One Hundred Best Books | Page 2

firm hand, even by the angry reaction he may feel
from such suggestions, than by a dull academic chart--professing
tedious judicial impartiality--of all the continents, promontories, and
islands, marked on the official map.
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 darlings, with what might be called the
"scholastic-veneration-cult"; the cult, namely, of becoming a superior
person 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 responsive chord, the answering vibration, he
may well get more imaginative stimulus from reading "Alice in
Wonderland," 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 predestined 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 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
themselves 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 enhanced by the obvious fact that in this particular
company there are several quite prominent and popular writers, both
ancient and modern, 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
popular figures; but they manifest a sufficient sense of incongruity 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 appeal
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 implying 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, prefers also Emily Brontë to Charlotte Brontë, 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 regard to the advice to
be given to young and ardent people, in the matter of their reading, than
some