There is scarcely any question, the sudden explosion of which out of a
clear sky, excites more charming perturbation in the mind of a
man--professionally, as they say, "of letters"--than the question, so
often tossed disdainfully off from young and ardent lips, as to "what
one should read," if one has--quite strangely and accidentally--read
hitherto absolutely nothing at all.
To secure the privilege of being the purveyor of spiritual germination
to such provocatively virgin soil, is for the moment so entirely
exciting that all the great stiff images from the dusty museum of
"standard authors," seem to swim in a sort of blurred mist before our
eyes, and even, some of them at least, to nod and beckon and put out
their tongues. After a while, however, the shock of first excitement
diminishing, that solemn goblin Responsibility lifts up its head, and
though we bang at it and shoo it away, and perhaps lock it up, the
pure sweet pleasure of our seductive enterprise, the "native hue," as
the poet says, of our "resolution" is henceforth "sicklied o'er with
the pale cast of thought," and the fine design robbed of its freshest
dew.
As a matter of fact, much deeper contemplations and maturer
ponderings, only tend, in the long run, to bring us back to our
original starting-point. It is just this very bugbear of
Responsibility which in the consciences and mouths of grown-up persons
sends the bravest of our youth post-haste to confusion--so impinging
and inexorable are the thing's portentous horns. It is indeed after
these maturer considerations that we manage to hit upon the right key
really capable of impounding the obtrusive animal; the idea, namely,
of indicating to our youthful questioner the importance of aesthetic
austerity in these regions--an austerity not only no less exclusive,
but far more exclusive than any mandate drawn from the Decalogue.
The necessary matter, in other words, at the beginning of such a
tremendous adventure as this blowing wind into the sails of a newly
built little schooner, or sometimes even of a poor rain-soaked
harbor-rotten brig, bound for the Fortunate Islands, is the
inspiration of the right mood, the right tone, the right temper, for
the splendid voyage. It is not enough simply to say "acquire aesthetic
severity." With spoils so inexhaustible offered to us on every side,
some more definite orientation is desirable. Such an orientation,
limiting the enormous scope of the enterprise, within the sphere of
the possible, can only be wisely found in a person's own individual
taste; but since such a taste is, obviously, in a measure "acquired,"
the compiler of any list of books must endeavor, by a frank and almost
shameless assertion of _his_ taste, to rouse to a divergent
reciprocity the latent taste, still embryotic, perhaps, and quite
inchoate, of the young person anxious to make some sort of a start.
Such a neophyte in the long voyage--a voyage not without its reefs and
shoals--will be much more stirringly provoked to steer with a bold
firm hand, even by the angry reaction he may feel from such
suggestions, than by a dull academic chart--professing tedious
judicial impartiality--of all the continents, promontories, and
islands, marked on the official map.
One does not trust youth enough, that is in short what is the matter
with our educational method, in this part of it at least, which
concerns "what one is to read." One teases oneself too much, and one's
infants, too, poor darlings, with what might be called the
"scholastic-veneration-cult"; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior
person by reading the best authors. It comes back, after all, to what
your young person emphatically is, in himself, independent of all this
acquiring. If he has the responsive chord, the answering vibration, he
may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading "Alice in
Wonderland," than from all the Upanishads and Niebelungenlieds in the
world. It is a matter of the imagination, and to the question "What is
one to read?" the best reply must always be the most personal:
"Whatever profoundly and permanently stimulates your imagination." The
list of books which follows in this volume constitutes in itself, in
the mere perusal of the titles, such a potential stimulation. A reader
who demands, for instance, why George Eliot is omitted, and Oliver
Onions included; why Sophocles is excluded and Catullus admitted, is
brought face to face with that essential right of personal choice in
these high matters, which is not only the foundation of all thrilling
interest in literature, but the very ground and soil of all-powerful
literary creation. The secret of the art of literary taste, may it not
be found to be nothing else than the secret of the art of life
itself--I mean the capacity for discovering the real fatality, the
real predestined direction of one's intrinsic nature and the refusal,
when this is found, to waste one's energies in alien paths and
irrelevant junketings?
A list of books of the kind appended here, becomes, by the very reason
of its shameless subjectivity, a challenge to the intelligence
perusing it--a challenge that is bound, in some degree or another, to
fling such a reader back upon his own inveterate prejudices; to fling
him back upon them with a sense that it is his affair reasonably to
justify them.
From quite another point of view, however, might the appended list
find its excuse--I mean as being a typical choice; in other words, the
natural choice of a certain particular minority of minds, who, while
disagreeing in most essentials, in this one important essential find
themselves in singular harmony. And this minority of minds, of minds
with the especial prejudices and predilections indicated in this list,
undoubtedly has a real and definite existence; there are such people,
and any list of books which they made would exclude the writers here
excluded, and include the writers here included, though in particular
instances, the motives of the choice might differ. For purely
psychological reasons then--as a kind of human document in criticism,
shall we say?--such a list comes to have its value; nor can the value
be anything but enhanced by the obvious fact that in this particular
company there are several quite prominent and popular writers, both
ancient and modern, signalized, as it were, if not penalized, by their
surprising absence. The niches of such venerated names do not exactly
call aloud for occupancy, for they are emphatically filled by less
popular figures; but they manifest a sufficient sense of incongruity
to give the reader's critical conscience the sort of jolt that is so
salutary a mental stimulus. A further value might be discovered for
our exclusive catalogue, in the interest of noting--and this interest
might well appeal to those who would themselves have selected quite a
different list--the curious way certain books and writers have of
hanging inevitably together, and necessarily implying one another.
