ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF THE WORK OF JESUS.
Jesus, it will be seen, limited his action entirely to the Jews.
Although his sympathy for those despised by orthodoxy led him to admit
pagans into the kingdom of God--although he had resided more than once
in a pagan country, and once or twice we surprise him in kindly
relations with unbelievers[1]--it may be said that his life was passed
entirely in the very restricted world in which he was born. He was
never heard of in Greek or Roman countries; his name appears only in
profane authors of a hundred years later, and then in an indirect
manner, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his
doctrine, or persecutions of which his disciples were the object.[2]
Even on Judaism, Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who
died about the year 50, had not the slightest knowledge of him.
Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the
century, mentions his execution in a few lines,[3] as an event of
secondary importance, and in the enumeration of the sects of his time,
he omits the Christians altogether.[4] In the _Mishnah_, also, there
is no trace of the new school; the passages in the two Gemaras in
which the founder of Christianity is named, do not go further back
than the fourth or fifth century.[5] The essential work of Jesus was
to create around him a circle of disciples, whom he inspired with
boundless affection, and amongst whom he deposited the germ of his
doctrine. To have made himself beloved, "to the degree that after his
death they ceased not to love him," was the great work of Jesus, and
that which most struck his contemporaries.[6] His doctrine was so
little dogmatic, that he never thought of writing it or of causing it
to be written. Men did not become his disciples by believing this
thing or that thing, but in being attached to his person and in loving
him. A few sentences collected from memory, and especially the type of
character he set forth, and the impression it had left, were what
remained of him. Jesus was not a founder of dogmas, or a maker of
creeds; he infused into the world a new spirit. The least Christian
men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who,
beginning from the fourth century, entangled Christianity in a path of
puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other, the scholastics
of the Latin Middle Ages, who wished to draw from the Gospel the
thousands of articles of a colossal system. To follow Jesus in
expectation of the kingdom of God, was all that at first was implied
by being Christian.
[Footnote 1: Matt. viii. 5, and following; Luke vii. 1, and following;
John xii. 20, and following. Comp. Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 3.]
[Footnote 2: Tacitus, _Ann._, xv. 45; Suetonius, _Claudius_, 25.]
[Footnote 3: _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 3. This passage has been altered by a
Christian hand.]
[Footnote 4: _Ant._, XVIII. i.; _B.J._, II. viii.; _Vita_, 2.]
[Footnote 5: Talm. of Jerusalem, _Sanhedrim_, xiv. 16; _Aboda zara_,
ii. 2; _Shabbath_, xiv. 4; Talm. of Babylon, _Sanhedrim_, 43 _a_, 67
_a_; _Shabbath_, 104 _b_, 116 _b_. Comp. _Chagigah_, 4 _b_; _Gittin_,
57 _a_, 90 _a_. The two Gemaras derive the greater part of their data
respecting Jesus from a burlesque and obscene legend, invented by the
adversaries of Christianity, and of no historical value.]
[Footnote 6: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 3.]
It will thus be understood how, by an exceptional destiny, pure
Christianity still preserves, after eighteen centuries, the character
of a universal and eternal religion. It is, in fact, because the
religion of Jesus is in some respects the final religion. Produced by
a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, freed at its birth from all
dogmatic restraint, having struggled three hundred years for liberty
of conscience, Christianity, in spite of its failures, still reaps the
results of its glorious origin. To renew itself, it has but to return
to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, differs notably
from the supernatural apparition which the first Christians hoped to
see appear in the clouds. But the sentiment introduced by Jesus into
the world is indeed ours. His perfect idealism is the highest rule of
the unblemished and virtuous life. He has created the heaven of pure
souls, where is found what we ask for in vain on earth, the perfect
nobility of the children of God, absolute purity, the total removal of
the stains of the world; in fine, liberty, which society excludes as
an impossibility, and which exists in all its amplitude only in the
domain of thought. The great Master of those who take refuge in this
ideal kingdom of God is still Jesus. He was the first to proclaim the
royalty of the mind; the first to say, at least by his actions, "My
kingdom is not of this world." The foundation of true religion is
indeed his work: after him, all that remains is to develop it and
render it fruitful.
