The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

CHAPTER FOUR

The One Hundred “Best” Books for an Education

IF I WERERICH I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young.

I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a rosary. I would have my library spacious and dark and cool, safe from alien sights and sounds, with slender casements opening on quiet fields, voluptuous chairs inviting communion and reverie, shaded lamps illuminating sanctuaries here and there, and every inch of the walls concealed with the mental heritage of our race. And there at any hour my hand or spirit would welcome my friends, if their souls were hungry and their hands were clean. In the center of that temple of my books I would gather the One Hundred Best of all the educative literature in the world.

I picture to myself a massive redwood table, worked out in loving detail by the artists who carved the wood for King Henry’s chapel at Westminster Abbey (I must be an old reactionary, for I abominate the hard materials that make our concrete homes and iron beds and desks today, and I find something organically responsive to my affection in everything made of wood). Along the center of the table would stand a glass case protecting and yet revealing my One Hundred Best. I picture my friends treated comfortably there, occasional hours of every week, passing from volume to volume with loving leisureliness.

Will you sit down with me? Perhaps you are a college graduate, and are ready, then, to begin your education. Perhaps you have never had a chance to go to college, and have never considered what else our children learn there except the latest morals. They might learn many fine things if they came to it old enough, but our youngsters take so long to grow up in these complex days that they are too immature, when they enter college, to absorb or understand the treasures offered them there so lavishly. If you have studied with life rather than with courses, it may be as well; the rough tutelage of reality has ripened you into some readiness to know great men. Here at this spacious table you will prepare yourself for membership in the International of the Mind; you will be friends with Plato and Leonardo, with Bacon and Montaigne; and when you have passed through that goodly company you will be fit for the fellowship of the finest leaders of your time and place.

Can you spare an hour a day? Or, if some days are too crowded with life and duty to give you leisure for these subtler things, can you atone for such bookless evenings by an extra hour or two on those Sunday mornings when the endless newspaper consumes you to no end? Let me have seven hours a week, and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you; in four years you shall be as well educated as any new-fledged Doctor of Philosophy in the land.

But let us understand each other: you must not expect any material gain from this intimacy with great men. Some lucre may flow incidentally in later years from the maturity and background that you will win, but these dividends, like those of the insurance companies, are not in any way guaranteed. Indeed, you will be “losing time” from your profession or your business; if you long for millions you had better lay aside this map of the City of God, and keep your nose to the earth. And there will be blocks along the line: occasionally you will come to an obscure or lengthy book, a bad upgrade, and all your strength will have to be subpoenaed to your task. Remember that we are not making a list of the absolutely best one hundred books, no list merely of the masterpieces of belles lettres; we are choosing those volumes that will do most to make a man educated.

Since we wish to have orderly minds, and to avoid the chaos of desultory reading, we shall want to begin at the beginning—even with the distant stars and the antique earth, and these beginnings will be the worst obstructions in our path. Initium dimidium facti, said the Romans—“the start is half the deed.” Let us gird up our loins and screw our courage to the sticking point for these initial hills, and the rest will be level road, with knowledge and wisdom at every milestone, and pleasant reaches of beauty everywhere.We want here not entertainment only, but education, and we want it in such order that the knowledge we win may fall into logical sequence in our memories, and give us at last that full perspective which is the source and summit of understanding.

Therefore the first books on our list—the necessary introduction to the rest—are the most terrifying of all. A thousand barbs of wit will be invited by placing The Outline of Science first: alas! are we to be fed on predigested food, in the fashion of an American breakfast? Worse still, The Outline of History, bugbear of all proper historians, is fifth on our list—this is unforgivable. Let the critic control himself; he will soon see how far these books are used as substitutes, and how far as preparation, for the best. At the cost of a little unpleasantness we must make ourselves acquainted with the current scientific description of the world in which man has grown: we must have a little astronomical and biological background to give some modesty to our conception of the human race; we must learn the latest gossip about electrons and chromosomes, and look on for a moment while physics and chemistry transform the world.

And then, still as introductory, we pass to ourselves. It will not do to leave for the last some knowledge of the art of health; what if, after four years, we are learned and dyspeptic, philosophers in imagination, and ruins in the flesh? Let two great physicians offer us their rival theories of how to live: Dr. Clendening will tell us, with wit scandalous in a scientist, that most of the things we eat, drink, smoke, or do are well and good, and Dr. Kellogg, with no other charm than seventy years of experience and his own ruddy health, will tell us that these ancient ways are all wrong. I believe that Dr. Kellogg is usually right; but it is conceivable that both of us are usually wrong.

