The Critical Game Part 4

The curate says you have no soul-- I know that he has none.

That is good; but it is spiteful. Let us admit the curate. For the dog would. A dog does not care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is our superior.

Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan doubt of our times, is a true believer in other kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that "nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to please, to delight and to prove herself happy, does almost what we should do had we her treasures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs the whole question and ascribes to "nature" wishes, desires, intentions. He does the trick that poets always do; he answers the question that he asks and that he pretends to be discussing. "All that we observe within ourselves," he says, "is rightly open to suspicion; we are at once litigant and judge, and we have too great an interest in peopling our world with magnificent illusions and hopes. But let the least external indication be dear and precious to us."

In this the poet says all, while, on another page, the man of science, with firm integrity, minimizes evidence and refuses to be convinced.

There is a region where the poet knows almost everything worth knowing. There is a region where the man of science knows, not everything worth knowing, but all that is known. There is a misty mid-region where a full-minded, large-hearted man can live happily. He gets the message going and coming. He receives what the poet has to say and what the man of fact has to say and he constructs his world from the fragmentary contributions of both regions. Maeterlinck himself in "Our Eternity," dwells on this central ground. Shakespeare and Isaiah are on his right hand. On his left hand are William James and other psychological students of the evidence of spooks.

Poets are enamored of death. Nine-tenths of all the imaginative literature of the world is concerned with love and death, the begetter and the extinguisher. The sweetest lines in Shakespeare deal with love; the stateliest lines, Hamlet's and Macbeth's, are upon death.

The chief interest of life is in dying. We get our highest emotions from some other person's death, and we adapt our entire course, from the cradle to the grave, with a view to the fact that we are going to quit in some year determined by fate or G.o.d or other power not quite understood, a year carefully figured out by the actuaries of the life insurance companies.

Man is a perfect coward in the face of death, his own or that of somebody he loves. The believer and the unbeliever alike bewail the great adventure. The tears shed by the believer in immortality and by the disbeliever are the same hot, saline, human drops. Everybody wants an answer, and only the adherents of certain sects receive an answer that satisfies them. Those answers do not satisfy me or you, not because there is anything wrong in the answers, but because the people that hold the answers behave as all the rest of us do in the presence of death. Maeterlinck, on the basis of modern evidence, argues for two-hundred and fifty-eight pages that we do not know what happens when we die. "In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand-fold loftier and a thousand-fold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp an atom."

Amen! That leaves us where we started. But the fact, the cold, interesting, magnificent fact, is that we are alive, and some of us are working and some are playing. Maeterlinck is a great child playing with flowers and with words. He is also a competent workman, and he is a.s.sisted by another skilful craftsman to whom English readers owe much, Mr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translates Maeterlinck into English. He is a fine artist. Following faithfully the run of our English idiom, he succeeds in keeping for our Anglo-Saxon eyes and ears the color, tone, or whatever it is, of Maeterlinck's beautiful style.

JOSEPH CONRAD

To the newest generation of adult readers the dawn of a literary light is a rare experience. It is as if the courses of our literature were Arctic in their slowness, as if the day came at long intervals, and then without warmth or brilliance. Our fathers knew the joy of welcoming the latest novel of d.i.c.kens or a new volume of essays by Carlyle. The only[1] great day whose beginning young men have witnessed is the day of Kipling; his light mounted rapidly to a high noon, and if the afternoon shadows have begun to deepen prematurely, that sun is still beautiful and strong. Other lights have kindled in the last fifteen years, and have gone out before they had fairly dislodged the darkness, or have continued to burn dimly.

[1] I ask the reader to remember that this was written in 1906.

Eyes accustomed only to darkness and uncertain lights are in condition to be deluded by the phantoms of false dawn; it is therefore unwise to greet with too much enthusiasm the arrival of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Even if the dawn is real, it is certainly overcast with heavy clouds, and it has not proved bright enough to startle the world. Nevertheless, his light is of unique beauty in contemporary literature, and the story of its kindling makes interesting biography.

Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was born fifty years ago in Poland. His father, a critic and poet, and his mother, who was exiled to Siberia, were engaged in revolutionary journalism. At nineteen Conrad left home, to escape an unsettled life, and also, it is fair to a.s.sume, to satisfy his love of adventure. He found work on English vessels, and this fact gave to contemporary English letters a man who might otherwise have written in French. To-day he appears in hand-books of biography as Master in the British Merchant Service, and Author. At nineteen he had not mastered English; at thirty-eight he had published no book. Since then he has published about a volume a year. In preparation for his books he sailed as able seaman, mate, and master, for twenty years, on steam and sailing craft, and meanwhile he was reading deep in French and English literature,--all, we are told, with no intent to become a writer. Indeed it was a period of ill health resulting in an enforced idleness from the familiar sea that gave him opportunity to put some of his adventures into words. Perhaps he is a lesser ill.u.s.tration of a theory of Th.o.r.eau's that a word well said "must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive knight, after all." However that may be, the intellectual and physical adventures of Conrad's life were abundant, and they reappear, discernible though transfigured, in the substance and the qualities of his work.

