OLIN Z 1035 .P88 1916a "*^'f Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924074488002 3 1924 074 488^002 In compliance with current copyright law, Cornell University Library produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1984 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1994 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS Books by JOHN COWPER POWYS "The War and CwUure" lor^. . .$ .60 "Visions and Revisions," Essays, 1915. . . 2.00 "Wood and Stone," a Romance, 1915.. . i.so " Confessions of Two Brothers," 1916. . .. 1.50 "Wolf's-Bane," Rhymes, 1916 .. 1.25 In Preparation Rodmoor, a Romance . .$1.50 Suspended Judgments, Essays . . 2.00 PUBLISHED BY G. ARNOLD SHAW Grand Central Terminal New York ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS WITH COMMENTARY AND AN ESSAY ON BOOKS AND READING BY JOHN COWPER POWYS 1916 G. ARNOLD SHAW NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY G. ARNOLD SHAW COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN AND THE COLONIES First Printing, June, 1916 Second Printing, July, 1916 VAIL-eALLOU COMPANY eiNGHAMTON AND NEW YORK PREFACE This selection of " One hundred best books " is made after a different method and with a different purpose from the selections already in existence. Those appar- ently are designed to stuff the minds of young persons with an accumulation of " standard learning " calculated to alarm and discourage the boldest. The following list is frankly subjective in its choice; being indeed the selec- tion of one individual, wandering at large and in freedom through these " realms of gold." The compiler holds the view that in expressing his own predilection, he is also supplying the need of kindred minds; minds that read purely for the pleasure of read- ing, and have no sinister wish to transform themselves by that process into what are called " cultivated persons." The compiler feels that any one who succeeds in reading, with reasonable receptivity, the books in this list, must become, at the end, a person with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all pleasurable arts — the art of intelligent conversation. BOOKS AND READING There is scarcely any question, the sudden explosion of which out of a clear sky, excites more charming perturba- tion in the mind of a man — professionally, as they say, "of letters " — than the question, so often tossed disdain- fully 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 spirit- ual 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 Re- sponsibility 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 inexor- 7 8 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS able 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 Deca- logue. 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 esthetic severitj'." 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 sugges- tions, than by a dull academic chart — professing tedious judicial impartiality — of all the continents, promontories, and islands, marked on the official map. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 dar- lings, with what might be called the " scholastic-venera- tion-cult " ; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior per- son 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 respon- sive chord, the answering vibration, he may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading " Alice in Wonder- land," 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 predes- tined 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 lO ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 them- selves 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 en- hanced by the obvious fact that in this particular com- pany there are several quite prominent and popular writ- ers, both ancient and modem, 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 popu- lar figures ; but they manifest a sufficient sense of incon- gruity 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 ap- ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS II peal 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 im- plying 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, pre- fers also Emily Bronte to Charlotte Bronte, 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 re- gard to the advice to be given to young and ardent people, in the matter of their reading, than some sort of com- munication of the idea — and it is not an easy idea to convey — that there is in this aflfair a subtle fusion desira- ble 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, win- nowed out, as it were, and austerely purged, by the wash- ing 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. 12 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 criti- cism, 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 ex- changed. This common ground is not necessarily — one is reluctant to introduce metaphysical speculation — any hidden " law of beauty " or " principle of spiritual har- mony." 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 in- evitably appeals to what, below temperamental differences, remains permanent and unchanging in us. " Nature," as Leonardo says, " is the mistress of the higher intelligencies " ; and Goethe, in his most oracular utterances, recalls us to the same truth. What imagina- tion 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS I3 diversely constructed temperaments to make their differ- ences effective and intelligible. There could be no recognizable differences, no conver- sation, 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 some- thing 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 be- coming inarticulate, without giving vent to such unre- lated and incoherent cries as overtake one in the corridors of Bedlam. " Nature is the mistress of the higher in- telligencies," 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,. 14 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 out- side. 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 " f urtivi 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 experi- ence 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 in- tolerable 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS I5 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 every- thing 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 Dos- toievsky, 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 Dos- toievsky 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. l6 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS Yes, I have a sneaking feeling that all this modem fuss about " art " and the " creative vision " and " the projec- tion 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 in- terval 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 king- dom of heaven, and the kingdom of heaven is Imagina- , tion. Imagination ! How all other ways of escape from what is mediocre m 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 tur- ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS I7 moil, and perhaps, after all — who can tell ? — there is i 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 irrele- vant, 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 ! " ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 1. The Psalms of David. The Psalms remain, whether in the Latin version or in the authorized English translation, the most pathetic and poignant, as well as the most noble and dignified of all poetic literature. The rarest spirits of our race will always return to them at every epoch in their lives for consolation, for support and for repose. 2. Homer. The Odyssey. Butcher and Lang's Prose Translation. The Odyssey must continue to appeal to adventur- ous persons more powerfully than any other of the ancient stories because, blent with the classic quality of its pure Greek style, there can be found in it that magical element of thrilling romance, which belongs not to one age, but to all time. 3. The Bacchanals. The Bacchae of Euripides. Translated by Professor Gilbert Murray. Euripides, the favourite poet of John Milton and Goethe, is the most modem in feeling, the most romantic in mood of all the Greek poets. One is conscious that in his work, as in the sculpture of Praxiteles, the calm beauty of the Apollonian temper is touched by the wilder rhythm of the perilous music of Dionysus. 19 20 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 4. Horace. Any selection in Latin of The Odes of Hor- ace and complete prose translation published by Macmillan. Flawlessly hammered out, as if from eternal bronze — " aere perennius " — The Odes of Horace are the consummate expression of the pride, the reserve, the tragic playfulness, the epicurean calm, the absolute distinction of the Imperial Roman spirit. A few lines taken at random and learned by heart would act as a talisman in all hours to drive away the insolent pressure of the vulgar and common crowd. 5. Catullus. Any Latin edition and the prose transla- tion published by Macmillan bound up with Tibullus. Catullus, the contemporary of Julius Csesar, is, of all the ancient lyrical poets, the one most modern and neurotic in feeling. One discerns in his work, breathing through the ancient Roman reserve, the pressure of that passionate and rebellious reaction to life, which we enjoy in the most magical of all later poets from Villon to Verlaine. 6. Dante's Divine Comedy. Best edition the " Temple Classics," in three small volumes, with the Italian original and English prose translation on opposite pages. Dante's poetry can legitimately be enjoyed in single great passages, of which there are more in the " In- ferno " than in the other sections of the poem. His peculiar qualit}' is a certain blending of mordant realism with a high and penetrating beauty. There is no need in reading him to vex oneself with symbolic interpretations. He is at his best, when ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 21 from behind his scholastic philosophy, bursts forth, in direct personal betrayal, his pride, his humility, his passion, and his disdain. 