The orange of our persistent simile is in Mr. Hugh Walpole’s hands very
remarkably sweet—a quality we recognise in it even while reduced to
observing that the squeeze pure and simple, the fond, the lingering, the
reiterated squeeze, constitutes as yet his main perception of method. He
enjoys in a high degree the consciousness of saturation, and is on such
serene and happy terms with it as almost make of critical interference,
in so bright an air, an assault on personal felicity. Full of material
is thus the author of “The Duchess of Wrexe,” and of a material which we
should describe as the consciousness of youth were we not rather
disposed to call it a peculiar strain of the extreme unconsciousness.
Mr. Walpole offers us indeed a rare and interesting case—we see about
the field none other like it; the case of a positive identity between
the spirit, not to say the time of life or stage of experience, of the
aspiring artist and the field itself of his vision. “The Duchess of
Wrexe” reeks with youth and the love of youth and the confidence of
youth—youth taking on with a charming exuberance the fondest costume or
disguise, that of an adventurous and voracious felt interest, interest
in life, in London, in society, in character, in Portland Place, in the
Oxford Circus, in the afternoon tea-table, in the torrid weather, in
fifty other immediate things as to which its passion and its curiosity
are of the sincerest. The wonderful thing is that these latter forces
operate, in their way, without yet being disengaged and
hand-free—disengaged, that is, from their state of _being_ young, with
its billowy mufflings and other soft obstructions, the state of being
present, being involved and aware, close “up against” the whole mass of
possibilities, being in short intoxicated with the mixed liquors of
suggestion. In the fumes of this acute situation Mr. Walpole’s
subject-matter is bathed; the situation being all the while so much more
his own and that of a juvenility reacting, in the presence of
everything, “for all it is worth,” than the devised and imagined one,
however he may circle about some such cluster, that every cupful of his
excited flow tastes three times as much of his temperamental freshness
as it tastes of this, that or the other character or substance, above
all of this, that or the other group of antecedents and references,
supposed to be reflected in it. All of which does not mean, we hasten to
add, that the author of “The Duchess of Wrexe” has not the gift of life;
but only that he strikes us as having received it, straight from nature,
with such a concussion as to have kept the boon at the stage of
violence—so that, fairly pinned down by it, he is still embarrassed for
passing it on. On the day he shall have worked free of this primitive
predicament, the crude fact of the convulsion itself, there need be no
doubt of his exhibiting matter into which method may learn how to bite.
The tract meanwhile affects us as more or less virgin snow, and we look
with interest and suspense for the imprint of a process.
If those remarks represent all the while, further, that the performances
we have glanced at, with others besides, lead our attention on, we hear
ourselves the more naturally asked what it is then that we expect or
want, confessing as we do that we have been in a manner interested, even
though, from case to case, in a varying degree, and that Thackeray,
Turgenieff, Balzac, Dickens, Anatole France, no matter who, can not do
more than interest. Let us therefore concede to the last point that
small mercies are better than none, that there are latent within the
critic numberless liabilities to being “squared” (the extent to which he
may on occasion betray his price!) and so great a preference for being
pleased over not being, that you may again and again see him assist with
avidity at the attempt of the slice of life to butter itself thick. Its
explanation that it _is_ a slice of life and pretends to be nothing else
figures for us, say, while we watch, the jam super-added to the butter.
