Suppose that a lot of us were living aboard a huge ship. Suppose the
ship didn't rock much, or require any urgent attention, but kept along
on an even keel and left us free to do as we liked. And suppose we got
into the habit of staying below more and more, never coming up on deck
or regarding the sea or the sky. Just played around below, working at
little jobs; eating, starving, quarreling, and arguing in the hold of
that ship.
And then, maybe, something would happen to call us on deck. Some peril,
some storm. And we'd suddenly realize that our life between decks wasn't
all. We'd run up and rub our eyes, and stare around at the black waters,
the vast, heaving waves; and a gale from far spaces would strike us, and
chill us like ice. And we'd think, "By Jove, we're on a ship! And where
is our ship sailing?"
Wars, plagues and famines are the storms that make us run up on deck.
They snatch us up, out of our buying and selling and studying, and show
us our whole human enterprise as a ship, in great danger.
We want to scurry back below, where it's lighted and smaller. Down below
where our toys are. On deck it's too vast, too tremendous....
We want to forget that the human race is on an adventure, sailing no one
knows where, on a magical, treacherous sea.
We have fought our way up from being wild, houseless lemurs, or lower,
and little by little we have built up our curious structure--of
learning, of art, of discovery--a wonderful structure: at least for us
monkey-men. It has been a long struggle. We can guess, looking backward,
what our ancestors had to contend with--how the cavemen fought mammoths,
and their tough sons and daughters fought barbarism. But we want to
forget it. We wish every one now to be genial. We pretend that this
isn't the same earth that our ancestors lived on, but quite a different
planet, where roughness is kept within bounds and where persons wear
gloves and have neat wooden doors they can lock.
But it's the very same earth that old Grandpa Caveman once wrestled
with, and where old Grandma Cavewoman ran for her life twice a week.
We've varnished the surface.
But it's still wild and strange just beneath.
In a book called "The War in the Air," by H. G. Wells (1907) he pictures
the world swimming along quietly, when bang! a war starts! And it
spreads, and takes in East and West, smashes cities, stops everything.
And one of the young men in the story looks around rather dazed, and
says in a low voice: "I've always thought life was a lark. It isn't.
This sort of thing has always been happening, I suppose--these things,
wars and earthquakes, that sweep across all the decency of life. It's
just as though I had woke up to it all for the first time.... And it's
always been so--it's the way of life."
So that's what we need to get used to, that it's _that_ kind of a ship.
We ought to have a sense of the adventure on which we're all bound.
* * * * *
It's not only war--not by a long shot--that gives men that sense. Great
scientists have it. Great sailors. You can sort out the statesmen around
you, the writers, the poets, according to whether or not they ever have
been up on deck.
Theodore Dreiser has, for instance; Arnold Bennett has not. Charles
Dickens did not, and that's why he is ranked below Thackeray. Compare
James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" with George Moore's
"Confessions," and if you apply this criterion, Moore takes a back seat.
* * * * *
There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of
this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad.
Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon him too suddenly, or his boyhood
sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the
men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through
the immense forces surrounding the world. "There they are," one of them
says, as he stands at the rail, "stars, sun, sea, light, darkness,
space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which
man seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed."
We all have that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit
at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up
rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man
must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at
heart,--because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind.
It's as though the man told himself ghost stories about this great
universe. He feels that it ought to have a gracious and powerful master,
leading men along fiery highways to test but not crush them, and
marching them firm-eyed and glorious toward high goals. But instead
there is nothing. The gray, empty wastes of the skies beyond starland
are silent. Or, worse, their one sound is the footfall of that buffoon
Fate.
The way to meet this black situation, according to Conrad, is to face it
with grim steady courage. And that's what he does. It's stirring to
discover the fineness of this man's tragic bravery. But when I get loose
from his spell, and reflect, independently, I ask myself, "After all, is
this performance so brave?"
We must all weigh the universe, each in his own penny-scales, and decide
for ourselves whether to regard it as inspiring or hollow. But letting
our penny-scales frighten us isn't stout-hearted.
If I were to tell myself ghost stories until I was trembling, and then,
with my heart turning cold, firmly walk through the dark, my courage
would be splendid, no doubt, but not finely applied. Conrad's courage is
splendid--it is as great as almost any modern's--but it isn't courageous
of him to busy it with self-conjured dreads.