http://www.freeliterature.org (images generously made available by the internet archive.) joseph conrad by hugh walpole new york henry holt and company [frontispiece: joseph conrad] to sir sidney colvin in friendship contents i. biography ii. the novelist iii. the poet iv. romance and realism a short bibliography american bibliography index i biography i to any reader of the books of joseph conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making of his art. it may happen often enough that an author's artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of joseph conrad the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters. with the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour his art has been placed we have some compulsory connection. joseph conrad (teodor josef konrad karzeniowski) was born on 6th december 1857, and his birthplace was the ukraine in the south of poland. in 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last polish rebellion, was banished to vologda. the boy lived with his mother and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the ukraine. in 1870 his father died. conrad was then sent to school in cracow and there he remained until 1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. in the month of may, 1878, he first landed on english ground; he knew at that time no english but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the _duke of sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. he became a master in the english merchant service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. in 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various periods during his sea life to mr fisher unwin. with that publisher's acceptance of _almayer's folly_ the third period of his life began. since then his history has been the history of his books. looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical relationship of these three backgrounds--poland, the sea, the inner security and tradition of an english country-side--one can realise what they may make of an artist. that early polish atmosphere, viewed through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be enough to give life and vigour to any poet's temperament. the romantic melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom. growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful tyranny, conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what impulses those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. he sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible. that ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. he discovered the sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. he thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. he found in her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. he found, too, in her service, the type of man who, most strongly, appealed to him. he had known a world composed of threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient struggles against tyranny. he was in the company now of those who realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about it. england had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of freedom, and now on an english ship he realised the practice and performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest possible words. moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in nature. the wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. too much vision had driven his country under the heel of tyranny, had bred in himself a despair of any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to him. then, towards the end of his twenty years' service of the sea, the creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. he wrote, at stray moments of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations, will feel to the end of his days. he has said that if _almayer's folly_ had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world. _almayer's folly_, however, was not rejected; its publication caused _the spectator_ to remark: "the name of mr conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the kipling of the malay archipelago." he had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind from the beginning. he himself, however, may have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when henley accepted _the nigger of the narcissus_ for _the new review_ as a more important date in his new career. that date may serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure. the quiet atmosphere of the england that he had adopted made the final, almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. with such a country behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole "case" of his earlier life. it was as a "case" that he saw it, a "case" that was to produce all those other "cases" that were his books. this has been their history. ii his books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first period, beginning with _almayer's folly_ in 1895, ended with _lord jim_ in 1900. the second contains the two volumes of _youth_ and _typhoon_, the novel _romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with ford madox hueffer, and ends with _nostromo_, published in 1903. the third period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _the secret agent_, and receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _chance_ in 1914, and _victory_ (1915). his first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of view of the "schools," to remain too strong for him, struggles with the very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild beasts behind iron bars. _almayer's folly_ and _the outcast of the islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in the freshness of their discovery of a new world. it was not that their world had not been found before, but rather that conrad, by the force of his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and a new vigour. in the character of almayer, of aissa, of willems, of babalatchi and abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of great things. nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in their style a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. his vision of his background was pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else. these two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _tales of unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, conrad's difficulties. one study in this book, _the return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the cruelest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds. it was, however, as though, with these efforts, conrad flung himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898 what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _the nigger of the narcissus_. this was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death, an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always tender and humorous. conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other vessels, the _narcissus_. never again, except perhaps in _the mirror of the sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. the book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant, abandoned. it is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence. of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period of his work, _lord jim_. this was to remain, until the publication of _chance_, his most popular novel. it is the story of a young englishman's loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious recovery. the first half of the book is a finely sustained development of a vividly remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. here then in 1900 conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to choose his path. his choice was still dictated by the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his creative genius