For since the jam, on this system, descends upon our desert, in its form
of manna, from quite another heaven than the heaven of method, the mere
demonstration of its agreeable presence is alone sufficient to hint at
our more than one chance of being supernaturally fed. The happy-go-lucky
fashion of it is indeed not then, we grant, an objection so long as we
do take in refreshment: the meal may be of the last informality and yet
produce in the event no small sense of repletion. The slice of life
devoured, the butter and the jam duly appreciated, we are ready, no
doubt, on another day, to trust ourselves afresh to the desert. We break
camp, that is, and face toward a further stretch of it, all in the faith
that we shall be once more provided for. We take the risk, we enjoy more
or less the assistance—more or less, we put it, for the vision of a
possible arrest of the miracle or failure of our supply never wholly
leaves us. The phenomenon is too uncanny, the happy-go-lucky, as we know
it in general, never _has_ been trustable to the end; the absence of the
last true touch in the preparation of its viands becomes with each
renewal of the adventure a more sensible fact. By the last true touch we
mean of course the touch of the hand of selection; the principle of
selection having been involved at the worst or the least, one would
suppose, in any approach whatever to the loaf of life with the
_arrière-pensée_ of a slice. There being no question of a slice upon
which the further question of where and how to cut it does not wait, the
office of method, the idea of choice and comparison, have occupied the
ground from the first. This makes clear, to a moment’s reflection, that
there can be no such thing as an amorphous slice, and that any waving
aside of inquiry as to the sense and value of a chunk of matter has to
reckon with the simple truth of its having been _born_ of naught else
but measured excision. Reasons have been the fairies waiting on its
cradle, the possible presence of a bad fairy in the form of a bad reason
to the contrary notwithstanding. It has thus had connections at the very
first stage of its detachment that are at no later stage logically to be
repudiated; let it lie as lumpish as it will—for adoption, we mean, of
the ideal of the lump—it has been tainted from too far back with the
hard liability to form, and thus carries in its very breast the hapless
contradiction of its sturdy claim to have none. This claim has the
inevitable challenge at once to meet. How can a slice of life be
anything but illustrational of the loaf, and how can illustration not
immediately bristle with every sign of the extracted and related state?
The relation is at once to what the thing comes from and to what it
waits upon—which last is our act of recognition. We accordingly
appreciate it in proportion as it so accounts for itself; the quantity
and the intensity of its reference are the measure of our knowledge of
it. This is exactly why illustration breaks down when reference,
otherwise application, runs short, and why before any assemblage of
figures or aspects, otherwise of samples and specimens, the question of
what these are, extensively, samples and specimens _of_ declines not to
beset us—why, otherwise again, we look ever for the supreme reference
that shall avert the bankruptcy of sense.
Let us profess all readiness to repeat that we may still have had, on
the merest “life” system, or that of the starkest crudity of the slice,
all the entertainment that can come from watching a wayfarer engage with
assurance in an alley that we know to have no issue—and from watching
for the very sake of the face that he may show us on reappearing at its
mouth. The recitals of Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Gilbert Cannan, Mr. D. H.
Lawrence, fairly smell of the real, just as the “Fortitude” and “The
Duchess” of Mr. Hugh Walpole smell of the romantic; we have sufficiently
noted then that, once on the scent, we are capable of pushing ahead. How
far it is at the same time from being all a matter of smell the terms in
which we just above glanced at the weakness of the spell of the
happy-go-lucky may here serve to indicate. There faces us all the while
the fact that the act of consideration as an incident of the esthetic
pleasure, consideration confidently knowing us to _have_ sooner or later
to arrive at it, may be again and again postponed, but can never hope
not some time to fall due. Consideration is susceptible of many forms,
some one or other of which no conscious esthetic effort fails to cry out
for; and the simplest description of the cry of the novel when
sincere—for have we not heard such compositions bluff us, as it were,
with false cries?—is as an appeal to us when we have read it once to
read it yet again. _That_ is the act of consideration; no other process
of considering approaches this for directness, so that anything short of
it is virtually not to consider at all. The word has sometimes another
sense, that of the appeal to us _not_, for the world, to go back—this
being of course consideration of a sort; the sort clearly that the truly
flushed production should be the last to invoke. The effect of
consideration, we need scarce remark, is to light for us in a work of
art the hundred questions of how and why and whither, and the effect of
these questions, once lighted, is enormously to thicken and complicate,
even if toward final clarifications, what we have called the amused
state produced in us by the work. The more our amusement multiplies its
terms the more fond and the more rewarded consideration becomes; the
fewer it leaves them, on the other hand, the less to be resisted for us
is the impression of “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds
sang.” Birds that have appeared to sing, or whose silence we have not
heeded, on a first perusal, prove on a second to have no note to
contribute, and whether or no a second is enough to admonish us of those
we miss, we mostly expect much from it in the way of emphasis of those
we find. Then it is that notes of intention become more present or more
absent; then it is that we take the measure of what we have already
called our effective provision. The bravest providers and designers show
at this point something still in store which only the second rummage was
appointed to draw forth. To the variety of these ways of not letting our
fondness fast is there not practically no limit?—and of the arts, the
devices, the graces, the subtle secrets applicable to such an end what
presumptuous critic shall pretend to draw the list? Let him for the
moment content himself with saying that many of the most effective are
mysteries, precisely, of method, or that even when they are not most
essentially and directly so it takes method, blest method, to extract
their soul and to determine their action.
