Part 4

Walter Pater's writings are more capable than any in our list of offering, if approached at the suitable hour and moment, new vistas and possibilities both intellectual and emotional. That wise and massive egoism taught by Goethe, that impassioned "living to oneself" indicated by Stendhal, find in Walter Pater a new qualification and a new sanction.

Himself a supreme master of the rare and exquisite in style, he becomes, for those who really understand him, something more penetrating and insidious than a mere personality. He becomes an atmosphere, an attitude, a tone, a temper--and one too which may serve us to most rich and recondite purpose, as we wander through the world seeking the excitement and consecration of impassioned cults and organized discriminations.

For this austere and elaborately constructed style of his is nothing less than the palpable expression of his own discriminating days; the wayfaring, so self-consciously and scrupulously guarded, of his own fastidious "hedonism," seeking its elaborate satisfactions among the chance-offered occasions of hour, or person or of place.

Walter Pater remains, for those who are permitted to feel these things, the one who above all others has the subtlest and most stimulating method of approach with regard to all the great arts, and most especially with regard to the art of literature.

No one, after reading him, can remain gross, academic, vulgar, or indiscriminate. And, with the rest, we seem to be aware of a secret attitude not only towards art but towards life also, to miss the key to which would be to fail in that architecture of the soul and senses which is the object of the discipline not merely of the æsthetic but of the religious cult.

For the supreme initiation into which we are led by these elaborate and patient essays, is the initiation into the world of inner austerity, which makes its clear-cut and passionate distinctions in our emotional as well as in our intellectual life.

Everything, without exception, as we read Pater becomes "a matter of taste"; but the high and exclusive nature of this taste, to which no sensations but those which are vulgar and common are forbidden, is itself a guarantee of the gentleness and delicacy of the passions evoked. His ultimate philosophy seems to be that--as he himself has described it in "Marius,"--of Aristippus of Cyrene; but this "undermining of metaphysic by means of metaphysic" lands him in no mere arid agnosticism or weary emptiness of suspended judgment; but in a rich and imaginative region of infinite possibilities, from the shores of which he is able to launch forth at will; or to gather up at his pleasure the delicate shells strewn upon the sand.

85. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW. MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stupidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America. In Germany, too, there seems naïveté and simplicity enough to be still entertained by these mischievously whimsical and yet portentously moral comedies. It appears however that the civilization for which Rabelais and Voltaire wrote, is less willing to acclaim as an extraordinary genius one who has the wit to pierce with a bodkin the idolatries and illusions of such pathetically simple people.

Bernard Shaw takes the Universe very seriously. By calling it the Life-Force he permits himself to address it in that heroic vein reserved, among more ordinary intelligencies, for anthropomorphic deities. Bernard Shaw's sense of the comic draws its spirit from the contrast between clever people and stupid people, and seems to appear at its best when engaged in upsetting the pseudo-historical, pseudo-philosophical illusions of Anglo-Saxons, in charmingly ridiculous pantomimes, which the redeeming humor of that patient race has just intelligence enough thoroughly to enjoy.

If he were himself less moralistically earnest the spice of the jest would disappear. His humor is not universal humor. It is topical humor; and topical humor derives its point from moral contrast,--the contrast in this case between the virtue of Mr. Shaw and the vices of modern society.

"Man and Superman" is undoubtedly his most interesting work from a philosophical point of view, but his later plays--such bewitching farces as "Fanny's First Play," "Androcles," and "Pygmalion"--seem to express more completely than anything else that rollicking combative roguishness which is his most characteristic quality.

86. GILBERT K. CHESTERTON. ORTHODOXY.

Mr. Chesterton may congratulate himself upon being the only man of letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy; whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barrés, Bourget, Bordeaux, and many others, whose persuasive and romantic rôle it is to prop up tottering altars; in England we have only Mr. Chesterton.

That is doubtless why it is necessary for him to exaggerate his paradoxes so extravagantly; and also why he is so important and so dear to the hearts of intelligent clergymen.

Mr. Chesterton's grand philosophical "coup" is a simple and effective one--the turning of everything, complacently and hilariously, upside down. One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the Universe in the posture of a Gargantuan baby, "prepared" for a sound smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this performance and wonderful pyrotechnic stars leap into space as its happy result.

Mr. Chesterton has his own peculiar "religion"--a sort of Chelsea Embankment Catholicism, in which, in place of Pontifical Encyclicals, we have Punch and Judy jokes, and in place of Apostolic Doctrine we have umbrellas, lamp-posts, electric-signs and prestidigitating clerics.

Mr. Chesterton is never more entertaining, never more entirely at ease, than when turning one or other of the really noble and tragic figures of human intellect into preposterous "Aunt Sallies" at whose battered heads he can fling the turnips and potatoes of the Average Man's average suspicion, dipped for that purpose in a fiery sort of brandy of his own whimsical wit. If we don't become "like little children"; in other words like jovial, middle-aged swashbucklers, and protest our belief in Flying Pigs, Pusses in Boots, Jacks on the top of Beanstalks, Old Women who live in Shoes, Fairies, Fandangos, Prester Johns, and Blue Devils, there is no hope for us and we are condemned to a dreadful purgatory of pedantic and atheistic dullness, along with Li Hung Chang, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer and other heretics whose view of the Dogma of the Immortality of the Soul differs from that of Mr. Chesterton.

