One Hundred Best Books | Page 9

le Noir" the eternal sex-struggle with its fierce
accompaniment of "Odi et Amo" is concentrated in the clash of
opposing forms of pride; the pride of intellect against the pride of
sex-vanity.
No writer has ever lived with more contempt for mere sedentary
theories or a fiercer mania for the jagged and multifarious edges of
life's pluralistic eccentricity. For any reader teased and worried by
idealistic perversion this obstinate materialistic sage will have untold
value. And yet he knows, none better, the place of sentiment in life!

34. ANATOLE FRANCE. L'ORME DE MAIL. L'ABBE JEROME
COIGNARD. LE LIVRE DE MON AMI. Either in French or the
authorized English translation.
Anatole France, now translated into English, is the most classical, the
most ironical, the most refined, of all modern European writers. He is
also, of all others, the most antipathetic to the Anglo-Saxon type of
mind. In a word he is a humanist of the great tradition--a civilized
artist--a great and wise man. He is Rabelaisian and Voltairian, at the

same time. His style has something of the urbanity, the unction, the fine
malice, of Renan; but it has also a quality peculiar to its creator--a sort
of transparent objectivity, lucid as rarified air, and contemptuously cold
as a fragment of antique marble. Monsieur Bergeret, who appears in all
four of the masterpieces devoted to Contemporary France, is a creation
worthy, as some one has said, of the author of Tristram Shandy. One
cannot forget that Anatole France spent his childhood among the
bookshops on the South side of the Seine. We are conscious all the
while in reading him of the wise, tender, pitiful detachment of a true
scholar of the classics, contemplating the mad pell-mell of human life
from a certain epicurean remoteness, and loving and mocking the sons
and daughters of men, as if they were little children or comical small
animals.

37. REMY DE GOURMONT. UNE NUIT AU LUXEMBOURG.
_Translated with a preface by Arthur Ransome, published by Luce,
Boston_.
Remy de Gourmont's death must be regretted by all lovers of the rare in
art and the remote in character. As a poet his "Litany of the Rose" has
that strange, ambiguous, sinister, and lovely appeal, the full
appreciation of which is an initiation into all the "enclosed gardens" of
the world.
He is a great critic--perhaps the greatest since Walter Pater--and as a
philosopher his constant and frank advocacy of a noble and shameless
Hedonism has helped to clear the air in the track of Nietzsche's
thunder-bolts.
His audacity in placing an exposition of the very principles of
Epicurean Hedonism, touched with Spinozistic equanimity, into the
mouth of our Lord, wandering through the Luxembourg Gardens, may
perhaps startle certain gentle souls, but the Dorian delicacy of what
might for a moment appear blasphemous robs this charming Idyll of
any gross or merely popular profanity. It is a book for those who have
passed through more than one intellectual Renaissance. Like the
"Golden Ass" of Apuleius it has a philosophical justification for its
mythological audacity.

38. PAUL BOURGET. LE DISCIPLE.
"Le Disciple" is perhaps the best work of this voluminous and
interesting writer. Devoid of irony, deficient in humor, lacking any
large imaginative power, Paul Bourget holds, all the same, an
unassailable place among French writers. Though a devoted adherent of
Goethe and Stendhal, Bourget represents, along with Bordeaux, the
conservative ethical reaction. He upholds Catholicism and the
sacredness of the "home." He is a master in plot and has a clear,
vigorous and appealing style. A gravely portentous sentiment
sometimes spoils his tragic effects; but every lover of Paris will enjoy
the unctuous elaboration of the "backgrounds" of his stories, touched
often with the most delicate and mellow evocations of that City's
atmosphere.

39. ROMAIN ROLLAND. JEAN CHRISTOPHE. Translated by
Gilbert Cannan.
Rolland's "Christophe" is without doubt the most remarkable book that
has appeared in Europe since Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo."
It is a profoundly suggestive treatise upon the relations between art and
life. It contains a deep and heroic philosophy--the philosophy of the
worship of the mysterious life-force as God; and of the reaching out
beyond the turmoil of good and evil towards some vast and dimly
articulated reconciliation. Since "Wilhelm Meister" no book has been
written more valuable as an intellectual ladder to the higher levels of
æsthetic thought and feeling.
Massive and dramatic, powerful and suggestive, it magnetizes us into
an acceptance of its daring and optimistic hopes for the world; of its
noble suggestions of a spiritual synthesis of the opposing
race-traditions of Europe. Of all the books mentioned in this list it is the
one which the compiler would most strongly recommend to the notice
of those anxious to win a firmer intellectual standing-ground.

40. GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO. THE FLAME OF