was working. james wait, donkin, jim, marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth. there appeared now in _youth, heart of darkness_ and _typhoon_ three of the finest short stories in the english language, work of reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be abandoned. that salutation of farewell is in _youth_ and its evocation of the east, in _the heart of darkness_ and its evocation of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in _typhoon_ and its evocation of the sea. he was never, after these tales, to write again of the sea as though he were still sailing on it. from this time he belonged, with regret and with some ironic contempt, to the land. this second period closed with the production of a work that was deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _nostromo_. conrad may have known dr monyngham, decoud, mrs gould, old viola; but they became stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man anything for their creation. there is much to be said about _nostromo_, in many ways the greatest of all conrad's works, but, for the moment, one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical births, in a journal--_t.p.'s weekly_--and astonished and bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its critics did not understand it, and its author's own admirers were puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories. _nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one can easily imagine that its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. when, however, in 1907 appeared _the secret agent_, a new attitude was most plainly visible. he was suddenly detached, writing now of "cases" that interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning participation of experience. he is tender towards winnie verloc and her old mother, the two women in _the secret agent_, but he studies them quite dispassionately. that love that clothed jim so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _an outcast of the islands_ accompanied willems to his degraded death, is gone. we have the finer artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. _the secret agent_ is a tale of secret service in london; it contains the wonderfully created figure of verloc and it expresses, to the full, conrad's hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so completely accepted by unimaginative men. in 1911 _under western eyes_ spoke strongly of a russian influence. turgéniev and dostoievsky had too markedly their share in the creation of razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in geneva. moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold. a volume of short stories, _a set of six_, illustrating still more emphatically conrad's new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the napoleonic wars--_the duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note. in 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _'twixt land and sea_, to unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _a smile of fortune_ and _the secret sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. the sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something that conrad has conquered. his contact with the land has taken from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. nevertheless _the secret sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the contrast between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of its moral idea. finally in 1914 appeared _chance_, by no means the finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of _the nigger of the narcissus_, of _lord jim_, of _nostromo_. with the popular success of _chance_ the first period of his work is closed. on the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no prophecy. iii to any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of joseph conrad, no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. _some reminiscences_ and _the mirror of the sea_ demand consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author's work, because they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation. in both these books conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares to read. they are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor fashion. they are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels. _some reminiscences_ has only _tristram shandy_ for its rival in the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. _the mirror of the sea_ has no rival at all. we may suppose that the author did really intend to write his reminiscences when he began. he found a moment that would make a good starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _almayer's folly_; at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _some reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of _almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the maid-servant is still standing in the doorway, the hands of the clock have covered five minutes of the dial. what has occurred is simply that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. it is of the very essence of conrad's art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short. his reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: "ah! yes. i'm interesting, of course, but don't you remember...?" the whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident, not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be crowded about with other incidents. there is the pen one wrote the book with, that pen that belonged to poor old captain b---of the _nonsuch_ who ... or there is the window just behind the writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the year '88 when ... in the course of his thrilling voyage of discovery we are, by a kind of most blessed miracle, told something of mr nicholas b. and of the author's own most fascinating uncle. we even, by an extension of the miracle, learn something of conrad as ship's officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle's house in poland. so by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us, only partially realised. nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both breathless, and, by the virtue of its author's style, solemn, we do obtain, in addition to our glimpses of poland and the sea, one or two revelations of conrad himself. our revelations come to us partly through our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality. partly also through certain deliberate utterances. he tells us: "those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. it rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of fidelity. at a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention i have not been revolutionary in my writings." (page 20.) or again: "all claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free." (page 21.) or again: "even before the most seductive reveries i have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame." (page 194.) this simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some implication of the colour of the work that will arise from them; and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that he was to do. it is for this that _some reminiscences_ is valuable. to read it as a detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _my autobiography_ or _my life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is to be most grievously disappointed. if the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding, disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all their own. no book reveals more clearly the reasons both of conrad's faults and of his merits. no book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. as a work of art there is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of art, overwhelming vitality. but it is formless, ragged, incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured into a friend's ear in a moment of sudden confidence. that may or may not be the best way to conduct reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and enlightening introduction to its author. with _the mirror of the sea_ we are on very different ground. as i have already said, this is conrad's happiest book--indeed, with the possible exception of _the nigger of the narcissus_, his only happy book. he is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. he is here permitting himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at variance with the distrust of his later novels. the book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard papers, with such titles as _landfalls and departures_, _overdue and missing, rulers of east and west, the nursery of the craft_. no reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely binding impression of unity. he has been led, it will seem to him, into the very heart of the company of those who know the sea as she really is, he has been made free of a great order. the foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty, power and cruelty of the sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that sail upon her. this is the trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life and pageant of the sea; it is because conrad holds all three elements in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is the life of the sea. conrad's attitude to the sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and passionate worship. he sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism, her deceits, her cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. he will write of her like this: "the sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. no display of manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. the ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. he cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown ... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty." nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave, and he is that because he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this cruelty. she positively "brings it off," this assertion of her right, and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. in this worship of the sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. he was never again, not even in _typhoon_ and _youth_, to write with such free and spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the "west wind." _the mirror of the sea_ forms then the best possible introduction to conrad's work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion. it presents also, however, in its treatment of the second element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in his novels. about these same men there are certain characteristics to be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later analysis of conrad's creative power, but that nevertheless demand some mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions that he, most naturally, observes. it is, in the first place, to be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from "poor captain b----, who used to suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was approaching a coast," to the dramatic dominic ("from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had never smiled in his life"), are silent and thoughtful. granted this silence, conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast. captain b---dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in the quiet room, "his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea"--"poor p---," with "his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in _punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing looking-glasses, for instance"--that captain who "did everything with an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations, but the result somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart"--that other captain in whom "through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament"--here are little sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well, marlowe, captain mcwhirr, captain lingard, captain mitchell and many others. here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects, such "cases" that it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them. nevertheless they have to be left. he has obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and his picture. not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the soul of the ship. it is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship that _the mirror of the sea_, ultimately, has most to do. as other men write of the woman they have loved, so does conrad write of his ships. he sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft. you may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their crime in speaking of "casting" an anchor when the true technicality is "brought up"--"to an anchor" understood. in the chapter on "yachts" he provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences--"the art of handling ships is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men."... "a ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to mark." indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which i have already spoken, to the book. she grows, as it were, from her birth, in no ordered sequence of events, but admitting us ever more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. he watches her shy, new, in the dock, "her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her."... "she looked modest to me. i imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men." her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of contrast, his companion's "ships are all right...." he explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the wickedly malicious, the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the staid, the decorous. for even the worst of these he has indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. he cannot be severe before such a world of fine spirits. finally, in the episode of the _tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _freya of the seven islands_), in that sinister adventure of dominic and the vile cæsar, he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this material. he gives us the soul of the _tremolino_, the soul of dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. without ever deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his house of romance. this book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of all his books. he has been troubled here by no questions of form, of creation, of development, whether of character or of incident. it is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work. ii the novelist i in discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the theme, as to the form, as to the creation of character. it is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel, as, for instance, _the ring and the book_ and _aurora leigh_ bear witness. all such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain, but these three divisions of theme, form and character do cover many of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his position as novelist and nothing else. that joseph conrad is, in his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. i wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to those histories. concerning the form of the novel the english novelists, until the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but slightly. if they considered the matter they chuckled over their deliberate freedom, as did sterne and fielding. scott considered story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect. jane austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite unaware of her happy possession. the mid-victorians gloriously abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which