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A BOOK OF PREFACES
By H. L. MENCKEN
PUBLISHED AT THE BORZOI · NEW YORK · BY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
_Published September, 1917_
_Second edition, 1918_
_Third edition, August, 1920_
_Reprinted, January, 1922_
_Set up, electrotyped and printed by Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.
Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
_BY H. L. MENCKEN_
VENTURES INTO VERSE
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: HIS PLAYS
MEN VERSUS THE MAN
_With R. R. La Monte_
A LITTLE BOOK IN C MAJOR
A BOOK OF CALUMNY
[_The above books are out of print_]
THE PHILOSOPHY OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
A BOOK OF BURLESQUES
IN DEFENSE OF WOMEN
A BOOK OF PREFACES
PREJUDICES: FIRST SERIES
PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES
THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
_New York: Alfred A Knopf_
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
This fourth printing of "A Book of Prefaces" offers me temptation, as
the third did, to revise the whole book, and particularly the chapters
on Conrad, Dreiser and Huneker, all of whom have printed important new
books since the text was completed. In addition, Huneker has died. But
the changes that I'd make, after all, would be very slight, and so it
seems better not to make them at all. From Conrad have come "The Arrow
of Gold" and "The Rescue," not to mention a large number of sumptuous
reprints of old magazine articles, evidently put between covers for the
sole purpose of entertaining collectors. From Dreiser have come "Free,"
"Twelve Men," "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub" and some chapters of autobiography.
From Huneker, before and after his death, have come "Unicorns,"
"Bedouins," "Steeple-Jack," "Painted Veils" and "Variations." But not
one of these books materially modifies the position of its author. "The
Arrow of Gold," I suppose, has puzzled a good many of Conrad's admirers,
but certainly "The Rescue" has offered ample proof that his old powers
are not diminished. The Dreiser books, like their predecessors that I
discuss here, reveal the curious unevenness of the author. Parts of
"Free" are hollow and irritating, and nearly all of "Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub"
is feeble, but in "Twelve Men" there are some chapters that rank with
the very best of "The Titan" and "Jennie Gerhardt." The place of Dreiser
in our literature is frequently challenged, and often violently, but
never successfully. As the years pass his solid dignity as an artist
becomes more and more evident. Huneker's last five works changed his
position very little. "Bedouins," "Unicorns" and "Variations" belong
mainly to his journalism, but into "Steeple-Jack," and above all into
"Painted Veils" he put his genuine self. I have discussed all of these
books in other places, and paid my small tribute to the man himself, a
light burning brightly through a dark night, and snuffed out only at the
dawn.
I should add that the prices of Conrad first editions given on page 56
have been greatly exceeded during the past year or two. I should add
also that the Comstockian imbecilities described in Chapter IV are still
going on, and that the general trend of American legislation and
jurisprudence is toward their indefinite continuance.
H. L. M.
Baltimore, January 1, 1922.
CONTENTS
I. Joseph Conrad 11
II. Theodore Dreiser 67
III. James Huneker 151
IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197
Index 285
A BOOK OF PREFACES
I
JOSEPH CONRAD
§ 1
"Under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of tempered
melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding...." I take the words
from a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privately
printed, and now, I believe, out of print.[1] They define both the mood
of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as
criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the
"immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping
that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of
life--fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt
at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser,
more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort
of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to
last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are
not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and
undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each
protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his
helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster,
leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely
recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain
Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all
they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible
forces that beset them.
Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The Shadow Line," superficially stories
of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing
sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the
surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the _Nan-Shan_ to port at last, but it
is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more
than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting
one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one
of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth." A tale of the
spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me
its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it
is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years
have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods
have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The
whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an
incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic
record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in
microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm!
Mr. Follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause of
Conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life--his
double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is
surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must
be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been back
to Poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spirit
moves him. I see no reason for looking in such directions for his view
of the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. We detect
certain curious qualities in every Slav simply because he is more given
than we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us.
Introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study of
man and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forever
gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. But in the last analysis
his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. Surely his
resignationism is not a Slavic copyright; all human philosophies and
religions seem doomed to come to it at last. Once it takes shape as the
concept of Nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will.
