TWELVE BOOKSAND WHY?

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19202, 7 January 1928, Page 11

TWELVE BOOKSAND WHY?

|i M+hv in the "Saturday w*fcs?V uw"™-"'

' T was chloroformed * Vpt 10 'S declaration of what into » the world's twelve best ffirtion outside poetry and! JL I came to myself, I be2er for what qualities I had ,ofopaer lartwe i ve . f or ,ncTeset down the result Srfwere these: Cervantes'* V J, Tolstoy's "War and "P® Q ,( A nna Karenina'; Dick- \ i ;f u : e ;, s iW* ' Trhildren" and "Smoke , Musketeer" series and Tfcfltf 8 . : \fareot" series (but only •ty in their native French); 'lie Brothers KaramaW toie «f«k "Tom & a ;vyer &« Of doubt conI »^ R * iff' the "Reine Margot" *** .® ut r + re ; "j (j 0 . n ot see with «hat 1 fijj.m/cogitation, I perceived the excep k Twain S | ieer gaum a Lprned to be an advantage, bulk then jjfo, 0 f the racecourse foUoffWg •fuiv justified—that "a good beat a good little MrM ived that all of them I n«t per easy to read, j fjthont ««P' . n tQ spea k 0 f on the rfft jiL er j n matter or in style; jnfeHwt, e J vj UC ed, either that I was Sy%.^ t ® readability " as a prime r } r^ae ' ge arc h for common fac»n these books have I ®* •t extm ' 0 ' -l ou l - J mfb on them as it on resilient i r* skates > a V VCI ' ! I r Li sliooery surface of, say, a | fW.Tan "Egoist," nor gets ! .'%ited in the valuable clay of a : " a. : 'Clarissa Harlowe," or ■ '^rt' rio t " The texture of Cer--1 Lw ttckens, Dumas,. Mark Twain, !ff'„ and the Russian Turgemev, rSerj no doubt, than that of the •SKSIa •» 1 Hirt Mminon factor that I discov2?ni that »u these books contain !m «"ore, unforgettable—oue might ut'ifflßOrta^—characters. Don Quixote S£P«» in.the first; Naand Prince Andrey m fisei;'Anna and Stenan Arkadye- & l«™4e third; Pickwick, bum StyJingK and 01d W ! U w. in Hr May Trotwood and Micawber Minth'r D'Artagnan et Oie, in the Bjbth: Brasy and Chicot in the mnth- tin Yoougost Karainazov in the fSth'- Tom »ndTHuck in the eleventh, SUS* Becky Sharp. This indeed. > really indispensable festnre «f tfoipeatest fiction, and the afenoeof if would rule out any book. GozolVDead Souls" could not com© in - neither, iaording to my judgment al io what is unforeettable character • could MelvilloY'The White Whale" nor Stendhal's "'La Chartreuse de Parae." - . When I'had got as far as this, 1 leaned to hM« the end ot it were tru6 that »U theae boota had what I call "familiar sprit." 'FrooeecKng to put tliem to 'test, and discounting for the extravagance, of . Dickens, the panache of Dmns, .and-the epilepsies of Dpitoiresty, I ffcorered- that they 1 do fll hsr» Mat. particular quality, and in aarltfld i degree. In other -words, a lire jvhile reading, in the Kame same streets and tOTDi iiiid'ieoniiiiieß, as the people of thesQ. I)6^<';vlhis is but a crude way of what I mean by hap be;V:Very deep reality, the reality of » wsOnupprenension .and presentae& ef-plkf-and character .as conor invented presentment. that can be feH]alwn|® l)Ook but can . hardly be desmTiedl-fllaubert has not-got it, exoepf/perjiajg in "Un Coe.ur Simple." ?. ' is a marvellous bit of [•- Jiwittuig,Mt it'remains a picture; and k \fA ps»{ -''Madanie Bovary," and her ki l 1 (Sfands apart and gazes. One j . JKB t live with' her, however one may rto. Rawthorne just misses , lißihw flpirijij" . Zola never had it; wj; Jferemth; nor, Victor Hhigo. JWto; :had it; in "Robinson Crusoe" (w ia some moods this book would ' JfS'W my list the place of "Vauity ; «¥)• On the other hand, I don't f«l "familiar spirit"' in Fielding . book though "Tom Jones" imis. The great Russian writand all, have it in . their work; wd this is probably what makes Arnold ®iMtt,6ay that the twelve best novels •» «#• world were all written by Rus- ' B P resei, t in the "Tale of W r-bijt gome other qualities are in Hudson's "Purple Land," and «waeth Grahame's "Goldten Age," JMj.owiously enough, in the nonsensic Wonderland," iu Conrad's "M and "Nigger of the Nar-. SW>' but not by any means in all Stevenson had it in "Kid- ' . y' and "Catriona," but in his scarcely anywhere else, lovely *™G. though < he be. Maupassant in 'Tvette" and "Boule do but not quite in his novels. 1 itJJ.ii on with illustrations, because j jjgnt shy 0 f trying to define the inWhether it is the same S U 48 " br ? ath °f life " 1 don,t fiun ■ w > hut it is as near as makes "tUematter. ■■•jiWWiiOT writers, both young rP?women, with very different ?j™4ne, have it —Katherine Mansof her work, and -Mar-•-.:€Ss£A»i>aedT in "Tho Constant ; It is present in "The 'Old ' in "Ricej'nian's Steps," iPoliy": in James Boyd's SPhcal hovel "Drums." "Babbitt" HElmer Gantry" hasn't. become invidious. »A?n l had got so far in tho record tt I discussed the whole 8 r ' en d. u of humour is necessary," to any great work of fiction." what," I answered, "about gracefully, and I began answer. fjr! .we Russian books in my list very little humour, do not give the impression jjjWe writers are lacking in that UjJJs firaoe; while many books with humour do. l\iriolstoy, Dostoievsky, so very - rom eac h other, were all men !s#wng mjnds, and that is what not the introduction of comedy per acre. My friend t®st, 1 always think, of the in literature is that it larger than life." UttSfe"' ? a 'd I, "is a very dangerous so it is—it lets in the i- at, d the jsstlietes' 0n art ' s larger than ft|j «l a . Part could ever be larger °!®* Rut in the careful which followed, it apvli® tt y friend merely meant fiction the cliarac- , them, should sum up Wttj w hole Btrcaks of human ▼ell.vLw " la t our friends, liowito us ' do not - And k">® an^ y n rUe ' 14 is the renson fij &iicho; S a l" ov .> and the Don ' '"i and Micaw- , . y «nd IVArtagnan, are

