Wordsworth had, but a fair acquaintance with contemporaneous science.
He has learned lessons from Fabre, whom he admires. He has studied his
own garden in the light of what botanists have told him and in the
other light, which is not hostile to botany, but is different, the
light of poetry. He loves to speculate about unsettled questions. And
his speculations have a very great intellectual merit. He is, on the
whole, content to be uncertain about uncertain things and to express
his inclinations toward one or another conclusion in a persuasive,
wistful manner. Like many other poets, he leans toward the belief that
nature, which includes us, knows more than we do, and that to ascribe
intelligence, in a restricting way, to man alone is probably to leave
out a good deal of the magic of growing things, and to omit some
potential explanations of their mystery, their mystery in the poet's
sense and in the stern truth seeker's sense. The essay on "The
Intelligence of Flowers" revivifies the old moot question about what
knowledge is, what instinct is. It's a very fine question, and it
becomes hottest when the men of imagination and the men of science
(happily they are not mutually exclusive) argue about whether a dog
knows that he loves you. A British poet began a verse to a dog:
The curate says you have no soul--
I know that he has none.
That is good; but it is spiteful. Let us admit the curate. For the dog
would. A dog does not care a wag of his tail whether a man is curate
or editor of a newspaper. Therein the dog is our superior.
Maeterlinck, though overtaken by the wan doubt of our times, is a
true believer in other kinds of intelligence than ours. He holds that
"nature, when she wishes to be beautiful, to please, to delight and
to prove herself happy, does almost what we should do had we her
treasures at our disposal." There, you see, he begs the whole
question and ascribes to "nature" wishes, desires, intentions. He
does the trick that poets always do; he answers the question that he
asks and that he pretends to be discussing. "All that we observe
within ourselves," he says, "is rightly open to suspicion; we are at
once litigant and judge, and we have too great an interest in
peopling our world with magnificent illusions and hopes. But let the
least external indication be dear and precious to us."
In this the poet says all, while, on another page, the man of science,
with firm integrity, minimizes evidence and refuses to be convinced.
There is a region where the poet knows almost everything worth
knowing. There is a region where the man of science knows, not
everything worth knowing, but all that is known. There is a misty
mid-region where a full-minded, large-hearted man can live happily. He
gets the message going and coming. He receives what the poet has to
say and what the man of fact has to say and he constructs his world
from the fragmentary contributions of both regions. Maeterlinck
himself in "Our Eternity," dwells on this central ground. Shakespeare
and Isaiah are on his right hand. On his left hand are William James
and other psychological students of the evidence of spooks.
Poets are enamored of death. Nine-tenths of all the imaginative
literature of the world is concerned with love and death, the begetter
and the extinguisher. The sweetest lines in Shakespeare deal with
love; the stateliest lines, Hamlet's and Macbeth's, are upon death.
The chief interest of life is in dying. We get our highest emotions
from some other person's death, and we adapt our entire course, from
the cradle to the grave, with a view to the fact that we are going to
quit in some year determined by fate or God or other power not quite
understood, a year carefully figured out by the actuaries of the life
insurance companies.
Man is a perfect coward in the face of death, his own or that of
somebody he loves. The believer and the unbeliever alike bewail the
great adventure. The tears shed by the believer in immortality and by
the disbeliever are the same hot, saline, human drops. Everybody wants
an answer, and only the adherents of certain sects receive an answer
that satisfies them. Those answers do not satisfy me or you, not
because there is anything wrong in the answers, but because the people
that hold the answers behave as all the rest of us do in the presence
of death. Maeterlinck, on the basis of modern evidence, argues for
two-hundred and fifty-eight pages that we do not know what happens
when we die. "In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his
understanding a thousand-fold loftier and a thousand-fold mightier
than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he
had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun
to grasp an atom."
Amen! That leaves us where we started. But the fact, the cold,
interesting, magnificent fact, is that we are alive, and some of us
are working and some are playing. Maeterlinck is a great child playing
with flowers and with words. He is also a competent workman, and he is
assisted by another skilful craftsman to whom English readers owe
much, Mr. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who translates Maeterlinck
into English. He is a fine artist. Following faithfully the run of our
English idiom, he succeeds in keeping for our Anglo-Saxon eyes and
ears the color, tone, or whatever it is, of Maeterlinck's beautiful
style.
