One isn’t always as careful of what one says as one should be. When I stated in a book of mine called The Summing Up that young people often came to me for advice on the books they would do well to read, I did not reckon with the consequences. I received a multitude of letters from all manner of persons, asking me what the advice was that I gave. I answered them as best I could, but it is not possible to deal fully with such a matter in a private letter; and as many people seem to desire such guidance as I can offer, it has occurred to me that they might like to have a brief account of what suggestions I have to make from my own experience for pleasant and profitable reading.

The first thing I want to insist on is that reading should be enjoyable. Of course, there are many books that we all have to read, either to pass examinations or to acquire information, from which it is impossible to extract enjoyment. We are reading them for instruction, and the best we can hope is that our need for it will enable us to get through them without tedium. Such books we read with resignation rather than with alacrity. But that is not the sort of reading I have in mind. The books I shall mention in due course will help you neither to get a degree nor to earn your living, they will not teach you to sail a boat or get a stalled motor to run, but they will help you to live more fully. That, however, they cannot do unless you enjoy reading them.

The “you” I address is the adult whose avocations give him a certain leisure and who would like to read the books which cannot without loss be left unread. I do not address the bookworm. He can find his own way. His curiosity leads him along many unfrequented paths and he gathers delight in the discovery of half-forgotten excellence. I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.But there are masterpieces which are acknowledged to be such by all the best critics and to which the historians of literature devote considerable space, yet which no ordinary person can now read with enjoyment. They are important to the student, but changing times and changing tastes have robbed them of their savour and it is hard to read them now without an effort of will. Let me give one instance:I have read George Eliot’s Adam Bede , but I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that it was with pleasure. I read it from a sense of duty: I finished it with a sigh of relief.

Now of such books as this I mean to say nothing. Every man is his own best critic. Whatever the learned say about a book, however unanimous they are in their praise of it, unless it interests you it is no business of yours. Don’t forget that critics often make mistakes, the history of criticism is full of the blunders the most eminent of them have made, and you who read are the final judge of the value to you of the book you are reading. This, of course, applies to the books I am going to recommend to your attention. We are none of us exactly like everyone else, only rather like, and it would be unreasonable to suppose that the books that have meant a great deal to me should be precisely those that will mean a great deal to you. But they are books that I feel the richer for having read, and I think I should not be quite the man I am if I had not read them. And so I beg of you,if any of you who read these pages are tempted to read the books I suggest and cannot get on with them, just put them down; they will be of no service to you if you do not enjoy them. No one is under an obligation to read poetry or fiction or the miscellaneous literature which is classed as belles-lettres . (I wish I knew the English term for this, but I don’t think there is one.) He must read them for pleasure,and who can claim that what pleases one man must necessarily please another?

But let no one think that pleasure is immoral. Pleasure in itself is a great good, all pleasure, but its consequences may be such that the sensible person eschews certain varieties of it. Nor need pleasure be gross and sensual. They are wise in their generation who have discovered that intellectual pleasure is the most satisfying and the most enduring. It is well to acquire the habit of reading. There are few sports in which you can engage to your own satisfaction after you have passed the prime of life; there are no games except patience, chess problems and crossword puzzles that you can play without someone to play them with you. Reading suffers from no such disadvantages; there is no occupation—except perhaps needlework, but that leaves the restless spirit at liberty—which you can more easily take up at any moment, for any period, and more easily put aside when other calls press upon you; there is no other amusement that can be obtained in these happy days of public libraries and cheap editions at so small a cost. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. Almost all, I say, for I would not go so far as to pretend that to read a book will assuage the pangs of hunger or still the pain of unrequited love; but half a dozen good detective stories and a hot-water bottle will enable anyone to snap his fingers at the worst cold in the head. But who is going to acquire the habit of reading for reading’s sake, if he is bidden to read books that bore him?

It is more convenient to take the books of which I am now going to speak in chronological order, but I can see no reason why, if you make up your mind to read them, you should do so in that order.I think you would be much better advised to read them according to your fancy; nor do I see even why you should read them one by one. For my own part, I find it more agreeable to read four or fiv books together. After all, you aren’t in the same mood on one day as on another, nor have you the same eagerness to read a certain book at all hours of the day. We must suit ourselves in these matters, and I have naturally adopted the plan that best suits me. In the morning before I start work I read for a while a book, either of science or philosophy, that requires a fresh and attentive brain. It sets me off for the day. Later on, when my work is done and I feel at ease, but not inclined for mental exercise of a strenuous character, I read history,essays, criticism or biography; and in the evening I read a novel.Besides these, I keep on hand a volume of poetry in case I feel in the mood for that, and by my bedside I have one of those books, too rarely to be found, alas, which you can dip into at any place and stop reading with equanimity at the end of any paragraph.