Thus it appears that the type of mind--it would be presumptuous to
call it the best type of mind--which prefers Euripides to Sophocles,
and Heine to Schiller, prefers also Emily Brontë to Charlotte Brontë,
and Oliver Onions to Compton Mackenzie. Given the mind that in
compiling such a list would at once drag in The Odyssey and The
Psalms, and run hastily on to Sir Thomas Browne and Charles Lamb, we
are instinctively conscious that when it reaches, with its arbitrary
divining rod, our own unlucky age, it will skip quite lightly over
Thackeray; wave an ambiguous hand in the direction of Meredith, and
sit solemnly down to make elaborate mention of all the published works
of Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy and Mr. Henry James.
It seems to me that nothing is more necessary, in regard to the advice
to be given to young and ardent people, in the matter of their
reading, than some sort of communication of the idea--and it is not an
easy idea to convey--that there is in this affair a subtle fusion
desirable between one's natural indestructible prejudices, and a
certain high authoritative standard; a standard which we may name, for
want of a better word, "classical taste," and which itself is the
resultant amalgam of all the finest personal reactions of all the
finest critical senses, winnowed out, as it were, and austerely
purged, by the washing of the waves of time. It will be found, as a
matter of fact, that this latter element in the motives of our choice
works as a rule negatively rather than positively, while the positive
and active force in our appreciations remains, as it ought to remain,
our own inviolable and quite personal bias. The winnowed taste of the
ages, acquired by us as a sort of second nature, warns us what to
avoid, while our own nerves and palate, stimulated to an ever
deepening subtlety, as our choice narrows itself down, tells us what
passionately and spontaneously we must snatch up and enjoy.
It will be noted that in what we have tried to indicate as the only
possible starting-point for adventurous criticism, there has been a
constant assumption of a common ground between sensitive people; a
common sensual and psychic language, so to speak, to which appeals may
be made, and through which intelligent tokens may be exchanged. This
common ground is not necessarily--one is reluctant to introduce
metaphysical speculation--any hidden "law of beauty" or "principle of
spiritual harmony." It is, indeed, as far as we can ever know for
certain, only "objective" in the sense of being essentially human; in
the sense, that is, of being something that inevitably appeals to
what, below temperamental differences, remains permanent and
unchanging in us.
"Nature," as Leonardo says, "is the mistress of the higher
intelligences"; and Goethe, in his most oracular utterances, recalls
us to the same truth. What imagination does, and what the personal
vision of the individual artist does, is to deal successfully and
masterfully with this "given," this basic element. And this basic
element, this permanent common ground, this universal human
assumption, is just precisely what, in popular language, we call
"Nature"; that substratum of objective reality in the appearances of
things, which makes it possible for diversely constructed temperaments
to make their differences effective and intelligible.
There could be no recognizable differences, no conversation, in fact,
if, in the impossible hypothesis of the absence of any such common
language, we all shouted at one another "in vacuo" and out of pure
darkness. It is from their refusal to recognize the necessity for
something at least relatively objective in what the individual
imagination works upon, that certain among modern artists, if not
among modern poets, bewilder and puzzle us. They have a right to make
endless experiments--every original mind has that--but they cannot let
go their hold on some sort of objective solidity without becoming
inarticulate, without giving vent to such unrelated and incoherent
cries as overtake one in the corridors of Bedlam. "Nature is the
mistress of the higher intelligencies," and though the individual
imagination is at liberty to treat Nature with a certain creative
contempt, it cannot afford to depart altogether from her, lest by
relinquishing the common language between men and men, it should
simply flap its wings in an enchanted circle, and utter sounds that
are not so much different from other sounds, as outside the region
where any sound carries an intelligible meaning.
The absurd idea that one gets wise by reading books is probably at the
bottom of the abominable pedantry that thrusts so many tiresome pieces
of antiquity down the throats of youth. There is no talisman for
getting wise--some of the wisest in the world never open a book, and
yet their native wit, so heavenly-free from "culture," would serve to
challenge Voltaire. Lovers of books, like other infatuated lovers,
best know the account they find in their exquisite obsessions. None of
the explanations they give seem to cover the field of their enjoyment.
The thing is a passion; a sort of delicate madness, and like other
passions, quite unintelligible to those who are outside. Persons who
read for the purpose of making a success of their added erudition, or
the better to adapt themselves--what a phrase!--to their "life's
work," are, to my thinking, like the wretches who throw flowers into
graves. What sacrilege, to trail the reluctances and coynesses, the
shynesses and sweet reserves of these "furtivi amores" at the heels of
a wretched ambition to be "cultivated" or learned, or to "get on" in
the world!