87. OSCAR WILDE. INTENTIONS. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. DE PROFUNDIS.

"Intentions" is perhaps the most original of all Wilde's remarkable works.

His supreme art, as he himself well knew, was, after all, the art of conversation. One might even put it that his greatest achievement in life was just the achievement of being brazenly and shamelessly what he naturally was--especially in conversation. To call him a "poseur" with the implication that he pretended or assumed a manner, were just as absurd as to call a tiger striped with the implication that the beast deliberately "put on" that mark of distinction.

If it is a pose to enjoy the sensation of one's own spontaneous gestures, Wilde was indeed the worst of pretenders. But the stupid gravity of many generals, judges and archbishops is not more natural to them than his exquisite insolence was to him.

Below the wit and provocative persiflage of "Intentions" there is a deep and true conception of the nature of art--a conception which might well serve as the "philosophy" of much of the most interesting and arresting of modern work.

Wilde's extraordinary charm largely depends upon something invincibly boyish and youthful in him. His personality, as he himself says, has become almost symbolic--symbolic, that is, of a certain shameless and beautiful defiance of the world, expressed in an unconquerable insolence worthy of the very spirit of hard, brave, flagrant youth.

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is perhaps the gayest, least responsible, and most adorably witty of all English comedies; just as "Salome" is the most richly colored and smoulderingly sensual of all modern tragedies. One actually touches with one's fingers the feasting-cups of the Tetrarch; and the passion of the daughter of Herodias hangs round one like an exotic perfume.

In "De Profundis" we sound the sea-floor of a quite open secret; the secret namely of the invincible attraction of a certain type of artist and sensualist towards the "white Christ" who came forth from the tomb where he had been laid, with precious ointments about him, by the Arimathaean.

In "The Soul of Man" another symbolic reversion displays itself--that reversion namely of the soul of the true artist towards the revolutionary organization which, along with insensitiveness and brutality, proposes to abolish ugliness also.

The name of Oscar Wilde thus becomes a name "to conjure with" and a fantastic beacon-fire to which those "oppressed and humiliated" may repair and take new heart.

90. RUDYARD KIPLING. THE JUNGLE BOOK.

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.

95. W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM. OF HUMAN BONDAGE.

In this remarkable book Mr. W. Somerset Maugham surpasses by a long distance the average novels of recent appearance. The portion of the book which deals with Paris, especially with that mad poet there, who expounds the philosophy of the "Pattern," is as suggestive a piece of literature as any we have seen for half a dozen years.

The passage towards the end of the book on the subject of the genius of El Greco is also profoundly interesting; and the sentences which comment so gravely and beautifully upon the cry of the Christ, "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do," have a rare and most moving power.

96. GILBERT CANNAN. ROUND THE CORNER.

"Round the Corner" is perhaps Mr. Cannan's best book but "Young Earnest" and "Old Mole" are also curious and interesting volumes.

Mr. Cannan is as typical a modern writer as could be found anywhere. And yet modernity is not his only charm. He has genuine psychological insight and though this insight comes in flashes and is not continuous it often gives an original twist to his characters which helps to make them strangely convincing and appealing. "Round the Corner" is a genuine masterpiece. It is the history of the most charming and touching clergyman described in all English fiction since the Vicar of Wakefield; and the massive, solid manner in which the story is constructed, the vigor and reality of the interplay of the various members of Francis' family, the admirable portrait of the mother, the grand and solemn close of the book, make it one of the most powerful works of fiction England has produced during the last decade.

Now and again--and what praise could go further?--there are little touches of clear-cut realism, of that kind which has a mystical background, which actually suggest some of the lighter and more idyllic work of Goethe himself. The book has genuine wisdom in it, of a sort superior to any philosophical system, and one feels at the close the tonic and soothing effect of a powerful moral influence, sweetening and refining one's general reaction towards life.

97. VINCENT O'SULLIVAN. THE GOOD GIRL. _Published by Dutton & Co._

This admirable work of art is not known as well as it deserves either in England or America. It is a work of genius in every sense of that word, and it produces on the mind that curious sense of completeness and finality which only such works produce.

Mr. L.U. Wilkinson--himself a writer of powerful achievement--says of "The Good Girl": "It does what I have always desired should be done; it reduces 'atmosphere' and 'nature' to their proper subordinate place. It wastes no energy. It focuses one's intellect and one's emotion. It creates characters who resemble none others in fiction. It is imaginative realism of the highest level of excellence."

The complex figure of Vendred, the hero of the story, the evasive provocative Mona Lisa-like portrait of Mrs. Dover, the extraordinary and stimulating art with which her husband is described, the agitating and tragic appeal made to us by Vendred's child-wife, the unfortunate Louise--all these together make up one of the most absorbing and unforgettable impressions we have received for many years.

