night. The weary men tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the
young mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the reflective
and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had
never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without
moving. And then I saw the men of the East--they were looking at me.
The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze,
yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern
crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh,
without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men
who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds
of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the
shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green
foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like
leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the navigators, so
old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full
of danger and promise.... I have known its fascinations since: I have
seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown
nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so
many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their
knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in
that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my
young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea--and I was
young--and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that it left of it!
Only a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth!"
A CONRAD MISCELLANY
Nothing that Joseph Conrad writes is negligible; he is one of few
living writers whom we must have complete to the last, or the latest,
published word. Readers who care only for the yarn-spinner will not
find much in his volume of essays, "Notes on Life and Letters," but
even they will find something. And for those to whom Conrad is more
than a story teller, an incomparable magician, these small bits from
his laboratory will have much of the charm of the larger pieces, if
only the reminiscent charm that brings any book of his, the least read
or read longest ago, swiftly to the surface of memory. If a mere
landlubber may hazard the similitude, the captain will always show his
qualities whether he is on the bridge of a liner or in a rowboat.
The essays on books are unpretentious notes--eight pages on Henry
James, seven on Maupassant, twelve on Anatole France, short excursions
in criticism made between the longer voyages to the islands of the
blessed. Like most criticism written by men of genius, these papers
are interesting for what they say about another man of genius and also
for what they say about the critic. One of the most satisfactory
essays in what it reveals of Conrad is least satisfactory as objective
criticism--the one about Marryat and Cooper, in which there is a
declaration of descent in terms of surrender. To be sure, since the
elder men are seamen and writers of the sea, Conrad's delight in them
is understandable and not to be denied. But there are some things that
must be denied even by a critic who gets seasick a mile off shore. One
is Conrad's reiterated judgment that the greatness of Marryat "is
undeniable." If Marryat is great, then so is Oliver Optic. And when
Conrad speaks of the "sureness and felicity of effect" of the prose of
Cooper--Cooper, whose style grates on the ear and who drags us by the
sheer power of his story through his verbal infelicities--then I jump
overboard and leave these literary sailors to fight it out.
When we get back on land to another of Conrad's masters, Guy de
Maupassant, I feel less shaky. In "Tales of Unrest" are two stories,
"The Return" and "The Idiots," in which I long ago thought I
discovered the right kind of influence from the French master--what
Conrad praises as Maupassant's austere fidelity to fact. Yet one is
puzzled by the implied praise in the very dubious statement that "this
creative artist [Maupassant] has the true imagination; he never
condescends to invent anything." Just what does that mean? If "A Piece
of String" and "The Necklace" are not diabolically ingenious
inventions, then the word invention means nothing as applied to
fiction. In point of invention how far apart are the story of the
girls in "La Maison Tellier" and the story of the girl in the pathetic
troupe in "Victory"? Both stories are equally invented, equally true
to nature, equally free from "the miserable vanity of a catching
phrase." But what is a catching phrase? I suppose that a Frenchman
gets somewhat the same shiver of delight from fine rhythms in
Maupassant's prose that we get from fine rhythms in Conrad. Both
men--I could quote many examples--strike out amazing metaphors, the
poetry of prose, which are not decorations hung on the outside but are
the unremovable intestines of their story. Such metaphors in rhythm
are surely "catching phrases," but they are not miserable vanities. I
wonder if Conrad has a moment now and then when he distrusts his own
eloquence--an eloquence which has brought against him from more than
one critic the charge of being a phrase maker.
Conrad's prose is not so hard and compact as Maupassant's, and except
the two short stories I have mentioned I recall nothing in Conrad
which in manner or substance obviously illustrates his own statement
that he has been "inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with
the work" of Maupassant. His greatest short stories, "Youth" and "The
Heart of Darkness," seem worlds away from the French master. But
inspiration, the influence of one artist on another, does not mean
imitation in method or any visible resemblance in effect. It may mean
a fundamental similarity in artistic attitude. The elements of
similarity between the French writer and the British are the plain
virtues, honesty and courage, which Conrad rightly ascribes to
Maupassant; for these are the central virtues in the creed which
Conrad announced many years ago and to which he has loyally adhered in
the remotest strange seas of romance.
Another of Conrad's masters, acknowledged in the phrase "twenty years
of attentive acquaintance" (and the phrase was written in 1905) is
Henry James. This seems a curious discipleship if we consider only the
material: James static, land-bound, class-bound; Conrad adventurous,
errant, familiar with all breeds and degrees of men. But much the same
thing happens to both kinds of material. For in the first place the
material is not essentially different; it is the history of a
two-legged animal staggering on land or aboard ship. And in the second
place what happens is simply (though it is not so simple) that an
artist tries to put this animal steady on its feet and make it give a
reasonable account of itself--through himself. It gets transmitted
through an intelligence, a personality, a style, into something more
interesting than the actual poor creature who wabbles along the street
or on the deck of a steamer. The courageous interpreters make their
fellow men stand up, and the real hero of a romance is the romancer.