"Christianity" has thus become almost a synonym of "religion." All
that is done outside of this great and good Christian tradition is
barren. Jesus gave religion to humanity, as Socrates gave it
philosophy, and Aristotle science. There was philosophy before
Socrates and science before Aristotle. Since Socrates and since
Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress; but all
has been built upon the foundation which they laid. In the same way,
before Jesus, religious thought had passed through many revolutions;
since Jesus, it has made great conquests: but no one has improved, and
no one will improve upon the essential principle Jesus has created; he
has fixed forever the idea of pure worship. The religion of Jesus in
this sense is not limited. The Church has had its epochs and its
phases; it has shut itself up in creeds which are, or will be but
temporary: but Jesus has founded the absolute religion, excluding
nothing, and determining nothing unless it be the spirit. His creeds
are not fixed dogmas, but images susceptible of indefinite
interpretations. We should seek in vain for a theological proposition
in the Gospel. All confessions of faith are travesties of the idea of
Jesus, just as the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming
Aristotle the sole master of a completed science, perverted the
thought of Aristotle. Aristotle, if he had been present in the debates
of the schools, would have repudiated this narrow doctrine; he would
have been of the party of progressive science against the routine
which shielded itself under his authority; he would have applauded his
opponents. In the same way, if Jesus were to return among us, he would
recognize as disciples, not those who pretend to enclose him entirely
in a few catechismal phrases, but those who labor to carry on his
work. The eternal glory, in all great things, is to have laid the
first stone. It may be that in the "Physics," and in the "Meteorology"
of modern times, we may not discover a word of the treatises of
Aristotle which bear these titles; but Aristotle remains no less the
founder of natural science. Whatever may be the transformations of
dogma, Jesus will ever be the creator of the pure spirit of religion;
the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed. Whatever revolution
takes place will not prevent us attaching ourselves in religion to
the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which shines the
name of Jesus. In this sense we are Christians, even when we separate
ourselves on almost all points from the Christian tradition which has
preceded us.
And this great foundation was indeed the personal work of Jesus. In
order to make himself adored to this degree, he must have been
adorable. Love is not enkindled except by an object worthy of it, and
we should know nothing of Jesus, if it were not for the passion he
inspired in those about him, which compels us still to affirm that he
was great and pure. The faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the
first Christian generation is not explicable, except by supposing at
the origin of the whole movement, a man of surpassing greatness. At
the sight of the marvellous creations of the ages of faith, two
impressions equally fatal to good historical criticism arise in the
mind. On the one hand we are led to think these creations too
impersonal; we attribute to a collective action, that which has often
been the work of one powerful will, and of one superior mind. On the
other hand, we refuse to see men like ourselves in the authors of
those extraordinary movements which have decided the fate of humanity.
Let us have a larger idea of the powers which Nature conceals in her
bosom. Our civilizations, governed by minute restrictions, cannot give
us any idea of the power of man at periods in which the originality of
each one had a freer field wherein to develop itself. Let us imagine a
recluse dwelling in the mountains near our capitals, coming out from
time to time in order to present himself at the palaces of sovereigns,
compelling the sentinels to stand aside, and, with an imperious tone,
announcing to kings the approach of revolutions of which he had been
the promoter. The very idea provokes a smile. Such, however, was
Elias; but Elias the Tishbite, in our days, would not be able to pass
the gate of the Tuileries. The preaching of Jesus, and his free
activity in Galilee, do not deviate less completely from the social
conditions to which we are accustomed. Free from our polished
conventionalities, exempt from the uniform education which refines us,
but which so greatly dwarfs our individuality, these mighty souls
carried a surprising energy into action. They appear to us like the
giants of an heroic age, which could not have been real. Profound
error! Those men were our brothers; they were of our stature, felt and
thought as we do. But the breath of God was free in them; with us, it
is restrained by the iron bonds of a mean society, and condemned to an
irremediable mediocrity.
Let us place, then, the person of Jesus at the highest summit of human
greatness. Let us not be misled by exaggerated doubts in the presence
of a legend which keeps us always in a superhuman world. The life of
Francis d'Assisi is also but a tissue of miracles. Has any one,
however, doubted of the existence of Francis d'Assisi, and of the part
played by him? Let us say no more that the glory of the foundation of
Christianity belongs to the multitude of the first Christians, and not
to him whom legend has deified. The inequality of men is much more
marked in the East than with us. It is not rare to see arise there, in
the midst of a general atmosphere of wickedness, characters whose
greatness astonishes us. So far from Jesus having been created by his
disciples, he appeared in everything as superior to his disciples. The
latter, with the exception of St. Paul and St. John, were men without
either invention or genius. St. Paul himself bears no comparison with
Jesus, and as to St. John, I shall show hereafter, that the part he
played, though very elevated in one sense, was far from being in all
respects irreproachable. Hence the immense superiority of the Gospels
among the writings of the New Testament. Hence the painful fall we
experience in passing from the history of Jesus to that of the
apostles. The evangelists themselves, who have bequeathed us the image
of Jesus, are so much beneath him of whom they speak, that they
constantly disfigure him, from their inability to attain to his
height. Their writings are full of errors and misconceptions. We feel
in each line a discourse of divine beauty, transcribed by narrators
who do not understand it, and who substitute their own ideas for those
which they have only half understood. On the whole, the character of
Jesus, far from having been embellished by his biographers, has been
lowered by them. Criticism, in order to find what he was, needs to
discard a series of misconceptions, arising from the inferiority of
the disciples. These painted him as they understood him, and often in
thinking to raise him, they have in reality lowered him.
