Conrad. Some one must have done it, so illuminating in both
directions is the result. Here are two dreamers who write of the
sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in
man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and
come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when
they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes,
transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure
imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing
gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and
description unsurpassed:
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas,
among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding
rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full
terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched
hideousness of his jaw.
Melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the South Seas,
"Typee," "Omoo," which were perfect of their kind, but still only
superlative travel books, distinguished in style but seldom
lifting beyond autobiography, began another reminiscent narrative
in "Moby Dick." In spite of his profound intellectual growth away
from the cool and humorous youth who paddled the Marquesan lake
with primitive beauties beside him, he seems to have meant in "The
White Whale" to go back to his earlier manner, to write an
accurate though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and
to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm
whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins
as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal,
Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford
lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before
the _Pequod_ leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to
sweep through the narrative. This brooding captain, Ahab (for
Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and
his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew
of all races and temperaments--the civilized, the barbarous, and
the savage--in their ship, which is a microcosm, hints that creep
in of the white whale whose nature is inimical to man and arouses
passions deeper than gain or revenge--all this prepares the reader
for something more than incident. From the mood of Defoe one
passes, by jerks and reversions, to the atmosphere of "The Ancient
Mariner" and of "Manfred."
When Conrad could not manage his story he laid it aside, sometimes
for twenty years, as with "The Rescue." But Melville was a wilder
soul, a greater man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser
craftsman. He lost control of his book. He loaded his whaling
story with casks of natural history, deck loaded it with essays on
the moral nature of man, lashed to its sides dramatic dialogues on
the soul, built up a superstructure of symbolism and allegory,
until the tale foundered and went down, like the _Pequod_.
And then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a dream
whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams; and every now and
then, as dreams will, it takes on an appearance of reality more
vivid than anything in life, more real than anything in Conrad--
the meeting with the _Rachel_ and her captain seeking his
drowned son, the rising of Moby Dick with the dead Parsee bound to
his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of Ahab....
In this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs in the midst
of confusion, and vivid realities mingled with untrammeled
speculation, lies the secret of Melville's purpose, and, by
contrast, the explanation of Conrad's modern effect beside him.
Melville, friend of Hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on
his own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible than
man. He sees the will of man trying to control the universe, but
failing; crushed if uncowed by the unmeasured power of an evil
nature, which his little spirit, once it loses touch with the will
of God, vainly encounters. Give man eyes only in the top of his
head, looking heavenward, says Ahab, urging the blacksmith, who
makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new creature complete. He
writes of man at the beginning of the age of science, aware of the
vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part
of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own
moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate pursuit of Moby Dick,
and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as Ahab, the
_Pequod_, and all her crew went down before the lashings and
charges of the white whale.
"Oh, Life," says Ahab, "here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet
standing debtor to this blockhead [the carpenter] for a bone to
stand on!... I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with." And
yet as they approach the final waters "the old man's purpose
intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vise; the
Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in
his very sleep his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull:
'Stern all! The white whale spouts thick blood!'"
Conrad comes at the height of the age of science. The seas for him
are full of dark mysteries, but these mysteries are only the
reflections of man. Man dominates the earth and sea, man conquers
the typhoon, intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the
barbarians of the shallows, man has learned to master all but his
own heart. The center of gravity shifts from without to within.
The philosopher, reasoning of God and of nature, gives place to
the psychologist brooding over an organism that is seat of God and
master of the elements. Melville is centrifugal, Conrad
centripetal. Melville's theme is too great for him; it breaks his
story, but the fragments are magnificent. Conrad's task is easier
because it is more limited; his theme is always in control. He
broods over man in a world where nature has been conquered,
although the mind still remains inexplicable. The emphasis shifts
from external symbols of the immensities of good and evil to the
behavior of personality under stress. Melville is a moral
philosopher, Conrad a speculative psychologist.
The essentially modern quality of Conrad lies in this transference
of wonder from nature to the behavior of man, the modern man for
whom lightning is only electricity and wind the relief of pressure
from hemisphere to hemisphere. Mystery lies in the personality
now, not in the blind forces that shape and are shaped by it. It
is the difference, in a sense, between Hawthorne, who saw the
world as shadow and illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to
humanity, and Hardy, who sees in external nature the grim
scientific fact of environment. It is a difference between eras
more marked in Conrad than in many of his contemporaries, because,
like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, he avoids the plain prose of
realism and sets his romantic heroes against the great powers of
nature--tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus
the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of romantic
setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only to beat upon the mind
whose behavior he is studying; his moral problems are raised only
that he may study their effect upon man.