forbade form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. a new period began at the end of the fifties; but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _evan harrington_ was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _almayer's folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _richard feverel_ had already preceded it. with the coming of george meredith and thomas hardy the form of the novel, springing straight from the shores of france, where _madame bovary_ and _une vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into a question of considerable import. robert louis stevenson showed how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much to say. henry james showed that there was so much to say about everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and rudyard kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. at the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that things were done. _the yellow book_ sprang into a bright existence, flamed, and died. "art for art's sake" was slain by the trial of oscar wilde in 1895. mr wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop assistants and knew something about biology. the fabian society made socialism entertaining. mr bernard shaw foreshadowed a new period and the boer war completed an old one. of the whole question of conrad's place in the history of the english novel and his influence upon it i wish to speak in a later chapter. i would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the french influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its destruction, but, beginning to write in english as he did in the time of _the yellow book_, passing through all the realistic reaction that followed the collapse of æstheticism, seeing the old period washed away by the storm of the boer war, he had, especially prepared for him, a new stage upon which to labour. the time and the season were ideal for the work that he had to do. ii the form in which conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently attacked. his difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as i have already suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. let us imagine, for an instant, an imaginary case. he has seen in some foreign port a quarrel between two seamen. one has "knifed" the other, and the quarrel has been watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken seaman. the author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, _oratio recta_, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the girl are. he describes the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. seen standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. that leads one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for a witness of that we must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. this old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. once she was ... and so the matter continues. it is not so much a deliberate evocation of the most difficult of methods, this manner of narration, as a poignant witness to conrad's own breathless surprise at his discoveries. mr henry james, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says: "it places mr conrad absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing," and his amazement at conrad's patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that in _what maisie knew_ and _the awkward age_ he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. indeed beside the intricate but masterly form of _the awkward age_ the duplicate narration of _chance_ seems child's-play. mr henry james makes the mistake of speaking as though conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the ancient mariner and all the seamen before and after him. conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had generally come to him. he wishes to deny the effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to him. he must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth of it then must he have two or three. consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: _lord jim, nostromo_ and _chance_. it is possible that _lord jim_ was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence. certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the _patna_, or rather the vision of jim and his appalling companions waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. simply in the contemplation of these four men conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the _patna_: "he made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. he was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head." there are also two other "no-account chaps with him"--a sallow-faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and, with these three, jim, "clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on." here are these four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. that boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! at once the artist has fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and discoveries. we, the observers, share the artist's thrill. we watch our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers discovering a gold mine. how much will it yield? how deep will it go? we are thrilled with the suspense. conrad, having discovered his subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. "i was not there myself," he tells us, "but i can show you someone who was." he introduces us to a first-hand witness, marlowe or another. "now tell your story." he has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone's disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself go. he is bothered now by no question but the thorough investigation of his discovery. what had jim done that he should be in such a case? we must have the story of the loss of the _patna_, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and jim's fine, chivalrous soul. marlowe is inexhaustible. he has so much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. at present, so absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. the illusion is perfect. we come to the inquiry. one of the judges is captain brierley. "what! not know captain brierley! ah! but i must tell you! most extraordinary thing!" the world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the _patna_, brierley and jim at the same time! the subject before us seems now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author's hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. we believe even in the eloquent marlowe. then the moment passes. every possible probe into its heart has been made. we are satisfied. there follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method is apparent. the author having created his narrator must continue with him. marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. but the trouble is that we are no longer assured now of the truth and reality of his story. he saw--we cannot for an instant doubt it--that group on the esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly, awaited. but now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic sequel. he must go on--that is the truly terrible thing about marlowe--and at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. the author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, habits and histories. that then is the peril of the method. whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. create your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled. marlowe has certainly been compelled to face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience. _nostromo_ is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. that is not to deny that _nostromo_ is extremely confused in places, but it is a confusion that arises rather from conrad's confidence in the reader's fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. the