One Hundred Best Books

One Hundred Best Books

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Cowper Powys
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Title: One Hundred Best Books
Author: John Cowper Powys
Release Date: July 15, 2004 [eBook #12914]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE
HUNDRED BEST BOOKS***
E-text prepared by Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreaders Team

ONE HUNDRED BEST BOOKS
With Commentary and an Essay on Books and Reading
by
JOHN COWPER POWYS
1916

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 apparently 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 selection 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 reading, 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 perturbation in the mind of a
man--professionally, as they say, "of letters"--than the question, so
often tossed disdainfully 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 spiritual 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 Responsibility 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 inexorable 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 Decalogue.
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 aesthetic severity." 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