SOME BEST REMEMBERED BOOKS
C. L. R. SASTRI
“You
only, O books, are liberal and independent;
you give to all who ask. –RICHARD
DE BURY
The
first book that gripped my fancy was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I was then in my fourth form and our Bible
teacher never failed to impress upon us the manifold beauties of that
unforgettable allegory. There was no help for me, therefore, but to borrow a
copy of it from the school library and to set to work upon it in my spare
hours. It instantly struck a chord in me and I followed the hero’s
nerve-racking adventures with breathless interest. I used to heave a profound
sigh of relief whenever he came out unscathed from his hair-raising encounters
with his adversaries; and it was a positive delight to me when, at long last,
his terrible “burden” dropped from his shoulders and the pearly gates of heaven
swung wide open on their hinges to receive him. I have had many literary heroes
since then, but none so ennobling, I dare to say, as Bunyan’s Christian. I read
the book twice in quick succession; and, though it would be idle for me to
pretend that I remember much of it now, I feel immensely proud of having
grappled with one of the world’s acknowledged
masterpieces so early in my life.
Shaw on
Bunyan
Then,
rummaging in the library, I was beside myself with joy when I discovered
another book by the same author, Grade
Abounding, I think. I devoured that also with the same eagerness as the
first. To this day I feel a warm interest in Bunyan; and it is a source of the
most unalloyed gratification to me to reflect that in this I am in excellent
company, indeed, as no less a person than the great G. B. S. himself shared my
enthusiasm. Shaw adored Bunyan “this side idolatry”; and so do I. Bunyan’s prose is markedly Biblical; but that held no
terror for me, because I was familiar with the Holy Bible and its lovely
cadences. His book firmly set me on the literary path that I was to tread
thereafter; and though there have been many Sloughs of Despond and Valleys of
the Shadow of Death in my career, just as in that of the valiant Christian
himself, I have never felt the slightest remorse for continuing on the trail
that Bunyan blazed before me.
At about that period I
had a school-chum who was in the habit of boasting that he had read this novel
of Sir Walter Scott and that; and, not being content with that boast, would
actually produce before our envious eyes brand new volumes in the Nelson’s
Classics Series. Our interest in Scott, let me interpolate, had been kindled by
the fact that we had, at the time, as our English text, an abridged edition of Ivanhoe. My friend used to look down
upon us because, according to his own testimony, he had finished reading the
unabridged edition, and appetite obviously growing by what it feeds on, was
fully determined, wind and weather permitting, to exhaust the whole unwieldy
lot. This, of course, was too much for mere flesh and blood; and we vowed
within ourselves that we would not lag behind him in that effort. Well,
speaking for myself, I was as good as my word, reading, as I did, almost all
the Waverley novels, including even Peveril of the Peak, which Robert Louis
Stevenson confessed to having baffled him continuously and which, in the end,
he gave up as a bad job.
I am not, let me submit,
among those who take pride in scoffing at Scott’s works. It is not everyone
that has his matchless eloquence, what the ancients, I believe, used to call
the copia fandi, the
giving out of the full man because he was full. Nor can there be any two
opinions about his extraordinary creative ability. Nevertheless I must enter a
respectful caveat against his
overindulgence in a certain kind of detail which is not only apt to weary us
but has the additional disadvantage of impeding the movement of his narrative.
His style of writing, to be quite frank, is definitely not my
cup of coffee. I like a chaste, elegant diction, and Scott is verbose to a
degree. Even his grammar is not always wholly above reproach. The secret of all good prose is the art of
omission, and Scott and Ruskin and Carlyle and De Quincey
seem never to have even heard about it. The consequence is that they revel in
sentences that, in the late Mr. G. K. Chesterton’s memorable words, “lengthen
out like nightmare corridors, or rise higher and higher like impossible eastern
Pagodas.” The lesson that the inimitable R. L. S. inculcated to Edmund Gosse (himself, be it remembered, a stylist “to the manner
born”) is as true today as it ever was:
“Beware of purple passages.….And in a style which (like yours) aims
more and more successfully at the academic, one purple word is already too
much; three–a whole page–is inadmissible. Wed
yourself to a clean austerity: that is your forte. Wear a linen ephod, splendidly candid. Assemble its folds,
but do not fasten it with any brooch. I swear to you, in your talking robes
there should be no patch of adornment; and, where the subject forces, let it
force you no further than it must.” (My italics.)