Now, the first book on my list is Defoe’s Moll Flanders . No English novelist has ever achieved a greater verisimilitude than Defoe; it is hard, indeed, when you read him, to remember that you are reading a work of fiction; it is more like a consummate piece of reporting. You are convinced that his people spoke exactly as he made them speak, and their actions are so plausible that you cannot doubt that this is how, in the circumstances, they behaved. Moll Flanders is not a moral book. It is bustling, coarse and brutal, but it has a robustness that I like to think is in the English character. Defoe had little imagination and not much humour, but he had a wide and varied experience of life and, being an excellent journalist, he had a keen eye for the curious incident and the telling detail. He had no sense of climax, he attempted no pattern; and so the reader is not swept away by a power that he does not seek to resist; he is carried along in the crowd, as it were, and it may be that when he comes to a side street he will slip down it and get away. He may, to put it plainly, after a couple of hundred pages of very much the same sort of thing feel that he has had enough. Well, that’s all right. But for my part, I am quite willing to accompany my author till he brings his ribald heroine to the haven of respectability tempered with penitence.

Then I should like you to read Swift’s Gulliver ’ s Travels . I am going to deal with Doctor Johnson later on, but here I must note that,speaking of this book, he said: “When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest.” Doctor Johnson was an excellent critic and a very wise man, but here he talked nonsense. Gulliver ’ s Travels has wit and irony, ingenious invention,broad humour, savage satire and vigour. Its style is admirable. No one has ever written this difficult language of ours more compactly,more lucidly and more unaffectedly than Swift. I could wish that Doctor Johnson had said of him what he said of another: “Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.” He could then have added a third to his pairs of adjectives: virile but not overweening.

Two novels come next. Fielding’s Tom Jones is, perhaps, the healthiest novel in English literature. It is a dashing, brave and cheerful book, sturdy and generous; it is, of course, very frank,and Tom Jones, with his good looks and vitality, a friendly fellow whom we should all like to have known, does certain things which the moralist will deplore. But do we care? Not unless we are solemn prigs, for he is disinterested and his heart is golden.Fielding was, unlike Defoe, a conscious artist; his scheme gave him the opportunity to describe a multitude of incidents and to create a great number of personages. They are splendidly alive in a world that is pungent with the bustle and turmoil of reality. Fielding took himself seriously—as, of course, every author should—and there were many subjects of importance on which he felt called upon to deliver himself. At the beginning of each part he puts a dissertation in which he discusses one thing and another. These have humour and sincerity, but for my part I think they can be skipped without disadvantage. I have a notion that no one can read Tom Jones without delight, for it is a manly, wholesome book, without any humbug about it, and it warms the cockles of your heart.

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a novel of very different character.You might say of it what Doctor Johnson said of Sir Charles Grandison : “If you were to read it for the story, you would hang yourself.” It is a book that, according to your temperament, you will find either as readable as anything you have ever read, or tiresome and affected. It has no unity. It has no coherence. Digression follows upon digression. But it is wonderfully original, funny and pathetic; and it increases your spiritual possessions with half a dozen characters so full of idiosyncrasy and so lovable that once you have come to know them, you feel that not to have known them would have been an irreparable loss. Nor would I have anyone fail to read Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey ; I have nothing to say of it except that it is enchanting.

Now let us leave fiction for a little. I suppose it is universally acknowledged that Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson is the greatest biography in the language. It is a book that you can read with profit and pleasure at any age. You can pick it up at any time,opening it at random, and be sure of entertainment. But to praise such a work at this time of day is absurd. I should like, however, to add to it a book that, to my mind undeservedly, is less well known.This is Boswell’s The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides . The purchase by Colonel Isham of the Boswell manuscripts has resulted in a new and unexpurgated edition of it, for, as I suppose everyone knows,Boswell’s manuscript was edited by Malone, who thought it proper to tone it down in accordance with the primly elegant taste of the day, and so left out much that gave the book flavour. It enlarges your knowledge both of Johnson and of Boswell, and if it increases your love and admiration for the sturdy old doctor, it adds also to your respect for his poor biographer who has been so much abused.This is not a writer to be despised who had such a quick eye for an amusing incident, so much appreciation of a racy phrase, and such a rare gift for reproducing the atmosphere of a scene and the liveliness of a conversation.