I know that our modern ideas have been offended more than once in this
legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst
of other social wants. There are virtues which, in some respects, are
more conformable to our taste. The virtuous and gentle Marcus
Aurelius, the humble and gentle Spinoza, not having believed in
miracles, have been free from some errors that Jesus shared. Spinoza,
in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek.
By our extreme delicacy in the use of means of conviction, by our
absolute sincerity and our disinterested love of the pure idea, we
have founded--all we who have devoted our lives to science--a new
ideal of morality. But the judgment of general history ought not to be
restricted to considerations of personal merit. Marcus Aurelius and
his noble teachers have had no permanent influence on the world.
Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son,
and a decaying nation. Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of
moral regeneration for humanity. Philosophy does not suffice for the
multitude. They must have sanctity. An Apollonius of Tyana, with his
miraculous legend, is necessarily more successful than a Socrates with
his cold reason. "Socrates," it was said, "leaves men on the earth,
Apollonius transports them to heaven; Socrates is but a sage,
Apollonius is a god."[1] Religion, so far, has not existed without a
share of asceticism, of piety, and of the marvellous. When it was
wished, after the Antonines, to make a religion of philosophy, it was
requisite to transform the philosophers into saints, to write the
"Edifying Life" of Pythagoras or Plotinus, to attribute to them a
legend, virtues of abstinence, contemplation, and supernatural powers,
without which neither credence nor authority were found in that age.
[Footnote 1: Philostratus, _Life of Apollonius_, i. 2, vii. 11, viii.
7; Unapius, _Lives of the Sophists_, pages 454, 500 (edition Didot).]
Preserve us, then, from mutilating history in order to satisfy our
petty susceptibilities! Which of us, pigmies as we are, could do what
the extravagant Francis d'Assisi, or the hysterical saint Theresa, has
done? Let medicine have names to express these grand errors of human
nature; let it maintain that genius is a disease of the brain; let it
see, in a certain delicacy of morality, the commencement of
consumption; let it class enthusiasm and love as nervous
accidents--it matters little. The terms healthy and diseased are
entirely relative. Who would not prefer to be diseased like Pascal,
rather than healthy like the common herd? The narrow ideas which are
spread in our times respecting madness, mislead our historical
judgments in the most serious manner, in questions of this kind. A
state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in
which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will,
exposes him to being confined as a lunatic. Formerly this was called
prophecy and inspiration. The most beautiful things in the world are
done in a state of fever; every great creation involves a breach of
equilibrium, a violent state of the being which draws it forth.
We acknowledge, indeed, that Christianity is too complex to have been
the work of a single man. In one sense, entire humanity has
co-operated therein. There is no one so shut in, as not to receive
some influence from without. The history of the human mind is full of
strange coincidences, which cause very remote portions of the human
species, without any communication with each other, to arrive at the
same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations. In the
thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and
the Mussulmans, adopted scholasticism, and very nearly the same
scholasticism from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century every
one in Italy, Persia, and India, yielded to the taste for mystical
allegory; in the sixteenth, art was developed in a very similar manner
in Italy, at Mount Athos, and at the court of the Great Moguls,
without St. Thomas, Barhebræus, the Rabbis of Narbonne, or the
_Motécallémin_ of Bagdad, having known each other, without Dante and
Petrarch having seen any _sofi_, without any pupil of the schools of
Perouse or of Florence having been at Delhi. We should say there are
great moral influences running through the world like epidemics,
without distinction of frontier and of race. The interchange of ideas
in the human species does not take place only by books or by direct
instruction. Jesus was ignorant of the very name of Buddha, of
Zoroaster, and of Plato; he had read no Greek book, no Buddhist Sudra;
nevertheless, there was in him more than one element, which, without
his suspecting it, came from Buddhism, Parseeism, or from the Greek
wisdom. All this was done through secret channels and by that kind of
sympathy which exists among the various portions of humanity. The
great man, on the one hand, receives everything from his age; on the
other, he governs his age. To show that the religion founded by Jesus
was the natural consequence of that which had gone before, does not
diminish its excellence; but only proves that it had a reason for its
existence that it was legitimate, that is to say, conformable to the
instinct and wants of the heart in a given age.