This is one of the paradoxes of fiction which the mere reader of
fiction and of criticism written by masters of fiction can enjoy, that
the modern self-conscious story tellers, forever proclaiming their
devotion to an objective reality, to the naked fact, and even, like
Conrad, pretending scorn of the phrase, are wilful persons who distort
life into a new reality. There is something almost naive in the honest
belief of Tolstoy, James, Conrad, that nature, human nature, is
something outside the artist, lying _over there_, and that the artist
standing _over here_ observes it, renders it, "mirrors" it. James
himself, a most sophisticated realist, was not always so insistent as
Conrad seems to think on the function of the novelist as historian;
some years later than Conrad's essay, James found fault with the
younger novelists because their work was too undigested, because it
was not sufficiently remade, transformed by an individual
interpreter--that is, though he did not say it so harshly, the younger
men were not interesting individuals, not men of first-rate
imagination.
But we must not get too far away from Conrad and his particular
relation to James. He has a generously envious admiration for James's
inconclusiveness, for the novel that stops but does not end because
life does not end; it seems to be, like his admiration for
Maupassant's accuracy and directness, a declaration of something that
he has striven for and not always accomplished. Conrad winds his own
stories up pretty sharply, wipes out his people with annihilation more
desolating than the conventional piling of corpses at the end of
"Romeo and Juliet" or "Hamlet." Recall the obliterating finality of
"Lord Jim," of "Victory," which ends with the blank word "nothing."
Or, where death does not conclude it all but the character lives on,
remember the abrupt inevitable termination of "The Rescue": "Steer
north!" Another relation which I have suggested and which Conrad as
critic does not hint is this: Conrad's material, though superficially
it is made up of adventure, wreck, blood, piracy, mystery, and
Stevensonian yo-heave-ho, is, as he treats it, often as static as
anything in James; it is stationary, concerned with the moods of men,
analytic, psychological (that tiresome word has to do for it), even
while the storm rages; and this is one of the reasons why readers with
a taste for ripping yarns have not welcomed him with the unanimous
popularity which they accorded to Stevenson and Kipling, to name fine
artists and not, of course, to mention cheap favorites. If we really
understood Conrad's fiction we have no difficulty in understanding his
filial relation to Henry James. Begin with the paragraph on page 13 of
"Notes on Life and Letters:" "Action in its essence, the creative art
of the writer of fiction," etc., and see if the rest that follows is
not, with a change or two, as good an account of Joseph Conrad as of
Henry James--better, indeed, since one master of fiction writing of
another speaks with two voices or with a voice proceeding from a
two-fold authority and wisdom.
Joseph Conrad, novelist, child of English and Continental literature,
is not more unaccountable than any other literary genius. But how to
explain, or even remember at all, that the head of living English men
of letters, next to Hardy, is a Pole named Korzeniowski? It is fair to
remember that and be inquisitive about it because in "Notes on Life
and Letters" he pretends to write autobiography, and reminds us of his
origin in a paper called "Poland Revisited." It is a baffling
narrative, even more baffling than the vague book which he chose to
call "A Personal Record." Conrad in quest of his youth never gets back
to Poland at all except as a British tourist. The paper consists of
thirty-two pages. Mr. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski reaches Cracow on the
twenty-fourth page. There are two or three pages of reminiscence,
chiefly about his father's death. Then war is declared (this is in
1914), and the British subject, with the assistance of the American
Ambassador, escapes from Poland and amid the booming of distant guns
in Flanders sails safely back through the Downs "thick with the
memories of my sea-life."
Mr. Conrad is the least patriotic of Poles and the most patriotic of
Englishmen. His political opinions, which he was evidently invited to
express by some English editor who remembered the fading fact of
Korzeniowski and appreciated the luminous fact of Joseph Conrad, the
writer, are no better and no worse than any competent journalist might
have delivered. His hatred of Russia, expressed long before his
adopted country became the ally of the Czar, may have its origin in
some boyhood bitterness. But it is an Englishman who speaks, not a
Pole. His prophecy of the downfall of Russian autocracy and of the
menace of Prussianism shoots into the future with as true an aim as
any man could have had in 1905, and a prophet is to be excused for
having said at that time that there was in Russia "no ground ready for
a revolution." "Conrad political" is less interesting than "Conrad
controversial," since his controversial utterances were provoked by
the sinking of the Titanic, the question of the safety of ships, and
the stupidity of marine officials on land, subjects which he can
discuss with the cool knowledge of the expert and the vehemence of an
offended master of ships and words.