Like the kingdom of heaven and all other high and sacred things, the
choicest sorts of books only reveal the perfume of their rare essence
to those who love them for themselves in pure disinterestedness. Of
course they "mix in," these best-loved authors, with every experience
we encounter; they throw around places, hours, situations, occasions,
a quite special glamour of their own, just as one's more human
devotions do; but though they float, like a diffused aroma, round
every circumstance of our days, and may even make tolerable the
otherwise intolerable hours of our impertinent "life's work," we do
not love them because they help us here or help us there; or make us
wiser or make us better; we love them because they are what they are,
and we are what we are; we love them, in fact, for the beautiful
reason which the author of that noble book--a book not in our present
list, by the way, because of something obstinately tough and tedious
in him--I mean Montaigne's Essays--loved his sweet friend Etienne.
Any other commerce between books and their readers smacks of Baconian
"fruits" and University lectures. It is a prostitution of pleasure to
profit.
As with all the rare things in life, the most delicate flavor of our
pleasure is found not exactly and precisely in the actual taste of the
author himself; not, I mean, in the snatching of huge bites out of
him, but in the fragrance of anticipation; in the dreamy solicitations
of indescribable afterthoughts; in those "airy tongues that syllable
men's names" on the "sands and shores" of the remote margins of our
consciousness. How delicious a pleasure there is in carrying about
with us wherever we go a new book or a new translation from the pen of
our especial master! We need not open it; we need not read it for
days; but it is there--there to be caressed and to caress--when
everything is propitious, and the profane voices are hushed.
I suppose, to take an instance that has for myself a peculiar appeal,
the present edition--"brought out" by the excellent house of
Macmillan--of the great Dostoievsky, is producing even now in the
sensibility of all sorts and conditions of queer readers, a thrilling
series of recurrent pleasures, like the intermittent visits of one's
well-beloved.
Would to God the mortal days of geniuses like Dostoievsky could be so
extended that for all the years of one's life, one would have such
works, still not quite finished, in one's lucky hands!
I sometimes doubt whether these sticklers for "the art of
condensation" are really lovers of books at all. For myself, I would
class their cursed short stories with their teasing "economy of
material," as they call it, with those "books that are no books,"
those checker boards and moral treatises which used to annoy Elia so.
Yes, I have a sneaking feeling that all this modern fuss about "art"
and the "creative vision" and "the projection of visualized images,"
is the itching vice of quite a different class of people, from those
who, in the old, sweet, epicurean way, loved to loiter through huge
digressive books, with the ample unpremeditated enjoyment of leisurely
travelers wayfaring along a wonderful road. How many luckless
innocents have teased and fretted their minds into a forced
appreciation of that artistic ogre Flaubert, and his laborious pursuit
of his precious "exact word," when they might have been pleasantly
sailing down Rabelais' rich stream of immortal nectar, or sweetly
hugging themselves over the lovely mischievousness of Tristram Shandy!
But one must be tolerant; one must make allowances. The world of books
is no puritanical bourgeois-ridden democracy; it is a large free
country, a great Pantagruelian Utopia, ruled by noble kings.
Our "One Hundred Best Books" need not be yours, nor yours ours; the
essential thing is that in this brief interval between darkness and
darkness, which we call our life, we should be thrillingly and
passionately amused; innocently, if so it can be arranged--and what
better than books lends itself to that?--and harmlessly, too, let us
hope, God help us, but at any rate, amused, for the only unpardonable
sin is the sin of taking this passing world too gravely. Our treasure
is not here; it is in the kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of heaven
is Imagination. Imagination! How all other ways of escape from what is
mediocre in our tangled lives grow pale beside that high and burning
star!
With Imagination to help us we can make something of our days,
something of the drama of this confused turmoil, and perhaps, after
all--who can tell?--there is more in it than mere "amusement." Once
and again, as we pause in our reading, there comes a breath, a
whisper, a rumor, of something else; of something over and above that
"eternal now" which is the wisest preoccupation of our passion, but
not wise are those who would seek to confine this fleeting intimation
within the walls of reason or of system. It comes; it goes; it is; it
is not. The Hundred Best Books did not bring it; the Hundred Best
Books cannot take it away. Strangely and wonderfully it blends itself
with those vague memories of what we have read, somewhere, sometime,
and not always alone. Strangely and wonderfully it blends itself with
those other moments when the best books in the world seem irrelevant,
and all "culture" an impertinent intrusion; but however it comes and
however it goes, it is the thing that makes our gravity ridiculous;
our philosophy pedantic. It is the thing that gives to the
"amusements" of the imagination that touch of burning fire; that
breath of wider air; that taste of sharper salt, which, arriving when
we least expect it, and least--heaven knows--deserve it, makes any
final opinion upon the stuff of this world vain and false; and any
condemnation of the opinions of others foolish and empty. It destroys
our assurances as it alleviates our miseries, and in some unspeakable
way, like a primrose growing on the edge of a sepulchre, it flings
forth upon the heavy night, a fleeting signal, "Bon espoir y gist au
fond!"