Is it more just to say that Jesus owes all to Judaism, and that his
greatness is only that of the Jewish people? No one is more disposed
than myself to place high this unique people, whose particular gift
seems to have been to contain in its midst the extremes of good and
evil. No doubt, Jesus proceeded from Judaism; but he proceeded from it
as Socrates proceeded from the schools of the Sophists, as Luther
proceeded from the Middle Ages, as Lamennais from Catholicism, as
Rousseau from the eighteenth century. A man is of his age and his race
even when he reacts against his age and his race. Far from Jesus
having continued Judaism, he represents the rupture with the Jewish
spirit. The general direction of Christianity after him does not
permit the supposition that his idea in this respect could lead to any
misunderstanding. The general march of Christianity has been to remove
itself more and more from Judaism. It will become perfect in returning
to Jesus, but certainly not in returning to Judaism. The great
originality of the founder remains then undiminished; his glory admits
no legitimate sharer.
Doubtless, circumstances much aided the success of this marvellous
revolution; but circumstances only second that which is just and true.
Each branch of the development of humanity has its privileged epoch,
in which it attains perfection by a sort of spontaneous instinct, and
without effort. No labor of reflection would succeed in producing
afterward the masterpieces which Nature creates at those moments by
inspired geniuses. That which the golden age of Greece was for arts
and literature, the age of Jesus was for religion. Jewish society
exhibited the most extraordinary moral and intellectual state which
the human species has ever passed through. It was truly one of those
divine hours in which the sublime is produced by combinations of a
thousand hidden forces, in which great souls find a flood of
admiration and sympathy to sustain them. The world, delivered from the
very narrow tyranny of small municipal republics, enjoyed great
liberty. Roman despotism did not make itself felt in a disastrous
manner until much later, and it was, moreover, always less oppressive
in those distant provinces than in the centre of the empire. Our petty
preventive interferences (far more destructive than death to things of
the spirit) did not exist. Jesus, during three years, could lead a
life which, in our societies, would have brought him twenty times
before the magistrates. Our laws upon the illegal exercise of medicine
would alone have sufficed to cut short his career. The unbelieving
dynasty of the Herods, on the other hand, occupied itself little with
religious movements; under the Asmoneans, Jesus would probably have
been arrested at his first step. An innovator, in such a state of
society, only risked death, and death is a gain to those who labor for
the future. Imagine Jesus reduced to bear the burden of his divinity
until his sixtieth or seventieth year, losing his celestial fire,
wearing out little by little under the burden of an unparalleled
mission! Everything favors those who have a special destiny; they
become glorious by a sort of invincible impulse and command of fate.
This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of
the world, we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has
absorbed all the divine, or has been adequate to it (to employ an
expression of the schoolmen), but in the sense that Jesus is the one
who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the
divine. Mankind in its totality offers an assemblage of low beings,
selfish, and superior to the animal only in that its selfishness is
more reflective. From the midst of this uniform mediocrity, there are
pillars that rise toward the sky, and bear witness to a nobler
destiny. Jesus is the highest of these pillars which show to man
whence he comes, and whither he ought to tend. In him was condensed
all that is good and elevated in our nature. He was not sinless; he
has conquered the same passions that we combat; no angel of God
comforted him, except his good conscience; no Satan tempted him,
except that which each one bears in his heart. In the same way that
many of his great qualities are lost to us, through the fault of his
disciples, it is also probable that many of his faults have been
concealed. But never has any one so much as he made the interests of
humanity predominate in his life over the littlenesses of self-love.
Unreservedly devoted to his mission, he subordinated everything to it
to such a degree that, toward the end of his life, the universe no
longer existed for him. It was by this access of heroic will that he
conquered heaven. There never was a man, Cakya-Mouni perhaps excepted,
who has to this degree trampled under foot, family, the joys of this
world, and all temporal care. Jesus only lived for his Father and the
divine mission which he believed himself destined to fulfill.
As to us, eternal children, powerless as we are, we who labor without
reaping, and who will never see the fruit of that which we have sown,
let us bow before these demi-gods. They were able to do that which we
cannot do: to create, to affirm, to act. Will great originality be
born again, or will the world content itself henceforth by following
the ways opened by the bold creators of the ancient ages? We know not.
But whatever may be the unexpected phenomena of the future, Jesus will
not be surpassed. His worship will constantly renew its youth, the
tale of his life will cause ceaseless tears, his sufferings will
soften the best hearts; all the ages will proclaim that among the sons
of men, there is none born who is greater than Jesus.
[THE END.]