Scott, in my opinion, is
at his best in his purely Scotch novels; and in The Antiquary and The Heart
of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermuir are to be found his peculiar virtues. The Abbott and The Monastery, however, are mere pot-boilers. My heart,
unfortunately, does not warm towards historical fiction, nor am I (worse luck!)
excessively partial to that kind of story-telling which, when all is said and
done, is nothing but a record–a fascinating record, if you will, but just a
record–of the adventures (breath-taking or otherwise) of the hero and the
heroine. Naturally, therefore, Ivanhoe and
Quentin Durward,
to take but two examples, fell flat upon me.
After that I began to
tackle Dickens. Dickens was, by any standard, much more interesting than
Scott, and, besides, he had the saving grace of wit and humour.
I was extremely fortunate in that, by a curious combination of circumstances,
the very first book of his that came my way was his
universally acknowledged masterpiece, David
Copperfield. In his preface to it he himself confesses his preference
for it over the rest of his novels and reveals also, with a twinge of remorse,
how he took leave of the characters in it:
“It would concern the
readers little, perhaps, to know how sorrowfully the pen is laid
down at the end of a two-years’ imaginative task: or how an author feels as if
he were dismissing some portions of himself into the shadowy world, when a
crowd of all the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever. Yet I had
nothing else to tell, unless indeed
I were to confess (which might be of less moment
still) that no one can ever believe this narrative in the reading more than I
believed it in the writing.”
David Copperfield, as everyone is aware, is a chunk (and not an
insignificant chunk at that) of his own autobiography. “Master Davy” is none
other than himself, and Wilkie Micawber
is but a thinly-veiled caricature of his own ludicrous father. Micawber is a masterly creation and Dickens could have been
sure of his niche in the temple of fame if he had contented himself with
writing only that book and resting on his laurels. But he marched–or, rather,
“leap-frogged” – from strength to strength and was
responsible for many more lovely creations. If ever there was a “prolific”
author it was himself: he was of the race of giants. There was nothing that he
touched that he did not adorn. One unmistakable quality of genius is that which
is known as exuberance; and this Dickens had in plenty. We instinctively hug to
our bosoms with hoops of steel authors who have the superb fertility of
Shakespeare and Victor Hugo, authors possessed of an infinity of riches, of
wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, flinging their treasures abroad with the recklessness
of Omar’s rose:
“Look to the blowing
Rose about us – ‘Lo,
Laughing, she says,
‘into the world I blow,
At once the silken
tassel of my Purse
Tear, and its Treasure
on the Garden throw’.”
From David Copperfield I
passed on, by another lucky chance, to the Pickwick
Papers, and it was as though a new planet had swum into my ken. And then
there was no restraining me. The man who created Wilkie
Micawber and Samuel Weller was, obviously, ...a gem
of purest ray serene,” in his own chosen field, and, thereafter, whatever books
of Dickens happened to fall into my hands I devoured eagerly. This is not, of
course, to suggest that I liked them all equally. The Tale of Two Cities was definitely not to my taste, nor can I
lay my hand upon my heart and affirm that I succeeded in unravelling
the mystery that is at the core of Little
Dorrit. I suffered from the same handicap as
regards Oliver Twist also. Either Dickens was not good at mystery stories, or I do
not possess the knack of following them intelligently. But I had never any
difficulty with the Sherlock Holmes volumes, so I suppose I must regretfully
assign the blame to Dickens himself. The gods are notoriously jealous and they
do not confer all the gifts on the same individual. I verily believe that,
having seen to it that Dickens was a superb creator and humourist,
they decided within themselves to call it a day as far as he was concerned.
