Chapter D: H. Lawrence 325 (3)

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.

A crew that have left a burning ship in boats find an Eastern port at 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

Sometimes the world, or a section of it, goes wildly cheering after a prophet; and a stranger, watching the multitude, wonders wherein lies the greatness of the great man. The sceptic may be too ignorant to understand or he may be too clear-sighted to be deceived. Not many years ago the tom-tom of the Nobel Prize beat before the tent of the modest and inoffensive Hindoo poet, Rabindranath Tagore. English critics and poets of first-rate authority have called him wonderful. For all I know he may be wonderful, for I have not read all his work in English and I am not well acquainted with Bengali. But I submit that in "The Crescent Moon" and "The Gardener," there is not one great line, not one poem that is arresting, compelling, memorable. Moreover, there is much that is false and weak.

O Great Beyond, O the keen call of thy flute!
O Farthest End, O the keen call of thy flute!

Now that may do in India, but in our part of the world it is feeble orchestration. The poets of the Bible and English poets since the days of the Elizabethan translation have equipped the celestial choirs with more sounding instruments. One cannot without a smile consider the far end of the cosmos playing a flute or a piccolo. Harken to how a supreme poet makes music worthy of the wide spaces:

But thou dost set in statelier pageantry,
Lauded with tumults of the firmament;
Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky,
Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident,
Thou dost thy dying so triumphally;
I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms.

This is from Francis Thompson's "Ode to the Setting Sun." You see the difference. Thompson's lines are poetry. Tagore's simply are not.

Miss May Sinclair, herself a distinguished artist, says that Mr. Tagore's translation of his Bengali poetry into English "preserves, not only all that is essential and eternal in his poetry, but much of the strange music." That may be so, but how does Miss Sinclair know that? Does she understand Bengali? Does she read it and speak it well enough to be sure that Mr. Tagore has translated himself adequately? Is not she affording an instance of criticism that in an excess of enthusiasm runs beyond its own knowledge? Some of Tagore's lines are mildly sweet, and there are some pretty fancies in the Child-Poems. The poem in "The Gardener," which begins:

Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O
Death, my Death?

would be faintly impressive if Walt Whitman had never lived.

Not only are Tagore's lines not great but some of his lines are foolish:

Under the banyan tree you were milking the cow with your hands,
tender and fresh as butter.

Perhaps Mr. Tagore did not know that in English "butter fingers" greasily signifies manual ineptitude. I can not take that line seriously, nor understand how Tagore has become one of England's acknowledged poets. He distorts nature with pathetic fallacies which have not verbal splendor to carry them, as the verbal splendor of Shakespeare, Shelley, and Thompson often carries a metaphor that, so to speak, will not hold water.

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was
hiding its last gold like a miser.

The sunset is not in the least like a miser; and a true lover and observer of nature would not allow himself such a niggardly fallacious image. Are not our friends, the poets and critics, victims of the spell which odd things out of the East put on our occidental minds, the spell that makes some people run after queer preachers and philosophers who talk religion through their turbans?

One is reminded that Mr., or Sir Owen Seaman has in his delicious book of parodies, "The Battle of the Bays", an Edwin-Arnoldy thing that runs like this:

The bulbul hummeth like a book
Upon the pooh-pooh tree,
And now and then he takes a look
At you and me,
At me and you.
Kuchi! Kuchoo!

It is, I confess, sheer perversity that made that stanza come into my head while I was reading Tagore. Tagore does not rhyme; he puts his verses into simple prose, most of which is pleasant enough, but none of which is rich in thought or magnificent in phrase.

Tagore is a faker in the English sense of the word. I do not know what he is in Hindoo. He gives lectures in America to audiences that are, of course, mostly women. Then when he has got all the money he can get from them (for his schools; he is not selfish) he tells them as a Parthian shot that they are idle. If they were not, the poor ignorant dears, he would not have had any audiences or any money. It is caddish to kick the cow that gives the milk. I should rejoice if he took millions from the idle ladies of America to help the ladies of India and to free India from the British murderer and thief. Spoiling the Egyptians is a good game. But it is not playing the game like a man and a philosopher to bite the hand that feeds you.

And it is not manly or philosophic to kiss the hand that strikes you. Tagore with a feeble gesture relinquishes his British title as a protest against British crime in India. If he had been a real philosopher and a true patriot he would not have accepted the title in the first place. The lost leader who sticks a riband in his coat does not recover leadership by throwing the riband away. The political and social beliefs of poets, even of Dante and Shelley and Hugo, are of less importance than their sense of beauty. But there is a connection, not quite impertinent to a purely literary discussion, between the quality of a poet's work and his character as it is expressed when he descends from Parnassus and uses the prose of politicians. It is not surprising that Tagore, who babbles to American chautauquas and allows an English king to tap him on the shoulder, should be a weak and stammering poet. That voice from the east is not impressive. If it is the best that modern India can do, then India is done for intellectually as well as economically.

