Read Ebook: One Hundred Best Books With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading by Powys John Cowper

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victor Hugo is the greatest of all incorrigible romanticists. Something between a prophet, a charlatan, a rhetorician, and a spoiled child, he believes in God, in democracy, in innocence, in justice, and he has a noble and unqualified devotion to human heroism and the depths of the dangerous sea. He has that arbitrary, maniacal inventive imagination which is very rare except in children--and in spite of his theatrical gestures he has the power of conjuring up scenes of incredible beauty and terror.

Balzac's books create a complete world, which has many points of contact with reality; but, in a deep essential sense, is the projection of the novelist's own passionate imagination. A thundering tide of subterranean energy, furious and titanic, sweeps, with its weight of ponderous details, through every page of these dramatic volumes. Every character has its obsession, its secret vice, its spiritual drug. Even when, as in the case of Vautrin, he lets his demonic fancy carry him very far, there is a grandeur, an amplitude, a smouldering flame of passion, which redeem a thousand preposterous extravagances.

His dramatic psychology is often drowned in the tide of his creative energy; but though his world is not always the world of our experience, it is always a world in which we are magnetized to feel at home. It is consistent with its own amazing laws; the laws of the incredible Balzacian genius. Profoundly moral in its basic tendency, the "Human Comedy" seems to point, in its philosophical undercurrent, at the permanent need in our wayward and childish emotionalism, for wise and master-guides, both in the sphere of religion and in the sphere of politics.

Guy de Maupassant's short stories remain, with those of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, the very best of their kind. After "Madame Tellier's Establishment" perhaps the stories called respectively "A Farm Girl" and "Love" are the best he wrote.

He has the eternal excellencies of savage humanity, savage sincerity, and savage brevity. His pessimism is deep, absolute, unshaken;--and the world, as we know it, deserves what he gives it of sensualized literary reactions, each one like the falling thud of the blade of a murderous axe.

His racking, scooping, combing insight, into the recesses of man's natural appetites will never be surpassed. How under the glance of his Norman anger, all manner of pretty subterfuges fade away; and "the real thing" stands out, as Nature and the Earth know it--"stark, bleak, terrible and lovely." His subjects may not wander very far from the basic situations. He does not deal in spiritual subtleties. But when he hits, he hits the mark.

Stendhal is one of those who, following Goethe and anticipating Nietzsche, has not hesitated to propound the psychological justifications for a life based upon pagan rather than Christian ethics. A shrewd and sly observer, with his own peculiar brand of the egoistic cult, Stendhal lived a life of desperately absorbing emotions, most of them intellectual and erotic. He made an aesthetic use of the Will to Power before even Nietzsche used that singular expression. In "Le Rouge et le Noir" the eternal sex-struggle with its fierce accompaniment of "Odi et Amo" is concentrated in the clash of opposing forms of pride; the pride of intellect against the pride of sex-vanity.

No writer has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have untold value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment in life!

Anatole France, now translated into English, is the most classical, the most ironical, the most refined, of all modern European writers. He is also, of all others, the most antipathetic to the Anglo-Saxon type of mind. In a word he is a humanist of the great tradition--a civilized artist--a great and wise man. He is Rabelaisian and Voltairian, at the same time. His style has something of the urbanity, the unction, the fine malice, of Renan; but it has also a quality peculiar to its creator--a sort of transparent objectivity, lucid as rarified air, and contemptuously cold as a fragment of antique marble. Monsieur Bergeret, who appears in all four of the masterpieces devoted to Contemporary France, is a creation worthy, as some one has said, of the author of Tristram Shandy. One cannot forget that Anatole France spent his childhood among the bookshops on the South side of the Seine. We are conscious all the while in reading him of the wise, tender, pitiful detachment of a true scholar of the classics, contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life from a certain epicurean remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons and daughters of men, as if they were little children or comical small animals.

Remy de Gourmont's death must be regretted by all lovers of the rare in art and the remote in character. As a poet his "Litany of the Rose" has that strange, ambiguous, sinister, and lovely appeal, the full appreciation of which is an initiation into all the "enclosed gardens" of the world.