unforgettable. Within their belts are cinctured not only individuals, but sections of mankind; and, moreover, sections of importance in the make-up of a world not averse from variety. Within the corset of Irina is bound up all fascination. Modernity would call'her a "vamp," and I should be inclined to black its eye- 1 for it; one should not apply a vulgar word to a type exquisite, however dangerous—l have never forgotten a dinner-party in Boston where the epithet was used of Audrey Noel in my own novel, "The Patrician," a much more passive and less dangerous type than Irina. Within Bazarov we have the very kernel of modernity, its brutal frankness, its passion for life stripped, its denial, its unquenchable curiosity, and its restive energy. In that stark young doctor with his mania for dissecting frogs, Turgeniev did not merely foreshadow Nihilism, he foreshadowed this postwar age; just as in Pavel Petrovitch ho epitomised the fastidious spirit which the last sixty years has been gradually replacing. There is no needl to expatiate on what Cervantes incorE orated in the immortal Don, nor in is foil, the equally immortal Sancho, nor on what is wrapped up in the comfortable frame of Pickwick, nor in that supple and complete cat Becky, nor indeed in any of the other unforgettable characters of these twelve books. All boyhood is in Tom and Huck; all parade in Porthos; all girlhood m Natasha; all scheming subtlety in Aramis; all starved virginity in Betsy Trotwood; all gambling optimism in Micawber, and so forth and so on. But perhaps if we had pursued our conversation further, my friendl would have contended that the whole of a great work of fiction should be larger, or rather richer, than life. Well, of course it should. _ Selection, conscious and unconscious, is the secret of art — a field typically painted will render for vou the whole of the English shires; a few pages, such as those, describing the death of Bazarov, bring before you all death. All the spirit of rivers is in "Huckleberry Finn"; all passion in "Smoke," and all the essence of adventure in "The Three Musketeers" and the "Reine Margot." In this essential of being richer than life, none of these twelve books is in the least lacking. In the examination of my reasons for selecting them I started by finding them all eminently readable; I end by considering whether or not they are conspicuously rereadable. I learn from mv own experience that they all are; and in the following order: "The Pickwick Paoers"; "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn"; "The Musketeer" series: "Don Quixote": "War and Peace"; "DavidCopperfield" ; "Fathers and Children" and "Smoke"; "Anna Karenina"; "The Reine Margot" series; "Vanity Fair," and "The Brothers Karamazov." I don't say that this indicates my view of their relative merit; it only indicates my peculiar temperament. T° & books rereadable, however, and even very rereadable is, I think, a sine qua non of selection, and a very good way of making sure that one has not selected out of an unconscious snobbery, or de-; sire to be in the intellectual fashion of the time, a most insidious literary malady to which we are all liable. Rereadability can only be judged over a long period of one's life; to stand the test properly, a book ought to be rereadable at almost any age after, say, twenty-five, when the sap has finished running up our trunks to all main intents. I think, at the age of sixty, if I could take those twelve books with me to Tristan da Cunha. where ships only call, it seems, about once in two years, I could! get on fairly well for the rest of my life, without feeling that I was divorced from the world as it was. is, and will be.

And now, having cleared ray mind of wonder on the point at issue, there is no reason why I should talk on.