7. Rabelais. The English translation with the Dore illustrations. Rabelais is the philosopher's Bible and his book of outrageous jests. He is the recondite cult of wise and magnanimous spirits. He reconciles Nature with Art, Man with God, and religious piety with shameless enjoyment. His style restores to us our courage and our joy ; and his noble buffoonery gives us back the sweet wantonness of our youth. Ra- belais is the greatest intellect in literature. No one has ever had a humor so large; an imagination so creative, or a spirit so world-swallowing, so humane, so friendly. 8. Candida. Any French edition or English translation. Voltaire was a true man of action, a knight of the Holy Ghost. He plunged fiercely into the human arena, and fought through a laborious life, against obscurantism, stupidity and tyranny. He had a clear-cut, aristocratic mind. He hated mystical balderdash, clumsy barbarity, and stupid hypocrisy. Candide is not only a complete refutation of opti- mism ; it is a book full of that mischievous humor, which has the power, more than anything else, of reconciling us to the business of enduring life. 9. Shakespeare. In the Temple edition. 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 22 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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. lo, Milton. Any edition. No epicurean lover of the subtler delicacies in poetic rhythm or of the more exalted and translunar har- monies 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 23 writes with his own formidable image and super- scription. 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." 24 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 15. Nietzsche. Zarathustra, The Joyful Wisdom, and Ecce Homo are all translated in the English edi- tion of Fotilis and published in America by Mac- inillan. Lichtenberger's exposition of his doctrines is in the same series. The most artistic life of him is by Daniel Halevy, 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 distinc- tion with the due pinch of Attic salt it is necessary to be possessed of more imagination than most per- sons are able to summon up. The dramatic gran- deur of Nietzsche's extraordinary intellect over- tops 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 " Confes- sions," translated in the "Scott Library." A good short life of Heine in the " Great Writers " Series. Heine's genius remains unique. Full of dreamy at- tachment 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. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 2$ 19. Sudermann. Song of Songs. Translation into Eng- lish published by Huebsch of New York. Sudermann is the most remarkable and characteris- tic of modern German writers. His massive and la- borious 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 pub- lished 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 Ma- donna of Nuremburg. "The Fool in Christ" — outside some of the characters in Dostoievsky — is the nearest modern approach to a literary interpre- tation 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 indi- vidualists. Absolute self-reliance is the note he con- stantly strikes. He is obsessed by the psychology of moral problems ; but for him there are no uni- versal 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 26 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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." Ul- timately, though absorbed in " matters of con- science," it is as an artist rather than as a philoso- pher 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 in- sight 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. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 2^ 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 elucida- tion. 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 friend- ship and the poet of all those exquisite evasive emo- tions which arise when our loves and our regrets are blended with the presence of Nature. 25. Edgar Lee Masters. Spoon River Anthology, pub- lished 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 astrin- gent 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 peo- ple reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The little chances, the unguessed-at 28 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS accidents, the undeserved blows of a capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless in- ertness, are the aspects of life which interest him most. 26. Theodore Dreiser. The Titan. Of all modern novelists Theodore Dreiser most en- tirely 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," espe- cially, the peculiar power of Dreiser's massive, coulter-like impetus is evident. Here we realize how, between animal passion and material ambi- tion, 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 ex- cept 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 2g 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, unconquer- able spirit of humanity. 28. Victor Hugo. The Toilers of the Sea. In any translation. Victor Hugo is the greatest of all incorrigible ro- manticists. Something between a prophet, a charla- tan, 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 hero- ism 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, Pere 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 sub- terranean 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 30 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 ir the sphere of religion and in the sphere of politics 32. Guy de Maupassant. Le Maison Tellier. Madame Tellier's Establishment. Any translation, pref- erably not one bound in paper or in an " Editiot de Luxe'' Guy de Maupassant's short stories remain, witl those of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the ver^ best of their kind. After " Madame Tellier's Es tablishment" perhaps the stories called respect ively " A Farm Girl " and " Love " are the best hi wrote. He has the eternal excellencies of savage humanity savage sincerity, and savage brevity. His pessimisn is deep, absolute, unshaken ; — and the world, as w^ know it, deserves what he gives it. of sensualizei literary reactions, each one like the falling thud o the blade of a murderous axe. His racking, scooping, combing insight, into the re cesses of man's natural appetites will never be sui passed. How under the glance of his Norma ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 3I 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. Standhal 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 aesthetic use of the Will to Power before even Nietzsche used that singular ex- pression. 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 ! 32 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 34. Anatole France. L'Orme de Mail. L'Abbe Jerome Coignard. Le Livre de mon Ami. Either in French or the authorised 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 trans- parent objectivity, lucid as rarified air, and con- temptuously 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 Ana- tole France spent his childhood among the book- shops on the South side of the Seine. We are con- scious 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 charac- ONE ■'lUNDRED BEST BOOKS 33 ter. 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 blas- phemous 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 mythologi- cal audacity. 38. Paul Bourget. Le Disciple. " Le Disciple " is perhaps the best work of this vo- luminous and interesting writer. Devoid of irony, deficient in humor, lacking any large imaginative power, Paul Bourget holds, all the same, an unassail- able place among French writers. Though a de- voted 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 34 ONE HUNDRED BEST ^OOKS 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. Remain 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 re- lations 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 reconcilia- tion. Since " Wilhelm Meister " no book has been written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels of aesthetic 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 sugges- tions 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 anx- ious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground. 40. Gabriele D'Annunzio. The Flame of Life. The Triumph of Death. Translated by Arthur Horn- blow. D'Annunzio is the most truly Italian, the most in- veterately Latin, of all recent writers. Without ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 35 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 shame- less and antinomian hedonism, narrower, less hu- mane, but more fervid and emotional, than that taught by Remy de Gourmont. In " The Triumph of Death " we find a fierce smol- dering 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 Pimishment. The Idiot. The Brothers Karamazov. The Insulted and Injured. The Possessed. Translated by Con- stance Gamett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in Everyman's Library. Dostoievsky is the greatest and most racial of all Rus- sian 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 2,6 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS in his conclusions he is diametrically opposite. He teaches that out of weakness, abnormality, perversity, foolishness, desperation, abandonment, and a mor- bid pleasure in humiliation, it is possible to arrive at high and unutterable levels of spiritual ecstasy. His ideal is sanctity — not morality — and his reve- lations of the impassioned and insane motives of human nature — its instinct towards self-destruction for instance — will never be surpassed for their ter- rible 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 writ- ers. 