Hanover Browsing
FURTHER SUGGESTIONS for a Dartmouth Bookshelf: England under the Blitz has found that books mean even more than during peaceful times. As the contemporary output has been cut down owing to paper rationing they are turning to old favorites. Perhaps it wouldn't be too bad if that happened here. At any rate here are a few more books that would do you no harm to read. For the most part these books are well known to many people; some are old, some are recent. I would not dare call them "must" books but they would disgrace no shelf.
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography is the personal record of a great 19th century liberal and is available in Oxford's World Classics. Goethe's Faust may be had in a fine new edition with Rockwell Kent illustrations published by New Directions in Connecticut. For a picture of contemporary man in action by all means reread Swift's Gulliver's Travels particularly his descriptions of the Yahoo (you and me) in his fourth voyage to the Houyhnhnms. For those who enjoy reading literary criticism read some of Sainte-Beuve's essays preferably in French though they may be found in good English translations, (preferably in Trechmann's translation) and read Logan Pearsall Smith's Re-Perusals andRecollections.
THE JAMES BROTHERS
The James brothers, William and Henry, are worthy of a place on your shelves. Dutton's Everyman's Library has Papers onPhilosophy by William James; the Modern Library has his Varieties of Religious Experience. Henry James's The Turn of theScrew is one of the greatest ghost stories in English, and the same author's The AspernPapers betrays a faint emanation of Shelley. And mentioning Shelley reminds me of Peter Quennell's admirable volume Byronin Italy issued by Viking in 1941. This is one of the shrewdest books on romanticism ever written.
Perhaps the rhapsodical prose of Nietzsche, that weak, fastidious, and neurotic philologist and poet, might bear rereading. If you feel like trying get ThusSpake Zarathustra and see some of the wheels that make the German mind tick. There is nothing so silly and ridiculous that they will not believe it. They are more gullible, it seems, than the Hindus if that be possible.
There is of course always Jane Austen. She will return you to a world that in retro- spect appears like heaven on earth. My own favorites are Emma and Pride andPrejudice. George Gissing's The PrivatePapers of Henry Ryecroft will please you. Put it next to Alexander Smith's Dreamthorp. The Works of Rabelais will blow fresh air through your brain; it is always well to remember that Rabelais was a physician and a very sane one. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (there is now a one volume edition to be had from Harcourt) is probably the best book in its field. It will do no one any harm to read again for the fifth or first time James Harvey Robinson's The Mind in theMaking. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur will revive your faith in human nature if the New York Times won't. I have no bones to pick with Lewis Carroll who wrote Alice'sAdventures in Wonderland, nor with that lovely book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
Sumner's Folkways, as Ben Ames Williams pointed out, is solid fare; so, too, Longinus on the Sublime, and Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. Can there be a better time to reread Tolstoy's War andPeace? Many like Dickens and I read recently of a man who was buried with a copy of Pickwick Papers. The curious thing about it was that it was in braille and was printed on asbestos. The late Sir William Osier was buried with a copy of the UrnBurial by Sir Thomas Brown. You can procure his works for only a few pieces of silver. Meredith's Essay on Comedy is a marvelous thing in my opinion. Charles Lamb digests well these days, too. And who can ever tire of Boswell's Johnson? I am glad to know that the Nazis didn't quite succeed in destroying his house in Gough Square, London, though they did damage the attic where he wrote his dictionary.
I have yet to read Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy but I have it in a cheap and sumptuous edition edited by Floyd Dell and Jordan-Smith. For the autobiography of a modern read the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau; for a picture of a great American read Franklin's Autobiography. (Fish and guests stink in three days.) Ichy Crane swears by Stevenson and there is no doubt that Treasure Island stands up as does Kidnapped. I wonder how Robinsori Crusoe reads today? I'm sure it would bring on either an attack of the bends or an acute feeling of nostalgia. Dave Boyle '40 writes to recommend Hector Bywater's The Great Pacific War. Though written in 1925 without a proper appreciation of air power it is an extremely prophetic book. And so aloha.
