The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

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.