The figure of Doctor Johnson towers over the eighteenth century, and he has been accepted as representing the English character, with its sterling merits and unhappy defects, at its best.But if we have all read his biography, so that we know him more intimately than we know many of the people we have passed our lives with, few of us have read any of his writings; and yet he produced one work at least which is in the highest degree enjoyable. I know no better book to take on a holiday or to keep at one’s bedside than Johnson’s Lives of the Poets . It is written with limpidity. It has pungency and humour. It is full of horse sense.Though sometimes his judgments startle us—he found Gray dull and had little good to say of Milton’s Lycidas —you delight in them because they are an expression of his own personality. He was as much interested in the men he wrote of as in their works, and though you may not have read a word of these, you can hardly fail to be diverted by the shrewd, lively and tolerant observation with which he portrays their authors.

I come next to a book that I name with hesitation, for, as I must remind the reader, I wish to speak here only of books that one would be the poorer for not having read, and though I have a great fondness for Gibbon’s Autobiography , I am not quite sure that it would have made much difference to me not to have read it. I should certainly have lost a keen pleasure, but if I mention it I feel that I should mention also a large number of other works, not so great as the greatest, to be judged by a different standard, and they would need a chapter to themselves. But Gibbon’s Autobiography is very readable; it is short, written with the peculiar elegance of which he was master, and it has both dignity and humour. Of the latter I cannot resist giving an example. When he was at Lausanne he fell in love, but his father threatening to disinherit him, he prudently gave up the thought of marrying the object of his affections. He ends his recital of the episode with these words: “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; and my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.” I think if the book contained nothing else,it would be worth reading for that delicious sentence.

Now I want to abandon the chronological order to which I have till now roughly adhered, in order to speak of two great novels, David Copperfield and Butler’s The Way of All Flesh . This I do, not only because they are to a notable degree in the great tradition of the English novel, but also because they have eminently the features which, when I think of the works I have hitherto summarily considered, seem characteristic of English literature. With the possible exception of Tristram Shandy , all these books have in common something robust, straight-forward, humorous and healthy which, I like to think, is representative of the race. There is no especial subtlety in them and they are somewhat wanting in delicacy.It is a literature of men of action rather than of men of thought.There is a lot of common sense about it, some sentimentality and a great deal of humanity. Of David Copperfield there is nothing to be said but that it is Dickens’ best novel. His defects are here least noticeable and his merits most remarkable. Many long novels have been written since The Way of All Flesh , but I think it is the last English novel to have been written in the grand manner; it is the last,of any importance, that owes nothing to the great novelists of France and Russia. It is a worthy successor of Tom Jones , and its author had in him something of the old lexicographer whom we have agreed to regard as the typical Englishman.

Then I go back to Jane Austen. I would not claim that she is England’s greatest novelist; with all his faults of exaggeration,vulgarity, wordiness and sentimentality, Dickens remains that. He was prodigious. He did not describe the world as we know it; he created a world. He had suspense, drama and humour, and thus was able to give the feel of the multifariousness and bustle of life as, so far as I know, only one other novelist, Tolstoy, has done. Out of his immense vitality he fashioned a whole series of characters, diverse,individual, and tremulous with—no, “tremulous” isn’t the right word—turbulent with life. He managed his complicated and often highly improbable stories with a dashing skill that perhaps you must be a novelist thoroughly to appreciate. But Jane Austen is perfect.It is true that her scope is restricted; she deals with a little world of country gentlefolk, clergymen and middle-class persons; but who has equalled her insight into character or surpassed the delicacy and reasonableness with which she probed its depths? She does not need my praise. The only characteristic I would like to impress upon your attention is one which she exhibits with so much ease that you might well take it for granted. Though, on the whole, nothing very much happens in her stories, and she mostly eschews dramatic incident, you are inveigled, I hardly know how, to turn from page to page by the urgent desire to know what is going to happen next; and that is the novelist’s essential gift. Without it he is done. I can think of no one who possessed it more fully than Jane Austen. My only difficulty now is to decide which of her few novels especially to recommend. For my part, I like Mansfield Park best. I recognize that its heroine is a little prig and its hero a pompous ass, but I do not care; it is wise, witty and tender, a masterpiece of ironical humour and subtle observation.

