Whatever one may feel about Mr. Kipling's other work, about his
rampagious imperialism, his self-conscious swashbucklerism, his
pipe-clay and his journalism, his moralistic breeziness and his
patronage of the "white man's burden," one cannot help admitting that
the Jungle-Book is one of the immortal children's tales of the world.
In spite of the somewhat priggish introduction, even here, of what
might be called his Anglo-Saxon propaganda, the Jungle-Book carries
one further, it almost seems, and more convincingly, into the very
heart and inwards of beast-life and wood-magic, than any other work
ever written. The figures of these animals are quite Biblical in their
emphatic picturesqueness, and never has the romance of these spotted
and striped aboriginals, in their primordial struggles for food and
water, been more thrillingly conveyed. Every scene, every situation,
brands itself upon the memory as perhaps nothing else in literature
does except the stories in the Old Testament. The best of all
children's books--"Grimm's Fairy Tales" itself--takes no deeper hold
upon the youthful mind. Mr. Kipling's genius which in his other work
is constantly "dropping bricks" as the expressive phrase has it, and
running amuck through strenuous banalities, rises in the Jungle-Book
to heights of poetic and imaginative suggestion which will give him an
undying position among the great writers of our race.
91. CHARLES L. DODGSON. ALICE IN WONDERLAND. _The edition with the
original illustrations_.
It would be ridiculous to compile a list of a hundred best books and
leave out this one. Lack of space alone prevents us from including
"Through the Looking Glass" too.
"Alice" is after all as much of a classic now and by the same right,
the right of a universal appeal, to every type of child, as Mother
Goose of the Nursery Rhymes. She had only to appear--this
slender-legged, straight-haired, Early-Victorian little prude, to
enter at once the inmost arcana of the temple of art. The book is a
singular evidence of what the power of a desperate devotion can do--a
devotion like this of Mr. Dodgson to all little girls--when a certain
whimsical genius belongs to the possessed by it.
The creator of Alice has really done nothing but permit his absorbing
worship of many demure little maids to focus and concentrate itself
into an almost incredible transformation of what was the intrinsic
nature of the writer into what was the intrinsic nature of the
"written-about."
The author of this book has indeed, so to speak, eluded the
limitations of his own skin, and by the magic of his love for little
girls has passed--carrying his grown-up cleverness with him--actually
into the little girl's inmost consciousness. The book might be quite
as witty as it is and quite as amusing but it would not carry for us
that peculiar "perfume in the mention," that provocative enchantment,
if it were not much more--Oh, so much more--than merely amusing. The
thousand and one reactions, impressions, intimations, of a little
girl's consciousness, are reproduced here with a faithfulness that is
absolutely startling. What really makes the transformation complete is
the absence in "Alice" of that half-comic sententious priggishness
which, as soon as we have ceased to be children, we find so curiously
irritating in Kingsley's "Water Babies."
92. JOHN GALSWORTHY. THE COUNTRY HOUSE. THE MAN OF PROPERTY.
FRATERNITY.
John Galsworthy is almost alone among modern writers in the possession
of a genius, which in the most exact sense of that admirable word, can
only be described as the genius of a gentleman. It is a style
singularly sensitive, a little vibrant perhaps sometimes, and so tense
as to become attenuated, but of a most rare and wistful beauty. His
humor which is his weakest point is a thing of almost feminine
perceptions but quaintly pliable, as the sense of humor in women often
is, to an odd strain of peevish extravagance.
The chivalrous nobility of Mr. Galsworthy's habitual mood is at once
the cause of certain fragilities and betrayals in the mass and weight
of his art and the cause of the indignant pity which evokes some of
his finest touches.
It seems to irritate his nerves almost to frenzy to contemplate the
shackles and fetters with which, whether in the domestic or social or
legal world, the free spirits of men and women are bound down and
imprisoned.
The touching figure of Mrs. Pendyce in the "Country House"--the tragic
figure of Irene Soames Forsyte in the "Man of Property"--the pitiful
figure of the little Model in "Fraternity"--have all something of the
same quality.