I am not prepared to lay down a complete list, but I am prepared to hint at one. If I had to help a crude but willing taste, I would handle its reading as follows:--
Reading made up exclusively of recent novels, good, well-written, thoughtful novels, not too startling in form or contents. I would begin on novels because anybody can read a novel, and because the first cleansing operation is to induce the subject to read good novels instead of bad ones. Here is a preliminary list:--
_Tony-Bungay_ (Wells) _Kipps_ (Wells) _The Custom of the Country_ (Wharton) _The Old Wives' Tale_ (Bennett) _The Man of Property_ (Galsworthy) _Jude the Obscure_ (Hardy) _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ (Hardy) _Sussex Gorse_ (Kaye-Smith)
and say twenty or thirty more of this type, all published in the last dozen years. It is, of course, assumed that interest would be maintained by conversation.
After the subject (victim, if you like) had read say thirty of the best solid novels of the twentieth century, I think I should draw him to the more abstruse modern novels and stories. In the first period he would come in contact with a general criticism of life. In the second period he would read novels of a more iconoclastic and constructive kind, such as:--
_The Island Pharisees_ (Galsworthy) _The New Machiavelli_ (Wells) _Sinister Street_ (Mackenzie) _The Celestial Omnibus_ (Forster) _The Longest Journey_ (Forster) _Sons and Lovers_ (Lawrence) _The White Peacock_ (Lawrence) _Ethan Frome_ (Wharton) _Round the Corner_ (Cannan)
Briefly, the more ambitious kind of novel, say thirty or forty altogether. At that time, I should induce the subject to browse occasionally in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_.
Now only would I come to the older novels, because, by then, the mind should be supple enough to stand their congestion of detail, their tendency to caricature, their stilted phrasing, and yet recognise their qualities. Here are some:--
_The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (Howells) _Vanity Fair_ (Thackeray) _The Vicar of Wakefield_ (Goldsmith) _The Way of All Flesh_ (Butler) _Quentin Durward_ (Scott) _Guy Mannering_ (Scott)
Briefly, the bulk of the works of Thackeray, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. 'Barry Lyndon' twice, and Trollope never. Here, at last, the solid curriculum, but only, you will observe, when a little of the mud of the magazines had been cleaned off. Rather more verse too, beginning with Tennyson and Henley, passing on to Rossetti and perhaps to Swinburne. Verse, however, should not be pressed. But I think I should propose modern plays of the lighter kind, Mr Bernard Shaw's _Major Barbara_ and _John Bull's Other Island_, for instance. One could pass by degrees to the less obvious plays of Mr Shaw, certainly to those of St John Hankin, and perhaps to _The Madras House_. I think also a start might be made on foreign works, but these would develop mainly in the