narrations are sometimes complicated--old captain mitchell does not always achieve authenticity--but on the whole, the reader may be said to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so little about others. but this assurance of the author's that we must have already learnt the main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality of it. this time he has no marlowe. he was there himself. "of course," he says to us, "you know all about that revolution in sulaco, that revolution that the goulds were mixed up with. well, i happened to be there myself. i know all the people concerned, and the central figure was not gould, nor mitchell, nor monyngham--no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. i knew the man well.... he ..." and there we all are. the method is, in this case, as i have already said, completely successful. there may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our conviction of the veracity of it. no one, after a faithful perusal of _nostromo_, can possibly doubt of the existence of sulaco, of the silver mine, of nostromo and decoud, of mrs gould, antonio, the viola girls, of old viola, hirsch, monyngham, gould, sotillo, of the death of viola's wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of decoud alone on the isabels, of hirsch's torture, of captain mitchell's watch--here are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other hands, be fantastic melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth. not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author's word.... here the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing. not so with the third example, _chance_. here, as with _lord jim_, we may find one visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the _patna_ waiting with jim on the esplanade, so our glance back over _chance_ reveals to us that moment when the fynes, from the security of their comfortable home, watch flora de barrel flying down the steps of her horrible brighton house as though the furies pursued her. that desperate flight is the key of the book. the moment of the chivalrous captain anthony's rescue of flora from a world too villainous for her and too double-faced for him gives the book's theme, and never in all the stories that preceded flora's has conrad been so eager to afford us first-hand witnesses. we have, in the first place, the unquenchable marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. to him enter powell, who once served with captain anthony; to these two add the little fynes; there surely you have enough to secure your alliance. but it is precisely the number of witnesses that frightens us. marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible narrator. but not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides from us the figures of captain anthony and flora de barrel. both the knight and the maiden--as the author names them--are retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy for them as we contemplate their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of marlowe, young powell and the fynes. moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of _lord jim_ and the whole of _nostromo_. we believe most emphatically in that first narration of young powell's about his first chance. we believe in the first narration of marlowe, although quite casually he talks like this: "i do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations." we believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). we believe in marlowe's interview with flora on the pavement outside anthony's room. we believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that it would be pleasant to hear flora and anthony speak for themselves, that we resent, a little, marlowe's intimacy which prevents, with patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed. nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured. but when the second half of the book arrives we can be confident no longer. here, as in _lord jim_, it is possible to feel that conrad, having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to continue it. the true thing in _lord jim_ is the affair of the _patna_; the true thing in _chance_ is captain anthony's rescue of flora after her disaster. but whereas in _lord jim_ the sequel to jim's cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to captain anthony's rescue of flora seems to one listener at any rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. that chapter in _chance_ entitled _a moonless night_ is, in the first half of it, surely the worst thing that conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story, _the return_. the conclusion of _chance_ and certain tales in his volume, _within the tides_, make one wonder whether that alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these two qualities. it remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must before the end of _chance_, the form of narration in _oratio recta_ is nothing less than maddening. suddenly we do not believe in marlowe, in powell, in the fynes: we do not believe even in anthony and flora. we are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in. it is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered a charlatan. i have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. we are caught and held by the skinny finger of the ancient mariner. when he has a true tale to tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. but, if his presence be not true ... iii if we turn to the themes that engage joseph conrad's attention we shall see that in almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his irony. he chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom he can admire. "if a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up," we can hear him say. "he can see at once that the odds are too strong for him. but these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings and they will not quail." they command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his love. but at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: "you see. i told you so. he may even think he has won. we know better, you and i." the theme of _almayer's folly_ is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _the nigger of the narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of death, of _lord jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth). _nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first. _chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _typhoon_, the very epitome of conrad's themes, is the struggle of mcwhirr against the storm (here again it is mcwhirr who apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the storm's confident chuckle of ultimate victory). in _heart of darkness_ the victory is to the forest. in _the end of the tether_ captain whalley, one of conrad's finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. the three tales in _'twixt land and sea_ are all themes of this kind--the struggle of simple, unimaginative men against forces too strong for them. in _the secret agent_ winnie verloc, another simple character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. in _under western eyes_ razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals. of conrad's philosophy i must speak in another place: here it is enough to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them and leave defeat or victory to the stars. whatever conrad's books are or are not, it may safely be said that they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler affection. his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding over the inequality of life's battle. his humour, often of a very fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids light-heartedness. tom jones and tristram shandy would have found marlowe, jim and captain anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but