One Hundred Best Books Part 4

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 pressure of that contemporary vulgarity which finds a too lively response in something bourgeois and sn.o.bbish in his own nature.

Dealing with the eighteenth century he escapes not only from his age but from himself.

60. CHARLES d.i.c.kENS. GREAT EXPECTATIONS.

The compiler has placed in this list only one of d.i.c.kens' books for a somewhat different reason from that which has influenced him in other cases. All d.i.c.kens' 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 modern fashion, from enjoying the peculiar atmosphere of this astonishing person's work, will be found reverting to him constantly and indiscriminately. "Great Expectations" is perhaps, as a more "artistic" book than the rest, the most fitted of them all to entice towards a more sympathetic understanding of his mood, those 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 possesses 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, d.i.c.kens endows with fantastic spirituality the most apparently dead things in our ordinary environment.

His imagination plays superb tricks with such objects 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 d.i.c.kens is made of less lovely matters than leaves and flowers.

The wild exaggerations of d.i.c.kens--his reckless contempt for realistic possibility--need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost ident.i.ty 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 appeal and human voices of divine imagination.

61. JANE AUSTEN. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Jane Austen's delicate and ironic art will remain una.s.sailable through all changes of taste and varieties 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 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 style quite cla.s.sical in its economy 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 surpa.s.sed her. Without romance, without philosophy, without social theories, without pathological curiosity, without the remotest interest in "Nature," she has yet managed to achieve a triumphant artistic 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 imagination. She has pa.s.sion 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 unearthly air, wherein one hears the voices of the great lovers; and where Sappho and Michaelangelo and Swift and Sh.e.l.ley and Nietzsche gasp forth their imprecations and their terrible ecstasies. 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 inwards by sheer diabolical intensity, that they touch the granite substratum of what is eternal in human pa.s.sion. The smell of rain-drenched moors, the crying 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 extraordinary 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 stem to become antiquated and faded.

It is when he is least philosophical and least moralistic--as in the superbly imaginative figure of Richmond 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 fulfilled 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, prevents their impressing one with any sense of calm or finality. They are too aphoristic, these pa.s.sages. They are too clever. They smell too much of the lamp. The same fault may be remarked 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 problems.

Reading Henry James one feels like a wisp of straw floating down a wide smooth river; reading Meredith one is flicked and flapped and beaten, as if beneath a hand with a flail.

64. HENRY JAMES. THE AMBa.s.sADORS. 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 European writers of our age. His fame will steadily grow, and his extraordinary genius will more and more create that finer taste by which alone he can be appreciated.

No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and whimsical playfulness--sparing literally nothing. In spite of his beautiful cosmopolitanism it must never be forgotten that at bottom Henry James is richly and wonderfully American. That tender and gracious "penchant" of his for pure-souled and modest-minded young men, for their high resolves, their n.o.ble renunciations, their touching faith, is an indication of how much he has exploited--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 opening 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 intellectualized 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 distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle cla.s.s 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 consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of excitement--partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,--that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm--as with all the supreme masters.

70. THOMAS HARDY. TESS OF THE D'URBEVILLES. THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.

THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. WESs.e.x POEMS.

Thomas Hardy remains the greatest poet and novelist of the England of our age. His poetry, Wess.e.x Poems, Poems of Past and Present, Time's Laughing-Stock, Satires of Circ.u.mstance, 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 Greenwood Tree," and "The Trumpet Major"--the second being the period of the great tragedies which a.s.sume the place, in his work, of "Hamlet," "Lear," "Macbeth" and "Oth.e.l.lo," in the work of Shakespeare--the third, of curious and imaginative 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 concentration, which we find neither in Balzac nor Dostoievsky. Not to appreciate the power and beauty of his manner, when his real inspiration holds him, is to confess that the genuinely cla.s.sical in style and the 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, however, 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 Wess.e.x, thrills one with the same weight of acc.u.mulated fatality, as--the comparison is tedious and pedantic--the fortunes of the ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity 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 desolately emphatic human protagonists silhouetted so austerely along the tops of hills and against the perspectives of long white roads?

75. JOSEPH CONRAD. CHANCE. LORD JIM. VICTORY. YOUTH. ALMAYER'S FOLLY. _Published by Doubleday 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 origin and his late choice of English as a medium of expression, it is no less than an astounding achievement--is work of the very highest literary and psychological value. It is, indeed, as Mr. Follet says, only such criticism as is pa.s.sionately anxious to prove for itself the true "romance of the intellect" that can hope to deal adequately with such an output. The background of Conrad's books is primarily 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 mysterious potencies for courage and for fear, for good and for evil, of human beings themselves--of human 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 women and throws upon it a sudden, original, and singularly stimulating light; a light, that like a lantern carried down into the very Cave of the "Mothers," throws its flickering and ambiguous rays 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 nevertheless 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 excitement and the thrilling sensation of delayed denouement it must be conceded that not one of our cla.s.sical novelists can touch Conrad. "Victory" remains an absorbing evidence of his power of concentrating at one and the same moment our dramatic 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 ma.s.sive egoism taught by Goethe, that impa.s.sioned "living to oneself"

indicated by Stendhal, find in Walter Pater a new qualification and a new sanction.

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

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

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

No one, after reading him, can remain gross, academic, vulgar, or indiscriminate. And, with the rest, we seem to be aware of a secret att.i.tude 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 religious cult.

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

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