Suspended Judgments Part 26

I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome monotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does so without a.s.suming that ba.n.a.l and bullying air of the adventurous swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectual interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these wanderings into savage regions.

Most of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiet haunts of unadventurous people and set off for remote continents, leave behind them, when they embark, all the fineness and subtlety of their intelligence, and become drastic and crude and journalistic and vulgar. They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and they a.s.sume a sort of man-of-the-wide-world "knowingness" which is extremely unpleasant.

Conrad may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark heart of his Malay jungles, but he never forgets to carry with him his sensitiveness, his metaphysical subtlety, his delicate and elaborate art.

What gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the fact that while he is writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers, of ivory-traffickers and marooned seafarers, he never forgets that he is a philosopher and a psychologist.

This is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for years and years; a writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictions of civilised life, a writer who can initiate us into all the magical mysteries of dark continents and secret southern islands, without teasing us with the harsh sterilities of a brain devoid of all finer feelings.

This is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear; a writer capable of describing sheer physical beauty and savage elemental strength while remaining a subtle European philosopher. I suppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood to attain such a distinction--to be as crafty as a Henry James, moving on velvety feline paws through the drawing-rooms of London and the gardens of Paris; and yet to be leading us through the shadows of primordial forests, cheek by jowl with monstrous idolatries and heathen pa.s.sions.

But what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich in human value is not only that he can remain a philosopher in the deserted outposts of South-Pacific Islands, but that he can remain a tender and mellow lover of the innumerable little things, little stray memories and a.s.sociations, which bind every wanderer from Europe, however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has left behind in the land of his birth.

Here he is a true Slav, a true continental European. Here he is rather Russian--or French, shall I say--than an adopted child of Britain; for the colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimental devotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with the pa.s.sionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of the other races.

Conrad has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginative feeling for the little casual a.s.sociations of a person's birthplace in town or country, which seems to be a peculiar inheritance of the Slavonic and Latin races, and which for all their sentimental play with the word "home" is not really natural to the tougher-minded Englishman or Scotchman.

One is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderers in forlorn places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look of the fields and the actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streets and the warm interiors of little friendly taverns by wharfside and by harbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these people were born.

No modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr.

Hardy, has the power which Conrad has, of conveying to the mind that close indescribable intimacy between humanity's pa.s.sions and the little inanimate things which have surrounded us from childhood.

Conrad can convey this "home-feeling," this warm secure turning of the human animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even into the heart of the tempestuous ocean. He can give us that curious half-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony with our material surroundings, even in the little cabin of some weather-battered captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not a sailor, in his books, and not a single ship in which his sailors voyage, but has a sort of dim background of long rests from toil in ancient harbourback-waters where the cobblestones on the wharf-edge are thick with weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats mistily and greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and the lamplit streets.

It is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, brooding so carefully over the intimate and sacred relations between our frail mortality and its material surroundings, that makes it possible for him to treat with such delicate reverence the ways and customs, the usages and legendary pieties, of the various half-savage tribes among whom his exiled Europeans wander.

I am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid in Conrad's books upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure in reading him. What is the cause of this mania for violence? It surely detracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, from any psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of it lies. I do not feel that the thing is an erotic perversion. There is a downright brutality in it which militates against any subtly voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his Anglo-Saxon readers? No--that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the p.r.i.c.ks of a physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer has to pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?

No; that does not seem to me quite to cover the case. It is an obscure matter, and I think, in our search for the true solution, we may easily stumble upon very interesting and deeply hidden aspects, not only of Conrad's temperament, but of the temperament of a great many artists and scholars. In all artistic work there is so much that goes on in the darkness, so much secret exploitation of the hidden forces of one's nature, that it is extremely difficult to put one's finger upon the real cause of any particular flaming outbreak.

I have observed this sudden and tempestuous "obsession of violence" in the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitely wrought-upon women; and it is possible that the heavy, dull, thick, self-complacent brutality of Nature and average human nature is itself so hurting and rending a thing to the poignant susceptibilities of a n.o.ble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate revenge upon it, it goes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-Tamberlaines Tamberlaine in b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre.

What, however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not the melodramatic violence of these tempestuous scenes, but the remote psychological impulses at work behind them.

Where, in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from his world-deep revelations of direct human feeling, is in his imaginative fusion of some particular spiritual or material motif through the whole fabric of a story.

