哈佛經典（Harvard Classics）是一套五十一卷本的經典圖書匯集，起源於
哈佛大學第二任校長
查爾斯·愛略特的「五英尺書架」（Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf），於1909年出版第一版。
艾略特在一次演講中說，人文教育可以通過每天花十五分鐘閱讀可以放在五英尺書架上的經典圖書獲得（最初的說法是三英尺）。出版商P. F. Collier and Son看到了機會並且請艾略特選擇應該包含的圖書，「哈佛經典」就是這件事情的結果。
書目
NEW YORK: P.F. COLLIER & SON, 1909–1917
- 第1卷
- His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin
- 《富蘭克林自傳》 [美]班傑明·富蘭克林/著
- Journal, by John Woolman
- 《喬治·沃爾曼日記》[美] 喬治·沃爾曼/著
- Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
- 《痛思錄》[美]威廉·配恩/著
- 第2卷
- The Apology, Phado and Crito of Plato
- 《柏拉圖對話錄：辯解篇、菲多篇、克利多篇》[希臘]柏拉圖/著
- The Golden Sayings of Epictetus
- 《愛比克泰德金言錄》[希臘] 愛比克泰德/著
- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
- 《沉思錄》 [羅馬] 馬庫思·奧勒留/著
- 第3卷
- Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon
- 培根論說文集及新阿特蘭蒂斯 [英]弗蘭西斯·培根/著
- Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton
- 米爾頓論出版自由與教育 [英]約翰·米爾頓/著
- Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
- 虔誠的醫生 [英]托馬斯·布朗爵士
- 第4卷
- Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton
- 約翰·米爾頓英文詩全集 [英]約翰·米爾頓/著
- 第5卷
- Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- 《愛默生文集》[美]拉夫·沃爾多·愛默生/著
- 第6卷
- Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns
- 《伯恩斯詩歌集》 [蘇格蘭]羅伯特·伯恩斯/著
- 第7卷
- The Confessions of Saint Augustine
- 《懺悔錄》聖奧古斯丁/著
- The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis
- 《效法基督》托瑪斯·坎皮斯/著
- 第8卷
- Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus
- Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles
- Hippolytus & The Baccha of Euripides
- The Frogs of Aristophanes
- 《希臘戲劇》埃斯庫羅斯、索福克勒斯、尤里皮德斯、阿里斯托芬/著
- 第9卷
- On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero
- 《論友誼、論老年及書信集》[羅馬]西塞羅/著
- Letters, by Pliny the Younger
- 《書信集》[羅馬]（小）普林尼/著
- 第10卷
- Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
- 《國富論》[英]亞當·斯密/著
- 第11卷
- The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
- 《物種起源論》[英]查爾斯·達爾文/著
- 第12卷
- Lives, by Plutarch
- 《比較列傳》[希臘]普盧塔克/著
- 第13卷
- AEneid, by Vergil
- 《伊尼亞德》[羅馬]維吉爾/著
- 第14卷
- Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
- 《唐吉珂德》[西班牙]塞萬提斯/著
- 第15卷
- The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan
- 《天路歷程》[英]班揚/著
- The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
- 《多恩與赫伯特生平》 [英]艾薩克·沃頓/著
- 第16卷
- Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
- 《天方夜譚》[英]愛德華·威廉·蘭訥/譯
- 第17卷
- Fables, by Aesop
- Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
- Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
- 《民間傳說與寓言》伊索、格林、安徒生/著
- 第18卷
- All for Love, by John Dryden
- The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith
- The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley
- A Blot in the 『Scutcheon, by Robert Browning
- Manfred, by Lord Byron
- 《英國現代戲劇》 [英]德萊頓；謝里丹；歌德史密斯；雪萊；勃郎寧；拜倫
- 第19卷
- Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe
- 《浮士德（第一幕）》 [德]歌德/著
- Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
- 《浮士德博士》 [英] 克里思托福·馬洛/著
- 第20卷
- The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
- 《神曲》[意]但丁/著
- 第21卷
- I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
- 《許婚的愛人》[意]曼佐尼/著
- 第22卷
- The Odyssey of Homer
- 《奧德賽》[希臘]荷馬/著
- 第23卷
- Two Years before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
- 《兩年水手生涯》[美]（小）達納/著
- 第24卷
- On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
- 《伯克文集》 [英]愛德蒙·伯克/著
- 第25卷
- Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
- 《穆勒文集》約翰·斯圖亞特·穆勒/著
- Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by Thomas Carlyle
- 《卡萊爾文集》托馬斯·卡萊爾/著
- 第26卷
- Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca
- Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille
- Phadra, by Jean Racine
- Tartuffe, by Molière
- Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
- Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
- 《歐洲大陸戲劇》卡爾德隆；高乃依；拉辛；莫里哀；萊辛；席勒/著
- 第27卷
- English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