At this point I would draw your attention to Hazlitt. His fame has been overshadowed by that of Charles Lamb, but to my mind he was the better essayist. Charles Lamb, a charming, gentle, witty creature whom to know was to love, has always appealed to the affections of his readers. Hazlitt could hardly do that. He was rude,tactless, envious and quarrelsome; a man, in truth, of an unpleasing character; but, unfortunately, it is not always the most worthy men who write the best books. In the end it is the personality of the artist that counts, and for my part I find more to interest me in the tormented, striving, acrimonious soul of Hazlitt than in Charles Lamb’s patient but somewhat maudlin amiability. As a writer, Hazlitt was vigorous, bold and healthy. What he had to say, he said with decision. His essays are full of meat, and when you have read one of them you feel, not as you do when you have read one of Lamb’s,that you have made a meal of savoury kickshaws, but that you have satisfied your appetite with substantial fare. Much of his best work can be found in his Table Talk , but there have been published a number of selections from his essays, and none of these can fail to contain My First Acquaintance with Poets , which, I suppose, is not only the most thrilling piece he ever wrote but the finest essay in the English language.

Now, two more novels: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair , and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights . I can say little about them, for my space is growing short. Critics nowadays are inclined to carp at Thackeray.Perhaps he was unfortunate in his period. He should have lived and written in our own time, when he would not have been hampered by the conventions which prevented the Victorian novelist from telling the truth, however bitter, as he saw it. His point of view was modern.He was deeply conscious of the mediocrity of human beings and he was interested in the contradictions of their natures. And however much you may deplore his sentimentality and his sermonizing or regret the weakness that led him to defer unduly to the demands of the public, the fact remains that in Becky Sharp he created one of the most real, living and forcible characters in English fiction.

Wuthering Heights is unique. It is an awkward novel to read,because sometimes it so outrages probability that you are completely bewildered; but it is passionate and profoundly moving; it has the depth and power of a great poem. To read it is not like reading a work of fiction, in which, however absorbed, you can remind yourself, if need be, that it is only a story; it is to have a shattering experience in your own life.

I can but name three novels which I think it would be a pity to have left unread. They are George Eliot’s Middlemarch , Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds and Meredith’s The Egoist .

The reader will have noticed, perhaps with surprise, that hitherto I have said nothing of poetry. I do not think our race has produced either painters, sculptors or composers who can rank with the best of other countries; their achievements have been respectable rather than pre-eminent; but I do not believe it is a racial or national bias that leads me to claim that our poets are supreme. But because poetry is the flower and crown of literature, it cannot afford to be mediocre. I remember Edmund Gosse telling me that he would much rather read a volume of minor verse than an average novel; it took less time, he said, and required no mental effort. Well, I have no use for verse, however accomplished; to me, unless poetry is great, it is nothing, and I would sooner read a newspaper. I cannot read poetry at all times and in all places. I want to be in a particular mood and I want a favourable environment, I like to read poetry in a garden towards the end of a summer day; I like to sit on a cliff with a view of the sea or to lie on a mossy bank in a wood and take out the volume I have brought in my pocket. But even the greatest poets have written a great deal that is tedious to read; many versifiers have written endless volumes and in the end produced no more than two or three poems. I think that is enough to justify them, but I do not want to read so much to gain so little. I like anthologies.The critics, I understand, have a contempt for them; they say that in order to appreciate an author you must read him in full. But I do not read poetry as a critic; I read it as a human being in need of solace,refreshment and peace. I am thankful to the sensitive scholar who has taken the trouble to weed out from the great mass of English poetry what is not so good and has left for my perusal only what is to my purpose. The three best anthologies I know are Palgrave’s Golden Treasury , The Oxford Book of English Verse , and the admirable English Galaxy of Shorter Poems , by Gerald Bullett. But we live in the world of to-day and we should not neglect the writings of the poets of our own time. They, too, may have something important to give us. Unfortunately, the only anthology that, to my knowledge,has been made of them is so inadequate that I forbear even to name it.

Of course, everyone must read the great tragedies of Shakespeare.He is not only the greatest poet that ever lived but the glory of our race. But knowing, as I do, these plays pretty well, I wish that someone with taste, knowledge and discretion could be found who would make an anthology of Shakespeare’s plays and poems,putting in not only the famous passages with which we should all be familiar but also fragments, single lines even; so that I might have in a convenient volume a book to which I could always turn when I wanted the cream of all poetry. (Since I wrote these lines George Rylands has produced an anthology under the title of The Ages of Man which comes as near fulfilling the wish I have here expressed as, I suppose, anyone can expect. It is a welcome gift to a troubled world.) n2IruGfoY4UhVkla+MS+NZ3VuLxSgx2pSHlX4Pt0A6D0Rl4h6IrkHmHG/UAEK4UL