He is a great critic--perhaps the greatest since Walter Pater--and as a philosopher his constant and frank advocacy of a noble and shameless Hedonism has helped to clear the air in the track of Nietzsche's thunder-bolts.

His audacity in placing an exposition of the very principles of Epicurean Hedonism, touched with Spinozistic equanimity, into the mouth of our Lord, wandering through the Luxembourg Gardens, may perhaps startle certain gentle souls, but the Dorian delicacy of what might for a moment appear blasphemous robs this charming Idyll of any gross or merely popular profanity. It is a book for those who have passed through more than one intellectual Renaissance. Like the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius it has a philosophical justification for its mythological audacity.

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

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

It is a profoundly suggestive treatise upon the relations between art and life. It contains a deep and heroic philosophy--the philosophy of the worship of the mysterious life-force as God; and of the reaching out beyond the turmoil of good and evil towards some vast and dimly articulated reconciliation. Since "Wilhelm Meister" no book has been written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels of 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 suggestions of a spiritual synthesis of the opposing race-traditions of Europe. Of all the books mentioned in this list it is the one which the compiler would most strongly recommend to the notice of those anxious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For those who have been "fooled to the top of their bent" by the stupidities and brutalities of the crowd there is a savage satisfaction in reading of Foma's insane outbursts of misanthropy.

Tchekoff is one of the gentlest and sweetest tempered of Russian writers. There is in him a genuine graciousness, a politeness of soul, an innate delicacy, which is not touched--as such qualities often are in the work of Turgeniev--with any kind of self-conscious Olympianism. A doctor, a consumptive, 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 background and scenery of the play--are used to deepen and enhance the dramatic interest is a thing peculiarly 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 important matter is a certain sudden and pathetic illumination 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."

Artzibasheff is an extremist. The suicidal "motif" in the "Breaking-point" is worked out with an appalling and devastating thoroughness.

Pessimism, in a superficial sense, could hardly go further; though compared with Dostoievsky's insight into the "infinite" in character, one is conscious of a certain closing of doors and narrowing of issues. "Sanine" himself is a sort of idealization of the sublimated common sense which seems to be this writer's selected virtue. Artzibasheff appears 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 untroubled 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 something sententious and tiresome. He is, so to speak, an immoral prig; nor do his vivacious spirits compensate us for the lack of delicacy and irony in him. On the other hand there is something direct, downright and "honest" about his clear-thinking, and his shameless eroticism which wins our liking and affection, if not our admiration. Artzibasheff is indeed one of the few writers who dare excite our sympathy not only for the seduced in this world but for the seducer.

Sterne is a writer who less than any one else in the present list reveals the secrets of his manner and 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 Rabelaisian unction. A shrewd and ironical wisdom, gentle and light-fingered and redolent of evasive sentiment, is evoked from these digressive and wanton pages.

At his best Sterne is capable of an imaginative interpretation of character which for delicacy and subtlety has never been surpassed. For the Epicurean in literature, his unfailing charm will be found in his style--a style so baffling in the furtive beauty of its disarming simplicity that even the greatest of literary critics have been unable to analyze its peculiar flavour. There is a winnowed 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 picture by Jan Steen.

Swift's mysterious and saturnine character, his outbursts 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 "flamantia moenia mundi" and hits out, insanely and blindly, at the human crowd he loathes. His secretive 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 Shakespeare'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!"

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 with the great poets, an indescribable sense of something withdrawn, withheld, reserved, inscrutable--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 serenity 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 ordinary as if it were not ordinary, and by the sheer genius of his imagination he throws an indescribable glamour over the "little things" of the darkest of our days.

Moving among old books, old houses, old streets, old acquaintances, old wines, old pictures, old memories, 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.

The large, easy, leisurely manner of Scott's writing, 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 waylaid by the modern spirit. And yet Scott's novels have ample and admirable excellencies. In his expansive and digressive fashion he can give his characters--especially the older and the more idiosyncratic among them--a surprising and convincing verisimilitude.

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