- 《英國名家隨筆》菲利浦·錫德尼；本·簡森；亞伯拉罕·考利；約瑟夫·愛迪生；里查德·斯迪爾；斯威夫特；丹尼爾·笛福；塞繆爾·詹森；休謨；西尼·史密斯；柯勒律治；威廉·哈茲利特；韓特；蘭姆；德·昆西；雪萊；馬庫萊
- 第28卷
- Essays: English and American
- 《英國與美國名家隨筆》薩克雷；紐曼；阿諾德；羅斯金；白芝皓；赫胥黎；佛里曼；斯蒂文森；錢寧；愛倫。坡；梭羅；洛威爾
- 第29卷
- The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
- 《比格爾號上的旅行》 [英] 查爾·達爾文/著
- 第30卷
- Scientific Papers
- 《科學論文集：物理學，化學；天文學；地質學》法拉第；赫姆霍爾茲；湯姆森；紐科姆；蓋基/著
- 第31卷
- The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
- 《契里尼自傳》[意]本維努托·契里尼/著
- 第32卷
- Literary and Philosophical Essays
- 《文學和哲學名家隨筆》（法國、德國、義大利卷）蒙田；布沃；勒南；拉辛；席勒；康德；馬志尼；拜倫；歌德/著
- 第33卷
- Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern
- 《古代和現代著名航海與旅行記》希羅多德；德雷克；吉爾伯特；雷利/著
- 第34卷
- Discourse on Method, by René Descartes
- Letters on the English, by Voltaire
- On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
- 《法國和英國著名哲學家》笛卡爾；伏爾泰；盧騷；霍布斯/著
- 第35卷
- The Chronicles of Jean Froissart
- The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory
- A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
- 《見聞與傳奇》傅華薩；馬洛尼；哈里森/著
- 第36卷
- The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
- 《君王論》馬基雅維利/著
- The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper
《托馬斯.莫爾傳記》威廉.羅珀/著
- Utopia, by Sir Thomas More
- 《烏托邦》托馬斯·莫爾/著
- The Ninety-Five Thesis, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
- 《馬丁·路德論文和演講集》馬丁·路德/著
- 第37卷
- Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke
- Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, by George Berkeley
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
- 《17、18世紀英國著名哲學家》洛克；伯克利；休謨/著
- 第38卷
- The Oath of Hippocrates
- Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré
- On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey
- The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner
- The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes
- On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister
- Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur
- Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell
- 《科學論文集：物理學、醫學、外科學和地質學》帕雷；哈維；詹納；霍姆斯；利斯特；巴斯德；賴爾/著
- 第39卷
- Prefaces and Prologues
- 《名著之前言與序言》卡克斯頓；喀爾文；哥白尼；諾克斯；斯賓塞；萊利；培根；
- 第40卷
- English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
- 英文詩集（卷I）：從喬叟到格雷
- 第41卷
- English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
- 英文詩集（卷II）：從科林斯到費茲傑拉德
- 第42卷
- English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
- 英文詩集（卷III）：從丁尼生到惠特曼
- 第43卷
- American Historical Documents: 1000-1904
- 美國歷史文件：1000-1904
- 第44卷
- Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius
- Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes
- Christian I: Luke & Acts
- 聖書（卷一）：孔子；希伯來書；基督聖經（I）
- 第45卷
- Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns
- Buddhist: Writings
- Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita
- Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran
- 聖書（卷二）：基督聖經（II）；佛陀；印度教；穆罕默德
- 第46卷
- Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe
- Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
- 伊利莎白時期戲劇（卷I）：愛德華二世馬洛/著; 哈姆雷特，利爾王，麥克白，暴風驟雨 莎士比亞/著
- 第47卷
- The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker
- The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson
- Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher
- The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster
- A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
- 伊利莎白時期戲劇（卷II）：德克；詹森；博蒙特；佛萊徹；韋伯斯特；馬辛加/著
- 第48卷
- Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
- 帕斯卡文集帕斯卡/著
- 第49卷
- Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
- 史詩與傳說
- 貝奧武甫
- 羅蘭之歌
- 韃德嘎旅店的毀滅
- 沃爾松和尼貝龍根之歌
- 第50卷
- Lectures on the Harvard Classics
- 哈佛經典講座
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction[編輯]
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction was selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD (1834-1926), with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson. It also features an index to Criticisms and Interpretations.