It is odd and delightful perhaps that at the very moment of our urging
this truth we should happen to be regaled with a really supreme specimen
of the part playable in a novel by the source of interest, the principle
of provision attended to, for which we claim importance. Mr. Joseph
Conrad’s “Chance” is none the less a signal instance of provision the
most earnest and the most copious for its leaving ever so much to be
said about the particular provision effected. It is none the less an
extraordinary exhibition of method by the fact that the method is, we
venture to say, without a precedent in any like work. It places Mr.
Conrad absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall
make it undergo most doing. The way to do it that shall make it undergo
least is the line on which we are mostly now used to see prizes carried
off; so that the author of “Chance” gathers up on this showing all sorts
of comparative distinction. He gathers up at least two sorts—that of
bravery in absolutely reversing the process most accredited, and that,
quite separate, we make out, of performing the manœuvre under salvos of
recognition. It is not in these days often given to a refinement of
design to be recognised, but Mr. Conrad has made his achieve that
miracle—save in so far indeed as the miracle has been one thing and the
success another. The miracle is of the rarest, confounding all
calculation and suggesting more reflections than we can begin to make
place for here; but the sources of surprise surrounding it might be,
were this possible, even greater and yet leave the fact itself in all
independence, the fact that the whole undertaking was committed by its
very first step either to be “art” exclusively or to be nothing. This is
the prodigious rarity, since surely we have known for many a day no
other such case of the whole clutch of eggs, and these withal of the
freshest, in that one basket; to which it may be added that if we say
for many a day this is not through our readiness positively to associate
the sight with any very definite moment of the past. What concerns us is
that the general effect of “Chance” is arrived at by a pursuance of
means to the end in view contrasted with which every other current form
of the chase can only affect us as cheap and futile; the carriage of the
burden or amount of service required on these lines exceeding surely all
other such displayed degrees of energy put together. Nothing could well
interest us more than to see the exemplary value of attention, attention
given by the author and asked of the reader, attested in a case in which
it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to struggle with—since so we
are moved to qualify the particular difficulty Mr. Conrad has “elected”
to face: the claim for method in itself, method in this very sense of
attention applied, would be somehow less lighted if the difficulties
struck us as less consciously, or call it even less wantonly, invoked.
What they consist of we should have to diverge here a little to say, and
should even then probably but lose ourselves in the dim question of why
so special, eccentric and desperate a course, so deliberate a plunge
into threatened frustration, should alone have seemed open. It has been
the course, so far as three words may here serve, of his so multiplying
his creators or, as we are now fond of saying, producers, as to make
them almost more numerous and quite emphatically more material than the
creatures and the production itself in whom and which we by the general
law of fiction expect such agents to lose themselves. We take for
granted by the general law of fiction a primary author, take him so much
for granted that we forget him in proportion as he works upon us, and
that he works upon us most in fact by making us forget him.