_Modern Library of the World's Best Books_
COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN
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ADAMS, HENRY The Education of Henry Adams 76
AIKEN, CONRAD A Comprehensive Anthology of
American Poetry 101
AIKEN, CONRAD 20th-Century American Poetry 127
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD Winesburg, Ohio 104
AQUINAS, ST. THOMAS Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas 259
ARISTOTLE Introduction to Aristotle 248
ARISTOTLE Politics 228
BALZAC Droll Stories 193
BALZAC Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet 245
BEERBOHM, MAX Zuleika Dobson 116
BELLAMY, EDWARD Looking Backward 22
BENNETT, ARNOLD The Old Wives' Tale 184
BERGSON, HENRI Creative Evolution 231
BIERCE, AMBROSE In the Midst of Life 133
BOCCACCIO The Decameron 71
BRONTË, CHARLOTTE Jane Eyre 64
BRONTË, EMILY Wuthering Heights 106
BUCK, PEARL The Good Earth 15
BURK, JOHN N. The Life and Works of Beethoven 241
BURTON, RICHARD The Arabian Nights 201
BUTLER, SAMUEL Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136
BUTLER, SAMUEL The Way of All Flesh 13
BYRNE, DONN Messer Marco Polo 43
CALDWELL, ERSKINE God's Little Acre 51
CALDWELL, ERSKINE Tobacco Road 249
CANFIELD, DOROTHY The Deepening Stream 200
CARROLL, LEWIS Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79
CASANOVA, JACQUES Memoirs of Casanova 165
CELLINI, BENVENUTO Autobiography of Cellini 150
CERVANTES Don Quixote 174
CHAUCER The Canterbury Tales 161
COMMAGER, HENRY STEELE A Short History of the United States 235
CONFUCIUS The Wisdom of Confucius 7
CONRAD, JOSEPH Heart of Darkness
(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)
CONRAD, JOSEPH Lord Jim 186
CONRAD, JOSEPH Victory 186
CORNEILLE and RACINE Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194
CORVO, FREDERICK BARON A History of the Borgias 192
CRANE, STEPHEN The Red Badge of Courage 130
CUMMINGS, E.E. The Enormous Room 214
DANA, RICHARD HENRY Two Years Before the Mast 236
DANTE The Divine Comedy 208
DAY, CLARENCE Life with Father 230
DEFOE, DANIEL Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the
Plague Year 92
DEFOE, DANIEL Moll Flanders 122
DEWEY, JOHN Human Nature and Conduct 173
DICKENS, CHARLES A Tale of Two Cities 189
DICKENS, CHARLES David Copperfield 110
DICKENS, CHARLES Pickwick Papers 204
DICKINSON, EMILY Selected Poems of 25
DINESEN, ISAK Seven Gothic Tales 54
DOS PASSOS, JOHN Three Soldiers 205
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR Crime and Punishment 199
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR The Brothers Karamazov 151
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR The Possessed 55
DOUGLAS, NORMAN South Wind 5
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes 206
DREISER, THEODORE Sister Carrie 8
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE Camille 69
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE The Three Musketeers 143
DU MAURIER, DAPHNE Rebecca 227
DU MAURIER, GEORGE Peter Ibbetson 207
EDMAN, IRWIN The Philosophy of Plato 181
EDMAN, IRWIN The Philosophy of Santayana 224
ELLIS, HAVELOCK The Dance of Life 160
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO Essays and Other Writings 91
FAST, HOWARD The Unvanquished 239
FAULKNER, WILLIAM Sanctuary 61
FAULKNER, WILLIAM The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay
Dying 187
FIELDING, HENRY Joseph Andrews 117
FIELDING, HENRY Tom Jones 185
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE Madame Bovary 28
FORESTER, C.S. The African Queen 102
FORSTER, E.M. A Passage to India 218
FRANCE, ANATOLE Penguin Island 210
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN Autobiography, etc. 39
FROST, ROBERT The Poems of 242
GALSWORTHY, JOHN The Apple Tree
(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)
GAUTIER, THEOPHILE Mlle. De Maupin and
One of Cleopatra's Nights 53
GEORGE, HENRY Progress and Poverty 36
GODDEN, RUMER Black Narcissus 256
GOETHE Faust 177
GOETHE The Sorrows of Werther
(In Collected German Stories 108)
GOGOL, NIKOLAI Dead Souls 40
GRAVES, ROBERT I, Claudius 20
HAMMETT, DASHIELL The Maltese Falcon 45
HAMSUN, KNUT Growth of the Soil 12
HARDY, THOMAS Jude the Obscure 135
HARDY, THOMAS The Mayor of Casterbridge 17
HARDY, THOMAS The Return of the Native 121
