Victor Hugo is the greatest of all incorrigible romanticists.
Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled
child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and
he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the
depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive
imagination which is very rare except in children--and in spite of his
theatrical gestures he has the power of conjuring up scenes of
incredible beauty and terror.
29. BALZAC. LOST ILLUSIONS. COUSIN BETTE. PÉRE GORIOT. HUMAN COMEDY,
_in any translation. Saintsbury's is as good as any_.
Balzac's books create a complete world, which has many points of
contact with reality; but, in a deep essential sense, is the
projection of the novelist's own passionate imagination. A thundering
tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic, sweeps, with its
weight of ponderous details, through every page of these dramatic
volumes. Every character has its obsession, its secret vice, its
spiritual drug. Even when, as in the case of Vautrin, he lets his
demonic fancy carry him very far, there is a grandeur, an amplitude, a
smouldering flame of passion, which redeem a thousand preposterous
extravagances.
His dramatic psychology is often drowned in the tide of his creative
energy; but though his world is not always the world of our
experience, it is always a world in which we are magnetized to feel at
home. It is consistent with its own amazing laws; the laws of the
incredible Balzacian genius. Profoundly moral in its basic tendency,
the "Human Comedy" seems to point, in its philosophical undercurrent,
at the permanent need in our wayward and childish emotionalism, for
wise and master-guides, both in the sphere of religion and in the
sphere of politics.
32. GUY DE MAUPASSANT. LE MAISON TELLIER. MADAME TELLIER'S
ESTABLISHMENT. _Any translation, preferably not one bound in paper or
in an "Edition de Luxe."_
Guy de Maupassant's short stories remain, with those of Henry James
and Joseph Conrad, the very best of their kind. After "Madame
Tellier's Establishment" perhaps the stories called respectively "A
Farm Girl" and "Love" are the best he wrote.
He has the eternal excellencies of savage humanity, savage sincerity,
and savage brevity. His pessimism is deep, absolute, unshaken;--and
the world, as we know it, deserves what he gives it of sensualized
literary reactions, each one like the falling thud of the blade of a
murderous axe.
His racking, scooping, combing insight, into the recesses of man's
natural appetites will never be surpassed. How under the glance of his
Norman anger, all manner of pretty subterfuges fade away; and "the
real thing" stands out, as Nature and the Earth know it--"stark,
bleak, terrible and lovely." His subjects may not wander very far from
the basic situations. He does not deal in spiritual subtleties. But
when he hits, he hits the mark.
33. STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE). LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. _Either the
original French or any translation, if possible with a preface; for
the life of Stendhal is of extraordinary interest_.
Stendhal is one of those who, following Goethe and anticipating
Nietzsche, has not hesitated to propound the psychological
justifications for a life based upon pagan rather than Christian
ethics. A shrewd and sly observer, with his own peculiar brand of the
egoistic cult, Stendhal lived a life of desperately absorbing
emotions, most of them intellectual and erotic. He made an æsthetic
use of the Will to Power before even Nietzsche used that singular
expression. In "Le Rouge et le Noir" the eternal sex-struggle with its
fierce accompaniment of "Odi et Amo" is concentrated in the clash of
opposing forms of pride; the pride of intellect against the pride of
sex-vanity.
No writer has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary
theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of
life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by
idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have
untold value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment in
life!
34. ANATOLE FRANCE. L'ORME DE MAIL. L'ABBE JEROME COIGNARD. LE LIVRE
DE MON AMI. _Either in French or the authorized English translation_.
Anatole France, now translated into English, is the most classical,
the most ironical, the most refined, of all modern European writers.
He is also, of all others, the most antipathetic to the Anglo-Saxon
type of mind. In a word he is a humanist of the great tradition--a
civilized artist--a great and wise man. He is Rabelaisian and
Voltairian, at the same time. His style has something of the urbanity,
the unction, the fine malice, of Renan; but it has also a quality
peculiar to its creator--a sort of transparent objectivity, lucid as
rarified air, and contemptuously cold as a fragment of antique marble.
Monsieur Bergeret, who appears in all four of the masterpieces devoted
to Contemporary France, is a creation worthy, as some one has said, of
the author of Tristram Shandy. One cannot forget that Anatole France
spent his childhood among the bookshops on the South side of the
Seine. We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise,
tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics,
contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean
remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as
if they were little children or comical small animals.
37. REMY DE GOURMONT. UNE NUIT AU LUXEMBOURG. _Translated with a
preface by Arthur Ransome, published by Luce, Boston_.
Remy de Gourmont's death must be regretted by all lovers of the rare
in art and the remote in character. As a poet his "Litany of the Rose"
has that strange, ambiguous, sinister, and lovely appeal, the full
appreciation of which is an initiation into all the "enclosed gardens"
of the world.
He is a great critic--perhaps the greatest since Walter Pater--and as
a philosopher his constant and frank advocacy of a noble and shameless
Hedonism has helped to clear the air in the track of Nietzsche's
thunder-bolts.
His audacity in placing an exposition of the very principles of
Epicurean Hedonism, touched with Spinozistic equanimity, into the
mouth of our Lord, wandering through the Luxembourg Gardens, may
perhaps startle certain gentle souls, but the Dorian delicacy of what
might for a moment appear blasphemous robs this charming Idyll of any
gross or merely popular profanity. It is a book for those who have
passed through more than one intellectual Renaissance. Like the
"Golden Ass" of Apuleius it has a philosophical justification for its
mythological audacity.