JOSEPH CONRAD
To the newest generation of adult readers the dawn of a literary light
is a rare experience. It is as if the courses of our literature were
Arctic in their slowness, as if the day came at long intervals, and
then without warmth or brilliance. Our fathers knew the joy of
welcoming the latest novel of Dickens or a new volume of essays by
Carlyle. The only[1] great day whose beginning young men have
witnessed is the day of Kipling; his light mounted rapidly to a high
noon, and if the afternoon shadows have begun to deepen prematurely,
that sun is still beautiful and strong. Other lights have kindled in
the last fifteen years, and have gone out before they had fairly
dislodged the darkness, or have continued to burn dimly.
[1] I ask the reader to remember that this was written in
1906.
Eyes accustomed only to darkness and uncertain lights are in condition
to be deluded by the phantoms of false dawn; it is therefore unwise to
greet with too much enthusiasm the arrival of Mr. Joseph Conrad. Even
if the dawn is real, it is certainly overcast with heavy clouds, and
it has not proved bright enough to startle the world. Nevertheless,
his light is of unique beauty in contemporary literature, and the
story of its kindling makes interesting biography.
Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski was born fifty years ago in Poland. His
father, a critic and poet, and his mother, who was exiled to Siberia,
were engaged in revolutionary journalism. At nineteen Conrad left
home, to escape an unsettled life, and also, it is fair to assume, to
satisfy his love of adventure. He found work on English vessels, and
this fact gave to contemporary English letters a man who might
otherwise have written in French. To-day he appears in hand-books of
biography as Master in the British Merchant Service, and Author. At
nineteen he had not mastered English; at thirty-eight he had published
no book. Since then he has published about a volume a year. In
preparation for his books he sailed as able seaman, mate, and master,
for twenty years, on steam and sailing craft, and meanwhile he was
reading deep in French and English literature,--all, we are told, with
no intent to become a writer. Indeed it was a period of ill health
resulting in an enforced idleness from the familiar sea that gave him
opportunity to put some of his adventures into words. Perhaps he is a
lesser illustration of a theory of Thoreau's that a word well said
"must have taken the place of a deed by some urgent necessity, even by
some misfortune, so that the truest writer will be some captive
knight, after all." However that may be, the intellectual and physical
adventures of Conrad's life were abundant, and they reappear,
discernible though transfigured, in the substance and the qualities of
his work.
His ten books are for the most part concerned with the waters of the
earth, and the men that sail on the face of the waters, and with
lands, far from English readers, to be reached only by long journeying
in ships.[2] His first book, "Almayer's Folly," tells the story of a
disappointed Dutch trader in Borneo, whose half-caste daughter runs
away with a Malay chief. His second book, "An Outcast of the Islands,"
deals further with the career of Almayer and with that of another
exiled Dutchman. "Nostromo," has for its scene an imaginary South
American state, and its heroes are an Englishman and an Italian. "The
Nigger of the Narcissus" (published in America as "The Children of the
Sea") and "Typhoon" are each the chronicle of a voyage. "Lord Jim" is
the story of a young mate who disgraces himself by one unseamanlike
act, and becomes a wanderer in the eastern islands, and finally a kind
of king in a village of savages. "Tales of Unrest" contains five
stories, two of which are about Malays, and another about white
traders in an African station. The hero of "Falk"--the title story of
a volume of three pieces--is a Scandinavian sailor who has been a
cannibal, and who wins the daughter of a German ship captain in an
Eastern port. "Youth," the first story in a volume of three, is the
memory of a young mate's voyage in an unseaworthy ship, which burns
and leaves the crew to seek an Eastern seaport in the boats. The
second story, "The Heart of Darkness," is an account of a journey into
the Belgian Congo State and a curious study of the effect of solitude
and the jungle and savagery on a white trader. The third piece in the
volume is the story of a ship-captain who steers his ship with the
help of a Malay servant and lets no one guess until the end that he is
blind. Of two books written in collaboration with Mr. Ford M. Hueffer,
the only one worth considering, "Romance," comes the nearest to being
the kind of fiction that the advertisements announce as "full of heart
interest, love, and the glamor of a charming hero and heroine." It
begins with a smuggler's escapade in England, and ends in an elopement
in the West Indies; the best parts, probably Mr. Conrad's share in the
work, are those about the sea and all that on it is, fogs, ships, and
bearded pirates. In these books are men and women of all civilized
nations, the acquaintance of a globe-trotter, and there are, besides,
enough Malays, Chinamen, and Negroes to make the choruses of several
comic operas. But in Conrad they are serious people, every Malay with
a soul and a tragedy; even the Nigger of the Narcissus is equipped
with psychological machinery.