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 cer- tain delicate water-color sketches. His allusions to natural scenery are always introduced with peculiar ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 37 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 moral- izing running through his vj^ork but one is conscious that at bottom he is profoundly pessimistic and dis- enchanted. The gaiety of Turgeniev is w^inning 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 valu- able a quality in literature. " Foma Gordyeff " is, after Dostoievsky's master- pieces, 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 noth- ingness, 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." For those who have been " fooled to the top of their bent " by the stupidities and brutalities of the crowd 38 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS there is a savage satisfaction in reading of Foma's insane outbursts of misanthropy. 51. Tchekoff — Seagull. Tchekoff's plays and short stories are published by Scribners in admirable translations. Tchekoff is one of the gentlest and sweetest tem- pered of Russian writers. There is in him a genu- ine graciousness, a politeness of soul, an innate deli- cacy, which is not touched — as such qualities often are in the work of Turgeniev — with any kind of self-conscious Olympianism. A doctor, a consump- tive, and a passionate lover of children, there is a whimsical humanity about all that Tchekoff writes which has a singular and quite special appeal. The " Seagull " is a play full of delicate subtleties and dreamy glimpses of shy humane wisdom. The manner in which outward things — the mere back- ground and scenery of the play — are used to deepen and enhance the dramatic interest is a thing pecu- liarly characteristic of this author. Tchekoff has that kind of imaginative sensibility which makes every material object one encounters significant with spiritual intimations. The mere business of plot — whether in his plays or stories — is not the important matter. The im- portant matter is a certain sudden and pathetic il- lumination thrown upon the essential truth by some casual grouping of persons or of things — some emphatic or symbolic gesture — some significant movement among the silent " listeners." 52. Artzibasheff. Sanine, translation published by Huebsch. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 39 Artzibasheff is an extremist. The suicidal " motif " in the " Breaking-point " is worked out with an ap- palling and devastating thoroughness. Pessimism, in a superficial sense, could hardly go further; though compared with Dostoievsky's in- sight into the " infinite " in character, one is con- scious of a certain closing of doors and narrowing of issues. " Sanine " himself is a sort of idealiza- tion of the sublimated common sense which seems to be this writer's selected virtue. Artzibasheff ap- pears to advocate, as the wisest and sanest way of dealing with life, a certain robust and contemptuous self-assertion, kindly, genial, without baseness or malice; but free from any scruple and quite un- troubled by remorse. If regarded seriously — as he appears to be intended to be — as an approximate human ideal, one cannot help feeling that in spite of his humorous anarchism and subjective zest for life, Sanine has in him some- thing sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits com- pensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, down- right and " honest " about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration. Artzibasheff is in- deed one of the few writers who dare excite our sympathy not only for the seduced in this world but for the seducer. 53. Sterne -^ Tristram Shandy. Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list reveals the secrets of his manner and 40 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS mind to the casual and hasty reader. "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey" are books to be enjoyed slowly and lingeringly, with many humorous after- thoughts and a certain Rabe- laisian unction. A shrewd and ironical wisdom, gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked from these digressive and wan- ton pages. At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative in- terpretation of character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed. For the Epi- curean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in his style — a style so baffling in the fur- tive beauty of its disarming simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable to analyze its peculiar flavour. There is a win- nowed purity about it, and a kind of elfish grace; and with both these things there mixes, strangely enough, a certain homely, almost Dutch domesticity, quaint and mellow and a little wanton — like a pic- ture by Jan Steen. 54. Jonathan Swift. Tale of a Tub. Swift's mysterious and saturnine character, his out- bursts of terrible rage; his exquisite moments of tenderness ; his sledge-hammer blows ; his diabolical irony ; form a dramatic and tragic spectacle which no psychologist can afford to miss. With the " saeva indignatio " alluded to in his own epitaph, he puts his back, as it were, to the " fla- mantia moenia mundi " and hits out, insanely and bhndly, at the human crowd he loathes. His se- ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 4I cretive and desperate passion for Stella, his little girl pupil; his barbarous treatment of Vanessa — his savage championship of the Irish people against the Government — make up the dominant " notes " of a character so formidable that the terror of his personality strikes us with the force of an engine of destruction. His misanthropy is like the misanthropy of Shake- speare's Timon — his crushing sarcasms strike blow after blow at the poor flesh and blood he despises. The hatefulness of average humanity drives him to distraction and in his madness, like a wounded Titan, he spares nothing. To the whole human race he seems to utter the terrible words he puts into the mouth of God : " I to such blockheads set my wit, And damn you all — Go, go, you're bit ! " 55. Charles Lamb. The Essays of Elia. Charles Lamb remains, of all English prose-writers, the one whose manner is the most beautiful. So rich, so delicate, so imaginative, so full of surprises, is the style of this seductive writer, that, for sheer magic and inspiration, his equals can only be found among the very greatest poets. It is impossible to over-estimate the value of Charles Lamb's philosophy. He indicates in his delicate evasive way — not directly, but as it were, in little fragments and morsels and broken snatches — a deep and subtle reconciliation between the wisdom of Epicurus and the wisdom of Christ. And through and beyond all this, there may be felt, as 42 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS with the great poets, an indescribable sense of something withdrawn, withheld, reserved, inscruta- ble — a sense of a secret, rather to be intimated to the initiated, than revealed to the vulgar — a sense of a clue to a sort of Pantagruelian serenity ; a se- renity produced by no crude optimism but by some happy inward knowledge of a neglected hope. The great Rabelaisian motto, "bon espoir y gist au fond ! " seems to emanate from the most wistful and poignant of his pages. He pities the unpitied, he redeems the commonplace, he makes the ordi- nary as if it were not ordinary, and by the sheer genius of his imagination he throws an indescrib- able glamour over the " little things " of the dark- est of our days. Moving among old books, old houses, old streets, old acquaintances, old wines, old pictures, old mem- ories, he is yet possessed of so original and personal a touch that his own wit seems as though it were the very soul and body of the qualities he so caressingly interprets. 56. Sir Walter Scott. Guy Mannering. Bride of Lam- mermoor. Heart of Midlothian. The large, easy, leisurely manner of Scott's writ- ing, its digressiveness, its nonchalant carelessness, its indifference to artistic quality, has in some sort of way numbed and atrophied the interest in his work of those who have been caught up and way- laid by the modem spirit. And yet Scott's novels have ample and admirable excellencies. In his ex- pansive and digressive fashion he can give his char- acters — especially the older and the more idiosyn- ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 43 cratic among them — a surprising and convincing verisimilitude. He can create a plot which, though not dramatically flawless, has movement and energy and stir. The sweetness and modesty of his disposition lends itself to his portrayal of the more gracious aspects of human life, especially as seen in the humours and oddities of very simple and naive persons. Under the stress of occasional emotion he can rise to quite noble heights of feeling and he is able to throw a startling glamour of romance over certain familiar and recurrent human situations. At his best there is a grandeur and simplicity of utterance about what his characters say and an ease and largeness of sympathy about his own commentaries upon them, which must win admiration even from those most avid of modern pathology. Without the passion of Balzac, or the insight of Dostoievsky, or the art of Turgeniev, there is yet, in the sweetness of Scott's own personality, and in the biblical grand- eur of certain of the scenes he evokes, a quality and a charm which it would be at once foolish and arbitrary to neglect. 