Of Mr. and Mrs. Dover in their relation to one another the following passage reverberates through one's mind:--"They would sit opposite one another silently, criticising with a drastic pitiless criticism. This in itself showed where they had arrived; for faith has to be shaken before there is room for criticism, and if love survives the criticism of lovers, it is altogether different from the love they began with. Lovers can be almost anything they choose to each other and still be in love, but they cannot be critical. That is blighting."

Perhaps the most tragic thing in the book is the letter written by Louise to Vendred when the luckless child discovers her husband's intrigue with her mother:--"I came to you in the middle of the night last night because I was afraid of the wind. The fire was burning and I saw. I am gone, you will never see me again."

The last scenes of the unfortunate girl's life--indirectly described by the ruffian who got possession of her in Paris--produce on the mind that sickening sense of the wanton stupidity of the Universe which fills one with hopeless pity.

The author of this book must have a noble and formidable soul.

98. OLIVER ONIONS. THE STORY OF LOUIE.

"The Story of Louie" is the last and finest volume of an astonishing trilogy--the first two volumes of which are named respectively "In Accordance with the Evidence" and "The Debit Account."

The mere fact that in the midst of our contemptible hatred of "long books" this excellent trilogy should have appeared, is an indication of the daring and originality of Mr. Oliver Onions.

Mr. Onions is one of the few modern writers--along with Hardy, Conrad and James--who is entirely untouched by political or ethical propagandism. His trilogy is a genuinely creative work of a high and exclusive order. The manner in which, to quote Mr. L.U. Wilkinson again--"the whole prospect is, as it were, strained through the character of one or other of the leading persons is in itself a proof of this writer's fine artistic instinct." The way in which all the leading persons in the book stand out in clear relief and indelibly print themselves on the mind is evidence of the value of this method. And what masterly irony in the contrast between "Evie" for instance as Jeffries sees her and "Evie" as she is seen by her rival Louie!

Nowhere in literature, except in Dostoievsky, has the ferocious struggle of two women over a man been so savagely and truly portrayed as in the great scene in "Louie" between that young woman and Evie when the latter visits her in her rooms.

Oliver Onions' humor has that large and vigorous expansiveness, touched with something almost sardonic, which we associate with some of the very greatest writers. There is always present in his work a certain free sweep of imagination which deals masterfully and suggestively with all manner of sordid material.

99. ARNOLD BENNETT. CLAYHANGER.

"Clayhanger" with its sequels, "Hilda Lessways" and "These Twain," makes up an imposing and convincing trilogy of middle-class life in the English Pottery Towns. To these books should be added "Old Wives' Tale," "Anna of the Five Towns" and all the others among this writer's works which deal with these Pottery places he knows so superbly well.

Outside the Five Towns Mr. Bennett loses something of the power of his touch. He is an interesting example of a writer with a definite "milieu" out of whose happy security he is always ill-advised to stray.

But within his own region he is a powerful master. No one in modern English fiction has treated so creatively and illuminatingly the least interesting and least romantic strata of human society which is perhaps to be found in the whole world.

And yet he endows this paralyzing bourgeoisie with astonishing life. One turns back from much more exciting literature to these ignorant, conceited, restricted and undistinguished people.

One turns back to them because Mr. Bennett shows one the tragic humanity, eternally and mysteriously fascinating, to be found beneath these vulgar and unlovely exteriors. Nor when it comes to the problem of sex itself is this writer less of a master. Never has the undying conflict, the world-old struggle, between those who, in the Catullian phrase, "love and hate" at the same time, been more convincingly brought into the light than in the relations between these uninteresting but strangely appealing people.

Arnold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns gives to his work a background of significant congruity whose interaction upon the characters of his plots has the same kind of weight and portentousness as the interaction of Nature in the books of Mr. Hardy.

Such a background may be in itself materialistic and sordid, but in the imaginative reaction it produces upon the characters it has the genuine poetic quality.

100. OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE.

This is by far the best anthology of English poetry, its only rival being the first series of Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Those interested in the work of more recent poets and in the latest poetic "movements" in England and America would be wise to turn to Putnam's "Georgian Poetry"--two series--and "The New Poetry" by Harriet Monroe, published by Macmillan. The compiler of this selection of books feels himself that the most poetical among the younger poets of our age is Walter de la Mare and of the poems which Mr. de la Mare has so far written, he finds the best to be those extraordinary and magical verses entitled "The Listeners" which seem to come nearer to giving a voice to the unutterable margin of our days than any others written within the last ten years.

The following pages contain an alphabetical list by author of the One Hundred Best Books, also the titles of other books recommended in the text by Mr. Powys. The numerals following the titles of the books refer to the number given the books in this list, while the prices attached thereto are the Publisher's list prices. If sent by mail or express it is necessary to add the cost, which is usually about 10 per cent, of the price.

G. ARNOLD SHAW, PUBLISHER GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK

INDEX WITH PRICES OF RECOMMENDED EDITIONS OF JOHN COWPER POWYS' LIST OF ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS And Other Books Mentioned In the Text

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