Thus the desolate "hope against hope" of poor Almayer becomes a thing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up, fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness of his surroundings, out of the debris and litter of his half-ruined dwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out of the stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mud of his melancholy river.

Thus the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst's father--that fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity--overshadows, like a ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic son. It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the final issue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter of small significance whether the scene of a writer's choice be the uplands of Wess.e.x or the jungles of the tropics, as long as that ironic and pa.s.sionate consciousness of the astounding drama--of men and women being the baffled and broken things they are--rises into unmitigated relief and holds us spell-bound. And beyond and above this overshadowing in his stories of man's fate by some particular burden of symbolic implication, Conrad flings the pa.s.sionate flame of his imagination into the words of every single sentence.

That is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction. That is why it has such sudden surprises for us, such sharp revelations, such rare undertones. That is why after reading Conrad it is difficult to return to the younger English writers of the realistic school.

One enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishing thrill in the mere look of the words, as we see them so carefully, so scrupulously laid side by side, each with its own burden of intellectual perfume, like precious vases full of incense on the steps of a marble altar. To write as delicately, as laboriously, as exquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murder and suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; to write as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wild secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l savages, is great mastery. And it is more than mastery. It is a spiritual triumph. It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting the worst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning all things into grist for its mill.

For Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless and purposeless chance in the ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendid tenacity of courage in resisting any desperate betrayal of human joy.

Like that amazing character in "Lord Jim," who collects b.u.t.terflies and keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedy upon tragedy, he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woeful stories, that since there is no help in heaven or earth for the persecuted child of man, it is the more necessary that in defiance of the elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself, man should sink into his own soul and find in the strength of his own isolated and exiled spirit a courage equal to all that can be laid upon it. Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we found when we sank down thus into ourselves were courage, and courage only. What one comes to feel from the reading of Conrad is that there is nothing in the world which has enduring value--nothing in the world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind of dignity or beauty--except only love. And love like this, which is the forlorn hope of the race, is as far from l.u.s.t as it is far from sentiment or indolent pity. It is the "high old Roman virtue." It is the spirit of comradeship defiant still, under the tottering pillars of a shaken earth.

"Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither.

Ripeness is all."

"Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia, The G.o.ds themselves throw incense."

HENRY JAMES

The greatness of a writer can be estimated by the gap which would yawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment the expurgation of his whole body of work from our minds.

And what a hole there would be, what a jagged, bleeding, horrible hole, if the books of Henry James--and it is a continuous satisfaction to a lover of literature to think how many of them there are--were flung upon oblivion.

How often as the days of our life drift by, growing constantly more crowded and difficult, do we find ourselves exclaiming, "Only Henry James could describe this! What a situation for Henry James!"

The man has come to get himself a.s.sociated more--oh, far more --than any other writer of our day, with the actual stir and pressure of environment in which we habitually move. I say "we." By this I mean the great ma.s.s of educated people in Europe, England and America. Of the "Ma.s.ses," as they are called; of the persons by whose labours our middle-cla.s.s and upper-cla.s.s life, with its comparative leisure and comfort, is made possible, Henry James has little to say.

He never or very rarely deals, as Balzac and de Maupa.s.sant and Hardy do, with the farmers and farm labourers on the land. He never or very rarely deals with the slums of our great cities, as did d.i.c.kens and Victor Hugo. He confines himself more rigorously than any other novelist of equal power to the ways and manners and entanglements of people who are "in society," or who could be in society if they wanted to, or are on the verge and edge of society.

When the "lower cla.s.ses"--I use the convenient term; doubtless in the eyes of celestial hierarchies the situation is reversed--enter at all into the circle of Mr. James' consciousness, they enter, either as interesting anarchists, like young Hyacinth, or as servants.

Servants--especially butlers and valets--play a considerable part, and so do poor relations and impecunious dependents. For these latter of both s.e.xes the great urbane author has a peculiar and tender consideration.

It is not in the least that he is sn.o.bbish. Of that personal uneasiness in the presence of worldly greatness so unpleasantly prominent in Thackeray there is absolutely nothing. It is only that, conscientious artist as he is, he is unwilling to risk any sort of aesthetic "faux pas"

by adventuring outside his natural sphere, the sphere to which he was born. Of gentlefolk who are poor and of artists and writers who are poor there are innumerable types strewn throughout his works.

It were quite unfair to say that he only writes of the idle rich. What he actually does is--as I have said--to write of our upper middle cla.s.s life, with its aristocrats at the top and its luckless governesses and tutors and journalists at the bottom; as we, who are in it, know it and feel it and suffer from it, every day of our existence.

