Part 6

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 surpassed 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 assert 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 Maupassant 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 passages 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 passage 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 shore, 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 shores, 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 Maupassant, 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 shore. 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 Maupassant, 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 Maupassant's austere fidelity to fact. Yet one is puzzled by the implied praise in the very dubious statement that "this creative artist [Maupassant] 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 Maupassant'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 Maupassant's, and except the two short stories I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad which in manner or substance obviously illustrates his own statement that he has been "inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work" of Maupassant. 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 attitude. The elements of similarity between the French writer and the British are the plain virtues, honesty and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to Maupassant; 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, class-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.

This is one of the paradoxes of fiction which the mere reader of fiction and of criticism written by masters of fiction can enjoy, that the modern self-conscious story tellers, forever proclaiming their devotion to an objective reality, to the naked fact, and even, like Conrad, pretending scorn of the phrase, are wilful persons who distort life into a new reality. There is something almost naïve in the honest belief of Tolstoy, James, Conrad, that nature, human nature, is something outside the artist, lying _over there_, and that the artist standing _over here_ observes it, renders it, "mirrors" it. James himself, a most sophisticated realist, was not always so insistent as Conrad seems to think on the function of the novelist as historian; some years later than Conrad's essay, James found fault with the younger novelists because their work was too undigested, because it was not sufficiently remade, transformed by an individual interpreter--that is, though he did not say it so harshly, the younger men were not interesting individuals, not men of first-rate imagination.

But we must not get too far away from Conrad and his particular relation to James. He has a generously envious admiration for James's inconclusiveness, for the novel that stops but does not end because life does not end; it seems to be, like his admiration for Maupassant's accuracy and directness, a declaration of something that he has striven for and not always accomplished. Conrad winds his own stories up pretty sharply, wipes out his people with annihilation more desolating than the conventional piling of corpses at the end of "Romeo and Juliet" or "Hamlet." Recall the obliterating finality of "Lord Jim," of "Victory," which ends with the blank word "nothing." Or, where death does not conclude it all but the character lives on, remember the abrupt inevitable termination of "The Rescue": "Steer north!" Another relation which I have suggested and which Conrad as critic does not hint is this: Conrad's material, though superficially it is made up of adventure, wreck, blood, piracy, mystery, and Stevensonian yo-heave-ho, is, as he treats it, often as static as anything in James; it is stationary, concerned with the moods of men, analytic, psychological (that tiresome word has to do for it), even while the storm rages; and this is one of the reasons why readers with a taste for ripping yarns have not welcomed him with the unanimous popularity which they accorded to Stevenson and Kipling, to name fine artists and not, of course, to mention cheap favorites. If we really understood Conrad's fiction we have no difficulty in understanding his filial relation to Henry James. Begin with the paragraph on page 13 of "Notes on Life and Letters:" "Action in its essence, the creative art of the writer of fiction," etc., and see if the rest that follows is not, with a change or two, as good an account of Joseph Conrad as of Henry James--better, indeed, since one master of fiction writing of another speaks with two voices or with a voice proceeding from a two-fold authority and wisdom.

Joseph Conrad, novelist, child of English and Continental literature, is not more unaccountable than any other literary genius. But how to explain, or even remember at all, that the head of living English men of letters, next to Hardy, is a Pole named Korzeniowski? It is fair to remember that and be inquisitive about it because in "Notes on Life and Letters" he pretends to write autobiography, and reminds us of his origin in a paper called "Poland Revisited." It is a baffling narrative, even more baffling than the vague book which he chose to call "A Personal Record." Conrad in quest of his youth never gets back to Poland at all except as a British tourist. The paper consists of thirty-two pages. Mr. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski reaches Cracow on the twenty-fourth page. There are two or three pages of reminiscence, chiefly about his father's death. Then war is declared (this is in 1914), and the British subject, with the assistance of the American Ambassador, escapes from Poland and amid the booming of distant guns in Flanders sails safely back through the Downs "thick with the memories of my sea-life."

Mr. Conrad is the least patriotic of Poles and the most patriotic of Englishmen. His political opinions, which he was evidently invited to express by some English editor who remembered the fading fact of Korzeniowski and appreciated the luminous fact of Joseph Conrad, the writer, are no better and no worse than any competent journalist might have delivered. His hatred of Russia, expressed long before his adopted country became the ally of the Czar, may have its origin in some boyhood bitterness. But it is an Englishman who speaks, not a Pole. His prophecy of the downfall of Russian autocracy and of the menace of Prussianism shoots into the future with as true an aim as any man could have had in 1905, and a prophet is to be excused for having said at that time that there was in Russia "no ground ready for a revolution." "Conrad political" is less interesting than "Conrad controversial," since his controversial utterances were provoked by the sinking of the Titanic, the question of the safety of ships, and the stupidity of marine officials on land, subjects which he can discuss with the cool knowledge of the expert and the vehemence of an offended master of ships and words.

