Idealism and Liberal Education

A Dukedom Large Enough

A Dukedom Large Enough As one who loves and collects books, I was honored several years ago to be asked to speak at a university that had just added the two-millionth volume to its library. It had selected the Second Folio edition of William Shakespeare to mark this special occasion. Shakespeare remains our greatest maker of books, our supreme exemplar of poetic achievement, our most luminous symbol of the capacity of language to capture for all time the dilemmas ofthe human condition and the triumphs and anguish ofthe human spirit. It is a measure of Shakespeare's genius that even though he wrote primarily for the stage, we regard his work as the foremost literary achievement of our culture. When an unfettered imagination meets a work of Shakespearean literature, a miraculous transformation occurs. Those Elizabethan scripts, now almost four hundred years old, are quickened and virtually reenacted before the mind's eye. The university at which I spoke had an especially handsome building to house its collection. And yet, as impressive and essential as bricks and mortar inevitably are, I was reminded on that occasion ofthe remarks of a university librarian at the dedication of a new library building on his campus . He told the audience assembled on the lawn before that structure, "This is not the library. The library is inside." The librarian was, ofcourse, right. It is finally the collection of books-the libris-that constitutes the true substance and authentic strength of a university library. When we celebrate a university's acquisition of its two-millionth volume , we also celebrate those who undertake the daunting task of writing books. The Book ofEcclesiastes was most assuredly right in asserting that "of making many books there is no end." By sheer virtue of the size of their holdings-their marathons of shelf space and the bulk of their catalogs -libraries intimidate those prospective authors who contemplate the writing of a book. In the face of a collection of two million books, who would be presumptuous enough to believe that he or she could add to the world's store oftruly original knowledge? Who would be confident enough to think that he or she could command the attention of discriminating readers? Who 43 44 Idealism and Liberal Education would be bold enough to doubt Samuel Johnson's pronouncement that libraries are monuments to "the vanity of human wishes"? And yet tens of thousands of men and women undertake each year to write books, some doubtless motivated by vanity and others surely by professional obligation, but most by the simple desire to share their thoughts and work with others. They undertake to write books even though they recognize, as Huckleberry Finn did, that writing a book can be agony. "If I'd 'a' knowed what a trouble it was to make a book," Huck said, "I wouldn't 'a' tackled it, and ain't a-going to no more." Not only is writing a book exceedingly hard work, but the risks ofdisappointment at the conclusion of the enterprise are considerable. No matter how brilliant or imaginative or charming a book may be, there is no guarantee that it will receive the response it deserves. Because the process of historical judgment on books is, sadly, a kind of natural selectionuneven , ragged, indifferent to originality, resistant to idiosyncrasy-many authors of worthy books never receive full or proper recognition. Consider, for example, the chagrin of rejection that the historian Edward Gibbon must have felt when he presented the second volume of his great work, The History ofthe Decline and Fall ofthe Roman Empire, to the Duke of Gloucester. The duke examined the volume and said, "Another damn'd thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" We regularly misjudge the quality of books, particularly those of our contemporaries. Among the authors who never received the Nobel Prize for Literature are Chekhov, Tolstoy, Twain, Proust, Conrad, Joyce, Auden, Frost, and Nabokov-names that are themselves an honor roll of literary distinction. During the decades in which these authors were passed over, the Nobel Prize was awarded to, among others, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse, Carl Friedrich George Spitteler, Henrik Pontoppidan, Jacinto Benavente, Grazia Deledda, Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, and Harry Martinson. Who today can name even one of their books? Sic transit gloria. And yet for all our tardiness in recognizing literary worth, for all our lapses in literary judgment, we do know that an author and a book...