And, curiously enough, this is a very rare achievement. Of course there is a horde of second-rate writers, cheap hucksters of glittering sentimental wares for the half-educated, who write voluminously of the life of which I am speaking. There are others, more cultivated but endowed with less vivacity, who crowd their pages with grave personages from what are called "liberal professions." But the more imaginative writers of our day are not to be looked for in the drawing-rooms of their wives and daughters.

Mr. Hardy confines himself to the meadows of Blackmoor and the highways and hedges of Dorset Uplands. Mr. Conrad sails down tropical rivers and among the islands of Southern seas. The American Mr. Dreiser ploughs his earth-upheaving path through the workshops of Chicago and the warehouses of Manhattan.

It is Henry James and Henry James alone, who unravels for us the tangled skein of our actual normal-abnormal life, as the destinies twist and knot it in the civilised chambers of our natural sojourning.

The curious thing is that even among our younger and most modern writers, no one, except John Galsworthy, really deals with the sort of life that I have in mind when I speak of the European "upper cla.s.ses"; and one knows how Mr. Galsworthy's n.o.ble and chivalrous interest in social questions militates against the intellectual detachment of his curiosity.

The cleverer authors among our younger school almost invariably restrict their scope to what one feels are autobiographical histories of their own wanderings through the pseudo-Latin quarters of London and Paris. They flood their pages with struggling artists, emanc.i.p.ated seamstresses, demi-mondaine actresses, social reformers, and all the rag-tag and bob-tail of suburban semi-culture; whereas in some mysterious way--probably by reason of their not possessing imaginations strong enough to sweep them out of the circle of their own experiences--the more normal tide of ordinary "upper-cla.s.s" civilisation pa.s.ses them untouched.

It is imagination which is lacking, imagination which, as in the case of Balzac and Dostoievsky, can carry a writer beyond the sphere of his own personal adventures, into the great tides and currents of the human comedy, and into the larger air of the permanent life-forces.

It is the universal element which one misses in these clever and interesting books, that universal element which in the work of Henry James is never absent, however slight and frivolous his immediate subject or however commonplace and conventional his characters.

Is it, after all, not they,--these younger philosophical realists--but he, the great urbane humanist, who restricts his scope, narrowing it down to oft-repeated types and familiar scenes, which, as the world swings forward, seem to present themselves over and over again as an integral and cla.s.sic embodiment of the permanent forces of life?

It might seem so sometimes; especially when one considers how little new or startling "action" there is in Henry James, how few romantic or outstanding figures there are to arrest us with the shock of sensational surprise. Or is it, when we get to the bottom of the difference--this difference which separates Henry James from the bulk of our younger novelists--not a matter of subject at all, but purely a matter of method and mental atmosphere?

May it not, perhaps, turn out that all those younger men are preoccupied with some purely personal philosophy of life, some definite scheme of things--like the pattern idea in "Human Bondage"--to which they are anxious to sacrifice their experiences and subordinate their imaginations? Are they not all, as a matter of fact, interested more deeply in hitting home some original philosophical nail, than in letting the vast human tragedy strike them out of a clear sky? But it matters little which way it is. The fact that concerns us now is to note that Henry James has still no rival, nor anything approaching a rival, in his universal treatment of European Society. None, even among our most cynical and disillusioned younger writers, are able to get as completely rid as he of any "a priori" system or able to envisage, as he did, in pa.s.sionate colourless curiosity, the panorama of human characters drawn out along the common road of ordinary civilised life.

Putting Flaubert aside, Henry James is the only one of the great modern novelists to be absolutely free from any philosophical system. Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, Balzac, Hardy, de Maupa.s.sant, D'Annunzio--they all have their metaphysical or anti-metaphysical bias, their gesture of faith or denial.

Even Flaubert himself makes a kind of philosophic att.i.tude out of his loathing for the common-place. Henry James alone confronts the universe with only one pa.s.sion, with only one purpose, with only one obsession--the pa.s.sion and the purpose of satisfying his insatiable curiosity upon the procession of human motives and the stream of human psychological reactions, which pa.s.s him by in their eternal flux.

This cold, calm, detached intellectual curiosity, free from any moral alloy, renders him an extraordinary and unique figure; a figure that would be almost inhuman, if it were not that the fury of his research is softened and mitigated by a deep and tender pity for every sort and condition of frail human creature subjected to his unwearied scrutiny.