HARDY, THOMAS Tess of the D'Urbervilles 72
HART AND KAUFMAN Six Plays by 233
HARTE, BRET The Best Stories of 250
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL The Scarlet Letter 93
HELLMAN, LILLIAN Four Plays by 223
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST A Farewell to Arms 19
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST The Sun Also Rises 170
HEMON, LOUIS Maria Chapdelaine 10
HENRY, O. Best Short Stones of 4
HERODOTUS The Complete Works of 255
HERSEY, JOHN A Bell for Adano 16
HOMER The Iliad 166
HOMER The Odyssey 167
HORACE The Complete Works of 141
HUDSON, W.H. Green Mansions 89
HUDSON, W.H. The Purple Land 24
HUGHES, RICHARD A High Wind in Jamaica 112
HUGO, VICTOR The Hunchback of Notre Dame 35
HUXLEY, ALDOUS Antic Hay 209
HUXLEY, ALDOUS Point Counter Point 180
IBSEN, HENRIK A Doll's House, Ghosts, etc. 6
IRVING, WASHINGTON Selected Writings of Washington Irving
240
JACKSON, CHARLES The Lost Weekend 258
JAMES, HENRY The Portrait of a Lady 107
JAMES, HENRY The Turn of the Screw 169
JAMES, HENRY The Wings of the Dove 244
JAMES, WILLIAM The Philosophy of William James 114
JAMES, WILLIAM The Varieties of Religious Experience 70
JEFFERS, WILLIAM Roan Stallion; Tamar and Other
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JEFFERSON, THOMAS The Life and Selected Writings of 234
JOYCE, JAMES Dubliners 124
JOYCE, JAMES A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
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KAUFMAN AND HART Six Plays by 233
KOESTLER, ARTHUR Darkness at Noon 74
KUPRIN, ALEXANDRE Yama 203
LAOTSE The Wisdom of 262
LARDNER, RING The Collected Short Stories of 211
LAWRENCE, D.H. The Rainbow 128
LAWRENCE, D.H. Sons and Lovers 109
LAWRENCE, D.H. Women in Love 68
LEWIS, SINCLAIR Arrowsmith 42
LEWIS, SINCLAIR Babbitt 162
LEWIS, SINCLAIR Dodsworth 252
LONGFELLOW, HENRY W. Poems 56
LOUYS, PIERRE Aphrodite 77
LUDWIG, EMIL Napoleon 95
MACHIAVELLI The Prince and The Discourses of
Machiavelli 65
MALRAUX, ANDRÉ Man's Fate 33
MANN, THOMAS Death in Venice
(In Collected German Stories 108)
MANSFIELD, KATHERINE The Garden Party 129
MARQUAND, JOHN P. The Late George Apley 182
MARX, KARL Capital and Other Writings 202
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET Of Human Bondage 176
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET The Moon and Sixpence 27
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE Best Short Stories 98
MAUROIS, ANDRÉ Disraeli 46
McFEE, WILLIAM Casuals of the Sea 195
MELVILLE, HERMAN Moby Dick 119
MEREDITH, GEORGE Diana of the Crossways 14
MEREDITH, GEORGE The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 134
MEREDITH, GEORGE The Egoist 253
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci 138
MILTON, JOHN The Complete Poetry and Selected
Prose of John Milton 132
MISCELLANEOUS An Anthology of American Negro
Literature 163
An Anthology of Light Verse 48
Best Amer. Humorous Short Stories 87
Best Russian Short Stories, including
Bunin's The Gentleman from San
Francisco 18
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 94
Famous Ghost Stories 73
Five Great Modern Irish Plays 30
Four Famous Greek Plays 158
Fourteen Great Detective Stories 144
Great German Short Novels and
Stories 108
Great Modern Short Stories 168
Great Tales of the American West 238
Outline of Abnormal Psychology 152
Outline of Psychoanalysis 66
The Consolation of Philosophy 226
The Federalist 139
The Making of Man: An Outline of
Anthropology 149
The Making of Society: An Outline of
Sociology 183
The Poetry of Freedom 175
The Sex Problem in Modern Society 198
The Short Bible 57
Three Famous French Romances 85
Sapho, by Alphonse Daudet
Manon Lescaut, by Antoine Prevost
Carmen, by Prosper Merimee
MOLIERE Plays 78
MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER Parnassus on Wheels 190
NASH, OGDEN The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash 191
NEVINS, ALLAN A Short History of the United States 235
NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH Thus Spake Zarathustra 9
NOSTRADAMUS Oracles of 81
ODETS, CLIFFORD Six Plays of 67
O'NEILL, EUGENE The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie and
The Hairy Ape 146
O'NEILL, EUGENE The Long Voyage Home and Seven
Plays of the Sea 111
