Chapter 17

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure--treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he published _Chance_ that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober," and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety--"asceticism of sentiment," he calls it--in his literary work as at sea. He has been compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of Dostoevsky--an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky did for strange demons and goblins--that population of grotesque characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature. That is why one reads the volume called _Youth_ for the third and fourth time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.

2. TALES OF MYSTERY

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light--a little light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that. With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana" which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master--his master, at least, in the art of the long novel--Henry James. I do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like _Chance_, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a ghost story, however--and _The Turn of the Screw_ is one of the great ghost stories of literature--he remains supremely master of his materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart and compass.

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_, for instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive. To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets--often from the depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in _Heart of Darkness_ is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel--the daughter of the defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine of _Chance_--he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"--so the narrator of _Chance_ begins one of his sentences; and it is not in the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny--when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories _Typhoon_ and _The Secret Sharer_, the latter of which appeared in the volume called _'Twixt Land and Sea_. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house in _Kidnapped_. In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. _Typhoon_ was, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is--let us not shrink from praise--one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.

He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."

And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right."

Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in _The Secret Sharer_ in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the "tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than in _Typhoon_. It is a study in eccentric human relations--the relations between the captain and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal--an ironic fable of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship in order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in _Freya of the Seven Isles_ and elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin--tragic ruin against which no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy of the high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider till the bitter end. His _Youth_ is just such a comedy of the peacockry of adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.

All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated the flesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not want to give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manly men as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us the complete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering characters in them. In reading such a book as _Under Western Eyes_ we feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it has not been used to spell a magnificent man.

Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out as awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody discovered it. In _Chance_ and _Lord Jim_ he is not content to tell us a straightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by which it was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us the feeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas and harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of reconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired of the thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That is why some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They are books of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is by the way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramatic writing, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of an epic of description.

Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most people in believing, in three of his volumes of short stories--in _Typhoon, Youth_, and _'Twixt Land and Sea_. His fame will, I imagine, rest chiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests on their shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance--written in terms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has written little epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which are unique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature.

XXVI

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING

1. THE GOOD STORY-TELLER

Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad language and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has at least listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all about the ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favourite uncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by his magnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoples that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella--the little Anglo-Indian Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.

Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in verse. If one avoids _Barrack Room Ballads_ and _The Seven Seas_, one misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true, but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. _Recessional_ surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from _Recessional_, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.

His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness, Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once described the stories, still refuse to bore us.

At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life as _A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak--dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism--are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false touches in the boys' conversation in _The Drums of the Fore and Aft_, but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.

His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr. Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the library of law and order. When _Stalky and Co._ was published, parents and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If I am not mistaken, _The Spectator_ came down on the side of Mr. Kipling, and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.

But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause. Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the Ishmaelites--the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the genteel world.

2. THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELL

Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard Kipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at the time as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind him the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be--vulgar and canting and bloody--and a world that was preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:--

If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back, If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line, If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack, You will understand this little song o' mine.

This jumble--which seems so curious nowadays--of delight in piety and delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and respite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had been building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly: outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. It was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of reality--too much humour, indeed--to want to portray Empire-builders as a company of plaster saints. Like an _enfant terrible_, he was ready to proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. The thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and brutality and drunkenness--all of those things to which builders of Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone--he never dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with which he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing a new psalm:--

Ow, the loot! Bloomin' loot! That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot! It's the same with dogs an' men, If you'd make 'em come again. Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It might have frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had the old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take up," he would sing--