Mr. Conrad’s first care on the other hand is expressly to posit or set
up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular,
possessed of infinite sources of reference, who immediately proceeds to
set up another, to the end that this other may conform again to the
practice, and that even at that point the bridge over to the creature,
or in other words to the situation or the subject, the thing “produced,”
shall, if the fancy takes it, once more and yet once more glory in a
gap. It is easy to see how heroic the undertaking of an effective fusion
becomes on these terms, fusion between what we are to know and that
prodigy of our knowing which is ever half the very beauty of the
atmosphere of authenticity; from the moment the reporters are thus
multiplied from pitch to pitch the tone of each, especially as
“rendered” by his precursor in the series, becomes for the prime poet of
all an immense question—these circumferential tones having not only to
be such individually separate notes, but to keep so clear of the others,
the central, the numerous and various voices of the agents proper, those
expressive of the action itself and in whom the objectivity resides. We
usually escape the worst of this difficulty of a tone _about_ the tone
of our characters, our projected performers, by keeping it single,
keeping it “down” and thereby comparatively impersonal or, as we may
say, inscrutable; which is what a creative force, in its blest fatuity,
likes to be. But the omniscience, remaining indeed nameless, though
constantly active, which sets Marlow’s omniscience in motion from the
very first page, insisting on a reciprocity with it throughout, this
original omniscience invites consideration of itself only in a degree
less than that in which Marlow’s own invites it; and Marlow’s own is a
prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground
of the case exposed. We make out this ground but through the shadow cast
by the flight, clarify it though the real author visibly reminds himself
again and again that he must—all the more that, as if by some
tremendous forecast of future applied science, the upper aeroplane
causes another, as we have said, to depend from it and that one still
another; these dropping shadow after shadow, to the no small menace of
intrinsic colour and form and whatever, upon the passive expanse. What
shall we most call Mr. Conrad’s method accordingly but his attempt to
clarify _quand même_—ridden as he has been, we perceive at the end of
fifty pages of “Chance,” by such a danger of steeping his matter in
perfect eventual obscuration as we recall no other artist’s consenting
to with an equal grace. This grace, which presently comes over us as the
sign of the whole business, is Mr. Conrad’s gallantry itself, and the
shortest account of the rest of the connection for our present purpose
is that his gallantry is thus his success. It literally strikes us that
his volume sets in motion more than anything else a drama in which his
own system and his combined eccentricities of recital represent the
protagonist in face of powers leagued against it, and of which the
dénouement gives us the system fighting in triumph, though with its back
desperately to the wall, and laying the powers piled up at its feet.
This frankly has been _our_ spectacle, our suspense and our thrill; with
the one flaw on the roundness of it all the fact that the predicament
was not imposed rather than invoked, was not the effect of a challenge
from without, but that of a mystic impulse from within.
Of an exquisite refinement at all events are the critical questions
opened up in the attempt, the question in particular of by what it
exactly is that the experiment is crowned. Pronouncing it crowned and
the case saved by sheer gallantry, as we did above, is perhaps to fall
just short of the conclusion we might reach were we to push further.
“Chance” _is_ an example of objectivity, most precious of aims, not only
menaced but definitely compromised; whereby we are in presence of
something really of the strangest, a general and diffused lapse of
authenticity which an inordinate number of common readers—since it
always takes this and these to account encouragingly for
“editions”—have not only condoned but have emphatically commended. They
can have done this but through the bribe of some authenticity other in
kind, no doubt, and seeming to them equally great if not greater, which
gives back by the left hand what the right has, with however
dissimulated a grace, taken away. What Mr. Conrad’s left hand gives back
then is simply Mr. Conrad himself. We asked above what would become, by
such a form of practice, of indispensable “fusion” or, to call it by
another name, of the fine process by which our impatient material, at a
given moment, shakes off the humiliation of the handled, the fumbled
state, puts its head in the air and, to its own beautiful illusory
consciousness at least, simply runs its race. Such an amount of handling
and fumbling and repointing has it, on the system of the multiplied
“putter into marble,” to shake off! And yet behold, the sense of
discomfort, as the show here works out, _has_ been conjured away. The
fusion has taken place, or at any rate _a_ fusion; only it has been
transferred in wondrous fashion to an unexpected, and on the whole more
limited plane of operation; it has succeeded in getting effected, so to
speak, not on the ground but in the air, not between our writer’s idea
and his machinery, but between the different parts of his genius itself.
His genius is what is left over from the other, the compromised and
compromising quantities—the Marlows and their determinant inventors and
interlocutors, the Powells, the Franklins, the Fynes, the tell-tale
little dogs, the successive members of a cue from one to the other of
which the sense and the interest of the subject have to be passed on
together, in the manner of the buckets of water for the improvised
extinction of a fire, before reaching our apprehension: all with
whatever result, to this apprehension, of a quantity to be allowed for
as spilt by the way. The residuum has accordingly the form not of such
and such a number of images discharged and ordered, but that rather of a
wandering, circling, yearning imaginative _faculty_, encountered in its
habit as it lives and diffusing itself as a presence or a tide, a noble
sociability of vision. So we have as the force that fills the cup just
the high-water mark of a beautiful and generous mind at play in
conditions comparatively thankless—thoroughly, unweariedly, yet at the
same time ever so elegantly at play, and doing more for itself than it
succeeds in getting done for it. Than which nothing could be of a
greater reward to critical curiosity were it not still for the wonder of
wonders, a new page in the record altogether—the fact that these things
are apparently what the common reader has seen and understood. Great
then would seem to be after all the common reader!