I
The Chesil Bank was new to me, and it had no message. It was pleasing,
but it was strange, though it was England. It was but a whitewashed
wall topped by a tamarisk hedge. Below the wall was a deserted ridge
and beach of shingle, tawny and glowing, and a wide sea without a ship
in sight. The white wall, the pale and shimmering stones, and the
bright sea, were as far from my own interests as a West Indian cay.
A figure appeared in the distance, so unusual a blot on the shingle
that I watched it two miles away. There was nothing else to do. It
moved with briskness and determination, but appeared to be unconcerned
with anything I could see on that strand. It came straight towards me
as though it knew I was there, and at length handed me a telegram. It
was a smiling and rosy-cheeked little messenger from the post-office,
three miles away. The child waited, like the eternal figure of Eros in
a British uniform, as though it had been doing this, off and on, in
some form or other, since the gods began to sport with the affairs of
earth. “What’s all this about?” I asked Eros. But he only smiled. I
wondered who was in such a hurry to announce something, and opened the
envelope. “Conrad is dead.”
I stared at the messenger for a space, as though there must be
something more to come. But nothing more came. Then the messenger
spoke. “Anything to go back?”
Anything to go back? No, nothing to go back. Somehow, life seems
justified only by some proved friends and the achievements of good men
who are still with us. Once we were so assured of the opulence and
spiritual vitality of mankind that the loss of a notable figure did not
seem to leave us any the poorer. But to-day, when it happens, we feel a
distinct diminution of our light. That has been dimmed of late years by
lusty barbarians, and we look now to the few manifestly superior minds
in our midst to keep our faith in humanity sustained. The certainty
that Joseph Conrad was somewhere in Kent was an assurance of solace in
years that have not been easily borne.
Yet I cannot pretend to intimacy with him, nor to complete absorption
in his work. There was something in him not to be clearly discerned.
It was sought in his books with curiosity, but it did not appear to
be there. The man was only partly seen, as through a veil. Sometimes
his face peered through the filmy obscurity, massively, in still and
overlooking scrutiny, his eyes remote but intent, kindly but dangerous,
a face in a seclusion one could approach but never enter. Most of us
are aware, of course, that we are secluded, and that our friends can
never find out where we are. We wish they could. It is not a joy to us
that, in the nature of things, we must be alone. But Conrad, perhaps,
was more accustomed to exile and a solitary watch under the silent
stars. Occasionally he would vouchsafe a closer glimpse of himself,
something to make us alert, but at once fade into his own place. He
would utter such a word as _Meddlers_, meaning you and me, meaning all
those Englishmen, who, for example, are restive under the constraint
of foolish men and statutes, and plainly show it. He would exclaim
_Humanitarians_ in a way that implied, merely implied, that pitiful men
are a nuisance. My own guess is that he desired to take part in English
affairs, for he had strong antipathies, but that he repressed himself,
doubting his right to--well, to meddle. Perhaps it is as well he kept
out. He would have proved a formidable opponent. But mainly he was
silent about the affairs that provoked the prejudices of the English,
giving no more than an appraising and ironic glance. Or he would, when
we talked with emphasis about our national concerns, make an enigmatic
gesture. He was an aristocrat. Yet what does that mean? Of course he
was. Aristocrat and democrat are tokens that to-day look much alike,
and appear to have no relevance even to a money-lender. We may throw
them away. Everybody has forgotten what they mean.
I suppose it is about eighteen years ago since I began to read
Conrad. I knew of him, but mistrusted the evidence of the critics.
The literature of the sea did not interest me, for I had had some
experience with that rollicking stuff; the stories which, we are told,
have something called “tang” in them, the stories that represent seamen
as good-natured imbeciles, with a violent bully here and there among
them altogether too ingenious and foul-mouthed for comfort. Hearty
yarns! But I happened to know several seamen, and a few ships. However,
one day, in a hurry for a train, I snatched up the _Nigger_, and began
it in the cab on the way to Euston. That was a great surprise. The
_Narcissus_ was certainly the kind of craft which made fast in the
South-West India Dock; and old man Singleton was the embodiment of the
virtues and faults of a race of mariners which, in the year in which
I read the book, had all but gone. Singleton was of the clippers. I
had known some of those men, and I recognised Singleton at once. This
novelist had made a picture of a type of British seaman which, but for
his genius, would have been lost to us and forgotten.