His ten books are for the most part concerned with the waters of the earth, and the men that sail on the face of the waters, and with lands, far from English readers, to be reached only by long journeying in ships.[2] His first book, "Almayer's Folly," tells the story of a disappointed Dutch trader in Borneo, whose half-caste daughter runs away with a Malay chief. His second book, "An Outcast of the Islands,"

deals further with the career of Almayer and with that of another exiled Dutchman. "Nostromo," has for its scene an imaginary South American state, and its heroes are an Englishman and an Italian. "The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus" (published in America as "The Children of the Sea") and "Typhoon" are each the chronicle of a voyage. "Lord Jim" is the story of a young mate who disgraces himself by one unseamanlike act, and becomes a wanderer in the eastern islands, and finally a kind of king in a village of savages. "Tales of Unrest" contains five stories, two of which are about Malays, and another about white traders in an African station. The hero of "Falk"--the t.i.tle story of a volume of three pieces--is a Scandinavian sailor who has been a cannibal, and who wins the daughter of a German ship captain in an Eastern port. "Youth," the first story in a volume of three, is the memory of a young mate's voyage in an unseaworthy ship, which burns and leaves the crew to seek an Eastern seaport in the boats. The second story, "The Heart of Darkness," is an account of a journey into the Belgian Congo State and a curious study of the effect of solitude and the jungle and savagery on a white trader. The third piece in the volume is the story of a ship-captain who steers his ship with the help of a Malay servant and lets no one guess until the end that he is blind. Of two books written in collaboration with Mr. Ford M. Hueffer, the only one worth considering, "Romance," comes the nearest to being the kind of fiction that the advertis.e.m.e.nts announce as "full of heart interest, love, and the glamor of a charming hero and heroine." It begins with a smuggler's escapade in England, and ends in an elopement in the West Indies; the best parts, probably Mr. Conrad's share in the work, are those about the sea and all that on it is, fogs, ships, and bearded pirates. In these books are men and women of all civilized nations, the acquaintance of a globe-trotter, and there are, besides, enough Malays, Chinamen, and Negroes to make the choruses of several comic operas. But in Conrad they are serious people, every Malay with a soul and a tragedy; even the n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus is equipped with psychological machinery.

[2] Almayer's Folly. The Macmillan Co. 1895.

An Outcast of the Islands. Tauchnitz. 1896.

The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea). Dodd, Mead & Co. 1897.

Tales of Unrest. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898.

Lord Jim. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1899.

The Inheritors (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co.

1901.

Typhoon. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902.

Falk. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.

Youth. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.

Romance (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904.

Nostromo. Harper & Brothers. 1904.

Conrad's subject-matter, the secretion of experience, is rich enough and of sufficiently strange and romantic quality to endow a writer of popular fiction; and his style,--that is, the use of words for their melody, power, and charm,--is fit for a king of literature. Stevenson, who found so little sheer good writing among his contemporaries, would have welcomed Conrad and have lamented that he could not or would not tell his stories in more brief, steady, and continuous fashion.

For there is the rub. Conrad is not instinctively a story-teller. Many a writer of less genius surpa.s.ses him in method. He has no gift of what Lamb calls a bare narrative.

There are writers with magnificent power of language who do not attain that combination of literary and human qualities which is readableness, and there are others who interest many people in many generations, and yet do not write well. To most readers d.i.c.kens is as delightful when he writes slovenly sentences as when he writes at his best. Scott, the demiG.o.d, pours out his great romances in an inexpressive fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes infallibly well. These ill.u.s.trations are intended to suggest a difference which is a fact in literature, and are not to be carried to any conclusive comparison. The difference exists and it is not a strange fact. It is strange, however, that Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master of a kind of subject-matter that would make his books as popular as "Robinson Crusoe" and "Treasure Island," should be one of those who can write but cannot make an inevitably attractive and winning book for the mult.i.tude.

Either he knows his fault and can not help it, or he wills it and does not consider it a fault. There is evidence on this question.

Several of his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an eloquent, reflective, world-worn man. In one place Conrad says, "We knew that we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's _inconclusive_ experiences." The story Marlow tells is no more inconclusive and rambling than most of the other stories, so that one is forced to conclude that Marlow's character as narrator is Conrad's concession to his own self-observed habit of mind. In another place Conrad says: "The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the sh.e.l.l of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad prefers or pretends to prefer the haze to the kernel.