We have minds as well as bodies, and perhaps we should try in some measure to understand ourselves before we ponder the history of mankind. Go, then, to William James; it is true that he wrote more than a generation ago, but his Principles of Psychology is still the masterpiece in its field. Avoid the abbreviated edition in one volume; the longer form is easier to read. Until you have surrounded James you need not bother with such transitory psychological fashions as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, and when you have absorbed James you will be immune to these epidemics. Read actively, not passively: consider at every step whether what you read accords with your own experience, and how far it may be applied to the guidance of your own life. But if you disagree with an author, or are shocked by his heresies, read on nevertheless; toleration of differences is one mark of a gentleman. Make notes of all passages that offer help toward the reconstruction of your character (not someone else’s character) or the achievement of your aims, and classify these notes in such a way that they may at any moment, and for any purpose, be ready to your hand.

Take your time with these introductory books, for you must expect a long siege before you capture these obscure and lofty outworks of wisdom’s citadel. If they burden your digestion spice them with easier morsels from the list: Plutarch, for example, or Omar, or George Moore, or Rabelais, or Poe (numbers 16, 31, 32, 45, and 91); indeed, most of the books in Groups X and XI will serve as hors d’oeuvres or relief when other volumes oppress you with their heaviness.

Even Wells will prove a little dull at the outset; we grow a trifle weary of his reptiles and fishes, his Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal men. But we must climb up these geological periods, and wade through these paleontological remains and anthropological origins: we sharpen our teeth on these forbidding words, we take these difficulties by the bit, and harden ourselves for anything. If we are prosperous as well as brave, we shall buy a handy dictionary, such as Webster’s Collegiate (avoid vast dictionaries whose size discourage their use), and we shall adorn a wall with some spacious map of the world, so that new words and old places shall have some meaning for us. Once those Wellsian chapters are finished, Sumner’s Folkways will be enticing dessert; no one had dreamed that a professor could make sociology so fascinating.

Do you want to know how religion began, and how it grew up from superstition to philosophy? Read Frazer’s Golden Bough; here a great scholar has brought together in one volume the lifelong researches for which the British government, honoring itself, made him a knight of the realm. Skip if you will: learn the art of seizing out of every paragraph (usually near its beginning) the “topical sentence” in which the author lays down the proposition which his paragraph hopes to prove, and if this thesis falls outside your use or interest, leap on to the next topic, or the next, until you feel that the author is talking to you. Once that knighted volume is finished, the heaviest part of your education is over; the rest will be an adventure with gods.

Why is our list henceforth historically arranged? First, because it is well to study history as it was lived and made, taking all the activities of a civilization together—economic, social, political, scientific, philosophical, religious, literary, and artistic; in this way we shall see every work of literature, philosophy, or art in its proper place, and better understand its origin and significance—perspective is all. Second, because this arrangement will let the most delightful and entertaining masterpieces alternate with ponderous instructive tomes; it will be an aid to digestion. So, after a little more of Wells, and Breasted’s perfect chapter on Egypt in that excellent history of Europe, The Human Adventure, we shall find welcome diversion in Brian Brown’s selection of bits of wisdom from Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Men-cius, and the unequaled simplicity and beauty of the Bible will atone for Faure’s dithyrambs on art and Dr. Williams’s meaty History of Science (if you cannot secure this rare and excellent work, use Dampier-Whetham’s History of Science, or Ginzburg’s The Adventure of Science). By these rough seas we come at last to the Isles of Greece.

Here is genius almost too abundant; how shall we crowd so many giants into our little list? Let us engage guides: Breasted and Wells will show us the larger monuments, Professor Bury will unravel for us the complexities of Greek politics, and Gilbert Murray will introduce us to the greatest literature ever written. And then the geniuses themselves: Herodotus with his delightful stories, not always true; Thucydides with his realistic thinking and his classic style (the famous “Funeral Oration” composed for Pericles by Thucydides is in book 11, chapter 6 ); Plutarch with biographies that will make the names in Bury live on the stage of our memories; Homer with his lilting song of gods and heroes, of Helen and Penelope; Aeschylus the mighty with his picture of Prometheus chained and unrepentant, the very symbol of genius punished for advancing the race; Sophocles with a gentle wisdom won from suffering; and “Euripides the human,” mourning the misfortunes of his enemies, and at last forgiving even the gods.

Here is the first and greatest period in European philosophy: Diogenes Laertius tells the story of Socrates the martyr and Plato the reformer, of Democritus the Laughing Philosopher and Aristotle the Encyclopedia, of Zeno the Stoic and Epicurus who was not an Epicurean. Plato speaks, and paints his perfect state; the immaculately reasonable Aristotle preaches the golden mean, and marries the richest girl in Greece.Williams takes up the tale, and tells how science replaced superstition; how Hippocrates became, after many centuries of Physicians, the “Father of Medicine” and how Archimedes solved his theorems while a soldier, symbolizing the eternal opposition of war and art, stabbed him to death. Last of all, Elie Faure lets us stand by while Pheidias, with the patience that is genius, carves figures for the Parthenon, and Praxiteles chisels Aphrodite’s perfect grace. When shall we see such an age again?