59. Thackeray. The History of Henry Esmond. Thackeray is a writer who occupies a curious and very interesting position. Devoid of the noble and romantic sympathies of Scott, and corrupted to the basic fibres of his being by Early Victorian snob- bishness, he is yet — none can deny it — a power- ful creator of living people and an accomphshed and graceful stylist. Without philosophy, without faith, without moral 44 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS courage, the uneasy slave of conventional morality, and with a hopeless vein of sheer worldly philistin- ism in his book, Thackeray is yet able, by a certain unconquerable insight into the motives and impulses of mediocre people, and by a certain weight and mass of creative force, to give a convincing reality to his pictures of life, which is almost devastating in its sneering and sentimental accuracy. The most winning and attractive thing about him is his devotion to the eighteenth century; a century whose manners he is able to depict in his large and gracious way without being disturbed by the pres- sure of that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in something bourgeois and snob- bish in his own nature. Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age but from himself. 60. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. The compiler has placed in this list only one of Dickens' books for a somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other cases. All Dickens' novels have a unique value, and such an equal value, that almost any one of them, chosen at random, can serve as an example of the rest. Those who still are not prohibited, by temperamental difficulty or by some modem fashion, from enjoy- ing the peculiar atmosphere of this astonishing per- son's work, will be found reverting to him con- stantly and indiscriminately. " Great Expecta- tions " is perhaps, as a more " artistic " book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice towards a more sympathetic understandingof his mood, those ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 45 who are held from reading him by some more or less accidental reason. The most characteristic thing about this great genius is the power he pos- sesses of breathing palpable life into what is often called the inanimate. Like Hans Andersen, the writer of fairy-stories, and, in a measure, like all children, Dickens endows with fantastic spirituality the most apparently dead things in our ordinary en- vironment. His imagination plays superb tricks with such ob- jects and things, touching the most dilapidated of them with a magic such as the genius of a great poet uses, when dealing with nature — only the " nature " of Dickens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers. The wild exaggerations of Dickens — his reckless contempt for realistic possibility — need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired out- bursts of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost iden- tity of his queer people stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting ap- peal and human voices of divine imagination. 61. Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain unassailable through all changes of taste and varie- ties of opinion. What she really possesses — what might be called the clue to her inimitable secret — is nothing less than the power of giving expression to that undying ironic detachment, touched with a fine malice but full of tender understanding, which 46 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS all women, to some degree or other, share, and which all men, to some degree or other, suffer from ; in other words, the terrible and beautiful insight of the maternal instinct. The clear charm of her unequalled style — a st3'le quite classical in its econ- omy of material and its dignified reserve — is a charm frequently caught in the wit and fine malice of one's unmarried aunts; but it is, none the less, the very epitome of maternal humor. As a creative realist, giving to her characters the very body and pressure of actual life, no writer, living or dead, has surpassed her. Without romance, without philos- ophy, without social theories, without pathological curiosity, without the remotest interest in " Nature," she has yet managed to achieve a triumphant artis- tic success; and to leave an impression of serene wisdom such as no other woman writer has equaled or approached. 62. Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights. Of all the books of all the Brontes, this one is the supreme masterpiece. Charlotte has genius and im- agination. She has passion too. But there is a certain demonic violence about Emily which carries her work into a region of high and desperate beauty forbidden to the gentler spirit of her sister. The love of Heathcliff and Catherine breaks the bonds of ordinary sensual or sentimental relationship and hurls itself into that darker, stranger, more un- earthly air, wherein one hears the voices of the great lovers ; and where Sappho and Michaelangelo and Swift and Shelley and Nietzsche gasp forth their imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 47 Crude and rough and jagged and pitiless, the style of this astounding book seems to rend and tear, like a broken saw, at the very roots of existence. In some curious way, as in Balzac and Dostoievsky, emotions and situations which have the tone and mood of quite gross melodrama are so driven in- wards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite substratum of what is eternal in human passion. The smell of rain-drenched moors, the cry- ing of the wind in the Scotch firs, the long lines of black rooks drifting across the twilight, — these things become, in the savage style of this extraor- dinary girl, the very symbols and tokens of the power that rends her spirit. 63. George Meredith. Harry Richmond. " Harry Richmond " is at once the least Meredithian and the best of all Meredith's books. Meredith, though to a much less degree than George Eliot, is one of those pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-ethical writers, who influence a generation or two and then seem to become antiquated and faded. It is when he is least philosophical and least moral- istic — as in the superbly imaginative figure of Rich- mond Roy — that he is at his greatest. There is, throughout his work, an unpleasing strain, like the vibration of a rope drawn out too tight, — a strain and a tug of intellectual intensity, that is not ful- filled by any corresponding intellectual wisdom. His descriptions of nature, in his poems, as well as in his prose works, have an original vigor and a pungent tang of their own; but the twisted violence of their introduction, full of queer jolts and jerks. 48 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS prevents their impressing one with any sense of calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these passages. They are too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. The same fault may be re- marked in the rounding off of the Meredithian plots where one is so seldom conscious of the presence of the " inevitable " and so teased by the " obstinate questionings " of purely mental prob- lems. Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river; reading Mere- dith one is flicked and flapped and beaten, as if be- neath a hand with a flail. 64. Henry James. The Ambassadors. The Tragic Muse. The Soft Side. The Better Sort. The Wings of the Dove. The Golden Bowl. Henry James is the most purely " artistic " as he is the most profoundly " intellectual "of all the Euro- pean writers of our age. His fame will steadilj grow, and his extraordinary genius will more anc more create that finer taste by which alone he car be appreciated. No novelist who has ever lived has " taken art " sc seriously. But it is art, and not life, he take: seriously ; and, therefore, along with his methods o elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most deli cate and whimsical playfulness — sparing literalb nothing. In spite of his beautiful cosmopolitanisn it must never be forgotten that at bottom Henr James is richly and wonderfully American. Tha tender and gracious " penchant " of his for pure souled and modest-minded young men, for thei ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 49 high resolves, their noble renunciations, their touch- ing faith, is an indication of how much he has ex- ploited — in the completest aesthetic sense — the naive puritanism of his great nation. In regard to his style one may remark three main divergent epochs; the first closing with the open- ing of the " nineties," and the third beginning about the year 1903. Of these the second seems to the present compiler the best; being, indeed, more in- tellectualized and subtle than the first and less mannered and obscure than the final one. The finest works he produced would thus be found to be those on one side or the other of the year 1900. The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological dis- tinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sym- pathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be called moral. The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the pleasure — both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more discriminating conscious- ness of the tragic complexity of quite little and un- important characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibili- ties of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of ex- citement—partly intellectual and partly esthetic, that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm — as with all the supreme masters. 50 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 70. Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D'Urbevilles. The Return of the Native. The Mayor of Caster- bridge. Far from the Madding Crowd. Wes- sex Poems. Thomas Hardy remains the greatest poet and novel- ist of the England of our age. His poetry, Wessex Poems, Poems of Past and Present, Time's Laugh- ing-Stock, Satires of Circumstance, make up the most powerful and original contribution to modern verse, produced recently, either in England or America. Not to value Hardy's poetry as highly as all but his very greatest prose is to betray oneself as having missed the full pregnancy of his bitter and lovely wisdom. He has, like Henry James, three " manners " or styles — the first containing such lighter, friendlier work, as " Life's Little Ironies," " Under a Green- wood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major" — the second being the period of the great tragedies which assume the place, in his work, of " Hamlet," " Lear," " Macbeth " and " Othello," in the work of Shakespeare — the third, of curious and imagina- tive interest, expresses in quite a particular way, Mr. Hardy's own peculiar point of view. The Well- Beloved, Jude the Obscure, and the later poems would belong to this epoch. At his best Hardy is a novelist second to none His style has a grandeur, a distinction, a concentra- tion, which we find neither in Balzac nor Dostoiev- sky. Not to appreciate the power and beauty of hi; manner, when his real inspiration holds him, is tc confess that the genuinely classical in style and th< ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 5I genuinely pagan in feeling has no meaning for you. No English writer, whether in prose or poetry, has ever caught so completely the magic of the earth and the quaint humors, tragical and laughable, of those who live inured to her moods ; who live with her moroseness, her whimsicality, her vindictiveness, her austerity, her evasive grace. Mr. Hardy's clairvoyant feeling for Nature is, how- ever, only the background of his work. He is no idyllic posture-monger. The march of events as they drive forward the primitive earth-born men and women of Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality, as — the compari- son is tedious and pedantic — the fortunes of the ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One pe- culiarity of Mr. Hardy's method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic quality to these formidable scenes — I mean his preference for form over color. Who can forget those deso- lately emphatic human protagonists silhouetted so austerely along the tops of hills and against the per- spectives of long white roads? 75. Joseph Conrad. Chance. Lord Jim. Victory. Youth. Almayer's Folly. Published by Dou- bleday Page & Co. with a critical monograph, so admirably written {it is given gratis) by Wilson Follet that one longs to see more criticism from such an accomplished hand. Conrad's work — and, considering his foreign ori- gin and his late choice of English as a medium of expression, it is no less than an astounding achieve- ment — is work of the very highest literary and 52 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS psychological value. It is, indeed, as Mr. Follet says, only such criticism as is passionately anxious to prove for itself the true " romance of the intel- lect '' that can hope to deal adequately with such an output. The background of Conrad's books is pri- marily the sea itself ; and after the sea, ships. No one has indicated the extraordinary romance of ships in the way he has done — of ships in the open sea, in the harbour, at the wharf, or driven far up some perilous tropical river. But it is neither the sea nor the tropical recesses nor the sun-scorched river-edges of his backgrounds that make up the essence of romance in the Conrad books. This is found in nothing less than the mys- terious potencies for courage and for fear, for good and for evil, of human beings themselves — of hu- man beings isolated by some external " diablerie " which throws every feature of them into terrible and baffling relief. The finest and deepest effects of Conrad's art are always found when, in the process of the story, some solitary man and woman encounter each other, far from civilization, and tearing off, as it were, the mask of one another's souls, are confronted by a deeper and more inveterate mystery — the eternal mystery of difference, which separates all men born into the world and keeps us perpetually alone. In the case of Heyst and Lena — of Flora de Barral and her Captain Anthony — of Charles and Mrs. Gould — of Aissa and Willems — of Almayer's daughter and her Malay lover, Mr. Conrad takes up the ancient planetary theme of the loves of men and ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS S3 women and throws upon it a sudden, original, and singularly stimulating light ; a light, that like a lan- tern carried down into the very Cave of the " Moth- ers," throws its flickering and ambiguous ra3'5 over the large, dumb, formless shapes — the primordial motives of human hearts — which grope and fumble in that thick darkness. The style of Conrad, simpler than that of James, less monumental than that of Hardy, has never- theless a certain forward-driving impetus hardly less effective than these more famous mediums of expression. " Lord Jim " is perhaps his masterpiece and may be regarded as the most interesting book written recently in our language with the exception of Henry James' " Golden Bowl." For sheer ex- citement and the thrilling sensation of delayed denouement it must be conceded that not one of our classical novelists can touch Conrad. " Victory " remains an absorbing evidence of his power of con- centrating at one and the same moment our drama- tic and our psychological interest. 80. Walter Pater. Marius the Epicurean. Studies in the Renaissance. Imaginary Portraits. Plato and Platonism, Gaston de Latour. 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 "" liv- ing to oneself " indicated by Stendhal, find in ^^■alter Pater a new qualification and a new sanction. Himself a supreme master of the rare and exquisite 54 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS in style, he becomes, for those who really under- stand him, something more penetrating and insidious than a mere personality. He becomes an atmos- phere, an attitude, a tone, a temper — and one too which may serve us to most rich and recondite pur- pose, 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-ofifered 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 litera- ture. No one, after reading him, can remain gross, aca- demic, 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 aesthetic but of the re- ligious cult. For the supreme initiation into which we are led by these elaborate and patient essays, is the initia- tion into the world of inner austerity, which makes ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 55 its clear-cut and passionate distinctions in our emo- tional as well as in our intellectual life. Everything, without exception, as we read Pater becomes " a matter of taste " ; but the high and ex- clusive nature of this taste, to which no sensations but those which are vulgar and common are for- bidden, is itself a guarantee of the gentleness and delicacy of the passions evoked. His ultimate phil- osophy seems to be that — as he himself has de- scribed 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 Shawr. Man and Superman. Mr. Shaw has found his role and his occupation very happily cut out for him in the unfailing stu- pidity, not untouched by a sense of humor, of our Anglo-Saxon democracy in England and America. In Germany, too, there seems naivete and simplicity enough to be still entertained by these mischievously whimsical and yet portentously moral comedies. It appears however that the civilization for which Ra- belais 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 56 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 en- gaged in upsetting the pseudo-historical, pseudo- philosophical illusions of Anglo-Saxons, in charm- ingly 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 in- teresting work from a philosophical point of view, but his later plays — such bewitching farces as " Fanny's First Play," " Androcles," and " Pygma- lion " — seem to express more completely than any- thing else that rollicking combative roguishness which is his most characteristic quality. 86. Gilbert K. Chesterton. Orthodoxy. Mr. Chesterton may congratulate himself upon be- ing 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, Barres, Bourget, Bordeaux, and many others, whose per- suasive and romantic role it is to prop up tottering altars; in England we have only Mr. Chesterton. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 57 That is doubtless why it is necessary for him to ex- aggerate 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 everj'- thing, complacently and hilariously, upside down. One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the Universe in the posture of a Gargan- tuan baby, " prepared " for a sound smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this per- formance 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 hu- man intellect into preposterous " Aunt Sallies " at whose battered heads he can fling the turnips and potatoes of the Average Man's average sus- picion, dipped for that purpose in a fiery sort of brandy of his own whimsical wit. If we don't be- come " 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 58 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS Devils, there is no hope for us and we are con- demned 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 ab- surd 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 gen- erals, judges and archbishops is not more natural to them than his exquisite insolence was to him. Below the wit and provocative persiflage of "In- tentions " 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 interest- ing and arresting of modern work. Wilde's extraordinary charm largely depends upon something invincibly boyish and youthful in him. ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 59 His personality, as he himself says, has become almost symbolic — symbolic, that is, of a certain shameless and beautiful defiance of the world, ex- pressed 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 modem tragedies. One actually touches with one's fingers the f easting-cups of the Tetrarch; and the passion of the daughter of Herodias hangs round one like an exotic perfume. In " De Prof undis " 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 oint- ments 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 organi- zation which, along with insensitiveness and bru- tality, 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 re- pair and take new heart. go. 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 6o ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS journalism, his moralistic breeziness and his patron- age of the " white man's burden," one cannot help admitting that the Jungle-Book is one of the im- mortal 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 ani- mals are quite Biblical in their emphatic picturesque- ness, 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 ex- cept 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 con- stantly " dropping bricks " as the expressive phrase has it, and running amuck through strenuous banali- ties, rises in the Jungle-Book to heights of poetic and imaginative suggestion which will give him an un- dying 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 6l 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 lit- tle 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 — car- rying 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 amus- ing but it would not carry for us that peculiar " per- fume in the mention," that provocative enchantment, if it were not much more — Oh, so much more — than merely amusing. The thousand and one re- actions, impressions, intimations, of a little girl's consciousness, are reproduced here with a faithful- ness 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 62 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 femi- nine 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 " Coun- try House " — the tragic figure of Irene Soames Forsyte in the " Man of Property " — the pitiful fig- ure 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 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 63 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 " Pat- tern," 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 con- vincing and appeahng. " 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 con- structed, 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. 64 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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, sweet- ening 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 com- pleteness and finality which only such works pro- duce. Mr. L. U. Wilkinson — himself a writer of power- ful 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 focusses one's intellect and one's emotion. It creates characters who resemble none others in fic- tion. 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 por- trait of Mrs. Dover, the extraordinary and stimu- lating art with which her husband is described, the agitating and tragic appeal made to us by Vendred's ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 65 child-wife, the unfortunate Louise — all these to- gether make up one of the most absorbing and un- forgettable 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 lov- ers, 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 let- ter 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 — in- directly described by the ruffian who got possession of her in Paris — produce on the mind that sicken- ing 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 66 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 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 en- tirely untouched by political or ethical propagand- ism. 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 charac- ter 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 them- selves 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 hei rooms. Oliver Onions' humor has that large and vigorous expansiveness, touched with something almost sar- donic, which we associate with some of the verj greatest writers. There is always present in his work a certain free sweep of imagination whicl- ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS 67 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 con- vincing 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 some- thing of the power of his touch. He is an interest- ing 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 astonishir'^ life. One turns back from much more exciting literature to these ignorant, conceited, re- stricted 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 prob- lem of sex itself is this writer less of a master. Never has the undying conflict, the world-old strug- gle, between those who, in the Catullian phrase. 68 ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS " love and hate " at the same time, been more con- vincingly brought into the light than in the rela- tions between these uninteresting but strangely ap- pealing people. Arnold Bennett's knowledge of the Five Towns gives to his work a background of significant con- gruity whose interaction upon the characters of his plots has the same kind of weight and portentous- ness 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 pro- duces 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 " move- ments " in England and America would be wise to turn to Putnam's "Georgian Poetry" — two series — and " The New Poetry " by Harriet Monroe, pub- lished by Macmillan. The compil:;- of this selec- tion 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 ex- traordinary 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 lo per cent, of the price. G. ARNOLD SHAW, PUBLISHER GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK 6g INDEX WITH PRICES OF RECOMMENDED EDITIONS OF JOHN COWPER POWYS' LIST OF ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS And Other Books Mentioned In the Text Binding and price Author Title Leather Cloth Artzibasheff Sanine (52) $1-35 ArtzibasheflE Breaking Point 140 Austen, Jane *Pride and Prejudice (61) $1-25 -75 Balzac, Honore de*Lost Illusions (29) Centenary ed 1.35 Balzac, Honore de*Cousin Bette (30) Centenary ed. . 1.35 Balzac, Honore de*01d Goriot (31) Centenary ed. . 1.35 Bennett, Arnold . . Clayhanger (99) 1.50 Bennett, Arnold . . Hilda Lessways 1.50 Bennett, Arnold . . These Twain 1.50 Bennett, Arnold . . Old Wives' Tale 1.50 Bennett, Arnold . .Anna of the Five Towns 1.20 Bronte, Emily ... *Wiithering Heights (62) 1.75 Bourget, Paul Le Disciple (38) .75 Browne, Sir Thos . *Religio Medici and Urn Burial (11) in Scott Library .40 Browne, Sir Thos. *Religio (Golden Treasury Series) i.oo Cannan, Gilbert ..Round the Corner (96) 1.35 Cannan, Gilbert . .Young Earnest 1.35 Cannan, Gilbert . .Old Mole 1.35 Catullus Loeb Library Edition (s) 2.00 1.50 Cervantes *Don Quixote (27) trans. W. J. Jarvis 2.00 Carroll, Lewis ...Alice in Wonderland (91) i.oo Carroll, Lewis . . . Thro the Looking Glass i.oo Chesterton, G. K.. Orthodoxy (86) 1.50 Conrad, Joseph . . Chance (75) 1.50 Conrad, Joseph ..Lord Jim (76) 1.50 Conrad, Joseph . .Victory (77) 1.50 70 INDEX 71 Binding and price Author Title Leather Cloth Conrad, Joseph . . Youth (78) . . . ." 1.50 Conrad, Joseph .. Almayer's Folly (79) 1.35 Dante Divine Comedy (6) . Temple Clas- ^, . sics, 3 vols 1.95 1.3s JJ Annunzio, G. . .The Flame of Life (40) 1.50 D'Annunzio, G. . .The Triumph of Death (41) 1.50 de la Mare, Walter . . The Listeners 1.20 Dickens, Charles. .*Great Expectations (60), Oxford Edition .75 Dickens, Charles. .*Great Expectations, Oxford Red Venetian 1.25 Dickens, Charles. .*Great Expectations, India paper. Lambskin 1.75 Dostoievsky, F. . . *Crime and Punishment, trans. C. Garnett {42) i-SO Dostoievsky, F. . . *The Idiot (43), C. Garnett 1.50 Dbstoievsky, F. ..The Brothers Karamazov (44) C. Garnett l-SO Dostoievsky, F. ..The Insulted and Injured (45) C. Garnett i-So Dostoievsky, F. ..The Possessed (46) C. Garnett... 1.50 Dreiser, Theodore. The Titan (26) 140 Emerson, R. W... Essays (23), first and second se- ries in one volume. Cambridge Classics Edition .90 Euripides The Bacchae (3), trans, by Gilbert Murray -65 France, Anatole . .The Elm Tree on the Mall (34) . 1.7S France Anatole . .The Opinions of Jerome Coignard (35) ^-75 France, Anatole ..My Friend's Book (36) 1-75 Galsworthy, John. The Country House (92) 1.35 Galsworthy, John. The Man of Property (93) i.3S Galsworthy, John. Fraternity (94) i-3S Georgian Poetry. . 1911/1912 ^-5° Georgian Poetry. . 1913/1914 r-^-'-^-rW" ^'^° Goethe *Faust (12-) trans, by Bayard Tay- lor 400 2.50 Goethe *Wilhelm Meister (13) trans, by Carlyle ... 2 vols 300 Goethe Goethe's Conversations with Eck- erman (14) i-25 Gourmont, Remy de. A Nightin the Luxembourg (^37) i-5o Gorki Maxim . . . Foma Gordyeeflf (50) i-oo Hardy, ThoJnas . . Tess of the D'UrbeviUes (70) .... i-So 72 INDEX Bhiding and price Author Title Leather Cloth Hardy, Thomas . .The Return of the Native (71)- ■• i-SO Hardy, Thomas . . The Mayor of Casterbridge (72) . 1.50 Hardy, Thomas .. Far from the Madding Crowd {73) 1.50 Hardy, Thomas . . Wessex Poems (74) 1-85 Hardy, Thomas ..Poems of Past and Present 1.60 Hardy, Thomas . . Satires of Circumstances i-So Hauptmann The Fool in Christ, (20) i-SP Heine Prose works and "Confessions" (18), Scott Library .40 Heine Life of — Great Writers Series... -40 Horace *Odes (4) prose translation .... 1.25 Hugo, Victor *The Toilers of the Sea (28) i.oo Homer *The Odyssey, (2) Butcher and Lang .80 Ibsen *The Wild Duck (21) i.oo James, Henry The Ambassadors (64) 2.00 James, Henry The Tragic Muse (65) 2 vols, each 1.25 James, Henry The Soft Side (66) 1.50 James, Henry The Better Sort (67) i.3S James, Henry The Wings of a Dove (68) 2 vols. 2.25 James, Henry The Golden Bowl (69) 2 vols 2.25 Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book (90) 1.50 Lamb, Charles ...