- Vols. 1 & 2: The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding
- Vols. 1 & 2: 《湯姆·瓊斯》, 亨利·菲爾丁
- Vol. 3: A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
- Vol. 3: 《一縷芳魂》，勞倫斯·斯特恩；《傲慢與偏見》，簡·奧斯汀
- Vol. 4: Guy Mannering, by Sir Walter Scott
- Vol. 4: 《蓋伊·曼納林》，沃爾特·司各特
- Vol. 5 & 6: Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Vol. 5 & 6: 《名利場》，薩克雷
- Vols. 7 & 8: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens
- Vols. 7 & 8：《大衛·科波維爾》，查爾斯·狄更斯
- Vol. 9: The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot
- Vol. 9: 《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》，喬治. 艾略特
- Vol. 10: The Scarlet Letter & Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving; Three Short Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe; Three Short Stories, by Francis Bret Harte; Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, by Samuel L. Clemens; The Man Without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale
- Vol. 10: 《紅字》& 《拉帕帕齊尼醫生的女兒》，納撒尼爾·霍桑；《李伯大夢》 & 《沉睡谷傳奇》，華盛頓·歐文；三則短篇小說，埃德加·愛倫·坡；三則短篇小說，布雷·哈特；《吉姆•斯邁利和他的跳蛙》，薩慕爾·克萊門斯（馬克·吐溫）；《無國之人》，愛德華·埃弗雷特·希爾
- Vol. 11: The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James
- Vol. 11: 《貴婦的肖像》，亨利·詹姆斯
- Vol. 12: Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Marie Hugo
- Vol. 12: 《巴黎聖母院》，維克多·馬里·雨果
- Vol. 13: Old Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac; The Devil's Pool, by George Sand; The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset; Five Short Stories, by Alphonse Daudet; Two Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant
- Vol. 13: 《高老頭》，奧諾雷·德·巴爾扎克；《魔沼》，喬治·桑；《一隻白色黑鳥的故事》，阿爾弗萊·德·繆塞；五則短篇小說，阿爾封斯·都德；兩則短篇小說，居伊.德.莫泊桑
- Vols. 14 & 15: Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & The Sorrows of Werther, by J. W. von Goethe; The Banner of the Upright Seven, by Gottfried Keller; The Rider on the White Horse, by Theodor Storm; Trials and Tribulations, by Theodor Fontane
- Vols. 14 & 15: 《威廉·邁斯特》 & 《少年維特的煩惱》，約翰·沃爾夫岡·馮·歌德；《七個傳說》，高特費里特·凱勒；《白馬騎士》，特奧多·施托姆；，《審判與磨難》，台奧多爾·馮塔納
- Vols. 16 & 17: Anna Karenina & Ivan the Fool, by Leo Tolstoy
- Vols. 16 & 17: 《安娜·卡列尼娜》 & 《傻瓜伊萬》，列夫·托爾斯泰
- Vol. 18: Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Vol. 18: 《罪與罰》，費奧多爾·陀思妥耶夫斯基
- Vol. 19: A House of Gentlefolk & Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev
- Vol. 19: 《貴族之家》 & 《父與子》，伊萬·屠格涅夫
- Vol. 20: Pepita Jimenez, by Juan Valera; A Happy Boy, by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson; Skipper Worse, by Alexander L. Kielland
- Vol. 20: 《佩皮塔·希門尼斯》，胡安·巴雷拉；《快樂男孩》，比昂斯滕·比昂松；《Skipper Worse》亞力克山德·基蘭德
"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 become known as modernism. When he finished his introduction to the Harvard Classics in March of that same year, Charles William Eliot 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 capsule from that era just about to end. In 50 volumes
we have a record of what President Eliot's America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage--a monument from a more humane and confident time. It is surprisingly easy, even today, to find a complete set of the Harvard Classics in good condition. At least one is usually for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site, for $300 or so, a bargain at $6 a book. The supply, from attics or private libraries around the country, seems endless--a tribute to the success of the publisher, P.F. Collier, who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series' initial publication.