If, then, we are to estimate Conrad's work, let us begin by
defining him in these terms. He is a Slav who broods by racial
habit as well as by necessity of his theme. He is a modern who
accepts the growing control of physical forces by the intellect
and turns from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality.
From this personality he makes his stories. External nature bulks
large in them, because it is when beat upon by adversity, brought
face to face with the elemental powers, and driven into strange
efforts of will by the storms without that man's personality
reaches the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad
and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories of his
longer novels. His characters are concrete. They are not symbols
of the moral nature, like Melville's men, but they are
nevertheless phases of personality and therefore they shift and
dim from story to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their
hearts to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one nevertheless
forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which they come, the
tales in which they appear. The same phase, indeed, appears under
different names in several stories.
Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of the secret of
man's relation to the universe; only magnificent fragments of his
imagination were salvaged for his books. Conrad sails on an open
sea, tamed by wireless and conquered by steel. Mystery for him
lies not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers. On them
he broods. His achievement is more complete than Melville's; his
scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently
they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our
implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into
mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new
transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea,
earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become
symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a
while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and
given us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe.
There the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. It is an
opportunity for the psychologists and, while we are thinking less
of the soul, they have rushed to study the mechanics of the brain.
It was Conrad's opportunity also to brood upon the romance of
personality at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark
external force.
THE NOVELIST OF PITY
To those interested in the meaning of the generation that has now
left us quivering on the beach of after war, Thomas Hardy's books
are so engrossing that to write of them needs no pretext; yet the
recent publication of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces
included is a welcome excuse for what I propose to make, not so
much an essay as a record of a sudden understanding. Long
familiarity with Hardy's novels had led to an afternoon of
conversation with the author himself in the mildness of old age.
But he remained for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to
an earlier century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if
not ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty he saw
the young men beginning to follow him. It was a reading of "The
Dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of the new edition, that
suddenly and unexpectedly seemed to give me a key.
The danger, so I had thought and think, is that Hardy bids fair to
become a legendary figure with an attribute, as is the way with
such figures, better known than the man himself. "Hardy, oh, yes,
the pessimist" threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all
he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy of gloom is
already overshadowing the man's intense interest in strong and
appealing life. It has been the fate of many a great artist to get
a nickname, like a boy, and never be rid of it.
I do not wish by any ingenious fabrication to prove that Hardy was
not a pessimist. He is the father of the English school that
refuse to be either deists or moralists, and, like them, pushes
his stories to an end that is often bitter. His temperament is
cast in that brooding, reflective mood that concerns itself less
readily with jollity than with grief, and is therefore ever
slanting toward pessimism. This, even his style indicates. Like
the somber Hawthorne's, his style is brooding, adumbrative, rather
than incisive or brilliant, and it often limps among the facts of
his story like a man in pain. Indeed, Hardy is seldom a stylist,
except when his mood is somber; therefore it is by his sadder
passages that we remember him. Yet the most important fact about
Hardy is not that he is pessimistic.
His manner of telling a story, however, helps to confirm the
popular impression. Hardy's plots are a series of accidents, by
which the doom of some lovely or aspiring spirit comes upon it by
the slow drift of misfortune. Tess, Grace, Eustacia, Jude--it is
clear enough to what joys and sorrows their natures make them
liable. But the master prepares for them trivial error, unhappy
coincidence, unnecessary misfortune, until it is not surprising if
the analytic mind insists that he is laboring some thesis of
pessimism to be worked out by concrete example.
Nevertheless, this is incomplete definition, and it is annoying
that the dean of letters in our tongue should be subjected to a
sophomoric formula in which the emphasis is wrongly placed. The
critics, in general, have defined this pessimism, stopped there,
and said, this is Hardy. But youth that does not like pessimism
reads Hardy avidly. More light is needed.
Mr. Hardy himself does not suggest the simple and melancholy
pessimist. A mild old man, gentleness is the first quality one
feels in him, but at eighty he still waxed his mustache tips, and
his eyes lit eagerly. I remember how earnestly he denied knowledge
of science, piqued, I suppose, by the omniscient who had declared
that his art consisted of applying the results of scientific
inquiry to the study of simple human nature. If his treatment of
nature was scientific, as I affirmed, his wife agreed, and he did
not deny, then, he implied, his knowledge came by intuition, not
by theory. The war was still on when I talked with him. It had
lifted him to poetry at first, but by 1918 no longer interested
him vitally. "It is too mechanical," he said. His novels, where
fate seems to operate mechanically sometimes, he was willing that
day to set aside as nil. Poetry, he thought, was the only proper
form of expression. The novel was too indirect; too wasteful of
time and space in its attempt to come at real issues. Yet these
real issues, it appeared as we talked, were not theories. Ideas,
he said, if emphasized, destroy art. Writers, he thought, in the
future would give up pure fiction (serious writers, I suppose he
meant). Poetry would be their shorthand; they would by intenser
language cut short to their end.