Again, it is fatalism in this form or that--Mohammedanism, Agnosticism
... Calvinism! Yet again, it is the "Out, out, brief candle!" of
Shakespeare, the "_Eheu fugaces_" of Horace, the "_Vanitas vanitatum;
omnia vanitas!_" of the Preacher. Or, to make an end, it is
millenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow,
or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and striving
are thus useless. Search where you will, near or far, in ancient or
modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an
enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave
more than a passing bow to optimism. Even Christianity, starting out as
"glad tidings," has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and
today its chief professors moan and blubber like Johann in Herod's
rain-barrel. The sanctified are few and far between. The vast majority
of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. The divine grace,
so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. Why? There, alas, is your
insoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe!...
This conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that its
purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you
will see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. It
is obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be found
there, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate,
of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain,
superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in
secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced
itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?"
In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable
obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Molière,
Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the
Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Débâcle," the whole
Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and
particularly of "Fécondité," turned meliorist and idealist, and became
ludicrous.) Or in the Hauptmann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or
in Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann the
dramatist is a mere mechanician.)... The younger men in all countries,
in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to
move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the
last words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nachtasyl." Or Frank
Norris' "McTeague." Or Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical
fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt." Or George Moore's
"Sister Teresa."
Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his
work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of
unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of
Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless
as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale
negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of
Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must
be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to
accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a
gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad "as a
comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common
war on despair." With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps argues
that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one
notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is
pre-eminently _not_ a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt
and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His
undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he
vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral
agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and
pities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: "The more I see of men, the
more they amuse me--and the more I pity them." He is _simpatico_
precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite
disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human
volition and responsibility.... I have said that he does not criticize
God. One may even imagine him pitying God....
§ 2
But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality.
No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his
own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem
emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and
their naïve ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from
these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often
coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely
his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the
greater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as a
civilized man. It is the old difference between a Huxley and a
Gladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merely
comfortable, "_Quid est veritas?_" and "Thus saith the Lord!" He brings
into the English fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastly
more fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusual
sophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty rages
and puerile certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all about him,
leave him absolutely unmoved. He belongs to no party and has nothing to
teach, save only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the hysterical
splutterings and battle-cries of the Kiplings and Chestertons, the
booming pedagogics of the Wellses and Shaws, and the smirking at
key-holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands apart and almost
alone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees every
point and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoric
indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freight
and swamp the modern English novel. "At the centre of his web," says
Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with
a calm and cynical ferocity.... He calls up all the dreams and illusions
by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly
naked.... He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of
every vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices that have
come to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... And in all this there
is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside
nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and
civilization, are equal and indifferent...."[3]
Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin to
apology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor
Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, with
a vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these
later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view.
Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and
fury. That mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain,
indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza of
the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. Time was
when this was not true, as Congreve, Pope, Wycherley and even Thackeray
show, but that time was before the Reform Bill of 1832, the great
intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the _chandala_. In these our
days the Englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so he
must needs take in with his mother's milk the delusions which go with
that enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all human
problems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all that
is required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen to
wizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. This is the prime
and immovable doctrine of the _mobile vulgus_ set free; it is the
loveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation and
reasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstrated
facts, especially in history. Take away this notion that there is some
mysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory that
the consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins to
wither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. But the
notion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its own
effluvia. And out of it spring the two rules which give direction to all
popular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conduct
is valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above the
comprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of their
inherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that the
articulate individual in the mob takes on some of the authority and
inspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himself
up as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaid
bounds--in brief, that one man's opinion, provided it observe the
current decorum, is as good as any other man's.
Practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. The
man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience
already agape. The reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied
ethics, is the revived and reinforced _Sklavenmoral_ that besets all of
us of English speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining,
unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardice
sanctified, stupidity made noble, Puritanism. And in the theoretical
field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. Mountebanks almost
innumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics,
religion, philosophy and the arts. England and the United States,
between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together,
and they are more absurd. They rise, they flame, they fall and go out,
but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last.
What modern civilization save this of ours could have produced Christian
Science, or the New Thought, or Billy Sundayism? What other could have
yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the Uplift? What other could
accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of English philanthropy and
American law? The native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact,
is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed;
there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies of
other peoples. Let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any part
of the world, and at once there is a response from the two great free
nations. Once it was Tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacomb
Christianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was Bergson, with a
perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet again
came Rudolf Eucken and Pastor Wagner, with their middle-class beeriness
and banality. The list need go no further. It begins with preposterous
Indian swamis and yoghis (most of them, to do them justice, diligent
Jews from Grand street or the bagnios of Constantinople), and it ends
with the fabulous Ibsen of the symbols (no more the real Ibsen than
Christ was a prohibitionist), the Ellen Key of the new gyneolatry and
the Signorina Montessori of the magical Method. It was a sure instinct
that brought Eusapia Palladino to New York. It was the same sure
instinct that brought Hall Caine.