PALGRAVE, FRANCIS The Golden Treasury 232
PARKER, DOROTHY The Collected Short Stories of 123
PARKER, DOROTHY The Collected Poetry of 237
PASCAL, BLAISE Pensées and The Provincial Letters 164
PATER, WALTER Marius the Epicurean 90
PATER, WALTER The Renaissance 86
PAUL, ELLIOT The Life and Death of a Spanish
Town 225
PEARSON, EDMUND Studies in Murder 113
PEPYS, SAMUEL Samuel Pepys' Diary 103
PERELMAN, S.J. The Best of 247
PETRONIUS ARBITER The Satyricon 156
PLATO The Philosophy of Plato 181
PLATO The Republic 153
POE, EDGAR ALLAN Best Tales 82
POLO, MARCO The Travels of Marco Polo 196
POPE, ALEXANDER Selected Works of 257
PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE Flowering Judas 88
PROUST, MARCEL Swann's Way 59
PROUST, MARCEL Within a Budding Grove 172
PROUST, MARCEL The Guermantes Way 213
PROUST, MARCEL Cities of the Plain 220
PROUST, MARCEL The Captive 120
PROUST, MARCEL The Sweet Cheat Gone 260
RAWLINGS, MARJORIE KINNAN The Yearling 246
READE, CHARLES The Cloister and the Hearth 62
REED, JOHN Ten Days that Shook the World 215
RENAN, ERNEST The Life of Jesus 140
ROSTAND, EDMOND Cyrano de Bergerac 154
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES The Confessions of Jean Jacques
Rousseau 243
RUSSELL, BERTRAND Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell 137
SCHOPENHAUER The Philosophy of Schopenhauer 52
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM Tragedies, 1, 1A--complete, 2 vols.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM Comedies, 2, 2A--complete, 2 vols.
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM Histories, 3 }
Histories, Poems, 3A } complete, 2 vols.
SHEEAN, VINCENT Personal History 32
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS Humphry Clinker 159
SNOW, EDGAR Red Star Over China 126
SPINOZA The Philosophy of Spinoza 60
STEINBECK, JOHN In Dubious Battle 115
STEINBECK, JOHN Of Mice and Men 29
STEINBECK, JOHN The Grapes of Wrath 148
STEINBECK, JOHN Tortilla Flat 216
STENDHAL The Red and the Black 157
STERNE, LAURENCE Tristram Shandy 147
STEWART, GEORGE R. Storm 254
STOKER, BRAM Dracula 31
STONE, IRVING Lust for Life 11
STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER Uncle Tom's Cabin 261
STRACHEY, LYTTON Eminent Victorians 212
SUETONIUS Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188
SWIFT, JONATHAN Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The
Battle of the Books 100
SWINBURNE, CHARLES Poems 23
SYMONDS, JOHN A. The Life of Michelangelo 49
TACITUS The Complete Works of 222
TCHEKOV, ANTON Short Stories 50
TCHEKOV, ANTON Sea Gull, Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters,
etc. 171
THACKERAY, WILLIAM Henry Esmond 80
THACKERAY, WILLIAM Vanity Fair 131
THOMPSON, FRANCIS Complete Poems 38
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID Walden and Other Writings 155
THUCYDIDES The Complete Writings of 58
TOLSTOY, LEO Anna Karenina 37
TOMLINSON, H.M. The Sea and the Jungle 99
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY Barchester Towers and The Warden 41
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY The Eustace Diamonds 251
TURGENEV, IVAN Fathers and Sons 21
VAN LOON, HENDRIK W. Ancient Man 105
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN The Theory of the Leisure Class 63
VIRGIL'S WORKS Including The Aeneid, Eclogues, and
Georgics 75
VOLTAIRE Candide 47
WALPOLE, HUGH Fortitude 178
WALTON, IZAAK The Compleat Angler 26
WEBB, MARY Precious Bane 219
WELLS, H.G. Tono Bungay 197
WHARTON, EDITH The Age of Innocence 229
WHITMAN, WALT Leaves of Grass 97
WILDE, OSCAR Dorian Gray, De Profundis 125
WILDE, OSCAR Poems and Fairy Tales 84
WILDE, OSCAR The Plays of Oscar Wilde 83
WOOLF, VIRGINIA Mrs. Dalloway 96
WOOLF, VIRGINIA To the Lighthouse 217
WRIGHT, RICHARD Native Son 221
YEATS, W.B. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales 44
YOUNG, G.F. The Medici 179
ZOLA, EMILE Nana 142
ZWEIG, STEFAN Amok (In Collected German Stories 108)
MODERN LIBRARY GIANTS
_A series of full-sized library editions of books that formerly were
available only in cumbersome and expensive sets._
THE MODERN LIBRARY GIANTS REPRESENT A
SELECTION OF THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS
_Many are illustrated and some of them are over 1200 pages long._
* * * * *
G1. TOLSTOY, LEO. War and Peace.