I am, in my own humble
fashion, a connoisseur of style, but I do not agree with those literary
“exquisites” who deny, with more than a hint of superciliousness, that Dickens
was an artist in words. But Dickens had not, in my judgment, just one style of writing: he was given to
varying his mode with the occasion and in the process, mastered many different
kinds of styles. That is a point which many critics are in danger of
overlooking. Without pretending that, as a stylist. Dickens is in the same
class as William Hazlitt or Charlotte Bronte, I yet
maintain that his prose is definitely not to be sneezed at. I think it is at
its best in his best book, David
Copperfield. It is where it is at its simplest, with the fewest of frills
and furbelows. Before closing this part of my article I may refer to Dickens’s magnoperative power. In this he can claim kinship with
Shakespeare himself. People are either born with this creative faculty – on
such a magnificent scale – or not; and though, as we have been assured, by
taking thought we may contrive to add several cubits to our stature, we cannot,
unfortunately, become creative artists by merely willing to become such. One
has, or one has not, the “divine afflatus”; it is the Law and most of the
Prophets, too.
G. K. C., as usual,
expresses the truth of this for all time in his inspired monograph on Dickens,
with reference to that fool in a million, young Mr. Guppy of Bleak House:
“A man looking at a
hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard the hippopotamus as an enormous
mistake: but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents
him personally from making such a mistake.”
Well, one cannot,
surely, improve on this. Continuing, Chesterton says:
“Not one of us could
have invented Mr. Guppy. But, even if we could have stolen Mr. Guppy from
Dickens, we have all to confront the fact that Dickens would have been able to
invent another quite inconceivable character to take his place.”
I have to confess,
regretfully, that my Thackeray infatuation did not last long. Having read Vanity Fair and Esmond and The Newcomes
and half of Pendennis –
in that order – I had to bid good-bye to him. I much preferred his style to
that of Dickens, but fate supervened before I could thoroughly master his
novels, as someone snatched away my copy of Pendennis before I had finished it. The same misfortune befell me when I was
half-way through Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina too.
After that I had not the heart to begin over again. The only other Russian
novelist that I tackled was the incomparable Dostoevsky. Arnold Bennett was
firm in his conviction that Dostoevsky’s The
Bruthers Karamazov is
decidedly the greatest work of fiction in any language. Not having a tithe of
his erudition I am not, naturally, in a position to lay down the law in this
manner. But having read that novel diligently from the first word to the last,
I am inclined to agree with the author of The
Old Wives’ Tale. Dostoevsky’s masterpiece is terrific. Walt Whitman said of
some book: It is not a book, those who come to it come to a man.” (I am
repeating this from memory.) The same comment can be made about The Brothers Karamozov.
The writer of it was a
genius, if ever there was one. I know that that word lost much of its original
force; it has become a sort of rubbed coin. At present there is a general abuse
of words. They do not stand singly for an idea, as the late Mr. Edmund Candler
has noted somewhere, but have become clotted in the mosaic of a formula which
may mean anything, but which generally does not mean anything at all. Genius is
a very rare phenomenon: almost as rare as the flowering of the aloe, or the
laying of the phoenix’s egg. Dostoevsky was among the elect: he was terribly at
ease in Zion, No novelist, I believe, ever analysed
human motives as meticulously as he did: he was the cartographer of the
emotions of man. His character-study of Ivan Karamozov
is excelled only by that of Raskolnikov in his second
greatest book, Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov finds himself callously murdering an old woman
for her bag of money; and the epic may be said to start from that point. There
is a remorseless man-hunt for that crime and, until the last moment, Raskolnikov contrives to elude his hunters; but,
ultimately, his own conscience gives him up. If ever a denouement was masterly it
was this. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables comes nearest to Crime and Punishment; but I am certain that Dostoevsky’s two novels
are much greater than Hugo’s Les Miserables, even with its penetrating studies of Jean Valjean and the Bishop.