I have mentioned Ibsen. A glance at the literature he has spawned in the
vulgate is enough to show how much his falser aspects have intrigued the
American mind and how little it has reacted to his shining skill as a
dramatic craftsman--his one authentic claim upon fame. Read Jennette
Lee's "The Ibsen Secret,"[4] perhaps the most successful of all the
Ibsen gemaras in English, if you would know the virulence of the
national appetite for bogus revelation. And so in all the arts.
Whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever is
facile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color,
we embrace. Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignation
precisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonic
realism, his unsentimental logic. But the moment a meretricious and
platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how he
protested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabby
culture. Compare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, the other
no more than a raucous journalist. Brieux's elaborate proofs that two
and two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst
plays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of a
religious rite. But Hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel
Prize did not give him a vogue. Run the roll: Maeterlinck and his
languishing supernaturalism, Tagore and his Asiatic wind music, Selma
Lagerlöf and her old maid's mooniness, Bernstein, Molnar and company and
their out-worn tricks--but I pile up no more names. Consider one fact:
the civilization that kissed Maeterlinck on both cheeks, and Tagore
perhaps even more intimately, has yet to shake hands with Anatole
France....
This bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-bending to quacks, this
endless appetite for sesames and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in
our native literature, as it is in our native theology, philosophy and
politics. "The British and American mind," says W. L. George,[5] "has
been long honey-combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the
Reformation; it is very much what the German mind was up to the middle
of the Nineteenth Century." The artist, facing an audience which seems
incapable of differentiating between æsthetic and ethical values, tends
to become a preacher of sonorous nothings, and the actual
moralist-propagandist finds his way into art well greased. No other
people in Christendom produces so vast a crop of tin-horn haruspices. We
have so many Orison Swett Mardens, Martin Tuppers, Edwin Markhams,
Gerald Stanley Lees, Dr. Frank Cranes and Dr. Sylvanus Stalls that their
output is enough to supply the whole planet. We see, too, constantly,
how thin is the barrier separating the chief Anglo-Saxon novelists and
playwrights from the pasture of the platitudinarian. Jones and Pinero
both made their first strikes, not as the artists they undoubtedly are,
but as pinchbeck moralists, moaning over the sad fact that girls are
seduced. Shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers his dramaturgy
in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no more than a disguise for Puritanism.
Bennett and Wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the novel to
the volume of shoddy philosophizing. Kipling, with "Kim" behind him,
becomes a vociferous leader-writer of the _Daily Mail_ school, whooping
a pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical objurgations at the foe. Even
W. L. George, potentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops his
craft for the jehad of the suffragettes. Doyle, Barrie, Caine, Locke,
Barker, Mrs. Ward, Beresford, Hewlett, Watson, Quiller-Couch--one and
all, high and low, they are tempted by the public demand for sophistry,
the ready market for pills. A Henry Bordeaux, in France, is an
exception; in England he is the rule. The endless thirst to be soothed
with cocksure asseverations, the great mob yearning to be dosed and
comforted, is the undoing, over there, of three imaginative talents out
of five.
And, in America, of nearly five out of five. Winston Churchill may serve
as an example. He is a literary workman of very decent skill; the native
critics speak of him with invariable respect; his standing within the
craft was shown when he was unanimously chosen first president of the
Authors' League of America. Examine his books in order. They proceed
steadily from studies of human character and destiny, the proper
business of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and economic
panaceas, the proper business of leader writers, chautauquas
rabble-rousers and hedge politicians. "The Celebrity" and "Richard
Carvel," within their limits, are works of art; "The Inside of the Cup"
is no more than a compendium of paralogy, as silly and smattering as a
speech by William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Addams. Churchill,
with the late Jack London to bear him company, may stand for a large
class; in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright Kauffman and
Will Levington Comfort. Still more typical of the national taste for
moral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists and
eye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-school
romantics and the Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of the
former I give you George Barr McCutcheon, Owen Wister, the late Richard
Harding Davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanely
translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I give you the fair
authors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishly
praised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later Howells, the
virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in the air above them. No
other country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness or
in its banality. It is native and peculiar to a civilization which
erects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-ridden
into a national way of life....
