NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY Registered for transmission through the post as a newspaper. SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1024. LITERARY TASTE.

Northern Advocate, 23 August 1924, Page 4

NORTHERN ADVOCATE DAILY Registered for transmission through the post as a newspaper. SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 1024. LITERARY TASTE.

A literary journal in New York recently invited its readers to name the ten best books published since 1900. The result of the plebiscite was to give the following listi-r-H. G. Wells , ' ' Outline of History,'' Ibancz' '' Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," A. S. M. Hutchinson's "If Winter Comes," "The Americanisation of~ Kdward Bok," Pa pint's "Life of Christ," Winston Churchill's "The Crisis," O. Henry's "Short Stories," Owen Wister's "The Virginian," B. J. Hendrick's "Life and Letters of W. H. Page," and J. Harvey Robinson ; s "Mind in the Making." Tin- list obviously suggests that American taste runs to fiction, which accounts for half of the total of "best books-" aud earns second and third places in the list. Poetry and the drama it is to bo noted are not considered, though they came within the scope of the selecttion. American memories, so far as books at any rate are concerned, are short. "The Crisis" and "The Vir-

ginian" belong to the early yours of the century. O. Henry died in 1J)1O, and the translation of "The Four Horsemen" appeared in 1018. But the rest of these books arc of quite recent dale. !\rorcovcr, the electors in this referendum were free from any trace of national false modesty, or, shall wo say, they were conimendably patriotic. 'The favoured ten include two Englis'liMH'ii, an Italian, a Spaniard/

and si:. A .n-n.-:- >:-. But the >...■>; -v markai'i.- i!:ii: ; : "S * he composil ;< ■■ of the list. l<::.I such a vote been v.k.n in an 'English .-..usliluo.-fy wi- ■I^,;.f very much whether a single or..- ol tliese books avouM have been clmsen. Long ago the erudite Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, devoted a great part

of his life to a task similar to that

Which Mr Wells essayed, but gave it up in' despair.' Tlie prolific Mr H. G. Wells, however, greatly daring, nothing fearing, 'dashed off in the intervals between his novel writing a work whi'eli, "though readable, is very undepencfrtbTc as a guide. It is history as conceived by Mr Wells' fertile brain, rather than history a« actually enacted. Experts find -ser'iou? errors in every period he treats, errors not of interpretation, but of sheer fact. Mr

Wells, with an airy wave of his hand,

dismisses these corrections as trivial and pedantic. "The Four Horsemen" owed its vogue to the emotional tension of those days. Senor Ibanez is seen to better advantage in earlier works. "If Winter Comes ,, was a best seller, with an unblushing appeal !to the most glucose sentimentality. As editor of the "Ladies , Home Jour,nal," Mr Edward Bok came into c«btact with a host of celebrities, and his reminiscences of them are interesting. He also invented tlie theatre programme in its modern form, and the "cigarette card" —inasmuch as the latter service Tins earned him the gratitude 'of a generation of small bo3 r a, we may forgive him for the former. But Mr Bok would probably be the last to clnim that ho has written the fourth best hook of the century. The other novels, and O. Henry's short stories, are excellent, but are they entitled to the distinction accorded to them? Excellent, :too, is ; Mr Hendriek's "Life of W. B.TPage,'"' but one would hnve thought that since , 1900 many still bettor biographies have been produced. To take an example at random, does not Mr Lytton ] Strachcy's "Life of Queen Victoria" j rank higher from a literary point oi: j view? The same criticism can be applied to the other books on the list, i Good as they are, are they the best j that the century lias to offer? Surely

it is nothing short of distressing to realise how many and how serious are the omissions from the list. M. Anatole France and M. Romain Rolland are not mentioned. Mr Thomas Hardy and Mr Rudyard Kipling are passed by. Mr G. B. Shaw, Mr John Galsworthy, Mr Arnold Bennett —is there no place for these on the select bookshelves of America ? And how comes it that the readers of a literary

journal have . overlooked Joseph Conrad, whose death was reported so recently. He was a phenomenon in recent literature. It was surely a freak of circumstances that caused him, a Pole, brought up in a country which has no associations with the sea, to be consumed as a mere la«l wifh an over-, whelming passion for the sea, and to become a captain in the mercantile marine. No less .strange was the stroke of fate which made this Pole, who, until he reached mature years, could speak scarcely a word of English, a master of English prose, perhaps the foremost English novelist of his day. Indeed, in the opinion of many critics of high authority, among writers of the century there is none superior to Conrad as a stylist. His tales deal with many themes, and are set in many lands. They take us to the far places of the earth. He wanders from the snow-bound plains of Poland to a sunbaked roadstead in South America, from a sinister quarter of Soho, the haunt of Anarchists, to the mountains of Spain during the Carlist rising, and the coast of Provence in the Napoleonic wars. But there was one region he made peculiarly his own —the Eastern Archipelago, wifh its jungles, its dangerous channels, and its muddy creeks. He captured the very spirit of these, and transfused it into his works. A subtle analyst of character and motive, he certainly was one of the great writers of 'his age, and yet some thousands of Americans who profess some interest in literature overlook him. It is a curious commentary upon literary taste.