Part 2

It is time Shakespeare was read for the beauty of his poetry, and enjoyed without pedantry and with some imagination. The less usual and more cynical of his plays, such as Troilus, and Cressida, Measure for Measure and Timon of Athens, will be found to contain some very interesting commentaries upon life.

The Shakespearean attitude of mind is quite a definite and articulate one, and one that can be, by slow degrees, acquired, even by persons who are not cultivated or clever. It is an attitude "compounded of many simples," and, like the melancholy of Jaques, it wraps us about "in a most humorous sadness." But the essential secret of Shakespeare's genius is best apprehended in the felicity of certain isolated passionate speeches, and in the magic of his songs.

10. MILTON. _Any edition_.

No epicurean lover of the subtler delicacies in poetic rhythm or of the more exalted and translunar harmonies in the imaginative suggestiveness of words, can afford to leave Milton untouched. In sheer felicity of beauty--the beauty of suggestive words, each one carrying "a perfume in the mention," and together, by their arrangement in relation to one another, conveying a thrill of absolute and final satisfaction--no poem in our language surpasses Lycidas, and only the fine great odes of John Keats approach or equal it.

There are passages, too, in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, which, for calm, flowing, and immortal loveliness, are not surpassed in any poetry in the world.

Milton's work witnesses to the value in art of what is ancient and traditional, but while he willingly uses every tradition of antiquity, he stamps all he writes with his own formidable image and superscription.

11. SIR THOMAS BROWNE. RELIGIO MEDICI AND URN BURIAL. _In the "Scott Library" Series_.

The very spirit of ancient Norwich, the mellowest and most historic of all English cities, breathes in these sumptuous and aromatic pages. After Lamb and Pater, both of whom loved him well, Browne is the subtlest adept in the recondite mysteries of rhythmic prose who can be enjoyed in our language. Not to catch the cadences of his peculiar music is to confess oneself deaf to the finer harmonies of words.

12. GOETHE. FAUST, _translated in English Poetry by Bayard Taylor_. WILHELM MEISTER, _in Carlyle's translation_. GOETHE'S CONVERSATIONS WITH ECKERMAN, _translation in Bohn's Library_.

No other human name, except Da Vinci's, carries the high associations of oracular and occult wisdom as far as Goethe's does. He hears the voices of "the Mothers" more clearly than other men and in heathen loneliness he "builds up the pyramid of his existence."

The deep authority of his formidable insight can be best enjoyed, not without little side-lights of a laconic irony, in the "Conversations"; while in Wilhelm Meister we learn to become adepts in the art of living in the Beautiful and True, in Faust that abysmal doubt as to the whole mad business of life is undermined with a craft equal to his own in the delineation and defeat of "the queer son of Chaos."

15. NIETZSCHE. ZARATHUSTRA, THE JOYFUL WISDOM, AND ECCE HOMO _are all translated in the English edition of Foulis and published in America by Macmillan. Lichtenberger's exposition of his doctrines is in the same series. The most artistic life of him is by Daniel Halêvy, translated from the French_.

Nietzsche's writings when they fall into the hands of Philistines are more misunderstood than any others. To appreciate his noble and tragic distinction with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most persons are able to summon up. The dramatic grandeur of Nietzsche's extraordinary intellect overtops all the flashes of his psychological insight; and his terrific conclusions remain as mere foot-prints of his progress from height to height.

18. HEINE. HEINE'S PROSE WORKS WITH THE "CONFESSIONS," _translated in the "Scott Library." A good short life of Heine in the "Great Writers" Series_.

Heine's genius remains unique. Full of dreamy attachment to Germany he lived and died in Paris, but his heart was always with the exiles of Israel. Mocker and ribald, he touches depths of sentimental tenderness sounded by none other. He fooled the philosophers, provoked the pious, and confused the minds of his free-thinking friends by outbursts of wilful reaction. He sticks the horns of satyrish "diablerie" on the lovely forehead of the most delicate romance; and he flings into his magical poems of love and the sea the naughty mud-pellets of an outrageous capriciousness.

19. SUDERMANN. SONG OF SONGS. _Translation into English published by Huebsch of New York_.

Sudermann is the most remarkable and characteristic of modern German writers. His massive and laborious realism, his firm and exhaustive exposition of turbulent and troubled hearts, his heavy sledge-hammer style, his comprehension of the shadowy background of the most ponderous sensuality, are all found at their best in this solemn and sordid and pitiable tale.

20. HAUPTMANN. THE FOOL IN CHRIST, _translation published by Huebsch, New York_.

Hauptmann seems, of all recent Teutonic authors, the one who has in the highest degree that tender imaginative sentiment mixed with rugged and humorous piety which one finds in the old German Protestant Mystics and in such works of art as the engravings of Albert Durer and the Wooden Madonna of Nuremburg. "The Fool in Christ"--outside some of the characters in Dostoievsky--is the nearest modern approach to a literary interpretation of what remains timeless and permanent in the Christ-Idea.

