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We are going to tell the truth. It has been on our mind for some
time. We are going to tell it exactly, without any balancing or
trimming or crimped edges. We are weary of talking about
trivialities and are going to come plump and plain to the
adventures of our own mind. These are real adventures, just as
real as the things we see. The green frog that took refuge on our
porch last night was no more real. Perhaps frogs don't care so
much for wet as they are supposed to, for when that excellent
thunderstorm came along and the ceiling of the night was sheeted
with lilac brightness, through which ran quivering threads of
naked fire (not just the soft, tame, flabby fire of the domestic
hearth, but the real core and marrow of flame, its hungry,
terrible, destroying self), our friend the frog came hopping up
on the porch where we stood, apparently to take shelter. How
brilliant was his black and silver eye when we picked him up! His
direct and honourable regard somehow made us feel ashamed, we
know not why. And yet we have plenty to be ashamed about--but how
did he know? He was still on the porch this morning. Equally real
was the catbird on the hedge as we came down toward the station.
She--we call her so, for there was unmistakable ladyhood in her
delicately tailored trimness--she bickered at us in a cheerful
way, on top of those bushes which were so loaded with the night's
rainfall that they shone a blurred cobweb gray in the lifting
light. Her eye was also dark and polished and lucid, like a bead
of ink. It also had the same effect of tribulation on our spirit.
Neither the catbird nor the frog, we said to ourself, would have
tormented their souls trying to "invent" something to write
about. They would have told what happened to them, and let it go
at that. So, as we walked along under an arcade of maple trees,
admiring the little green seed-biplanes brought down by the
thrash of the rain--they look rather as though they would make
good coathangers for fairies--we asked ourself why we could not
be as straightforward as the bird and the frog, and talk about
what was in our mind.
The most exciting thing that happened to us when we got to New
York last February was finding a book in a yellow wrapper. Its
title was "Old Junk," which appealed to us. The name of the
author was H. M. Tomlinson, which immediately became to us a name
of honour and great meaning. All day and every day intelligent
men find themselves surrounded by oceans of what is quaintly
called "reading matter." Most of it is turgid, lumpy, fuzzy in
texture, squalid in intellect. The rewards of the literary
world--that is, the tangible, potable, spendable rewards--go
mostly to the cheapjack and the mountebank. And yet here was a
man who in every paragraph spoke to the keenest intellectual
sense--who, ten times a page, enchanted the reader with the
surprising and delicious pang given by the critically chosen
word. We sat up late at night reading that book, marvelling at
our good fortune. We wanted to cry aloud (to such as cared to
understand), "Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for here is born a
man who knows how to write!" In our exuberance we seized a pen
and wrote in the stern of our copy: "Here speaks the Lord God of
prose; here is the clear eye, the ironic mind, the compassionate
heart; the thrilling honesty and (apparent) simplicity of great
work." Then we set about making the book known to our friends. We
propelled them into bookshops and made them buy it. We took our
own copy down to William McFee on S.S. _Turrialba_ and a glad
heart was ours when he, too, said it was "the real thing." This
is a small matter, you say? When the discovery of an honest pen
becomes a small matter life will lose something of its savour.
Those who understand will understand; let the others spend their
time in the smoker playing pinochle. Those who care about these
things can get the book for themselves.
Of Mr. Tomlinson in person: he is a London newspaperman, we
understand, and now on the staff of the London _Nation_. (Trust
Mr. Massingham, the editor of that journal, to know an honest
writer when he sees him.) Mr. Tomlinson says of himself:
My life is like my portrait. It won't bear investigation. I am
not conscious of having done anything that would interest either
a policeman or the young lady of the kind who dotes on Daddy Long
Legs; worse luck. It's about time I got down to business and did
something interesting either to one or the other. That is why it
won't bear investigation, this record of mine. I am about as
entertaining as one of the crowd coming out of the factory gates
with his full dinner pail. All my adventures have been no more
than keeping that pail moderately full. I've been doing that
since I was twelve, in all sorts of ways. I was an office boy and
a clerk among London's ships, in the last days of the clippers.
And I am forced to recall some of the things--such as bookkeeping
in a jam factory and stoking on a tramp steamer--I can understand
why I and my fellows, without wanting to, drifted about in
indecision till we drifted into war and drifted into peace. And
of course, I've been a journalist. I am still; and so have seen
much of Africa, America, and Europe, without knowing exactly why.
