One Hundred Best Books | Page 8

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.

27. CERVANTES. DON QUIXOTE. In any translation except those
vulgarized by eighteenth century taste.
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.

28. VICTOR HUGO. THE TOILERS OF THE SEA. In any
translation.
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.

29. BALZAC. LOST ILLUSIONS. COUSIN BETTE. PÉRE GORIOT.
HUMAN COMEDY, _in any translation. Saintsbury's is as good as
any_.
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.

32. GUY DE MAUPASSANT. LE MAISON TELLIER. MADAME
TELLIER'S ESTABLISHMENT. _Any translation, preferably not one
bound in paper or in an "Edition de Luxe."_
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.

33. STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE). LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. _Either
the original French or any translation, if possible with a preface; for the
life of Stendhal is of extraordinary interest_.
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 æsthetic use of the Will to
Power before even Nietzsche used that singular expression. In "Le
Rouge et