[2] Almayer's Folly. The Macmillan Co. 1895.
An Outcast of the Islands. Tauchnitz. 1896.
The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea). Dodd,
Mead & Co. 1897.
Tales of Unrest. Charles Scribner's Sons. 1898.
Lord Jim. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1899.
The Inheritors (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co.
1901.
Typhoon. G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1902.
Falk. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
Youth. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903.
Romance (with F. M. Hueffer). McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904.
Nostromo. Harper & Brothers. 1904.
Conrad's subject-matter, the secretion of experience, is rich enough
and of sufficiently strange and romantic quality to endow a writer of
popular fiction; and his style,--that is, the use of words for their
melody, power, and charm,--is fit for a king of literature. Stevenson,
who found so little sheer good writing among his contemporaries, would
have welcomed Conrad and have lamented that he could not or would not
tell his stories in more brief, steady, and continuous fashion.
For there is the rub. Conrad is not instinctively a story-teller. Many
a writer of less genius surpasses him in method. He has no gift of
what Lamb calls a bare narrative.
There are writers with magnificent power of language who do not attain
that combination of literary and human qualities which is
readableness, and there are others who interest many people in many
generations, and yet do not write well. To most readers Dickens is as
delightful when he writes slovenly sentences as when he writes at his
best. Scott, the demigod, pours out his great romances in an
inexpressive fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes infallibly
well. These illustrations are intended to suggest a difference which
is a fact in literature, and are not to be carried to any conclusive
comparison. The difference exists and it is not a strange fact. It is
strange, however, that Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master
of a kind of subject-matter that would make his books as popular as
"Robinson Crusoe" and "Treasure Island," should be one of those who
can write but cannot make an inevitably attractive and winning book
for the multitude.
Either he knows his fault and can not help it, or he wills it and
does not consider it a fault. There is evidence on this question.
Several of his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an eloquent,
reflective, world-worn man. In one place Conrad says, "We knew that
we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of
Marlow's _inconclusive_ experiences." The story Marlow tells is no
more inconclusive and rambling than most of the other stories, so
that one is forced to conclude that Marlow's character as narrator is
Conrad's concession to his own self-observed habit of mind. In
another place Conrad says: "The yarns of seamen have a direct
simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a
cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin
yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not
inside a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these
misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral
illumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad prefers or pretends to
prefer the haze to the kernel.
In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns the methods usual to
fiction of "solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by
fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death," and says: "Why the reading
public, which as a body has never laid upon the story-teller the
command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine
omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings down
the gauntlet to those demands of readers which greater men than he and
Mr. James have been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wisdom and
reality.
A further announcement of his literary creed he made in a kind of
artistic confession published a few years ago. "His (the prose
writer's) answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks
for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled,
amused, who demand to be promptly improved or encouraged, or
frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: 'My task which I am
trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you
hear, to make you feel--it is before all to make you see.... If I
succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts,
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand; perhaps also
that glimpse of truth[3] for which you have forgotten to ask."
[3] These Slavs (see above on Tolstoy) are all for Truth,
but they are not Chadbandians. They are artists. And so was
the Anglo-Saxon who made Chadband.
A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for
trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that
if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he
must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by
interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once.
"Nostromo" is told forward and backward in the first half of the book,
and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all
proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book.
"Lord Jim" is confused.[4] The first few chapters are narrated in the
third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, a
more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an
after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to
get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within
quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other
stories the point of view fails. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are
conferences between two people in private which no third person could
overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by
one of the crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck almost
vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the
simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room
through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engine-room,
hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on
the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black
that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately
informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse hair, of immense
strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and
good-natured,--as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in
the darkness!