§ 3
My business, however, is not with the culture of Anglo-Saxondom, but
only with Conrad's place therein. That place is isolated and remote; he
is neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a futile meliorism
which deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like some
sinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a
flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him," says Arthur Symons, "is
to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no
need to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in a
chance passerby, a bit uncertain of the door. It was not an artistic
choice that made him write English instead of French; it was a choice
with its roots in considerations far afield. But once made, it concerned
him no further. In his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all
himself; in his last he is a stranger still--strange in his manner of
speech, strange in his view of life, strange, above all, in his glowing
and gorgeous artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty _per se_, his absolute
detachment from that heresy which would make it no more than a servant
to some bald and depressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the
uncomprehending. He is, like Dunsany, a pure artist. His work, as he
once explained, is not to edify, to console, to improve or to encourage,
but simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own eager sense of the
wonder and prodigality of life as men live it in the world, and of its
unfathomable romance and mystery. "My task," he went on, "is, by the
power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is,
before all, to make you _see_. That--and no more, and it is
everything."...[6]
This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic purpose, this
repudiation of the rôle of propagandist, this avowal of what Nietzsche
was fond of calling innocence, explains the failure of Conrad to fit
into the pigeon-holes so laboriously prepared for him by critics who
must shelve and label or be damned. He is too big for any of them, and
of a shape too strange. He stands clear, not only of all the schools and
factions that obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of the
whole stream of English literature since the Restoration. He is as
isolated a figure as George Moore, and for much the same reason. Both
are exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public enemies, for
both war upon the philosophies that caress the herd. Is Conrad the
beyond-Kipling, as the early criticism of him sought to make him?
Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby
(as, indeed, was actually done). He is not only a finer artist than
Kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. Kipling, within his
limits, shows a talent of a very high order. He is a craftsman of the
utmost deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect assurance.
Moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions.
But once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their
emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The ideas in them are not the
ideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a
mob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. Reduce any
of them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as it
is intelligible at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here that
Conrad leaps immeasurably ahead. His ideas are not only sound; they are
acute and unusual. They plough down into the sub-strata of human motive
and act. They unearth conditions and considerations that lie concealed
from the superficial glance. They get at the primary reactions. In
particular and above all, they combat the conception of man as a pet and
privy councillor of the gods, working out his own destiny in a sort of
vacuum and constantly illumined by infallible revelations of his duty,
and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitive
and responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in the
end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the same
inscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors and
irresolutions, and surrounded by the same terror and darkness....
But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist,
differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he
preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a
theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of
a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps
especially including, those to which, in moments of æsthetic detachment,
he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is this
constant falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant conversion of
the easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact,
that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite his
skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power to
tell a thumping tale. He is talked of, he brings forth a mass of
punditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would be
absurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon the
great class of normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once made, or H.
G. Wells, or William de Morgan in his brief day, or even such
cheap-jacks as Anthony Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show
fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable. And
in particular it is unbearable to women. One rarely meets a woman who,
stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthusiasm for a Conrad book,
or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. The feminine mind, which
rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves
inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad
has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects
itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that
all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them
afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women,
one may say, have to subscribe to absurdities in order to account for
themselves at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which sends
them to priests, as to other quacks. This is not because they are
unintelligent, but rather because they have that sharp and sure sort of
intelligence which is instinctive, and which passes under the name of
intuition. It teaches them that the taboos which surround them, however
absurd at bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and curiosity with
unescapable dudgeon, and so they become partisans of the existing order,
and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be menaced by
phantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. A woman
who reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Victory"
would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "Jenseits von Gut und Böse"
or "The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua."
As for Conrad, he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly.
His women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a
game played by the gods. The effort to erect them into the customary
"sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fire
of the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it seems to me, how
vastly the rôle of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount to
in the authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved by avarice, by
ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" which
passes for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passion
which is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popular
novels and on the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only at
the urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e.g._, a
fantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for
dominion, as in the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered by
Razumov--and Razumov is Conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of a
sentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much
the same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is less free from the
conventional obsession than Conrad; he takes a love affair far more
naïvely, and hence far more seriously.
I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story of
adultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our more
pretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethical
agnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was that
his failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that he
hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in the
department where they were most powerfully maintained. But it seems to
me now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but of
disdain. He has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. His
whole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing
notion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. The current
gyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current program
of rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. He not
only sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded by
petty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have us
believe; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behind
him as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot
penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in his stories, is either
a feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of
Darkness," perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all the frenzy
and horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heart
back in Brussels. Here we have his measure of the master sentimentality
of them all....