In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns the methods usual to fiction of "solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death," and says: "Why the reading public, which as a body has never laid upon the story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings down the gauntlet to those demands of readers which greater men than he and Mr. James have been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wisdom and reality.

A further announcement of his literary creed he made in a kind of artistic confession published a few years ago. "His (the prose writer's) answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused, who demand to be promptly improved or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: 'My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is before all to make you see.... If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand; perhaps also that glimpse of truth[3] for which you have forgotten to ask."

[3] These Slavs (see above on Tolstoy) are all for Truth, but they are not Chadbandians. They are artists. And so was the Anglo-Saxon who made Chadband.

A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once.

"Nostromo" is told forward and backward in the first half of the book, and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book.

"Lord Jim" is confused.[4] The first few chapters are narrated in the third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, a more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other stories the point of view fails. In "The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus" are conferences between two people in private which no third person could overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by one of the crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck almost vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engine-room, hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately informed that he is a man of fifty, with coa.r.s.e hair, of immense strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoa.r.s.e voice, easy-going and good-natured,--as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in the darkness!

[4] No, it is not. It is clear as daylight.

Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the magic rug, and even then the s.p.a.ce-o'erleaping imagination resents being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when Conrad's descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold, perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.

Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, no doubt, with his admiration for Mr. Henry James, of whom he has written an extremely "literary" appreciation. Too much interest in masters like Flaubert and Mr. James is not gentlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a sailor turned writer, who pilots a ship through a magnificent struggle with a typhoon, leads us into the bewitching terror of the African jungle, and guides us to Malay lands where the days are full of savage love, intrigue, suicide, murder, piracy, and all forms of picturesque and terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are "adventures in which only choice souls are involved, and Mr. James records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest and the feelings of the combatants." That is true and fine, no doubt, but the price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to discover it is the fact that hundreds of thousands of readers of good masculine romance are not reading "Lord Jim," or finding new "Youth" in a young mate's wondrous vision of the East, or welcoming a new hero in Captain Whalley. A man who can conceive the mournful tale of Karain and the fight between the half crazy white men at an African trading post has a kind of adventure better, as adventure, than the experiences of Mr.

James's choice souls. Stevenson knew all about Mr. James and his "peripeties," but he could stow that knowledge on one side of his head, and from the other side spin "Treasure Island" and "The Wrecker". "The Sacred Fount" never could have befuddled the chronicle of the amiable John Silver, but in Mr. Conrad's "An Outcast of the Islands," where it seems to be a question which white man will kill the other, after a dramatic meet-in the presence of a Malay heroine, each man stands still before our eyes and radiates states of mind.

The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud of her is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So my reason for dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is because his books are thoroughly worth consideration. His advent is really important. More than any other new writer he is master of the ancient eloquence of English style; no one since Stevenson has surpa.s.sed in fiction the cadence and distinction of his prose. Never has an English sailor written so beautifully, never has artist had such full and authoritative knowledge of the sea, not even Pierre Loti. Stevenson and Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. Marryat and Clark Russell never write well, though they tell absorbing tales. There was promise in Jack London, but he was not a seaman at heart. Herman Melville's eccentric genius, greater than any of these, never led him to construct a work of art, for all his amazing power of thought and language. Conrad stands alone with his two gifts of sea experience and cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, loved it, fought it, believed in it, been baffled by it, body and mind. To know its ways, to be master of the science of its winds and waves and the ships that brave it, to have seen men and events and the lands and waters of the earth with the eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a psychologist--artist and ship-captain in one--here is a combination through which Fate has conspired to produce a new writer about the most wonderful of all things, the sea and the mysterious lands beyond it.

If we grant that he is not master of the larger units of style, that is, of construction, we can a.s.sert that in the lesser units, sentence for sentence, he is a master of the English tongue. There is a story that he learned English first from the Bible, and his vigorous primal usages of words, his racial idioms and ancient rich metaphors warrant the idea that he came to us along the old highway of English speech and thought, the King James version. His sentences, however, are not biblical as Stevenson's and Kipling's often are, but show a modern sophistication and intellectual deliberateness. He frequently reminds us that he is a Slav who learned French along with his native tongue, that he has read Flaubert and Maupa.s.sant and Henry James. Approaching our language as an adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative meanings of words, their powerful first intentions, which familiarity has disguised from most of us native-born to English. He has achieved that ring and fluency which he has declared should be the artist's aim. Conrad's prose lifts to pa.s.sages of great poetic beauty, in which the color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its desolation and its blitheness, are mingled with its meaning for the men who sail it, its "austere servitude," its friendliness and its treachery.

"The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off,--disappeared, intent on its own destiny....

The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as if guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent of time."

No fairer temptation can be offered to a reader who does not know Conrad than to quote a pa.s.sage from the end of "Youth," and no more honest praise can be offered to Conrad than to say that it is a selected, but by no means unique, specimen of his genius.

