Books That Have Helped the Younger Generation W E wrote last
week of the books which had helped those whose careers were already made. Our task. now is harder, for we propose to survey the answers we have received to a similar questionnaire sent to the younger generation. The young have not so much leisure to answer letters as have their elders, or perhaps they are more diffident or suspicious of such inquiries. At any rate, the response to our letter has not been entirely satis- factory. Among the novelists who have answered, Mr. Aldous Huxley writes : " I find it rather hard to answer your question ; for though I am greatly influenced by books, in the sense that je prends mon bien ore je le trouve, I can think of no three particular works which I feel to be of cardinal importance in my development. The imagina- tive authors to whom I return most frequently are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dostoievsky and Tolstoy. When it is a question of ideas and generalizations about life, the books I rc-read most often are Pascal's Pensees, and (in another way no less inexhaustibly pregnant) the Maximes of La Roehefoucauld." Miss Margaret Kennedy writes that the three authors who have most influenced her outlook on life, and consequently her career, have been John Stuart Mill, Dostoievsky and Euripides. Miss Sylvia Thompson answers : " I do not know what three books or authors have influenced me. I think such in- fluences are, and should be, largely unconscious in their results. To say I should like to write as well as Virginia Woolf does not mean that I am so inept or vain as to imitate her." Miss Magdalen King-Hall writes : " No book has, as far as I know, had any effect on my life in general, except, of course, the Bible, but the following have helped me a little in my work, such as it is : (1) Anna Karenina, (2) Casanova's Memoirs [which induced her to write instead of merely planning her Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion] and (3) Sketches by Boz." Mrs. Williams- Ellis's selection is : (1) Gibbon's Decline and Fall, (2) Keats's Endymion, (3) Tawney's Acquisitive Society. Professor Julian Huxley's selection is : T. H. Huxley's Essays and Life and Letters, William Blake's Poems, E. B. Wilson's The Cell in Development and Inheritance. Mr. Gordon Selfridge, junr., writes : " It must surely take a long time before the influence of any particular thing that happens can be measured, and one whose life is still being influenced--at least who hopes it is--cannot possibly want to answer your question ; but here are three books that have impressed me : Ludwig's Napoleon, Ford's My Life and Work, Radhakrislman's The Hindu. View of Life." Mr. Noel Coward writes that Mr. Bernard Shaw, Mr. E. M. Forster and -Miss Evelyn Nesbit's books have chiefly influenced his career. Miss Olga Lindo chooses Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, Mr. Hugh Walpole's Fortitude, and Sir J. M. Barrie's The Little White Bird. Mr. Robert Loraine's favourite books arc : Pilgrim's Progress, Jules Verne, and The Direction of Desire, by Stanley M. Bligh. Mr. Robert Boothby tells us gravely that hi old age Carlyle and .T. N. Cairns are his chief influences ; in adolescence it was Turgenev, and in youth Hans Andersen and Thackeray's Christina-9 Stories. He adds : " I suppose the cumulative influence in this modern age of Shaw, Wells and D. H. Lawrence pushes one about to an incredible extent, but it is impossible to select single works in this field." Mr. John Strachey's selections arc hooks by Shaw, Wells, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. Mr, Oliver Baldwin chooses Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Tolstoy's Short Stories and 'William Morris's News from Nowhere. The President of the Oxford Union, Mr. Malcolm Brereton, writes that (1) Dickens, (2) Fairy Tales, (3) Chesterton are his favourite reading. Mr. J. S. R. Lloyd, President of the Cambridge Union, writes ; " The Bible, I understand, is taken for granted. After that, (1) Morley's Life of Gladstone, (2) Plato's Symposium, (3) Vachell's The Hill." Mr. Haydon, the President of the London University Union, chooses Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, Graham Wallas's The Great Society and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Mr. James S..- Jeffrey, President of the Edinburgh University Union, chooses The Mind in the Making, by Harvey Robinson, the poems of Browning, the Life and Letters of Walter H.. Page, and Martin Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. Miss. Vera Physey, President of the Bristol Union, writes : " As I have not yet commenced my career the question is difficult to answer. It is the people one comes into per- sonal contact with--e.g., tutors and professors, and certain big ideals, which I think have the greatest influence on the present generation, rather than specific books and authors. If I must name three books or writers who have most certainly moulded my attitude towards life, I should say : (1) The Bible, (2) Plato, and (3) Kant. I am sorry they sound so highbrow." Mr. Palmer, of the Manchester University Union, chooses : (1) The Bible, (2) Confucius, and (3) William James. Mr. Stephen King-Hall writes that his career has been influenced by persons rather than books, though he would like to pay a tribute of gratitude to the late Robert Young of Kobe, Japan, " a very wise old gentleman," whose leading articles he collected for many years. Mr. Edward Marsh tells us that (1) The novels of Jane Austen, (2) Alice in Wonderland, (3) La- Fontaine's Fables are his favourite books. Miss Iris Barry, the film critic of the Daily Mail, and a contribu7 tor to these columns, writes that the books that have helped her are : (1) Whitman's Leaves of Grass, (2) Stendhal's Rouge et Noir, and (3) Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Mr. David Low, the cartoonist, says that Jack Harkaway's Schooldays was the first book to teach him that reading could be a pleasure. Bellamy's Looking Backward started a precocious interest in politics, These two books were milestones in his life. For the third, he is unable to distinguish between the works of Tolstoy, of Shaw and of Wells. Mr. J. B. Morton's choice is : (1) Don Quixote, (2) The Song of Roland, (3) W. B. Yeats. Mr. Shane Leslie's choice is : (1) Lucretius' De Reruns Natura, (2) Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, and (3) Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, but adds that these are not his favourite books, but the ones that he would most wish- to have written. We are conscious that these opinions arc but the merest scratching of the surface. We have missed many who will make their mark on the history of our times, and. others to whom we wrote did not reply. Perhaps we shall return to the subject later, with a somewhat different approach ; meanwhile we sincerely thank all those who have given us their help in this inquiry,
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