§ 4
As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to
Conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write
about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form,
his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his
frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative,
sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "Lord Jim," for example, starts out
in the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological
discussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at
second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon
an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that's
the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten,
unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "Falk" is also a story within a
story; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man
over fifty." In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered through the prosaic
soul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told the
tale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscation
is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of
the "high gifts of imagination and expression." In "Youth" and "Heart
of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy Marlow, a
"cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two
separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are
hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic
manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh.
In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the
mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth
before we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the
drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are
thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning
until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in
structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look
about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of
motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon
as they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in
the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts near the end, and then
goes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning.
In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault.
The Kipling-Wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing has
accustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapid
tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty and
directness of statement; they expect an author to account for his
characters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. This
omniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that I have
been discussing. An author who knows just what is the matter with the
world may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matter
with his hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, is to be found
in Conrad. He is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a
doctor. One constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is as
much puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, is
feeling his way among shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we make,
about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about Kurtz, come as fortuitously and
as unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of our
world. The picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenly
and completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the
end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, lies
two-thirds of Conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever you
choose to call it. What he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so is
life itself blurred at the edges. We see least clearly precisely what is
nearest to us, and is hence most real to us. A man may profess to
understand the President of the United States, but he seldom alleges,
even to himself, that he understands his own wife.
In the character and in its reactions, in the act and in the motive:
always that tremulousness, that groping, that confession of final
bewilderment. "He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart...."
And the cloud enshrouds the inner man as well as the outer, the secret
springs of his being as well as the overt events of his life. "His
meanest creatures," says Arthur Symons, "have in them a touch of honour,
of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness,
or mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem." What is Lord Jim, scoundrel
and poltroon or gallant knight? What is Captain MacWhirr, hero or simply
ass? What is Falk, beast or idealist? One leaves "Heart of Darkness" in
that palpitating confusion which is shot through with intense curiosity.
Kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues and the most fantastic of
dreamers. It is impossible to differentiate between his vision and his
crimes, though all that we look upon as order in the universe stands
between them. In Dreiser's novels there is the same anarchy of
valuations, and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites in the
unintelligent. The essential thing about Cowperwood is that he is two
diverse beings at once; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist, a
guinea pig and half a god. The essential thing about Carrie Meeber is
that she remains innocent in the midst of her contaminations, that the
virgin lives on in the kept woman. This is not the art of fiction as it
is conventionally practised and understood. It is not explanation,
labelling, assurance, moralizing. In the cant of newspaper criticism, it
does not "satisfy." But the great artist is never one who satisfies in
that feeble sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who do it
better. "My purpose," said Ibsen, "is not to answer questions; it is to
ask them." The spectator must bring something with him beyond the mere
faculty of attention. If, coming to Conrad, he cannot, he is at the
wrong door.
§ 5
Conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and
shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own
road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among
men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost
unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any
appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of
sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw
it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the
carnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his very
best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He
himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he is the ship-master of "Heart
of Darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is
visibly present in most of the tales of the sea.
And what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere body
of reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. He came to his writing
years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises of
market places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets
pen to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon him
save it be colossal. When his men combat, not nature, but other men,
they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailors
battling with a tempest. "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes"
fill the dull back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, homicides
and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries
and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless,
insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a
massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood.
Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man
under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm
piece of writing--a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once
that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is
worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a
bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad
gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social
tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by
the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think of
Huckleberry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising law.
These things do not interest Conrad, chiefly, I suppose, because he does
not understand them. His concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy
of passion, not with its histology. He seeks to depict emotion, not in
its ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury.
Inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is at
one, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of the
baldest shockers. But with a difference!--a difference, to wit, of
approach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. He
lifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it a
means to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. In itself,
remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even
improbable. The world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of
savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes
indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. One cannot reasonably
ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of
him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them
understandable--that he logically account for them, that he give them
plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and
colourable events.
The objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to do
this. It is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes are
too puny. For all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us a
downright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is an
inadequate and hence unconvincing motive. In a cheap theatre we see a
bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young
woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. Why
does he do it? The melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the
first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of Satan and Don Juan
and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour.
Both parts are absurd. Our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far
more the floorwalker, the head barber, the Knight of Pythias than either
the Satan or the Don Juan, and our experience of life tells us that
young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so
dearly. But women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every
day, perhaps, but now and then. Men bind them, trains run over them, the
newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing
jousting of the jurisconsults. Why, then? The true answer, when it is
forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's
answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the
normal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, or
even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of
lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama
and reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It
is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar
and incommensurate.