What was _his_ end? Not mechanical, scientific theories, that
was clear. Not mere realistic description of life. He told me he
had little faith in mere observation, except for comic or quaint
characterization. He had seldom if ever studied a serious
character from a model. One woman he invented entirely (was it
Tess?) and she was thought to be his best. What, then, was this
essence which the novelist, growing old, would convey now in
concentrated form by poetry which to him, so he said, was story-
telling in verse.
It is easier to understand what he meant if one thinks how
definitely Hardy belongs to his age, the latter nineteenth
century, in spite of his reachings forward. On the one hand, his
very gentleness is characteristic of a period that was above all
others humane, On the other, his somber moods sprang from a
generation that was the first to understand the implications of
the struggle for life in the animal world all about them. They, to
be sure, deduced from what they saw a vague theory of evolution in
which the best (who were themselves) somehow were to come out best
in the end. He, though gentle as they were, deduced nothing so
cheerful, saw rather the terrible discrepancies between fact and
theory, so that his very gentleness made him pessimistic, where
Browning was optimistic. Then, like Hawthorne in the generation
before him, Hardy went back to an earlier, simpler life than his
own, and there made his inquiries. Hawthorne, who did not accept
the theology of Puritanism, was yet strangely troubled by the
problem of sin. Hardy, accepting the implacability of evolution
without its easy optimism, was intensely moved to pity. This is
his open secret.
The clearest statement is in his poetry, where again and again, in
our conversation that day, he seemed to be placing it--most of
all, I think, in "The Dynasts."
"The Dynasts" was published too soon. We English speakers, in
1904-1906, were beginning to read plays again, under the stimulus
of a dramatic revival, and the plays we read were successful on
the stage. As I recollect the criticism of "The Dynasts," much of
it at least was busied with the form of the drama, its great
length and unwieldiness. We thought of it not as a dramatic epic,
but as a dramatized novel--a mistake. We thought that Hardy was
taking the long way around, when in truth he had found a short cut
to his issues. That "The Dynasts," considering the vastness of its
Napoleonic subject, was far more concise, more direct, clearer
than his novels, did not become manifest, although the sharper-
eyed may have seen it.
In "The Dynasts" I find all of Hardy. The Immanent Will is God, as
Hardy conceives Him, neither rational nor entirely conscious,
frustrating His own seeming ends, without irony and without
compassion, and yet perhaps evolving like His world, clearing like
men's visions, moving towards consistency. The Sinister Angel and
the Ironic Angel are moods well known to Hardy, but not loved by
him. The Spirit of the Years that sees how poor human nature
collides with accident, or the inevitable, and is bruised, is
Hardy's reasoned philosophy. The Spirit of Pities (not always, as
he says, logical or consistent) is Hardy's own desire, his will,
his faint but deep-felt hope. I quote, from the very end of the
great spectacle, some lines in which the Spirits, who have watched
the confused tragedy of the Napoleonic age, sum up their thoughts:
AFTER SCENE
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
Thus doth the Great Foresightless mechanize
Its blank entrancement now as evermore
Its ceaseless artistries in circumstance....
Yet seems this vast and singular confection
Wherein our scenery glints of scantest size,
Inutile all--so far as reasonings tell.
SPIRIT OF PITIES
Thou arguest still the
Inadvertent Mind.
But, even so, shall blankness be for aye?...
SPIRIT OF THE YEARS
What wouldst have hoped and had the
Will to be?...
SEMI-CHORUS I OF THE PITIES
Nay;--shall not
Its blindness break?
Yea, must not
Its heart awake,
Promptly tending
To its mending
In a genial germing purpose,
and for loving-kindness' sake?
SEMI-CHORUS II
Should It never
Curb or cure
Aught whatever
Those endure
Whom It quickens,
Let them darkle
To extinction
Swift and sure,
CHORUS
But--a stirring thrills the air
Like to sounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and
Deliverance offered
From the darts that were,
Consciousness the
Will informing, till
It fashions all things fair!