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 audience 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 convinced Eliot to say yes. He enlisted professor of English William A. Neilson, later the president of Smith College, to act as his assistant, and secured the approval of the Board of Overseers for the series' name. Eliot and Neilson worked for a year, the former deciding "what should be included, and what should be excluded," while the latter was responsible for "introductions and notes" and the "choice among different 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 include and exclude called forth articles and letters to the editor across the country.
In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a museum display-case of the "world's best books," but as a portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no particular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set of six courses: "The History of Civilization," "Religion and Philosophy," "Education," "Science," "Politics," and "Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts." But in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is "Progress"--progress in each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human race as a whole. Eliot's introduction expresses complete faith in the "intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization," "the upward tendency of the human race."
Eliot's life was spent in the cultivation of that tendency. He built up Harvard into one of the world's great universities, vastly expanded its student body, course offerings, and faculty, and became a sort of public oracle on questions of education. He was one of the most effective evangelists for what the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold called "sweetness and light." Samuel Eliot Morison, in Three Centuries of Harvard, describes Eliot as a representative of "the best of his age--that forward-looking half-century before the World War, when democracy seemed capable of putting all crooked ways straight--the age of reason and of action, of accomplishment and of hope."
But already in 1936, when Morison wrote, Eliot's variety of optimism seemed sadly obsolete. Today we are proudly alert to the blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress. Three thinkers whose names appear nowhere in the Harvard Classics--Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--have taught us a new, more suspicious kind of reading, in which an author's motives are to be questioned, probed, overturned.
The Classics, in particular, cry out for such questioning. The series is authorless--there is only an editor, conducting his chorus of texts. Yet the way those texts are selected and arranged speaks volumes--literally. To take an obvious example, the total exclusion of female authors would be impossible today; at the time, it would hardly have been noticed. But the series' more profound limitations can be found in its treatment of science, philosophy, and literature--the most interesting and substantial of Eliot's six "courses." In these areas, the Harvard Classics serve as an index to just how much the world really has changed since 1910.
Perhaps the most consequential difference between Eliot's time and our own has to do with science, a subject dear to Eliot, a chemist at MIT when he was called to the presidency of Harvard. In his inaugural lecture, he adamantly refused to make any choice between "mathematics or classics, science or metaphysics," and the series follows the same precept. It contains no textbooks; rather, in keeping with his policy of using unabridged original texts, Eliot included treatises in which major scientific discoveries were announced--Harvey on the circulation of the blood, Pasteur on the germ theory--or educational works by genuine scientists, like Faraday's The Forces of Matter. With laudable if excessive enthusiasm, Eliot gave two of his 50 volumes to Darwin, for The Origin of Species and The Voyage of the Beagle. And the volume of "Famous Prefaces" contains the forewords to Copernicus's Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies and Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Clearly, this is not a basis for a complete scientific education, nor was it intended to be. The Classics provide something smaller but rarer--a humanistic appreciation of science. They bring to life a period when science was still, in William Harvey's phrase, a "department of the republic of letters." In our own time, we see science victorious, the acknowledged ruler of human destiny; in the Harvard Classics we find the more inspiring spectacle of science militant, the proud, embattled rationality that fought against ignorance and superstition for centuries.
We can hear this note already, though tentatively, in Copernicus, who resolves that "I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics." But the trumpet-call is sounded by Francis Bacon, in the preface to his Instauratio Magna. Bacon denies "that the inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted and forbidden....the divine philosopher declares that 'it is the glory of God to conceal a thing, but it is the glory of the King to find a thing out.' Even as though the divine nature took pleasure in the innocent and kindly sport of children playing at hide and seek, and vouchsafed of his kindness and goodness to admit the human spirit for his playfellow at that game."
