son invited him to “make it so,” and thus were the Harvard Classics born.
While taking some time off from life in general, writer Christopher R. Beha decided to read through all 51 volumes in a year. He relates his adventures in The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Grove Press, 2009). As the title implies, this is a personal memoir, with reflections on his family and the circumstances of his life occupying as much space as musings on Cicero. In fact, if there is an overarching theme, it would be that life and reading cannot be separated. The great books are not meant to be merely contemplated, but to inform our lives.
The tone of the book is informal and a little bit self-obsessed, as one might expect from a Gen-Xer writing his memoirs. But Beha is not on a self-improvement kick, nor is he interested in impressing people at cocktail parties. In fact, he notes that discussions about his reading project tended to be short and awkward. His interest is as much in the nature of the Harvard Classics and the democratic notion of a universally available classical education that they embody as in the component works themselves.
As a fairly slow reader, I would be terrified at setting myself a goal like Beha’s. And I have to wonder what one can get from reading at such a galloping pace. Obviously, some works struck him as especially meaningful (e.g., Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”), while others left him cold (e.g., Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, if you can imagine). Several he read without mentioning them at all. He doesn’t seem to be of a particularly religious temperament: he passes by both Luther and the Buddha without comment. While we differ on many points, Beha and I share an affection for Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.
I’ve admitted before to a dangerous fascination with reading lists, so of course I had as much fun analyzing the list of Harvard Classics as in reading Beha’s reactions to them. It’s interesting to see what was viewed as essential reading a hundred years ago and how that has changed. A great deal of it hasn’t, which is something of a relief. Anyone with an interest in such lists at all prefers that they don’t change too violently over the years. There are some names here that I had never heard before: John Woolman (1720-1772, Quaker preacher), Izaak Walton (1593-1683, best known for The Compleat Angler, but included here as biographer of John Donne and George Herbert), Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873, author of The Betrothed), and a handful of others. But mostly, the list consists of writers of whom I at least know something, although often very little. Not surprisingly, my ignorance is greatest with regard to the Greek and Roman classics. I may well use the Harvard Classics list as a starting point for that area of study someday, although I would imagine there are now better translations.
Like any good book about reading, Beha’s memoir often made me want to throw it aside so that I could run find a copy of one of the books that he discussed. Based on his description of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography (the unlikely starting point of the set), I think I’ll be reading that soon. I also intend to take a closer look at Matthew Arnold.
Coming back to the book at hand, it is unlikely to become a classic itself, but it is an honest and frequently touching memoir of a man looking to the authors of the past to find meaning in the present. I recommend it.