To understand these Greeks would in itself be a sufficient education, and indeed, a great American educator is making the experiment of giving two years of the college course, for one hundred fortunate students, to a study of Greek civilization in all its varied wealth. The Romans do not give us so much, for though they admirably laid the foundations of social order and political continuity for the nations of modern Europe, they lost themselves too much in laws and wars, in building roads and sewers and warding off encompassing barbarians, to snatch from their hard lives the quiet thought that flowers in literature, philosophy, and art.Yet even here there are gods: the greatest statesmen that ever lived, perhaps, made companionable by Plutarch’s artistry; the somber Lucretius expounding in masculine verse the inescapable Nature of Things; the delicate felicity of Virgil weaving his country’s legendary past into a cloth of gold; and, last of the Romans, Marcus Aurelius, meditating on the vanity of lust and power from the vantage point of an unequaled throne.

It is a tremendous and tragic story, how this great colossus bestrode all the earth with its majesty, and then through corruption and slavery slowly rotted away, until barbarian armies from without, and Oriental cults from within, brought it down to ruin. Here it is that the greatest historian of all, Edward Gibbon, begins his stately recital of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and plays with his mighty organ-prose a marche funèbre of desolation. Let us read those purple pages leisurely; life is not so important that we may not spare for this philosopher writing history the unhurried calm that we must have in order to drink in the wisdom of his comments and the music of his periods.

Gibbon is so generous that he tells the story not of dying Rome alone, but of that infancy of northern Europe which we know as the Middle Ages. Here is the rise of the Papacy to the realization of the greatest dream of Western statesmanship—the unification of Europe; here is the conversion of Constantine and the coronation of Charlemagne; here is the bloody tale of how Mohammed and his generals, leading armies hungry for booty and infuriated with theology, swept over Africa and Spain, built the civilization of Bagdad and Cordova, and sank back into the desert when the Turks, still more barbarous than themselves, poured down through the Caucasus upon the disordered West. How the Jews and the Persians prospered under Moslem sway let Maimonides and Omar attest. We shall find in Williams the noble record of Moslem achievements in mathematics and medicine, in astronomy and philosophy, and Faure will show us their unique and delicate architecture in the Alhambra at Granada, and in India’s Taj Mahal.

But there were a few Christians, too, in those days. Robinson takes up The Human Adventure, and describes their civilization so well that we cannot spare him from our list. Dante and Chaucer sum up the age: the Canterbury Pilgrims, though on a pious mission, frolic with stories as earthy as Rabelais’s; and Dante, though at war with his Church, lifts its theology to such splendor and dignity that for a moment we forget the barbarism that created Hell. Abelard doubted that theology, but very suddenly lost the manhood to stand his ground; nothing could be more pitiful and human than his weak abandonment of Heloise and doubt. If you would know how perfect, even in our styleless days, English prose can be, read George Moore’s quiet narrative of this immortal love. Henry Adams tells that story too in Mont St. Michel and Chartres, and expounds the encyclopedic orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as incidents in his personally conducted tour of the great French cathedrals; here Gothic is made to talk English, and reveal itself even to Americans. And here also we come upon that unappreciated glory, Taine’s History of English Literature: a book as scholarly in preparation and as brilliant in exposition as can be found this side of Gibbon; it took a Frenchman to explain their literature to the English.

Finally we listen to the masculine-melancholy music of the Middle Ages, and the Gregorian chant surrounds and deepens us with its flowing majesty. Cecil Gray is no perfect guide here, he is only brief, and those who love music as the highest philosophy will deviate from our list at this point and read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music. Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.