[4] No, it is not. It is clear as daylight.
Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the
course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present
scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and
when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same
page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If
a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the
globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the
magic rug, and even then the space-o'erleaping imagination resents
being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when
Conrad's descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the
current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold,
perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the
stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is
frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.
Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, no doubt, with his
admiration for Mr. Henry James, of whom he has written an extremely
"literary" appreciation. Too much interest in masters like Flaubert
and Mr. James is not gentlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a
sailor turned writer, who pilots a ship through a magnificent struggle
with a typhoon, leads us into the bewitching terror of the African
jungle, and guides us to Malay lands where the days are full of savage
love, intrigue, suicide, murder, piracy, and all forms of picturesque
and terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are "adventures in
which only choice souls are involved, and Mr. James records them with
a fearless and insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest
and the feelings of the combatants." That is true and fine, no doubt,
but the price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to discover it is
the fact that hundreds of thousands of readers of good masculine
romance are not reading "Lord Jim," or finding new "Youth" in a young
mate's wondrous vision of the East, or welcoming a new hero in Captain
Whalley. A man who can conceive the mournful tale of Karain and the
fight between the half crazy white men at an African trading post has
a kind of adventure better, as adventure, than the experiences of Mr.
James's choice souls. Stevenson knew all about Mr. James and his
"peripeties," but he could stow that knowledge on one side of his
head, and from the other side spin "Treasure Island" and "The
Wrecker". "The Sacred Fount" never could have befuddled the chronicle
of the amiable John Silver, but in Mr. Conrad's "An Outcast of the
Islands," where it seems to be a question which white man will kill
the other, after a dramatic meet-in the presence of a Malay heroine,
each man stands still before our eyes and radiates states of mind.
The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud
of her is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So my reason for
dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is because his books are
thoroughly worth consideration. His advent is really important. More
than any other new writer he is master of the ancient eloquence of
English style; no one since Stevenson has surpassed in fiction the
cadence and distinction of his prose. Never has an English sailor
written so beautifully, never has artist had such full and
authoritative knowledge of the sea, not even Pierre Loti. Stevenson
and Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. Marryat and Clark
Russell never write well, though they tell absorbing tales. There was
promise in Jack London, but he was not a seaman at heart. Herman
Melville's eccentric genius, greater than any of these, never led him
to construct a work of art, for all his amazing power of thought and
language. Conrad stands alone with his two gifts of sea experience and
cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, loved it, fought it,
believed in it, been baffled by it, body and mind. To know its ways,
to be master of the science of its winds and waves and the ships that
brave it, to have seen men and events and the lands and waters of the
earth with the eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a
psychologist--artist and ship-captain in one--here is a combination
through which Fate has conspired to produce a new writer about the
most wonderful of all things, the sea and the mysterious lands beyond
it.
If we grant that he is not master of the larger units of style, that
is, of construction, we can assert that in the lesser units, sentence
for sentence, he is a master of the English tongue. There is a story
that he learned English first from the Bible, and his vigorous primal
usages of words, his racial idioms and ancient rich metaphors warrant
the idea that he came to us along the old highway of English speech
and thought, the King James version. His sentences, however, are not
biblical as Stevenson's and Kipling's often are, but show a modern
sophistication and intellectual deliberateness. He frequently reminds
us that he is a Slav who learned French along with his native tongue,
that he has read Flaubert and Maupassant and Henry James. Approaching
our language as an adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative
meanings of words, their powerful first intentions, which familiarity
has disguised from most of us native-born to English. He has achieved
that ring and fluency which he has declared should be the artist's
aim. Conrad's prose lifts to passages of great poetic beauty, in which
the color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its desolation and its
blitheness, are mingled with its meaning for the men who sail it, its
"austere servitude," its friendliness and its treachery.
"The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and
swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea met in
an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her,
ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always
imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with
life, appeared far off,--disappeared, intent on its own destiny....
The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid
inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as
if guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The smiling greatness of
the sea dwarfed the extent of time."
No fairer temptation can be offered to a reader who does not know
Conrad than to quote a passage from the end of "Youth," and no more
honest praise can be offered to Conrad than to say that it is a
selected, but by no means unique, specimen of his genius.