The Spirit of the Years (which is another name for Hardy's
reflections upon life and history) planned in sad conviction of
the "blank entrancement" of the Great Foresightless Will, those
sad narratives in which innocence, as in "Tess of the
d'Ubervilles," is crushed, or vivid personality frustrated, as in
"The Return of the Native." It is the Spirit of Pities in Hardy
which wrote the stories. Philosophy constructed them, but pity
worked them out.
The characters that Hardy loved--Grace, Marty South, Jude, Tess--
are life, brooding, intense, potential, and lovely, struggling
against a fate which they help to draw upon themselves, but which
is, nevertheless, not necessary, not rational. The cruelty of this
fate he assumes and depicts, but the stories are not told to
describe it. It is his creatures that get the color, the interest;
they are valuable to us, and would be to him, whatever the truth
of his philosophy. But because he loves life, the living thing,
even the lizard in the woods, he broods upon their frustrations.
Pessimistic Hardy is, as any gentle heart would be who chose to
study misfortune; yet pessimist is not the right term for him.
Realist he is clearly, in the philosophic sense of one who is
willing to view things as they are without prejudice. I seek a
term for a mild spirit who sees clearly that the sufferer is more
intelligible than his fate, and so is pitiful even when most
ruthless in the depiction of misfortune. Pity for the individual,
not despair of the race, is his motive. And pity makes his gentle
style, pity makes him regardless of artifice, and gives his often
clumsy novels an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical
masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. It is
instructive to compare the relative fortunes of Hardy and
Meredith, once always bracketed--the apostle of pity in comparison
with the most subtle and brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has
outranked him.
Already it begins to appear that the inconsistent, half-conscious
Will that was the sum and substance of Hardy's pessimism was given
certain attributes of gloom that scarcely belonged to it. The
ruthless struggle for life by which the fittest for the
circumstances of the moment, and by no means the best, survive at
the expense of the others is no longer conceived as the clear law
of human life. Science, with the rediscovery of Mendelism and its
insistence upon psychological factors has submitted important
qualifications to this deduction which Hardy, in common with
others intellectually honest of his age, was forced to make. But
it is not Hardy's philosophy, sound or unsound, that counts in his
art? except in so far as it casts the plan of his stories, or
sometimes, as in "Tess," or "The Woodlanders," gives too much play
to cruel accident, and therefore an air of unreality to the tenser
moments of the plots. Our critical emphasis in the past has been
wrong. It should, to follow Hardy's own words, be set not upon the
idea, the suggested explanation of misfortune, but upon the living
creatures in his novels and poems alike. It is the characters he
wrought in pity, and, it would appear, in hope, that make him a
great man in our modern world, although only once did he pass
beyond the bounds of his primitive Wessex. The novelist of pity
and its poet, not the spokesman for pessimism, is the title I
solicit for him.
HENRY JAMES
It has always surprised Europeans that Henry James, the most
intellectual of modern novelists, should have been an American;
for most Europeans believe, as does Lowes Dickinson, that we are
an intelligent but an unintellectual race. Was the fact so
surprising after all? The most thoroughgoing pessimists come from
optimistic communities. Henry James, considered as a literary
phenomenon, represented a sensitive mind's reaction against the
obviousness of the life that one finds in most American "best
sellers." I suppose that he reacted too far. I feel sure of it
when he is so unobvious that I cannot understand him. And yet
every American writer must feel a little proud that there was one
of our race who could make the great refusal of popularity, sever,
with those intricate pen strokes of his, the bonds of interest
that might have held the "general reader," and write just as well
as he knew how.
Whether his novels and short stories gained by this heroic
"highbrowism," is another question. Certainly they did not always
do so. To get a million of readers is no sure sign of greatness;
but to find only thousands, as did Henry James in his later books,
is to be deplored. In "Daisy Miller" and "The Bostonians" he was
a popular novelist of the best kind, a novelist who drew the best
people to be his readers. But men read "The Golden Bowl" and "The
Wings of the Dove" because they were skilful rather than because
they were interesting. They were novelists' novels, like the
professional matinees that "stars" give on Tuesday afternoons for
the benefit of rivals and imitators in art.
But to stop here would be to misunderstand totally the greatest
craftsman that has come out of America. The flat truth is that
Henry James was not a novelist at all, at least in the good, old-
fashioned sense that we usually give to the word. He was primarily
a critic; the greatest American critic since Poe. Sometimes he
criticized literature with supreme success, as in his "Notes on
Novelists" of 1914; but ordinarily he criticized life. His later
novels are one-fifth story, one-fifth character creation, and the
rest pure criticism of life.