Then the Middle Ages melt away, and suddenly we stand before that full flowering of medieval art and thought, the Italian Renaissance. Mr.Wells gives us a few inadequate pages of outline, and then we abandon ourselves, for seven spacious and astounding volumes, to the lead of John Addington Symonds, who took the very breath of his ailing life, and even the latitude of his morals, from this greatest epoch of the Christian age. (If your years are too short for so extended a tour, read Burckhardt’s single volume, The Renaissance in Italy; if you have learned to make haste slowly, read Burckhardt and Symonds, too.) Here again is a very swarm of genius: at Florence we enter the Palace of the Medici, where Pico della Mirandola is burning candles before the bust of the rediscovered Plato, and a boy called Michelangelo is carving the figure of a toothless faun; at Rome we walk the marble floors of the Vatican with Julius II and Leo X, and watch them turning the wealth and poetry of the Church to the stimulation and nourishment of every art.Vasari opens to us the studios of Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Raphael, and Angelo; Faure rhapsodizes on this unprecedented efflorescence of painting, statuary, and ornament; Machiavelli makes Caesar Borgia sit for the portrait of the ideal prince; Cellini abandons murder occasionally to cast his Perseus or make a perfect vase; Bruno and Vanini renew man’s effort to understand the world with reason; Copernicus, Vesalius, and Gilbert lay the cornerstones of modern science; and Palestrina takes us aloft on the wings of song.A supreme era unfolds itself for us in every phase of its winnowed wealth.

But Luther, coming down from the cold, stern North, does not like the licentious art of sunny Italy, and in a voice heard throughout the world he calls for the return of the Church to primitive asceticism and simplicity. The princes of Germany, using the religious revolt as an instrument of policy, separate their growing realms from the Papacy, establish a multitude of independent states, and inaugurate that dynastic nationalism which is the thread of European history from the Reformation to the Revolution. National consciousness replaces religious conscience, patriotism replaces piety, and every European people has for a century its own Renaissance. It is an age of political romance: Catherine de Medici and Henry VIII, Charles V and Philip of the Armada, Elizabeth and Essex, Mary Queen of Scots and her inextricable lovers, and the Terrible Ivan. It is an epoch of giants in literature: in France Rabelais riots with all commandments and adjectives, and Montaigne discusses affairs public and privy in the greatest essays ever written; in Spain Cervantes finds one arm sufficient for writing the most famous of all novels, and Lope de Vega composes eighteen hundred plays; in London a butcher’s son produces the greatest of modern dramas, and all England, as Spengler would say, is “in form.” It is the springtime of the modern soul.

Scholars are wont to say that after that brilliant coming-of-age in Spain, England, and France, Europe suffered a setback, and fell from the high level of the Renaissance. In a sense it is true: the seventeenth century is an epoch of religious conflict, the period of that Thirty Years’War which ruined Germany, and that Puritan Revolution which put an end for a century to the poetic and artistic exuberance of England. But even so consider the roster of that century. It is the time of the Three Musketeers: Richelieu and Mazarin strengthen the central government of France against the feudal barons, and bequeath a united and powerful state to Louis XIV as an organized medium of security and order for the fine flower of French culture under Voltaire. La Rochefoucauld gives finished form to the cynicism of theaters and courts; Molière fights with ridicule the hypocrisies and conceits of his people, and Pascal mingles, in passionate rhetoric, mathematics and piety. Bacon and Milton raise English prose to its highest reach, and Milton writes, in addition, some tolerable verse. It is an era of mighty systems in philosophy: Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke in England; Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz on the Continent. In science it is the age of Galileo in astronomy, of Sir William Harvey in physiology, of Robert Boyle in chemistry, of Isaac Newton in everything. In painting it is a shower of stars: in Holland, Rembrandt and Franz Hals; in Flanders, Rubens and Van Dyke; in France, Poussin and Claude Lorrain; in Spain, El Greco and Velázquez. And in music, Bach is born.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the Olympians nearest to Jove; and you must not rest until your body and soul have trembled with the rhythmic majesty of the Mass in B Minor, and the Passion according to St. Matthew.With the old organist of Arnstadt and everywhere, who had time between masterpieces to have twenty children, music reaches one of its twin dominating peaks; not till the mad Beethoven will it scale such a height again. The eighteenth century is full of noble melody: Handel dispenses oratorios, and Haydn develops the sonata and the symphony; Gluck makes a noble accompaniment for Iphigenia’s sacrifice, and Mozart, out of his sadness and his happiness, weaves such a concourse of sweet sound as makes all later compositions seem chaotic and discordant. If you wish to know “absolute music”—music relying not on stories, or pictures, or ideas, but on its own “meaningless” beauty—turn off your radio for a moment, and play the Andante from Mozart’s Quartet in D Major.

But here we are at the eighteenth century, which Clive Bell, in his precious volumette on Civilization, rates with the age of Pericles and the Renaissance as one of the three supreme epochs in the history of culture. An age of barbaric wars, advancing science, and liberated philosophy; of baronial exploitation, fine manners, and such handsome dress as makes our forked pantaloons and incarcerating shirts seem funereal and penal. “Those who have not lived before 1789,” said that brilliant piece of “mud in a silk stocking,” as Napoleon called Talleyrand, “have never known the full happiness of life.” Read in Sainte-Beuve’s Portraits the lives of these gilded men; see their pictures in Watteau and Fragonard, in Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney; and then take with Taine and Carlyle a front seat at the fiery drama of their fall. Think of an age that could produce such historians as Gibbon and Voltaire, such philosophers as Hume and Kant, such an undertaking as the French Encyclopedie, such a biographer as Boswell, such a circle as Johnson, Goldsmith, Gibbon, Burke, Garrick, and Reynolds, such novelists as Fielding and Sterne, still unsurpassed in England, such an economist as Adam Smith, such a cynic as Jonathan Swift, such a woman as Mary Wollstonecraft!