But the true men of the four into which in his preface he divides
himself are "Conrad literary" and "Conrad reminiscent." The
reminiscence is not of a dimly, even indifferently, remembered Poland,
but of England and the sea. On the twenty-four-page journey to the
five-page sojourn in Cracow what happens? London, flashed on you in a
few sentences with an original vividness as if Englishmen had never
described it before, realized in brief transit, an immense solid
thing, compared to which Cracow is an insubstantial dream. He cannot
recapture his boyhood, but he gives you instantly the London of to-day
and the London of his youth when the British-Polish apprentice was
looking for a berth. And then the voyage across the North Sea. Here we
are at home. "The same old thing," he says. "A grey-green expanse of
smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam-ridges, and over
all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting
paper."
"The same old thing!" The sea is the same old thing, water deep and
shoal, storm and calm, fog and clear weather, light and darkness,
starshine and sunshine. It is understandable that from time to time a
new poet should be born, Byron, Tennyson, Swinburne, Whitman, Conrad,
Masefield, who, being a different man from all the rest, should phrase
some mood of the sea in words that no other poet in centuries had
used. But Conrad has written fifteen volumes mostly about the sea,
many pages necessarily about some aspect which he has treated more
than once. His treatment is so unmistakably his own that you could
recognize any passage as his if you saw it on a piece of torn paper
blown from nowhere. Yet it is truer of him than of Shakespeare that he
never repeats, has no _cliches_, no pet phrases, but in each book
finds astonishing new images, as if he himself had not written before.
How does he do it?
STRINDBERG
Some men of genius at forty or fifty arrive at a view of life, an
attitude toward the human comedy, as inclusive and definite as it is
possible for them to conceive. Hardy at seventy is quite recognizable
the man that he was at forty. The Meredith of 1860 is the Meredith of
1890. They grow, they improve or change their artistic methods. But
their natures do not undergo violent revolutions. Other men, Tolstoy
for example, experience a catastrophic annihilation of some part of
themselves and emerge from the confusion, remade, fired with new
beliefs. Tolstoy had one great battle with himself which divided his
life into two main periods, and after the struggle his philosophy,
whatever its worth, was fairly settled, and he knew how to express it
clearly over and over again.
Strindberg seems to have been continuously at war with Strindberg; and
the peace that he found was but the death-bed repentance of a man
whose forces were spent. He went through many phases. "The Growth of a
Soul", which is autobiographical, might better be called "The
Conflicts of a Soul". It seethes with ideas, ends in a half-formed
philosophy, and is only a section of Strindberg's intellectual
adventures. He was ten men at ten different times, and he was ten men
all the time. He expressed every aspect of himself. His manifold
genius was master of all forms of literature. As Emerson said of
Swedenborg, in whom Strindberg found all the light that his dark soul
ever knew, he lies abroad on his times, leviathan-like. Undoubtedly to
know him, one must know him entire, and I do not pretend to complete
knowledge of his life and works.
Some fragments of his total artistic expression are not intelligible
when they are read apart from his other books. "The Inferno" is a
confused and murky nightmare which takes on form and purpose only when
the light of biography is turned on it. Other works of Strindberg,
read by themselves, are clear and shapely.
"By the Open Sea" is an intensely powerful study of an overcultivated
man and a primitively passionate woman. It is, moreover, the work of a
poet who loves the sea. The passage in which the ichthyologist
observes through his telescope the wonder-world beneath the surface of
the water is rich with the essential poetry of natural fact. The
translator, Ellie Schleussner, would probably say, as Strindberg's
admirers all say, that his resonant poetic prose cannot be rendered in
another language. Yet the things that he sees in nature and his
interpretations of them are in their naked substance the imaginative
stuff which is poetry. This Titan was not content to be poet,
novelist, dramatist, essayist, philosopher. He was also a man of
science, no mean rival, they say, of the professional student of
biology and chemistry. The eye that looks through Borg's telescope has
been trained in a laboratory and can also roll with a fine frenzy:
"The blenny, which has developed a pair of oars in front, but is too
heavy in the stern and reminds one of first attempts at boat building,
raised its architectural stone head, adorned with the moustachios of a
Croat, above the heraldic foliage among which it had lain, and lifted
itself for a short moment out of the mud only to sink back into it the
next instant.
"The lump-fish with its seven backs stuck up its keel; the whole fish
was nothing but an enormous nose, scenting out food and females; it
illuminated for a second the bluish-green water with its rosy belly,
surrounding itself with a faint aureole in the deep darkness; but
before long its sucker again held safely to a stone, there to wait the
lapse of the million years which shall bring delivery to the laggards
on the endless road of evolution."