There could be no doubt about it. The _Nigger_ was the thing itself,
and I had never expected to see it. Next I read _Typhoon_; and the
_Nan-Shan_ and her men were exactly what even now you may meet any day
somewhere east of Tower Hill, if you care to look, and know what to
look for. I was not certain whether the critics knew it, but to me it
was plain that this worker, who was a Pole, I was told, had added to
the body of English literature testimony to a period of British ships
and seamen which otherwise would have passed as unmarked as the voyages
of the men of Tyre and Sidon. Its very atmosphere was there. As for
_Youth_ it is, without doubt, one of the finest short narratives in the
language, and there will never be again such a yarn of such a voyage in
such a ship.
Conrad told me that not seldom seamen wrote to him to say that they
knew Singleton well, though “that was not his name.” Of course they
knew Singleton. The novelist was very pleased that he could say
Singleton had been recognised. It was the kind of assurance he needed
then. It is all very well for us to make a fuss now, but Conrad had
given the public his best work years before he received from us
any worthy signal. He was an extremely sensitive man, and shy and
modest, and not so long ago he desired to learn from Englishmen that
his addition to our literature of the sea was just, and the kind
that we approved. We were in no hurry to give it. I met him first
in the company of Norman Douglas and Austin Harrison, in the office
of the _English Review_ in its earlier days. Because I knew he was
a noteworthy man, and because he looked distinguished and a little
haughty, and because only a few weeks before I had reviewed one of his
books of the sea, I was nervous and merely looked on. Presently Douglas
and Harrison began to talk of the affairs of their Review; Conrad
then came over, and stood beside me. He touched my arm, apparently as
nervous as I was myself. “Thank you very much for what you said about
my book. You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”
I was then a journalist on the staff of a daily newspaper. I was at
Sidney Street and elsewhere. But Conrad’s first words to me gave me
one of the shocks of my life. Here was a man, whose work, however
neglected by the public, was manifestly an admirable achievement. It
would be living when much of what was being done in London, and many
of the great men whose names were in the headlines daily, would be
forgotten. It did not want much knowledge to divine that. And hardly
a robust young writer who had a column to fill somewhere every other
day but was assured of his place in the handsome scheme of things, and
expected one to know his work. Yet this man, who had _Youth_ to his
credit, and _Typhoon_ and _Lord Jim_, touched the arm of his junior and
was pleased to say “You do think I am genuine, don’t you?”
A remark of that kind might go far to wreck one’s own career, if it
sank properly in. Yet it is as well to point out that, though modest,
Conrad could be quick enough in attack when folly or presumption
was about. He was not the man to suffer gladly the more ruinous
absurdities of his fellows. It was heartening to see that graciousness
and diffidence suddenly go, and those dark eyes become lambent at the
naming of an arrogant crudity.
I must say there is one of the company of the _Narcissus_ that I
deplore. Conrad should never have shipped that man Donkin. He is
not a man, but an unresolved dislike, a blot in a good book. Donkin
does a little to spoil the voyage of the _Narcissus_, for Conrad
imagined that he had shipped a Cockney; yet Donkin, whenever he speaks,
distresses the ear of a Londoner. We do not know his dialect. I fear
that Donkin may be, if examined, queer evidence of what was behind that
veil which Conrad preferred to keep between himself and his readers.
Mr. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Joseph Conrad’s posthumous
_Tales of Hearsay_, quotes with evident pleasure from one of the
tales: “It requires a certain greatness of soul to interpret
patriotism worthily--or else a sincerity of feeling denied to the
vulgar refinement of modern thought which cannot understand the august
simplicity of a sentiment proceeding from the very nature of things and
men.” Vulgar refinement! A shining epithet. And how it would be quoted
with unction by one group of ardent patriots, who would cheerfully
shoot another group, with admirable sincerity of feeling, because the
patriotism of their opponents, just as sincere if less admirable, stood
in their way! Patriotism doubtless is like true religion. It may be
entirely an expression of faith, and so need not be reasonable. And we
know who have true religion. We have it.
No matter. “There is a fountain in Marrakesh,” says Mr. Cunninghame
Graham, “with a palm tree near it, a gem of Moorish art, with tiles
as iridescent as the scales upon a lizard’s back. Written in Cufic
characters, there is this legend ‘Drink and admire.’ Read and admire;
then return thanks to Allah who gives water to the thirsty and at long
intervals sends us refreshment for the soul.” And we return thanks to
Allah. There is that to go back.