And so the Revolution comes, aristocracy is guillotined, art and manners droop, truth replaces beauty, and science remakes the world nearer to its head’s desire. Let Robinson tell of that Industrial Revolution which has so quickly and profoundly transformed our lives, our governments, our morals, our religions, and our philosophies; it is one of the great pivots on which history revolves. As the eighteenth century had been the age of theoretical mechanics and physics, and the next was the era of their victory in action, so the nineteenth century was the age of theoretical biology, and the twentieth will see it in triumphant operation. New conceptions of the nature of development and man dominated the scientific scene, and precipitated a war of faiths that has unsettled and saddened the Western mind. It was a century poor in sculpture, despite the unfinished Rodin, and a century full of dubious experiments in painting, from Turner’s sunsets to Whistler’s rain, but in music, strange to say (for who could have expected it in an age of machines?), it outsang every other epoch in history.

Here is Beethoven, passing with the turn of the century from the Mozartian simplicity of his early works through the power of the Eroica, the perfection of the Fifth Symphony, and the subtle delicacy of the Emperor Concerto and the Kreutzer Sonata, to the mad exuberance of the later sonatas and the Choral Symphony; here is Schubert, infinite store of melody, leaving unsung masterpieces by the hundred in his attic; here is the misty-melancholy Schumann, center of one of the finest love stories in truth or fiction; here is Johannes Brahms, looking like a butcher and composing like an angel, weaving harmonies profounder than any of Schumann, and yet so loyal to his memory that, though loving with full devotion the mad musician’s widow (the greatest woman pianist of her time), and protecting her for forty years, he never dared to ask her hand in marriage. What a dynasty of suffering—from the dying Beethoven shaking his fist at fate, through Schubert drunk and Schumann insane, through Chopin hunted by tubercle bacilli and deserted by George Sand, to Richard Wagner, genius and charlatan, who bore indignities for half a century, and then made German kings and princes pay the piper at Bayreuth! Happier was Mendelssohn, who was too kind and simple to suffer much; and Liszt who drank fame to the last drop, till all his life was intoxication with glory; and Rossini, who preferred cooking spaghetti to composing The Barber of Seville; and genial Verdi, living on his Fortunatus’ purse of melody, and putting a barrel-organ into every opera house in Europe. But when we pass to Russia it is melancholy that strums the strings again: the broken Moussorgsky sings of death, and the pathetic Tschaikowsky, breaking his heart over a Venus of the opera, ends his life with a cup of poison (we may be sure of this, since all respectable historians deny it).

Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief. The philosophers of our parent-century were almost as unhappy as the composers: they began with Schopenhauer, who wrote an encyclopedia of misery, and ended with Nietzsche, who loved life because it was a tragedy, but went insane with the thought that he might have to live again. What a pitiful sight, once more, is the invalid Buckle, who never had a healthy moment in his life, and died at forty-one before be could complete even the Introduction to his History of Civilization in England! The only sound man in all the list of nineteenth-century genius was old Goethe, who differed from Shelley by growing up. Read Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, and treat yourself to a week’s company with a mature mind. Read Part One of Faust,but let no historian of literature—not even the great Brandes—lure you into Part Two: it is a senile hotch-potch of nonsense worthy of Edward Lear. The only other mind comparable to Goethe’s in that age was that of Napoleon, powerful instrument of imagination, energy, and will; let Ludwig tell you his story, and then read the ninety sparkling pages with which Taine analyzes the Corsican’s genius in The Modern Regime.

Absorb every word of Taine’s chapter on Byron, and then read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Cain, and two or three cantos of Don Juan. Do not miss the odes of Keats: they are the finest poems in the language.Verlaine and De Musset fall out of our list, because no translation can capture their wistful melody, and Heine is included despite the failure of all who have tried to transpose from one tongue to another the wit and music of his verse. Tennyson enters with In Memoriam and the Idylls of the King, but if courage failed not, his place would be given to Sir Thomas Malory, whose Morte d’Arthur is a stately monument of English prose. Of Balzac, when this century of books is done, you must read a great deal, for he is almost as illuminating as life itself. Skip through Les Miserables, but miss not a word of Flaubert’s two masterpieces (Mme. Bovary and Salambo), which the list here dishonestly groups as one with the connivance of a publisher who issues most of Flaubert in one volume. Then you may nibble at the delicacies offered you by Anatole France, who is the distilled essence of French culture and art; only Penguin Isle is named, but if you are a gourmand for beauty and subtlety of speech you will read twenty volumes of Anatole. Take Pickwick Papers and Vanity Fair (or take David Copperfield and Henry Esmond) leisurely, and forget our egotistic depreciation of the Victorian Age; let our time equal that in literature and then we may throw stones.