Bacon's confidence in the power of human reason is authorized by a touching faith that science and religion go hand in hand. This view of science, so different from the secular positivism of the twentieth century, can be found everywhere in the Harvard Classics. Newton and Faraday were very religious men, and even Darwin writes respectfully about the divine. Yet as we approach 1910, we can already see this confidence souring into arrogance. T.H. Huxley, in his 1880 essay "Science and Culture," sounds the more familiar note of our own day: the overweening certainty that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge. He condescends to the Christian Middle Ages, gives a pat on the head to classical education, but admits no doubt about where the future lies: the modern "scientific 'criticism of life' presents itself to us with different credentials from any other."
At the same time, the language of science was growing completely estranged from that of "the republic of letters." Already in 1910, Eliot writes that "it was hard to make up an adequate representation of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century," because "the discoverers' original papers...have naturally been expressed in technical language." And it is inconceivable that the scientific advances of the twentieth century could be represented by original documents. We are condemned to live in the age of C.P. Snow's "two cultures."
Even more important, we are no longer so certain that science is purely a benefit to mankind. The hideous evils of the twentieth century--world wars, concentration camps, atomic bombs--were made possible by technological advance; the banality of modern culture is a product of miraculous technologies: radio and television. And it remains to be seen whether the frenzy of industry will make the earth uninhabitable through pollution and despoliation. In power and self-regard, science continues to progress. But in moral terms, the Harvard Classics 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 doubtful, the limitations of the Harvard Classics in the area of philosophy must have been glaring even in 1910. Aristotle and Aquinas are entirely absent, thus leaving out the major intellectual 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 centuries 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 government; only one unrepresentative chapter of Hobbes's Leviathan.Berkeley and Hume fare best of all, and Mill is almost excessively favored--Eliot makes room not just for On Liberty but for his Autobiography.
The common theme in these selections and omissions is a settled distrust of abstract thought; in every case, Eliot prefers autobiography 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 understand 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 philosophy that one takes away from the Harvard Classics is direly limited. The intellectual wonder that Plato called the origin of philosophy has little place here. Instead, the series uses philosophy to teach a particular manly ethic, a stoical toughness in the conduct of life.
In a good example of the power of context, the editors manage to make Plato himself seem merely a teacher of stoicism. Volume 2 contains three Platonic works--the Apology, the Crito,and the Phaedo--along with the aphorisms of Epictetus and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Together, the Platonic dialogues tell the story of Socrates' martyrdom: his condemnation by the assembly of Athens, his refusal to flee judgment, and his resolute drinking of the hemlock. It is one of the great moral legends of the West, and certainly deserves a place in the series.
Yet by choosing only these works, and placing them alongside the much narrower stoicism of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the series encourages us to read it simply as a legend--to make Socrates an example of heroism, while ignoring what he heroically defended. It is like reading the parts of the Gospels dealing with the Passion, and ignoring the Sermon on the Mount. How different Plato would appear if, instead of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, this volume contained the Symposium, the Republic, and the Phaedrus, with their teachings about love and politics. Then we could see beyond Socrates the symbol to Plato the philosopher.
But Eliot values philosophy when it tells a real story with practical applications, providing symbols of manliness on which readers of the Harvard Classics could pattern themselves. (In his excellent book Manhood at Harvard, Kim Townsend has shown that the rhetoric of manliness dominated Eliot's Harvard, from the classroom to the football field [see "The Manly Ideal," November-December 1966, page 25].) Thus Augustine's Confessions is present, but not his City of God. Locke on education is well worth reading--it is marvelous to see how he applies his theory of the association of ideas to the problem of getting a child to have regular bowel movements--but not at the expense of his treatises on government and psychology. And the radically disturbing thinkers of the nineteenth century--Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche--were either unknown or unwelcome to Eliot. One begins to suspect, perhaps unfairly, that his ideal work of philosophy is Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, included in the very first volume of the series: a book that shows a man overcoming obstacles, doing useful work, going to bed early, and rising healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Finally, there is the question of literature. Many of the literary selections in the Harvard Classics are indisputable--no one would put together such a series without including the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and the plays of Shakespeare (though, in fact, Eliot selected only four of these). In the traditional genres of epic and verse drama, the Harvard Classics does an estimable job.