Strindberg has been called both misogamist and misogynist. Yet it is
not possible to collect and compress within the bounds of such
definite words a man whose ideas on any one subject fly far apart as
the poles. If he sometimes, often, expresses virulent detestation of
women and all their ways, he is not more tender toward men. He is not
a caresser of life. He hangs the whole human race. But he analyzes;
tries it before the twelve-minded jury in himself before he pronounces
sentence. Point by point, detail for detail, he is just in perception
of character and motive. His final view is simply not final, but
contradictory as life itself. He thinks that woman is a snare to the
feet of a man who would walk upright and accomplish something in the
world. Yet he believes in the freedom of woman, would give her the
vote, and emancipate her from economic bondage to the man. He even
champions the liberty of the child, condemns "the family as a social
institution which does not permit the child to become an individual at
the proper time," and draws both parents as victims of "the same
unfortunate conditions which are honored by the sacred name of law."
"Marriage" contains twenty short stories of married life, so many
variations of Strindberg's thesis against the institution. So
regarded, the book leaves one rather sore than enlightened. But these
stories are stories, not tracts. Strindberg is a great, if rough and
savage, artist. His opinions, whatever they are, do not devitalize his
fiction. His short narratives are as skilful as Maupassant's in at
least one respect, compression, sinewy economy. He can put in ten
pages the domestic tragedy of a lifetime. He is a fine or, rather, a
firm craftsman, and though the man rages, the artist has the artist's
restraint and every other literary virtue short of ultimate beauty. He
sets down terrible things with a cool succinctness. One story ends
thus: "The children had become burdens and the once beloved wife a
secret enemy despised and despising him. And the cause of all this
unhappiness? The want of bread! And yet the large storehouses of the
new world were breaking down under the weight of an over-abundant
supply of wheat. What a world of contradictions! The manner in which
bread was distributed must be at fault. Science, which has replaced
religion, has no answer to give; it merely states facts and allows the
children to die of hunger and the parents of thirst."
"The Red Room" is a satire on life in Stockholm, on life everywhere.
The pathetic struggle of the artistic and literary career, its follies
and pretenses, the fatuity of politics, the dishonesty of journalism,
the disillusion that awaits the aspiring actor, all these things run
riot through the lively pages. Strindberg's satire is severe, it is
sometimes hard, but it is not mean. He has a large if rather distant
sympathy for the poor fellows whose aspirations, failures,
dissipations, and friendships he portrays. Of two young critics he
says: "And they wrote of human merit and human unworthiness and broke
hearts as if they were breaking egg-shells." He writes of their
unconscious inhumanity and blindness in a way that reveals his own
clearness of vision and fundamental humanity. The laughter of a somber
humorist has in it a tenderness unknown to merry natures.
The dramatic and literary critic may profitably read the chapter
called "Checkmate," in which the young journalist is made to say: "The
public does not want to have an opinion, it wants to satisfy its
passions. If I praise your enemy you writhe like a worm and tell me
that I have no judgment; if I praise your friend, you tell me that I
have. Take that last piece of the Dramatic Theatre, Fatty, which has
just been published in book form.... It's quite safe to say that there
isn't enough action in it: that's a phrase the public knows well;
laugh a little at the 'beautiful language'; that's good, old
disparaging praise; then attack the management for having accepted
such a play and point out that the moral teaching is doubtful--a very
safe thing to say about most things."
Strindberg's imagination visualized and dramatized everything. He made
plays of an astonishing variety of ideas ranging from wild poetic
fantasy to grim realism--a range as great as Ibsen's and greater than
Hauptmann's.
Glance at those in the third volume of Mr. Bjorkman's translations,
not to analyze them but merely to note their diversity. "Swanwhite" is
a fairy fantasy of love, confessedly inspired by Maeterlinck, yet in
no sense an imitation of him. "Advent" is a Christmas miracle play,
which embodies a gentle sermon on the forgiveness of sins--a strange
sermon from the man who wrote the last chapter of "By the Open Sea!"
"Debit and Credit" is a realistic sketch portraying the man who
succeeds at the expense of other people. "The Thunderstorm" plays upon
an old theme, one that Strindberg knew by experience, the failure of
marriage between an elderly man and a young woman. It ends rather
serenely for Strindberg, whose last years were not peaceful: "It's
getting dark, but then comes reason to light us with its bull's-eyes,
so that we don't go astray.... Close the windows and pull down the
shades so that all memories can lie down and sleep in peace of old
age."
In "After the Fire" the vanity and dishonesty of petty people are
ruthlessly exposed. The Stranger who finds all reputations to have
been based on sham and all pride founded on wind, is said to be
Strindberg himself. "Vanity, vanity.... You tiny earth; you, the
densest and heaviest of all planets--that's what makes everything on
you so heavy--so heavy to breathe, so heavy to carry. The cross is
your symbol, but it might just as well have been a fool's cap or a
strait-jacket--you world of delusions and deluded!"
TAGORE