Pass from England to Scandinavia and—ignoring Ibsen’s other plays’read Peer Gynt, the greatest poem since Faust. Cross over to Russia, taste the perfection of Turgenev, wander without hurry through the mountain ranges of Tolstoi’s War and Peace (there are only seventeen hundred pages), and at last surrender yourself to Dostoievski, the greatest novelist of all. Here again every volume is precious; if you wish to be torn up to the very roots with instruction and human revelation, you will read not only The Brothers Karamazov, but Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. After that you may come home to America.

Does the list slight some of our native heroes? But remember our youth: we have but lately passed from pioneering to commercialism, and are just beginning to emerge from commercialism into art; Whitman is our only giant yet. Thoreau is a stage in every full life, voice of that Return-to-Nature fever which burns in the blood of every youth who protests against being too quickly civilized. Emerson is a trifle thin today, and there is almost as little meat in him as in Thoreau; but those who study style must stay with him for a week. Poe, too, is a bit overrated; a man of melodious and spookish lines, a weaver of terrible tales that appeal to our bourgeois love of mystery and our tenderfoot delight in imagined pain; we are glad to suffer by proxy.We call Poe a great artist when we only mean that his biography is interesting and his sufferings attractive to us. It is always easier to love the weak than the strong; the strong do not need our love, and instinctively we look for flaws in their irritating perfection; every statue is a provocation.

And so we come to our own century, age of electricity and Gotterdammerung, age of the Great Madness and the Mad Peace, age of intellectual and moral change more rapid and fundamental than any epoch in history ever knew. Let Henry Adams reveal to you the secret of our time; there is no place for it here. Possibly Bergson has the answer to Adams: the mechanistic philosophy which is the basis of our pessimism is not the necessary conclusion of biology; perhaps, after all, men are not machines. Havelock Ellis, the greatest scholar of our day, seems to us something more than a machine; and as we read Jean Christophe, the supreme novel of our century, we catch the feeling of the artist, as against that of the scientist—the sense not of helplessness but of creation. Spengler differs from us, and will have it that our civilization is dying; if it is so, it is only because of that passion for power, and that addiction to war, which he admires with all the envy of the intellectual who thinks that he was born for action. Let Robinson and Wells (or, if you have time, Professor Fay) bare for us the origins of the First World War, that we may see how base these envied glories are in their origin, and how filthy in their result, and let our children read them too, that they may learn how wars are made, and how men may in three years retrace nearly all the steps that mankind has slowly climbed, through three thousand years, from savagery to civilization.

These are sad books, but by the time we reach the end of our list we shall be strong enough to face truth without anesthesia. We may still believe, despite all our knowledge, that the race that made Plato and Leonardo will some day grow wisdom enough to control population, to keep the seas open to food and fuel for all peoples, and all markets open for all traders and all capital, and so by some international organization graduate humanity out of war. Stranger things than that have been accomplished in the history of mankind; forty times such a marvel could not equal the incredible development of man from slime or beast to Confucius and Christ.We have merely begun.

This, then, is our Odyssey of books. Here is another world, containing the selected excellence of a hundred generations; not quite so fair and vital as this actual world of nature and human enterprise, but abounding nevertheless in unsuspected wisdom and beauty unexplored. Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with a profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books.

When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back, and always wait our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.

THE BOOKS

The Road To Freedom: Being One Hundred Best Books for an Education

GROUP I. INTRODUCTORY

1. THOMSON, J. A., The Outline of Science. 4 v.

2. CLENDENING, LOGAN, The Human Body.

*3. KELLOGG, J. H., The New Dietetics; pp. 1-531, 975-1011.

4. JAMES, Wm., Principles of Psychology. 2 v.

*5. WELLS, H. G., The Outline of History; chapters 1-14.

6. SUMNER,W. G., Folkways.

7. FRAZER, SIR JAS., The Golden Bough. 1-vol. ed.

GROUP II. ASIA AND AFRICA

*8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, The Human Adventure. 2v.Vol. 1, chs. 2-7.

5. WELLS, chs. 15-21, 26.

9. BROWN, BRIAN, The Wisdom of China.

*10. The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and Epistles of St. Paul.