The problem begins in the eighteenth century, with the rise of the novel as the major literary form. Eliot stated quite reasonably that the series would include no fiction from the nineteenth century, "partly because of its great bulk, and partly because it is easily accessible." (This gap was partially remedied in 1917 when he edited a separate 20-volume supplement, the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction--a worthy but conventional and very limited selection.) Yet the effect of eliminating the novel from the Harvard Classics, while including other kinds of fiction, is to severely unbalance the whole series.
Indeed, it seems that imaginative literature, as a category, did not seem entirely reputable to Eliot. Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are classics and therefore inevitable; but wherever there is more leeway in the selection, the series tends to favor childish works of adventure and fantasy. The Thousand and One Nights and a volume of fairy tales are fine reading, but they have the effect of making the imagination seem a juvenile thing, a holiday from the serious business of life. Perhaps it is for a similar reason that Eliot includes the Odyssey, the picaresque story of travels and monsters, and omits the Iliad, the brutal chronicle of vanity, ambition, and war.
Similarly, when Eliot is enthusiastic about poems it is because they have what might be called "real-world applications." Poetry, like philosophy, is valued mainly as another vehicle of uplift and toughness; it is a record of humanity's "gradually developed ethical means of purifying [the] sentiments and controlling [the] passions." As he writes in his introduction, "the poems of John Milton and Robert Burns are given in full; because the works of these two very unlike poets contain social, religious and governmental teachings of vital concern for modern democracies." But there is no volume for Chaucer, a far more democratic spirit than Milton, possibly because the Canterbury Tales offers fictional characters, not paraphrasable "teachings."
And what is genuinely vital in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is largely absent. The volume of "Modern English Drama" is composed largely of inert verse plays, such as Byron's Manfred, which were never intended for the stage; the only European novel in the series, rather inexplicably, is Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)--a selection chalked up to "the taste of his youth" by Eliot's biographer. There is something obviously flawed about a criterion that admits Richard Henry Dana's moderately interesting memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, because it is "fact," but has no place for Moby Dick, because it is "fiction."
Thus it is in the field of literature that it becomes most tempting to play the game of re-editing the Harvard Classics. To replace Dana with Melville, Manzoni with Tolstoy, and "Modern English Drama" with Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov; to find room for Lawrence, Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Kafka--this would be the most important step toward updating the series for 2001. A new Harvard Classics would have to recognize that literature is a part of education, and perhaps the most important part.
But immediately, other corrections and additions spring to mind. In 1910, the series included Adam Smith; in 2001 we would have to add Karl Marx. We would doubtless keep The Origin of Species, but perhaps The Voyage of the Beagle could be replaced by a twentieth-century equivalent like J.D. Watson's The Double Helix. Freud would be indispensable--if not as the successor to Harvey and Jenner, then as the heir of Plato and Goethe. Up from Slavery would make a good replacement for the journals of the Quakers John Woolman and William Penn; Thoreau could share space in the volume now devoted to Emerson. The sententious Cicero could make room for the disillusioned Tacitus.
And so on, endlessly, until we have inflated the five-foot shelf to the size of Widener Library. It would hardly be worthwhile simply to point to what's missing from the Harvard Classics of 1910, since a Harvard Classics of 2001 would soon look just as inadequate. And perhaps it would be impossible, today, to present any group of books as an essential library, when the very idea of cultural authority is so bitterly disputed--in the university as well as outside it. President Eliot's "five-foot-shelf" survives, not as a definitive canon, but as an inspiring testimony to his faith in the possibility of democratic education without the loss of high standards. If we scrutinize it today for its shortcomings, we are only paying it the tribute of applying our own standards, the products of a darker and more skeptical age.
Adam Kirsch '97 is a poet and critic living in New York City.
Your Harvard Classics
What books would you choose for a twenty-first century Harvard Classics? Harvard Magazine invites readers to submit lists of 10 books, excluding the following titles and authors, deemed likely consensus choices: Bible, Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad-Gita, Koran, Homer, Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, Goethe, Hegel, Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, Marx, Freud, Einstein. Submit responses via our website, www.harvard-magazine.com, or by mail or e-mail. A future issue will report results of this informal survey.