G2. BOSWELL, JAMES. Life of Samuel Johnson.
G3. HUGO, VICTOR. Les Miserables.
G4. THE COMPLETE POEMS OF KEATS AND SHELLEY.
G5. PLUTARCH'S LIVES (The Dryden Translation).
G6.} GIBBON, EDWARD. The Decline and Fall of the Roman
G7.} Empire (Complete in three volumes).
G8.}
G9. YOUNG, G.F. The Medici (Illustrated).
G10. TWELVE FAMOUS RESTORATION PLAYS (1660-1820)
(Congreve, Wycherley, Gay, Goldsmith, Sheridan, etc.)
G11. JAMES, HENRY. The Short Stories of.
G12. THE MOST POPULAR NOVELS OF SIR WALTER
SCOTT (Quentin Durward, Ivanhoe and Kenilworth).
G13. CARLYLE, THOMAS. The French Revolution.
G14. BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY (Illustrated).
G15. CERVANTES. Don Quixote (Illustrated).
G16. WOLFE, THOMAS. Look Homeward, Angel.
G17. THE POEMS AND PLAYS OF ROBERT BROWNING.
G18. ELEVEN PLAYS OF HENRIK IBSEN.
G19. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF HOMER.
G20. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
G21. SIXTEEN FAMOUS AMERICAN PLAYS.
G23. TOLSTOY, LEO. Anna Karenina.
G24. LAMB, CHARLES. The Complete Works and Letters of
Charles Lamb.
G25. THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF GILBERT AND SULLIVAN.
G26. MARX, KARL. Capital.
G27. DARWIN, CHARLES. The Origin of Species and The Descent
of Man.
G28. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF LEWIS CARROLL.
G29. PRESCOTT, WILLIAM H. The Conquest of Mexico and
The Conquest of Peru.
G30. MYERS, GUSTAVUS. History of the Great American
Fortunes.
G31. WERFEL, FRANZ. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.
G32. SMITH, ADAM. The Wealth of Nations.
G33. COLLINS, WILKIE. The Moonstone and The Woman in White.
G34. NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH. The Philosophy of Nietzsche.
G35. BURY, J.B. A History of Greece.
G36. DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR. The Brothers Karamazov.
G37. THE COMPLETE NOVELS AND SELECTED TALES OF
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
G38. ROLLAND, ROMAIN. Jean-Christophe.
G39. THE BASIC WRITINGS OF SIGMUND FREUD.
G40. THE COMPLETE TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR
ALLAN POE.
G41. FARRELL, JAMES T. Studs Lonigan.
G42. THE POEMS AND PLAYS OF TENNYSON.
G43. DEWEY, JOHN. Intelligence in the Modern World: John
Dewey's Philosophy.
G44. DOS PASSOS, JOHN. U.S.A.
G45. LEWISOHN, LUDWIG. The Story of American Literature.
G46. A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY.
G47. THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS FROM BACON TO
MILL.
G48. THE METROPOLITAN OPERA GUIDE.
G49. TWAIN, MARK. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
G50. WHITMAN, WALT. Leaves of Grass.
G51. THE BEST-KNOWN NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT.
G52. JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses.
G53. SUE, EUGENE. The Wandering Jew.
G54. FIELDING, HENRY. Tom Jones.
G55. O'NEILL, EUGENE. Nine Plays by.
G56. STERNE, LAURENCE. Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental
Journey.
G57. BROOKS, VAN WYCK. The Flowering of New England.
G58. THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN.
G59. HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. The Short Stories of.
G60. DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR. The Idiot. (Illustrated by
Boardman Robinson).
G61. SPAETH, SIGMUND. A Guide to Great Orchestral Music.
G62. THE POEMS, PROSE AND PLAYS OF PUSHKIN.
G63. SIXTEEN FAMOUS BRITISH PLAYS.
G64. MELVILLE, HERMAN. Moby Dick.
G65. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RABELAIS.
G66. THREE FAMOUS MURDER NOVELS
_Before the Fact_, Francis Iles.
_Trent's Last Case_, E.C. Bentley.
_The House of the Arrow_, A.E.W. Mason.
G67. ANTHOLOGY OF FAMOUS ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
POETRY.
G68. THE SELECTED WORK OF TOM PAINE.
G69. ONE HUNDRED AND ONE YEARS' ENTERTAINMENT.
G70. THE COMPLETE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE AND
WILLIAM BLAKE.
G71. SIXTEEN FAMOUS EUROPEAN PLAYS.
G72. GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL.
G73. A SUBTREASURY OF AMERICAN HUMOR.