But the true men of the four into which in his preface he divides himself are "Conrad literary" and "Conrad reminiscent." The reminiscence is not of a dimly, even indifferently, remembered Poland, but of England and the sea. On the twenty-four-page journey to the five-page sojourn in Cracow what happens? London, flashed on you in a few sentences with an original vividness as if Englishmen had never described it before, realized in brief transit, an immense solid thing, compared to which Cracow is an insubstantial dream. He cannot recapture his boyhood, but he gives you instantly the London of to-day and the London of his youth when the British-Polish apprentice was looking for a berth. And then the voyage across the North Sea. Here we are at home. "The same old thing," he says. "A grey-green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting paper."

"The same old thing!" The sea is the same old thing, water deep and shoal, storm and calm, fog and clear weather, light and darkness, starshine and sunshine. It is understandable that from time to time a new poet should be born, Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, Whitman, Conrad, Masefield, who, being a different man from all the rest, should phrase some mood of the sea in words that no other poet in centuries had used. But Conrad has written fifteen volumes mostly about the sea, many pages necessarily about some aspect which he has treated more than once. His treatment is so unmistakably his own that you could recognize any passage as his if you saw it on a piece of torn paper blown from nowhere. Yet it is truer of him than of Shakespeare that he never repeats, has no _clichés_, no pet phrases, but in each book finds astonishing new images, as if he himself had not written before. How does he do it?

STRINDBERG

Some men of genius at forty or fifty arrive at a view of life, an attitude toward the human comedy, as inclusive and definite as it is possible for them to conceive. Hardy at seventy is quite recognizable the man that he was at forty. The Meredith of 1860 is the Meredith of 1890. They grow, they improve or change their artistic methods. But their natures do not undergo violent revolutions. Other men, Tolstoy for example, experience a catastrophic annihilation of some part of themselves and emerge from the confusion, remade, fired with new beliefs. Tolstoy had one great battle with himself which divided his life into two main periods, and after the struggle his philosophy, whatever its worth, was fairly settled, and he knew how to express it clearly over and over again.

Strindberg seems to have been continuously at war with Strindberg; and the peace that he found was but the death-bed repentance of a man whose forces were spent. He went through many phases. "The Growth of a Soul", which is autobiographical, might better be called "The Conflicts of a Soul". It seethes with ideas, ends in a half-formed philosophy, and is only a section of Strindberg's intellectual adventures. He was ten men at ten different times, and he was ten men all the time. He expressed every aspect of himself. His manifold genius was master of all forms of literature. As Emerson said of Swedenborg, in whom Strindberg found all the light that his dark soul ever knew, he lies abroad on his times, leviathan-like. Undoubtedly to know him, one must know him entire, and I do not pretend to complete knowledge of his life and works.

Some fragments of his total artistic expression are not intelligible when they are read apart from his other books. "The Inferno" is a confused and murky nightmare which takes on form and purpose only when the light of biography is turned on it. Other works of Strindberg, read by themselves, are clear and shapely.

"By the Open Sea" is an intensely powerful study of an overcultivated man and a primitively passionate woman. It is, moreover, the work of a poet who loves the sea. The passage in which the ichthyologist observes through his telescope the wonder-world beneath the surface of the water is rich with the essential poetry of natural fact. The translator, Ellie Schleussner, would probably say, as Strindberg's admirers all say, that his resonant poetic prose cannot be rendered in another language. Yet the things that he sees in nature and his interpretations of them are in their naked substance the imaginative stuff which is poetry. This Titan was not content to be poet, novelist, dramatist, essayist, philosopher. He was also a man of science, no mean rival, they say, of the professional student of biology and chemistry. The eye that looks through Borg's telescope has been trained in a laboratory and can also roll with a fine frenzy:

"The blenny, which has developed a pair of oars in front, but is too heavy in the stern and reminds one of first attempts at boat building, raised its architectural stone head, adorned with the moustachios of a Croat, above the heraldic foliage among which it had lain, and lifted itself for a short moment out of the mud only to sink back into it the next instant.

"The lump-fish with its seven backs stuck up its keel; the whole fish was nothing but an enormous nose, scenting out food and females; it illuminated for a second the bluish-green water with its rosy belly, surrounding itself with a faint aureole in the deep darkness; but before long its sucker again held safely to a stone, there to wait the lapse of the million years which shall bring delivery to the laggards on the endless road of evolution."

Strindberg has been called both misogamist and misogynist. Yet it is not possible to collect and compress within the bounds of such definite words a man whose ideas on any one subject fly far apart as the poles. If he sometimes, often, expresses virulent detestation of women and all their ways, he is not more tender toward men. He is not a caresser of life. He hangs the whole human race. But he analyzes; tries it before the twelve-minded jury in himself before he pronounces sentence. Point by point, detail for detail, he is just in perception of character and motive. His final view is simply not final, but contradictory as life itself. He thinks that woman is a snare to the feet of a man who would walk upright and accomplish something in the world. Yet he believes in the freedom of woman, would give her the vote, and emancipate her from economic bondage to the man. He even champions the liberty of the child, condemns "the family as a social institution which does not permit the child to become an individual at the proper time," and draws both parents as victims of "the same unfortunate conditions which are honored by the sacred name of law."