21. IBSEN. _Any edition of Ibsen containing the_ WILD DUCK.

Ibsen is still the most formidable of obstinate individualists. Absolute self-reliance is the note he constantly strikes. He is obsessed by the psychology of moral problems; but for him there are no universal ethical laws--"the golden rule is that there is no golden rule"--thus while in the Pillars of Society he advocates candid confession and honest revelation of the truth of things; in the "Wild Duck" he attacks the pig-headed meddler, who comes "dunning us with claims of the Ideal." Ultimately, though absorbed in "matters of conscience," it is as an artist rather than as a philosopher that he visualizes the world.

22. STRINDBERG. THE CONFESSIONS OF A FOOL.

Strindberg has obtained, because of his own neurotic and almost feminine clairvoyance, a diabolical insight into the perversities of the feminine character. This merciless insight manifested in all his works reaches its intensest degree in the "Confessions of a Fool," where the woman implicated surpasses the perversities of the normal as greatly as the lashing energy with which he pursues her to her inmost retreats surpasses the vengeance of any ordinary lover.

23. EMERSON. _Routledge's complete works of Emerson, or any other edition containing everything in one volume_.

The clear, chaste, remote and distinguished wisdom of Emerson with its shrewd preacher's wit and country-bred humor, will always be of stirring and tonic value to certain kindred minds. Others will prove him of little worth; but it is to be noted that Nietzsche found him a sane and noble influence principally on the ground of his serene detachment from the phenomena of sin and disease and death. He will always remain suggestive and stimulating to those who demand a spiritual interpretation of the Universe but reluct at committing themselves to any particular creed.

24. WALT WHITMAN. _The complete unexpurgated edition of all his poems, with his prose works and Mr. Traubel's books about him as a further elucidation_.

Walt Whitman is the only Optimist and perhaps the only prophet of Democracy one can read without shame. The magical beauty of his style at its best has not even yet received complete justice. He has the power of restoring us to courage and joy even under circumstances of aggravated gloom. He puts us in some indescribable manner "en rapport" with the large, cool, liquid spaces and with the immense and transparent depths.

More than any he is the poet of passionate friendship and the poet of all those exquisite evasive emotions which arise when our loves and our regrets are blended with the presence of Nature.

25. EDGAR LEE MASTERS. SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, _published by Macmillan_.

After Whitman and Poe, Mr. Masters is by far the most original and interesting of American poets. There is something Chaucerian about the quizzical and whimsical manner in which he tells his brief and homely stories. His characters are penetrated with the bleak and yet cheerful tone of the "Middle West." Something quaint, humorous and astringent emerges as their dominant note.

Mr. Masters has the massive ironical observation and the shrewd humane wit of the great English novelists of the eighteenth century. His dead people reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The little chances, the unguessed-at accidents, the undeserved blows of a capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless inertness, are the aspects of life which interest him most.

26. THEODORE DREISER. THE TITAN.

Of all modern novelists Theodore Dreiser most entirely catches the spirit of America. Here is the huge torrential stream of material energies. Here are the men and women, so pushed and driven and parched and bleached, by the enormous forces of industry and commerce, that all distinction in them seems to be reduced to a strange colorlessness; while the primordial animal cravings, greedy, earth-born, fumble after their aims across the sad and littered stage of sombre scenery.

There is something epic--something enormous and amorphous--like the body of an elemental giant--about each of these books. In the "Titan," especially, the peculiar power of Dreiser's massive, coulter-like impetus is evident. Here we realize how, between animal passion and material ambition, there is little room left in such a nature as Cooperwood's for any complicated subtlety. All is simple, direct, hard and healthy--a very epitome and incarnation of the life-force, as it manifests itself in America.

27. CERVANTES. DON QUIXOTE. _In any translation except those vulgarized by eighteenth century taste_.

Cervantes' great, ironical, romantic story is written in a style so noble, so nervous, so humane, so branded with reality, that, as the wise critic has said, the mere touch and impact of it puts courage into our veins. It is not necessary to read every word of this old book. There are tedious passages. But not to have ever opened it; not to have caught the tone, the temper, the terrible courage, the infinite sadness of it, is to have missed being present at one of the "great gestures" of the undying, unconquerable spirit of humanity.

28. VICTOR HUGO. THE TOILERS OF THE SEA. _In any translation_.

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.

38. PAUL BOURGET. LE DISCIPLE.

"Le Disciple" is perhaps the best work of this voluminous and interesting writer. Devoid of irony, deficient in humor, lacking any large imaginative power, Paul Bourget holds, all the same, an unassailable place among French writers. Though a devoted adherent of Goethe and Stendhal, Bourget represents, along with Bordeaux, the conservative ethical reaction. He upholds Catholicism and the sacredness of the "home." He is a master in plot and has a clear, vigorous and appealing style. A gravely portentous sentiment sometimes spoils his tragic effects; but every lover of Paris will enjoy the unctuous elaboration of the "backgrounds" of his stories, touched often with the most delicate and mellow evocations of that City's atmosphere.