I have mentioned Arnold
Bennett’s name in connection with Dostoevsky. I was
once idly glancing at a railway station bookshop when my eyes caught the name, The Card, on the dust-cover of a book. I
bought it instantly and read it in the train at one stretch. That was my
introduction to Arnold Bennett. I liked his sly humour
and his staccato style and proceeded to his most celebrated novel, The Old Wives’ Tale. Most of Bennett’s
books are nothing much, are mere pot-boilers, but three or four of them,
including this, belong to quite a different category, and it is by them that
his fame survives. I always preferred him to those eminent contemporaries of
his, Wells and Galsworthy. But that other eminent contemporary of his, Joseph Conrad,
was in a class by himself: he was head and shoulders above Bennett. Conrad’s Nostromo took me to a wholly different world
from that of Bennett’s Five Towns; and Nostromo, the
Pole’s masterpiece, was breathtakingly wonderful. That exotic atmosphere was
very much to my taste. Then I switched over to his novels in a Malayan setting,
like Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands and the most glorious of the series, Lord Jim.
Whenever Conrad takes me
to the Straits of Malacca and the innumerable lagoons round about it I am all
attention. No less important than Conrad’s novels and short stories are his
prefaces. As for his English I can say only that it is superb. We are told that
he began to learn English only after he was twenty-five. Before that he had
been writing in French. His mastery over the English language was simply marvellous. Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Conrad belonged
to the same generation. I have no hesitation in saying that Conrad takes the
top place among these. Curiously enough, it was to Galsworthy that Conrad owes
his greatest debt, as it was he who detected his genius after a perusal of Almayer’s Folly and encouraged him to proceed
with his work. Next in the list amongst those who constantly cheered him was
Edward Garnert, whose assistance, at every stage had been invaluable.
G. B. S.
I came to Bernard Shaw
later than many other persons, but, once having come to him, I vowed allegiance
to him till the last breath of my life. I have read all his plays and most of
his prefaces; and, needless to say, I like the prefaces more. More vigorous
prose one does not often come across now-a-days. But I am not a whole-hearted
admirer of it, as I agree with the late C. E. Montague’s criticism when he
wrote:
“Mr. Shaw’s writing,
while it has no stupidities, has no beauties; the fairies seem to have made a
very strict arrangement, before his birth, that the ones with force, lucidity,
and mardancy to give away new-born infants should all
be there, and that all the ones with sensuous loveliness of any kind in their
gift should stay away.”
In conclusion I must
confess that, in English poetry, I like Shakespeare and Wordsworth most and
that, in English prose, my partiality is for William Hazlitt
and Charlotte Bronte. I agree with Stevenson when he says: “We are all mighty
fine fellows, but we cannot write like Willian Hazlitt.” If any young man comes to me and tells me that he
admires Hazlitt very much I am certain that there is
a glorious future for him. In Hazlitt one finds
English prose at its very belt: in his own chosen field there is no one to
compete with him. Next to him comes Charlotte Bronte. What can ever be said
about Charlotte Bronte that shall do the completest
justice to her? I am also, like Rudyard Kipling, a “Jane-ite”,
and am ready to take up the cudgels in Jane Austen’s behalf as against anyone else–always excepting Charlotte. Jane Austen’s
whole stock-in-trade was an almost unlimited capacity for specializing in what
I may designate as storms in tea-cups. There never, perhaps, was a writer that revelled more in the delineation of the minutae of life: give her, in social matters, an inch and she would take
an ell.
Not so with “Currer Bell.” Her genius
was less circumscribed. It required, for its satisfactory operation, real storms, storms the size of life
itself. Her own spirit was a terrific hurricane, and as such could be at home
only in a similarly bizarre emotional atmosphere. She might have justified
herself in the celebrated phrase of Charles Lamb’s: “I am made up of queer
points and I want so many answering needles.” Where Jane Austen
was supremely content with the mere surface, Charlotte knew no peace until she
could delve beneath that surface to whatever lay below. Read her Villette and Jane
Eyre and tell me whether this is not so. I am prepared to say of Villette that it is the grandest novel in the
English language. As the late Mr. Maurice Baring has said in another
connection: “It is the Pillars of Hercules of mortal achievement.”
This is a rough and
haphazard sketch; and it is my duty to remind my readers that though, according
to the poet, heard melodies are sweet, those unheard may well be sweeter.