I was in France in 1914--the August, too, of that year, and woke
up from that nightmare in 1917, after the Vimy Ridge attack, when
I returned to England to sit with my wife and children in a
cellar whenever it was a fine night and listened to the guns and
bombs. God, who knows all, might make something of this sort of
inconsequential drift of one day into the next, but I give it up.
But now we pass to the phase of the matter that puzzles us. How
is it that there are some books which can never have abiding life
until they perish and are born again? We have noticed it so
often. There is a book of a certain sort to which this process
seems inevitable. One need only mention Leonard Merrick or Samuel
Butler as examples. The book, we will suppose, has some peculiar
subtlety or flavour of appeal. (We are thinking at the moment of
William McFee's "Letters From an Ocean Tramp.") It is published
and falls dead. Later on--usually about ten years later--it is
taken up with vigour by some other publisher, the stone is rolled
away from the sepulchre, and it begins to move among its destined
lovers.
This remark is caused by our delighted discovery of a previous
book by the author of "Old Junk." "The Sea and the Jungle" is the
title of it, the tale of a voyage on the tramp steamer _Capella_,
from Swansea to Para in the Brazils, and thence 2,000 miles along
the forests of the Amazon and Madeira rivers. It is the kind of
book whose readers will never forget it; the kind of book that
happens to some happy writers once in a lifetime (and to many
never at all) when the moving hand seems gloriously in gear with
the tremulous and busy mind, and all the spinning earth stands
hearkeningly still waiting for the perfect expression of the
thought. It is the work of a hand trained in laborious task-work
and then set magnificently free, for a few blessed months, under
no burden save that of putting its captaining spirit truthfully
on paper. And this book--in which there is a sea passage that not
even Mr. Conrad has ever bettered--this book, which makes the
utmost self-satisfied heroics of the Prominent Writers of our
market place shrivel uncomfortably in remembrance--this book, we
repeat, though published in this country in 1913, has been long
out of print; and the copy which we were lucky enough to lay hand
on through the courtesy of the State Librarian of Pennsylvania
had not previously been borrowed since November 18, 1913. Someone
asks us if this man can really write. Let us choose a paragraph
for example. This deals with the first day at sea of the tramp
steamer _Capella_:
It was December, but by luck we found a halcyon morning which had
got lost in the year's procession. It was a Sunday morning, and
it had not been ashore. It was still virgin, bearing a vestal
light. It had not been soiled yet by any suspicion of this
trampled planet, this muddy star, which its innocent and tenuous
rays had discovered in the region of night. I thought it still
was regarding us as a lucky find there. Its light was tremulous,
as if with joy and eagerness. I met this discovering morning as
your ambassador while you still slept, and betrayed not, I hope,
any grayness and bleared satiety of ours to its pure, frail, and
lucid regard. That was the last good service I did before leaving
you quite. I was glad to see how well your old earth did meet
such a light, as though it had no difficulty in looking day in
the face. The world was miraculously renewed. It rose, and
received the newborn of Aurora in its arms. There were clouds of
pearl above hills of chrysoprase. The sea ran in volatile flames.
The shadows on the bright deck shot to and fro as we rolled. The
breakfast bell rang not too soon. This was a right beginning.
The above is a paragraph that we have chosen from Mr. Tomlinson's
book almost at random. We could spend the whole afternoon (and a
happy afternoon it would be for us) copying out for you passages
from "The Sea and the Jungle" that would give you the extremity
of pleasure, O high-spirited reader! It is an odd thing, it is a
quaint thing, it is a thing that would seem inconceivable (were
we not tolerably acquainted with the vagaries of the reading
public) that a book of this sort should lie perdu on the shelves
of a few libraries. Yet one must not leap too heartily to the
wrong conclusion. The reading public is avid of good books, but
it does not hear about them. Now we would venture to say that we
know fifty people--nay, two hundred and fifty--who would never
have done thanking us if we could lay a copy of a book of this
sort in their hand. They would think it the greatest favour we
could do them if we could tell them where they could go and lay
down honest money and buy it. And we have to retort that it is
out of print, not procurable.[1] Is it the fault of publishers?
We do not think so--or not very often. For every publisher has
experience of this sort of thing--books that he knows to be of
extraordinary quality and fascination which simply lie like lead
in his stockroom, and people will not listen to what he says
about them. Whose fault is it, then? Heaven knows.
[1] Since this was written, a new edition has been published by
E. P. Dutton & Co.