39. ROMAIN ROLLAND. JEAN CHRISTOPHE. _Translated by Gilbert Cannan_.

Rolland's "Christophe" is without doubt the most remarkable book that has appeared in Europe since Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo."

It is a profoundly suggestive treatise upon the relations between art and life. It contains a deep and heroic philosophy--the philosophy of the worship of the mysterious life-force as God; and of the reaching out beyond the turmoil of good and evil towards some vast and dimly articulated reconciliation. Since "Wilhelm Meister" no book has been written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels of æsthetic thought and feeling.

Massive and dramatic, powerful and suggestive, it magnetizes us into an acceptance of its daring and optimistic hopes for the world; of its noble suggestions of a spiritual synthesis of the opposing race-traditions of Europe. Of all the books mentioned in this list it is the one which the compiler would most strongly recommend to the notice of those anxious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground.

40. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO. THE FLAME OF LIFE. THE TRIUMPH OF DEATH. _Translated by Arthur Hornblow_.

D'Annunzio is the most truly Italian, the most inveterately Latin, of all recent writers. Without light and shade, without "nuance," without humor or irony, he compels our attention by the clear-cut, monumental images he projects, by the purple and scarlet splendor of his imperial dreams.

His philosophy, though lacking in the deep and tragic imagination of Nietzsche, has something of the Nietzschean intellectual fury. He teaches a shameless and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less humane, but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont.

In "The Triumph of Death" we find a fierce smoldering voluptuousness, expressed with a hard and brutal realism which recalls the frescoes on the walls of ancient Pompeii. In "The Flame of Life" we have in superb rhetoric the most colored and ardent description of Venice to be found in all literature. Perhaps the finest passage he ever wrote is that account of the speech of the Master of Life in the Doge's Palace with its incomparable eulogy upon Veronese and its allusion to Pisanello's head of Sigismondo Malatesta.

42. DOSTOIEVSKY. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT. THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. THE INSULTED AND INJURED. THE POSSESSED. _Translated by Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in Everyman's Library_.

Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Russian writers. He is the subtlest psychologist in fiction. As an artist he has a dark and sombre intensity and an imaginative vehemence only surpassed by Shakespeare. As a philosopher he anticipates Nietzsche in the direction of his insight, though in his conclusions he is diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality, perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a morbid pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and unutterable levels of spiritual ecstasy. His ideal is sanctity--not morality--and his revelations of the impassioned and insane motives of human nature--its instinct towards self-destruction for instance--will never be surpassed for their terrible and convincing truth.

The strange Slavophil dream of the regeneration of the world by the power of the Russian soul and the magic of the "White Christ who comes out of Russia" could not be more arrestingly expressed than in these passionate and extraordinary works of art.

47. TURGENIEV. VIRGIN SOIL. A SPORTSMAN'S SKETCHES. _Translated by Constance Garnett. And "Lisa" in Everyman's Library_.

Turgeniev is by far the most "artistic" as he is the most disillusioned and ironical of Russian writers. With a tender poetical delicacy, almost worthy of Shakespeare, he sketches his appealing portraits of young girls. His style is clear--objective--winnowed and fastidious. He has certain charming old-fashioned weaknesses--as for instance his trick of over-emphasizing the differences between his bad and good characters; but there is a clear-cut distinction, and a lucid charm about his work that reminds one of certain old crayon drawings or certain delicate water-color sketches. His allusions to natural scenery are always introduced with peculiar appropriateness and are never permitted to dominate the dramatic element of the story as happens so often in other writers.

There is a sad and tender vein of unobtrusive moralizing running through his work but one is conscious that at bottom he is profoundly pessimistic and disenchanted. The gaiety of Turgeniev is winning and unforced; his sentiment natural and never "staled or rung upon." The pensive detachment of a sensitive and yet not altogether unworldly spirit seems to be the final impression evoked by his books.

50. GORKI--FOMA GORDYEFF. _Translation published by Scribners_.

Maxim Gorki is one of the most interesting of Russian writers. His books have that flavour of the soil and that courageous spirit of vagabondage and social independence which is so rare and valuable a quality in literature.

"Foma Gordyeff" is, after Dostoievsky's masterpieces, the most suggestive and arresting of Russian stories. That paralysis of the will which descends like an evil cloud upon Foma and at the same time seems to cause the ground to open under his feet and precipitate him into mysterious depths of nothingness, is at once tragically significant of certain aspects of the Russian soul and full of mysterious warnings to all those modern spirits in whom the power of action is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."