*11. FAURE, ELIE, History Of Art. 4v. Vol. I, chs. 1-3; vol. II, chs. 1-3.

12. WILLIAMS, H. S., History of Science. 5v. Bk. I, chs. 1-4.

GROUP III. GREECE

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. I, chs. 8-19.

5. WELLS, chs. 22-25.

13. BURY, J. B., History of Greece. 2 v.

14. HERODOTUS, Histories. (Everyman Library.)

15. THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War. (Everyman Library.)

*16. PLUTARCH, Lives of Illustrious Men (esp. Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Alcibiades, Demos-thenes, Alexander).

17. MURRAY, G., Greek Literature.

18. HOMER, Iliad. Trans. Bryant. Selections.

19. HOMER, Odyssey. Trans. Bryant. Selections.

20. AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound. Trans. Eliz. Browning.

21. SOPHOCLES, Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. Trans.Young. (Everyman Library.)

22. EURIPIDES, all plays so far translated by Gilbert Murray.

23. DIOGENES LAERTIUS, Lives of the Philosophers.

*24. PLATO, Dialogues. Trans. Jowett. Esp. The Apology of Socrates, Phaedo, and The Republic (sections 327-32, 336-77, 384-85, 392-426, 433-35, 481-83, 512-20, 572-95). 1-vol. ed. by Irwin Edman.

25. ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics.

26. ARISTOTLE, Politics.

12. WILLIAMS, History of Science, bk. I, chs. 5-9.

11. FAURE, History of Art, vol. I, chs. 4-7.

GROUP IV. ROME

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. I, chs. 20-30.

5. WELLS, chs. 27-29.

16. PLUTARCH, Lives (esp. Cato Censor, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, Marius, Sylla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, Brutus, Antony).

27. LUCRETIUS, On the Nature of Things. Trans. Munro. (Certain passages are admirably paraphrased in W. H. Mallock, Lucretius on Life and Death. )

28. VIRGIL, Aeneid. Trans.Wm. Morris. Selections.

*29. MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations. (Everyman Library.)

12. WILLIAMS, bk. I, chs. 10-11.

11. FAURE, vol. I, ch. 8.

*30. GIBBON, E., Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 v. (Everyman Library.) Esp. chs. 1-4, 9-10, 14, 15-24, 26-28, 30-31, 35-36, 44, 71.

GROUP V. THE AGE OF CCHRISTIANITY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 1-11.

5. WELLS, chs. 30-34.

30. GIBBON, chs. 37-38, 47-53, 55-59, 64-65, 68-70.

*31. OMAR KHAYYAM, Rubaiyat. Fitzgerald’s paraphrase.

32. MOORE, GEO., Heloise and Abelard. 2 v.

33. DANTE, Divine Comedy. Trans. Longfellow, or C. E. Norton.

*34. TAINE, H., History of English Literature, bk. I.

35. CHAUCER, G., Canterbury Tales. (Everyman Library.) Selections.

36. ADAMS, H., Mont St. Michel and Chartres.

12. WILLIAMS, bk. II, chs. 1-3.

11. FAURE, vol. II, chs. 4-9.

37. GRAY, C., History of Music, chs. 1-3, 5.

GROUP VI. THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

5. WELLS, ch. 35.

38. SYMONDS, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy. 7 v.

39. CELLINI, B., Autobiography. Trans. Symonds.

40. VASARI, G., Lives of the Painters and Sculptors. 4v. Esp. Giotto, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

41. HOFFDING, H., History of Modern Philosophy. 2v. Sections on Bruno and Machiavelli.

42. MACHIAVELLI, N., The Prince.

37. GRAY, chs. 6, 8.

G ROUP VII. EUROPE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 13-14.

43. SMITH, P., The Age of the Reformation.

44. FAGUET, E., The Literature of France; sections on the sixteenth century.

45. RABELAIS, Gargantua and Pantagruel.

*46. MONTAIGNE, Essays. 3v. (Everyman Library.) Esp. Of Coaches, Of the Incommodity of Greatness, Of Vanity, and Of Experience.

47. CERVANTES, Don Quixote.

*48. SHAKESPEARE:, Plays. Esp. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Merchant ofVenice, As You Like It, Midsummer Night’s Dream,Timon of Athens, and The Tempest.

34. TAINE, bk. II, chs. 1-4.

37. GRAY, chs. 4, 7.

12. WILLIAMS, bk. II, chs.4-8.

11. FAURE, vol. III, chs. 4-6.

GROUP VIII. EUROPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, ch. 15.