A crew that have left a burning ship in boats find an Eastern port at night. The weary men tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the young mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the reflective and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving. And then I saw the men of the East--they were looking at me.

The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the sh.o.r.e, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise.... I have known its fascinations since: I have seen the mysterious sh.o.r.es, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea--and I was young--and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that it left of it!

Only a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth!"

A CONRAD MISCELLANY

Nothing that Joseph Conrad writes is negligible; he is one of few living writers whom we must have complete to the last, or the latest, published word. Readers who care only for the yarn-spinner will not find much in his volume of essays, "Notes on Life and Letters," but even they will find something. And for those to whom Conrad is more than a story teller, an incomparable magician, these small bits from his laboratory will have much of the charm of the larger pieces, if only the reminiscent charm that brings any book of his, the least read or read longest ago, swiftly to the surface of memory. If a mere landlubber may hazard the similitude, the captain will always show his qualities whether he is on the bridge of a liner or in a rowboat.

The essays on books are unpretentious notes--eight pages on Henry James, seven on Maupa.s.sant, twelve on Anatole France, short excursions in criticism made between the longer voyages to the islands of the blessed. Like most criticism written by men of genius, these papers are interesting for what they say about another man of genius and also for what they say about the critic. One of the most satisfactory essays in what it reveals of Conrad is least satisfactory as objective criticism--the one about Marryat and Cooper, in which there is a declaration of descent in terms of surrender. To be sure, since the elder men are seamen and writers of the sea, Conrad's delight in them is understandable and not to be denied. But there are some things that must be denied even by a critic who gets seasick a mile off sh.o.r.e. One is Conrad's reiterated judgment that the greatness of Marryat "is undeniable." If Marryat is great, then so is Oliver Optic. And when Conrad speaks of the "sureness and felicity of effect" of the prose of Cooper--Cooper, whose style grates on the ear and who drags us by the sheer power of his story through his verbal infelicities--then I jump overboard and leave these literary sailors to fight it out.

When we get back on land to another of Conrad's masters, Guy de Maupa.s.sant, I feel less shaky. In "Tales of Unrest" are two stories, "The Return" and "The Idiots," in which I long ago thought I discovered the right kind of influence from the French master--what Conrad praises as Maupa.s.sant's austere fidelity to fact. Yet one is puzzled by the implied praise in the very dubious statement that "this creative artist [Maupa.s.sant] has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything." Just what does that mean? If "A Piece of String" and "The Necklace" are not diabolically ingenious inventions, then the word invention means nothing as applied to fiction. In point of invention how far apart are the story of the girls in "La Maison Tellier" and the story of the girl in the pathetic troupe in "Victory"? Both stories are equally invented, equally true to nature, equally free from "the miserable vanity of a catching phrase." But what is a catching phrase? I suppose that a Frenchman gets somewhat the same shiver of delight from fine rhythms in Maupa.s.sant's prose that we get from fine rhythms in Conrad. Both men--I could quote many examples--strike out amazing metaphors, the poetry of prose, which are not decorations hung on the outside but are the unremovable intestines of their story. Such metaphors in rhythm are surely "catching phrases," but they are not miserable vanities. I wonder if Conrad has a moment now and then when he distrusts his own eloquence--an eloquence which has brought against him from more than one critic the charge of being a phrase maker.

Conrad's prose is not so hard and compact as Maupa.s.sant's, and except the two short stories I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad which in manner or substance obviously ill.u.s.trates his own statement that he has been "inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work" of Maupa.s.sant. His greatest short stories, "Youth" and "The Heart of Darkness," seem worlds away from the French master. But inspiration, the influence of one artist on another, does not mean imitation in method or any visible resemblance in effect. It may mean a fundamental similarity in artistic att.i.tude. The elements of similarity between the French writer and the British are the plain virtues, honesty and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to Maupa.s.sant; for these are the central virtues in the creed which Conrad announced many years ago and to which he has loyally adhered in the remotest strange seas of romance.

Another of Conrad's masters, acknowledged in the phrase "twenty years of attentive acquaintance" (and the phrase was written in 1905) is Henry James. This seems a curious discipleship if we consider only the material: James static, land-bound, cla.s.s-bound; Conrad adventurous, errant, familiar with all breeds and degrees of men. But much the same thing happens to both kinds of material. For in the first place the material is not essentially different; it is the history of a two-legged animal staggering on land or aboard ship. And in the second place what happens is simply (though it is not so simple) that an artist tries to put this animal steady on its feet and make it give a reasonable account of itself--through himself. It gets transmitted through an intelligence, a personality, a style, into something more interesting than the actual poor creature who wabbles along the street or on the deck of a steamer. The courageous interpreters make their fellow men stand up, and the real hero of a romance is the romancer.