REMY DE GOURMONT

In "Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas,"[1] Mr. William Aspenwall Bradley has made an excellent selection from the work of Remy de Gourmont; one only regrets that space did not permit him to give us more. He has a gift unfortunately rare among translators: he knows his original and he knows how to write the language into which he translates. He even corrects his master in one place: where de Gourmont, stumbling in a language which he has not quite mastered, writes that the English words, "sweet," and "sweat," are _mots de prononciation identique_, Mr. Bradley gently wipes out the blunder with "words which resemble each other." Not that de Gourmont, with his enormous knowledge, made many such mistakes! I merely note the care and delicacy of the translator.

[1] Decadence and Other Essays on the Culture of Ideas. Remy
de Gourmont. Translated by William Aspenwall Bradley. New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co. 1921.

Without pretending too much to the wisdom which should have ensued, I remember like a shock of light, as if a blind man had suddenly gained his vision, my introduction, a few years ago, to the work of de Gourmont (for which my thanks are due to Mr. Martin Loeffler, who is a distinguished musician and only potentially a man of letters). If you wish to have your darkness illuminated, associate with the wise. If you are groping in a foreign literature, the first man to meet is the critic. The little I know about France of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I owe to having clung to the broad and often elusive coat-tails of Sainte-Beuve. As a guide to the nineteenth century and much else beside--back to Rome and Greece--the most stimulating cicerone is Remy de Gourmont.

When he was born, the gods went crazy and put into one person an elf and a sage, Ariel and Prospero, Morgan and Merlin. It is no uncommon thing when you are reading a French book, by an author with whose work you are not familiar, to find facing the title-page a list of books _du meme auteur_ and to discover that he has published something in all the main divisions of imaginative literature, plays, poems, romances, criticism. It takes a Frenchman to box the literary compass. He assumes that the business of a writer is to write, and he learns and practises all the forms, with varying degrees of success, to be sure, just as a musician, trying all forms, may be at his best in songs or quartettes for strings or symphonies or operas.

De Gourmont played every instrument in the band and played it well. His range and versatility are remarkable even for a Frenchman. He took all knowledge for his province. In spreading his interests wide he never became thin; even when he played on the surface of an idea he somehow, in a page or two, showed the depth of mind and matter underneath. He was, as his American publishers say, poet, critic, dramatist, scholar, biologist, philosopher, novelist, philologist, and grammarian. He was an experimenter and explorer. When he died, just under sixty, he was still looking round with his keen roaming eye, and he was looking sadly, for the war, according to his brother Jean, who writes not sentimentally but like a de Gourmont, killed him.

Even the colossal, universal genius, the Hugo, the Goethe, can not be supreme in every realm of thought, in every type of literary expression. De Gourmont's poetry, to my ignorant alien ear, is not among the best in that prolific and still living period of French poetry which he as critic did so much to encourage. As for de Gourmont's fiction, "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," which he might have tossed with a wink into the lap of Anatole France, does not greatly enrich French fiction, which is already rich in similar achievements. "Couleurs" consists of delightful twittings on ideas, and surely is not greatly important in a nation where one man of letters out of four has mastered the art of the _conte_.

De Gourmont is supremely the critic, the man who digests, interprets, reorganizes the thoughts of other men and in the process adds to those thoughts. His favorite method of reorganization is disorganization, "dissociation" (and by the way, that word is good in English, as in French, and better than Mr. Bradley's "disassociation"). He pulls ideas to pieces and skilfully puts them together again. He is an analyst, a dissector. But the flowers of the garden are not all plucked to shreds and scattered on the paths, nor are they all taken to the laboratory and subjected to the microscope. De Gourmont is interested in things living and in propagating life. "_Toutes nos fleurs sont fraiches, jeunes et pleines d'amour._" He surveys wildernesses and lays out gardens. No other man was ever blessed with such a combination of the safe, sane, intellectually comfortable and the restless, daring, venturesome.

He loves paradoxes because life is full of contradictions, and his paradoxes are often elucidations and conciliations of conflicting ideas, never the cheap and facile paradoxes of a Chesterton. Is Mallarme obscure? There is never absolute, literal obscurity in an honestly written work. Besides, there are too few obscure writers in French. This from a Frenchman whose own writing is a marvel of clarity even when he is handling subtle and difficult ideas! Moreover, de Gourmont's essays on language and style are studies in precision, in definition.

De Gourmont is a wise man, who, like Socrates and William James, is not afraid to joke, and some of his perversities are uttered with his ironic tongue in his cheek. Like all fine humorists he is profoundly serious, and the delicate play of his fingers is backed by terrific muscular scholarship. His method is to appear to be casual, to make the review of a book "_une occasion de parler un peu_" and then to pack into six pages the reading of a lifetime. He manipulates Brunetiere into the corner and annihilates him before you have time to realize that there is no button on the rapier.