44. FAGUET, sections on the seventeenth century.

49. LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, Reflections.

50. MOLIERE, Plays. Esp. Tartuffe, The Miser, The Misanthrope, The Bourgeois Gentleman, The Feast of the Statue (Don Juan).

*51. BACON, F., Essays. All. (Everyman Library.)

52. MILTON, J., Lycidas, L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, Sonnets, Areopagitica, and selections from Paradise Lost.

12. WILLIAMS, bk.II, chs. 9-13.

41. HOFFDING, sections on Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibnitz.

53. HOBBES, Leviathan. (Everyman Library.)

54. SPINOZA, Ethics and On the Improvement of the Understanding. (Everyman Library.)

11. FAURE, vol. IV, chs. 1-4.

37. GRAY, chs. 9-10.

GROUP IX. EUROPE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 16-21.

5. WELLS, chs. 26-27.

44. FAGUET, sections on the eighteenth century.

55. SAINTE-BEUVE, Portraits of the 18th Century.

56. VOLTAIRE, Works. I-vol. ed. Esp. Candide, Zadig, and essays on Toleration and History.

57. ROUSSEAU, J. J., Confessions.

58. TAINE, H., Origins of Contemporary France. 6v.Vols. I-IV.

*59. CARLYLE, The French Revolution. 2v. (Everyman Library.)

34. TAINE, History of English Literature, bk. III, chs. 4-7.

*60. BOSWELL, Life of Samuel Johnson. 2v. (Everyman Library.)

61. FIELDING, H., Tom Jones. (Everyman Library, 2 v.)

62. STERNE, L., Tristram Shandy. (Everyman Library.)

*63. SWIFT, J., Gulliver’s Travels. (Everyman Library.)

64. HUME, D., Treatise on Human Nature. 2v. (Everyman Library.) Esp. bks. II and III.

65. WOLLSTONECRAFT, MARY, Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

66. SMITH, ADAM, The Wealth of Nations. 2v. (Everyman Library.) Selections.

12. WILLIAMS, bk. II, chs. 14-15.

41. HOFFDING, sections on the eighteenth century.

11. FAURE, vol. IV, chs. 5-6.

37. GRAY, chs. 11-12.

GROUP X. EUROPE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 22-28.

5. WELLS, chs. 38-39.

58. TAINE, Origins of Contemporary France. Vol.V, The Modern Regime, pp. 1-90.

67. LUDWIG, E., Napoleon.

68. BRANDES, G., Main Currents of 19th Century Literature. 6v.

*69. GOETHE, Faust.

70. ECKERMANN, Conversations with Goethe.

71. HEINE, Poems. Trans. Louis Untermeyer.

34. TAINE, History of English Literature, bks. IV-V.

*72. KEATS, Poems.

*73. SHELLEY, Poems.

*74. BYRON, Poems.

44. FAGUET, sections on the nineteenth century.

75. BALZAC, Père Goriot.

*76. FLAUBERT, Works. I-vol. ed. Esp. Mme. Bovary and Salambo.

77. HUGO, Les Miserables.

78. FRANCE, ANATOLE, Penguin Isle.

79. TENNYSON, Poems.

80. DICKENS, Pickwick Papers.

81. THACKERAY, Vanity Fair.

82. TURGENEV, Fathers and Children.

83. DOSTOIEVSKI, The Brothers Karamazov.

84. TOLSTOI, War and Peace.

85. IBSEN, Peer Gynt.

12. WILLIAMS, bks. III-IV.

86. DARWIN, Descent of Man.

41. HOFFDING, sections on the nineteenth century.

87. BUCKLE, Introduction to the History of Civilization in England. Esp. part I, chs. 1-5, 15.

88. SCHOPENHAUER, Works. I-Vol. ed.

89. NIETZSCHE, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

11. FAURE, vol. IV, chs. 7-8.

37. GRAY, chs. 13-17.

GROUP XI. AMERICA

*90. BEARD, C. and M., The Rise of American Civilization. 2 v.

91. POE, Poems and Tales.

92. EMERSON, Essays.

93. THOREAU, Walden.

*94. WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass.

95. LINCOLN, Letters and Speeches.

GROUP XII. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

8. BREASTED and ROBINSON, vol. II, chs. 29-30.

5. WELLS, chs. 40-41.

96. ROLLAND, R., Jean Christophe. 2 v.

*97. ELLIS, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vols. I, II, III, VI.

*98. ADAMS, H., The Education of Henry Adams.

99. BERGSON, Creative Evolution.

100. SPENGLER, O., Decline of the West. 2 v.

*Books marked with a star are recommended for purchase. Number of books starred, 27; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $90. Number of volumes in the list: 151; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $300. Time required for reading: 4 years at 7 hours per week, 10 hours per volume.