*Essays of Elia (55) Eversley Ed 1.50 Masters, Edgar Lee. .Spoon River Anthology (25). . 1.50 1.25 Maugham, W. Somerset. .Of Human Bondage (95) 1.50 Maupassant, Guy de. Madame Tellier's Establishment (32) paper .40 Meredith, George.. Harry Richmond (65) Pocketed.. i.oo Milton (10) Eversley Edition (or*), 3 vols, set 4.50 Monroe, Harriet . The New Poetry 1.50 Nietzsche, F Zarathustra (15) 2.00 Nietzsche, F The Joyful Wisdom (16) 1.60 Nietzsche, F Ecce Homo (17) 2.00 Nietzsche, F Commentary by Lichtenberger. . . . 1.50 Nietzsche, F Life of by Daniel Halevy, trans.. . 1.25 Onions, Oliver . . . The Story of Louie (98) 1.25 Onions, Oliver ...In Accordance with the Evidence. 1.25 Onions, Oliver ...The Debit Account 125 O'Sullivan, Vincent. .The Good Girl (97) 1.35 Oxford Book of English Verse (100), crown 8 vo 2.00 Oxford Book of English Verse, India Paper Edition. 2.75 Palgrave Golden Treasury, First Series*.. ixx) Pater, Walter Marius the Epicurean (80) , 2 vols. 4.00 Pater, Walter ... .Studies in the Renaissance (81).. 2j00 Pater, Walter Imaginary Portraits (82) 2joo INDEX 73 Binding and price Author Title Leather Cloth Pater, Walter Plato and Platonism (83) 2.00 Pater, Walter Gaston de Latour (84) 2jOO Rabelais (7) Edition with Dore Illustrations. .Rare Selection in French Classics for English Readers' Series 1.25 RoUand, Remain. .Jean Christophe (39) (trans. G. Cannan), 3 vols 4.50 Scott, Sir Walter. *Guy Mannering (56), Dryburgh Edition 1.2S Scott, Sir Walter. *Bride of Lammermoor (57).... 1.25 Scott, Sir Walter. *Heart of Midlothian (58) 1.25 Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (9), Temple .55 .35 Shakespeare Measure for Measure, Temple... .55 .35 Shakespeare Timon of Athens, Temple Edition. .55 .35 Shaw, George Bernard Man and Superman (85) 1.25 Stendhal The Red and the Black (33) i-7S Sterne, Laurence . *Tristram Shandy (53) Lib. of Eng. Classics, 2 vols, each 1.50 Strindberg, August. .The Confessions of a Fool (22) 1.35 Sudermann Song of Songs (19) 1.40 Swift, Jonathan... *Tale of a Tub (54), Bohn Lib. 1.25 Thackeray, W. M.*Henry Esmond (59), Cranford Series 2.00 Thackeray, W. M.*Henry Esmond, Oxford Edition. .75 Thackeray, W. M.*Henry Esmond, India Paper ed. 1.75 Turgeniev * Virgin Soil, trans. Constance Garnett, 2 vols, each (47) i.oo Turgeniev Sportsman's Sketches, trans. Con- stance Garnett, 2 vols, each (48) i.oo Turgeniev *Lisa, trans. Constance Garnett, (49) Tschekoff The Sea Gull (Si) • • •,- • ■ • -. ■ 1-5° Voltaire Candide (8) m Morley's Universal Library -35 Whitman, Walt . .*Leaves of Grass (24) .... ...... - . i-2S Wilde Oscar ....Intentions (87) Ravenna Edition 1.25 Wilde Oscar . . . .The Importance of Being Earnest (88) I-2S Wilde, Oscar De Profundis (89) i-2S An asterisk (*) before the title of a book indicates that it may be obtained in Everyman's Library, as well as the edition named, price 40 cts. in cloth, and 80 cts. in leather. THE END I.oo REMINISCENT OF DOSTOIEVSKY WOOD AND STONE A ROMANCE By JOHN COWPER POWYS izmo, 722 pages, $1.50 net This is -an epoch marking novel by an author " who is dramatic as is no other now writing." — Oakland Enquirer. In this startling and original romance, the author turns aside from the track of his contemporaries and reverts to models drawn from races which have bolder and less conventional views of literature than the Anglo-Saxon race. Following the lead of the Great Russian Dostoievsky, he proceeds boldly to lay bare the secret passions, the unacknowledged motives and impulses, which lurk below the placid-seeming surface of ordinary human nature. ■ - , It has been reviewed favorably by all of Americas principal newspapers, as the following extracts from press notices will indicate: . , Boston Transcript: "His mastery of language, nis knowledge ol human impulses, his interpretation of the forces of nature and of the power of inanimate objects over human beings, all pronounce him a writer of no mean rank. . , . He can express philosophy in terms of nar- rative without prostituting his art; he can suggest an answer without drawing a moral; with a clearer vision he could stand among the masters in literary achievement." Chicago Tribune; "Psychologically speaking, it is one of the most remarkable pieces of fiction ever written. ... I do not hesitate to say that a new novelist of power has appeared upon the scene." Evening Sun, New York: *' Mr. Powys, master essayist, comes for- ward with a first novel which is brilliant in style, absorbing in plot, deep and thoughtful in its purpose.' ' Philadelphia Press: " It undoubtedly will set a new mark in literature of the contemporary period. . . Mr. Powys' style is the style of Thomas Hardy," Philadelphia Eecord: " Every page is a joy, every chapter a fresh proof of Powys' genius." N. Y. Evening Post: " The best novel one reviewer has read in a. good while." New York Times: "Mr. Powys is evidently a keen observer of life and responsive to all its phases." N. Y. Tribune: " A good story well told." N. y. Herald: ** Here is a novel worth reading." The Nation: " A book of distinctive flavor." Review of Reviews: " An exceptional novel ... a brilliant intellec- tual piece of work." Philadelphia North American: "A notable achievement in fictitious literature.' ' Springfield Eepublioan: ' ' This is a book which will have more than the ephemeral existence of the average novel.' ' New Haven Courier Journal: " One of the most notable and im- portant novels that has appeared in the last twelve months." Hartford Courant: "The book is very interesting, prove kingly in- teresting." Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester: " Among the few works of fiction that stand out in the very forefront of this season's production." G. ARNOLD SHAW Publisher to the University Lecturers Association GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK SHAW'S FALL FICTION RODMOOR, A Romance by John Cowper Powys. ismo. About 400 pages. J1.50 net The New York Evening Post said of Mr. Powys' first novel " Wood and stone that it was one of the best novels of the twelvemonth " while the Boston iranscript said that " with a clearer vision he could stand among the masters ui literary achievement." The Chicago Tribune said of the same tc\- '^sy'^holo^ically speaking, it is one of the most remarkable pieces 01 notion ever written." The announcement of a second novel by the same Druuant author is therefore one of extraordinary interest In this new novel, Mr. Powys, while unhesitatingly using to his purpose those new fields of psychological interest opened up for us by recent Rus- sian writers, reverts, in the general style and content of his story, to that more idealistic, more simple mood, which we associate with such great roman- ticists as Emily Bronts and Victor Hugo. QUAKER-BORN, A Romance of the Great War, by Ian Campbell Hannah. Jimo. About 320 pages, iz.35 net While this is Dr. Hannah's first novel, it is his eighth published work; he thus brings to bear the skill of the literary craftsman upon his dramatic theme of the Quakers' conscientious objections to war. To fight or not to fight is the problem that confronted Edward Alexander when he witnessed the bombardment of Scarborough; he decided as an Englishman, not as a Quaker — ^ but, the next day a telegram came summoning him to the death-bed of his mother, who demanded as her dying wish that he should not abandon the principles^ of the Friends. He had the strength to reverse his decision but neither his fiancee nor his best Cambridge friend could understand. How he nearly lost the former while saving the life of the latter on the battle field in Flanders is the basis of an absorbing plot which holds the interest from beginning to end of this thrilling story of young love. An admirable book recommended especially to those who detest alike the mawkish sentiment of the " best-seller " and the revolting realistic novels of our day, THE CHILD OF THE MOAT, A Story of 1550, by I. B. Stoughtoa Holbom. i2mo. About 320 pages. $I.Z5 net This is a book for girls of from 13 to 16 written for a child rescued from the Lusitania. Many complain that girls' books are too tame and prefer those written for boys. Mr. Holbom therefore promised to write a girls' book with as much adventure as Stevenson's "Treasure Island." He has succeeded and the hair-breadth escapes of the heroine should satisfy the most exacting. The scene is laid in the stirring times of the Reformation and those who know the author as an archaeological lecturer will recognize his bent in several picturesque touches, such as the striking dressing scene be- fore the heroine s birthday-party. The book is a remarkable contribution to children's literature and suggests a raising of the standard if more were written by men of learning and scholarship who are true child-lovers. After all was not "Alice in Wonderland" written by an erudite Oxford don and everyone who has read the present author's volume of poems " Children of Fancy " will know him as a lover of children. A ARNOLD SHAW Publisher to the University U. I\Kl\KJl^LJ OXa/iVV Lecturers Association GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK Recommended by the A. L. A. Booklist Adopted for required reading by the Pittsburgh Teachers Reading Circle VISIONS AND REVISIONS A BOOK OF LITERARY DEVOTIONS By JOHN COWPER POWYS 8vo, sgS pp. Half White- Cloth with Blue Fahriano Paper Sides, $2.00 net This volume of essays on Great Writers by the well-known lecturer was the first of a series of three books with the same purpose as the author's brilliant lectures ; namely, to enable one to discriminate between the great and the mediocre in ancient and modern literature : the other two books being " One Hundred Best Books " and " Suspended Judgments." Within a year of its publication, four editions of " Visions and Revisions" were printed — an extraordinary record con- sidering that it was only the second book issued by a new pub- lisher. The value of the book to the student and its interest for the general reader are guaranteed by the international fame of the author as an interpreter of great literature and by the enthusiastic reviews it received from the American Press. Review of Reviews, New York : " Seventeen essays . . remarkable for the omission of all that is tedious and cumbersome in literary ap- preciations, such as pedantry, muckraking, theorizing, and, in particular, constructive criticism." Book News Monthly, Philadelphia: **Not one line in the entire book that is not tense with thought and feeling. With all readers who crave mental stimulation ... * Visions and Revisions ' is sure of a great and enthusiastic appreciation.