One Hundred Best Books | Page 4

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those who love them for themselves in pure disinterestedness. Of
course they "mix in," these best-loved authors, with every experience
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
intolerable 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 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 everything 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 Dostoievsky, 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 Dostoievsky 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.
Yes, I have a sneaking feeling that all this modern fuss about "art" and
the "creative vision" and "the projection 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 interval 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 kingdom of heaven, and the kingdom of heaven is
Imagination. Imagination! How all other ways of escape from what is
mediocre in 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 turmoil, and perhaps, after
all--who can tell?--there is 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