** The Nation and the Evening Post, New York : ' ' Their imagery is bright, clear and frequently picturesque. The rhythm falls with a pleas- ing cadence on the ear." Brooklyn Daily Eagle: "A volume of singularly acute and readable literary criticism.*' Chicago Herald: '* An essayist at once scholarly, human and charm- ing is John Oowper Powys. . . . Almost every page carries some arresting thought, quaintly appealing phrase, or picture spelling passage.'* Keedy's Mirror, St. Louis: " Powys keeps you wide awake in the reading because he's thinking and writing from the standpoint of life, not of theory or system. Powys has a system but it is hardly a system. It is a sort of surrender to the revelation each writer has to make.* ' Kansas City Star: ** John Cowper Powys' essays are wonderfully il- luminating. . . . Mr. Powys writes in at least a semblance of the Grand Style.' * " Visions and Revisions " contains the following essays : — Rabelais Dickens Thomas Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt Whitman Charles Lamb Nietzsche Conclusion G. ARNOLD SHAW Publisher to the University Lecturers Association GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK SUSPENDED JUDGMENTS ESSAYS ON BOOKS AND SENSATIONS By JOHN COWPER POWYS 8vo. about 400 pages. Half cloth with blue Fabriano paper sides $2.00 net The Book News Monthly said of "Visions and Revisions": " Not one line in the entire book that is not tense with thought and feeling." The author of "Visions and Revisions" says of this new book of essays : "In 'Suspended Judgments' I have sought to express with rnore deliberation and in a less spasmodic manner than in 'Vi- sions,' the various after-thoughts and reactions both intellectual and sensational which have been produced in me, in recent years, by the re-reading of my favorite writers. I have tried to capture what might be called the 'psychic residuum' of earlier fleeting impressions and I have tried to turn this emotional after- math into a permanent contribution — at any rate for those of similar temperament — to the psychology of literary apprecia- tion. " To the purely critical essays in this volume I have added a certain number of others dealing with what, in popular parlance, are called ' general topics,' but what in reality are always — in the most extreme sense of that word — personal to the mind reacting from them. I have called the book ' Suspended Judg- ments ' because while one lives, one grows, and while one grows, one waits and expects." SUSPENDED JUDGMENTS CONTAINS THESE ESSAYS : the art of disckimination in literature Montaigne Emily Bronte Pascal Joseph Conrad Voltaire Henry James Rousseau Oscar Wilde Balzac Aubrey Beardsley Victor Hugo DE Maupassant Friends Anatole France Religion Paul Verlaine Love Remy de Gourmont Cities William Blake Morality gyjfoj, Education ^ G. ARNOLD SHAW ^-""^^^^^J^^^^^SZ GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK "Rhymes or Real Poems?" — Boston Globe WOLF'S - BANE RHYMES BY JOHN COWPER POWYS 8vo, 120 pages, $1.25 net In these remarkable poems Mr. Powys strikes a new and startlingly unfamiliar note; their interest lies in the fact that they are the unaffected outcries and protests of a soul in exile, and their originality is to be found in that they sweep aside all facile and commonplace consolations and give expression to the natural and incurable sadness of the heart of man. New York Evening Post says: "As regards what Mr. Powys modestly calls his ' rhymes,* we hesitate to say how many years it is necessary to go back in order to find their equals in sheer poetic orig- inality." Book News Monthly says: ** Such poems as those are worthy of a permanent existence in literature." Kansas City Star says; "It is unmistakably verse of lasting quality." THE VS^AR AND CULTURE An Answer to Professor Musterberg By JOHN COWPER POWYS i2mo, 113 pages, 60 cents Mr. Powys says of this book that he has sought to correct that plausible and superficial view of the Russian people as "the half -civilised legions to whom we have taught killing by machinery" — a view to which even so independent a thinker as George Bernard Shaw appears to have fallen a victim. The Nation says : — "It is more weighty than many of the more pretentious treatises on the subject." The Soliloquy of a Hermit By THEODORE FRANCIS POWYS ismo, 144 pages, $1.00 A profoundly original interpretation of life by the great lec- turer's hermit brother of which the Dial, Chicago says : " Truly a satirist and humorist of a different kidney from the ordinary sort is this companionable hermit. There is many a chuckle in his little book." G. ARNOLD SHAW Publisher to the University Lectu rers Association GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK BOOKS BY I. B. STOUGHTON HOLBORN CHILDREN OF FANCY Second Edition, 256 pages, $2.00 net This volume has a special claim to attention as the poet was invited to read these poems at Oxford University at the 1915 Summer Meeting. The Oxford Chronicle in a long account " of one of the greatest pleasures provided for the Meeting," re- marked that " the ideal is perfectly attained when the poet can recite his own poems with the artistry with which Mr. Holborn introduced to his audience his charming ' Children of Fancy.' " Mr. Holborn swam with part of the MSS. from the Lusitania, and the Edinburgh Evening News says that " he has commemo- rated the tragedy in lines of sublime pathos." American Review of Reviews says: *' Mr. Holborn's poetry is delicate, musical, rhapsodic; often shaped to enfold claesicil themes, always of proportioned comeliness, filled with a vague haunting of indetinahle beauty that can never be embraced in words. It is a book of poetry for poets; one can hardly say more.*' Adopted for Required Reading by the Pittsburgh Teachers Reading Circle The Need for cArt in Life Cloth, 116 pp., 75 cents net The object of Mr. Holborn's little book is to show that the peculiar evil of the present day is a lack of the proper love and appreciation of Art and Beauty. Our social and political prob- lems which we attempt to tackle on scientific and moral lines can never be righted in that way, as we have not made a scientif- ically correct diagnosis of the disease. He makes a careful analytical survey of the three great epochs in our past civilization and clearly demonstrates that wherever one of the fundamentals of man's existence is want- ing the man as a whole must fail. .,.■.„ ^ , It makes no difference whether the lack be on the mtellectual, artistic or moral side — the result is equally disastrous to the *^°^e^B^t'o'n Transcript says: " This is one of the greatest little books of the age. If it is not epoch-making, it should be. It treats in charm- °ne style and convincing manner a theme of vital and universal interest The thoughtful man who reads it will feel that a new classic has been added to the world's literature." ARCHITECTURES OF EUROPEAN RELIGIONS Blue Buckram, Gold stamping, 264. pp., t2.oo net ^ A T»-M/-kT T» C'tTA^A/ Publisher to the University G. ARNOLD bMAW Lecturers Association GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL NEW YORK Recommended by the A. L. A. Booklist Specially suitable for Schools and Colleges ARMS AND THE MAP A STUDY IN NATIONALITIES AND FRONTIERS By IAN CAMPBELL HANNAH, M.A., D.C.L. i2mo, 256 pages, $1.2$ net This work, which has had a large sale in England, will be in- valuable when the terms of peace begin to be seriously dis- cussed. Every European people is reviewed and the evolution of the different nationalities is carefully explained. Particular reference is made to the so-called "Irredentist" lands, whose people want to be under a different flag from that under which they live. The colonizing methods of all the nations are dealt with, and especially the place in the sun that Germany hasn't got. New York Times Bays: *' Such a volume as this will undouhtedly be of value in. presenting . , , facts of great importance in a brief and in- teresting fashion." Brooklyn Daily Eagle says: "It is hard to find a man who presents his arguments so broad-mindedly as Dr, Hannah. His spirit is that of a catholic scholar striving earnestly to find the truth and present it sympathetically.' * Fhiladelpliia North American says: ** It is in no sense history, but rather a preparatory effort to mark broadly the outlines of any future peace settlement that would have even a fighting chance of permanency. Only in perusing a critical study of this character can the vast problems of post-bellum imminence be fully apprehended." FhHadelpbla Press says: " His work is immensely readable and par- ticularly interesting at this time and will throw much fresh light on the situation." OTHER BOOKS BY IAN C. HANNAH Eastern Asia, A History $2.50 Capitals of the Northlands (A tale of ten cities) 2.00 The Berwick and Lothian Coast (in the County Coast Series) 2.C0 The Heart of East Anglia (A History of Norwich) 2.00 Some Irish Religious Houses (Reprinted from the Arch