i do not deny that they might not have been something the better for a little of it. i have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple that there is nothing in them. the first thing of which one is sure in meeting a number of conrad's characters is that they have existences and histories entirely independent of their introducer's kind offices. conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real histories. one of the distinctions between the modern english novel and the mid-victorian english novel is that modern characters have but little of the robust vitality of their predecessors; the figures in the novel of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them. in the novels of mr henry james we feel at times that the characters fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of mr wells before an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of mr bennett before a creeping wilderness of important insignificances, in those of mr galsworthy before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of mrs wharton before the shadow of mr henry james, even in those of mr hardy before the omnipotence of an inevitable god whom, in spite of his inevitability, mr hardy himself is arranging in the background; it may be claimed for the characters of mr conrad that they yield their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author's own determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat. this is not for a moment to say that joseph conrad is a finer novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries--namely, the assurance that his characters have their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us. the russian tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at the close of _the three sisters_ or _the cherry orchard_ we are left speculating deeply upon "what happened afterwards" to gayef or barbara, to masha or epikhadov; with conrad's sea captains as with tchekov's russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we are told about them. this independence springs partly from the author's eager, almost naïve curiosity. it is impossible for him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. by so doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence, but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the things that he is discovering. we learn, for instance, about captain mcwhirr that he wrote long letters home, beginning always with the words, "my darling wife," and relating in minute detail each successive trip of the _nan-shan_. mrs mcwhirr, we learn, was "a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in the neighbourhood considered as 'quite superior.' the only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good." also in _typhoon_ there is the second mate "who never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention west hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house." how conscious we are of jim's english country parsonage, of captain anthony's loneliness, of marlowe's isolation. by this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole character stands, human and convincing, before us. of the sailors on board the _narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing, we are not curious. there is the skipper, whose wife comes on board, "a real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol."... "very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her over the side. we didn't recognise him at all...." and mr baker, the chief mate! is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends for life? "no one waited for him ashore. mother died; father and two brothers, yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the dogger bank; sister married and unfriendly. quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother-in-law quite respectable enough for him. quite a lady, quite a lady, he thought, sitting down for a moment's rest on the quarter-hatch. time enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere. he didn't like to part with a ship. no one to think about then. the darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck; and mr baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom through many long years he had given the best of a seaman's care. and never a command in sight. not once!" there are others--the abominable donkin for instance. "donkin entered. they discussed the account ... captain allistoun paid. 'i give you a bad discharge,' he said quietly. donkin raised his voice: 'i don't want your bloomin' discharge--keep it. i'm goin' ter 'ave a job hashore.' he turned to us. 'no more bloomin' sea for me,' he said, aloud. all looked at him. he had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his declaration." in how many novels would donkin's life have been limited by the part that he was required to play in the adventures of the _narcissus_? as it is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue only. or there is charley, the boy of the crew--"as i came up i saw a red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, fluffy hair, fall on charley's neck. it was his mother. she slobbered over him:--'oh, my boy! my boy!'--'leggo me,' said charley, 'leggo, mother!' i was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic, courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life to shame. i nodded and passed on, but heard him say again, good-naturedly:--'if you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall 'ave a bob for a drink out of my pay.'" but one passes from these men of the sea--from mcwhirr and baker, from lingard and captain whalley, from captain anthony and jim, with a suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. about such men as mcwhirr and baker he can tell us nothing that we will not believe. he has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little details, mcwhirr's wife, mr baker's proud sister, charley's mother, are their dearest secrets. but with the citizens of the other world--with stein, decoud, gould, verloc, kazumov, the sinister nikita, the little fynes, even the great nostromo himself--we cannot be so confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same perfect sympathy. his theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an _idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly, unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you. but is it? is it not possible that decoud or verloc, feeling the probing finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because they wish to be left alone? decoud himself, for instance--decoud, the imaginative journalist in _nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved, the burning passion for the beautiful antonia. he has yielded enough to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. with verloc again we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as conrad sees him. that first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality and its significance. "his eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed." with many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists' lives beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. because they have lives independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true things. verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of it. at the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very soul. conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground upon which he has placed him. we see the man tied to his rock of an _idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life, other motives, other humours, other terrors. it is perhaps a direct tribute to the author's reserve power that we feel, at the book's close, that we should have been told so much more. even with the great nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with captain whalley or mr bates. nostromo is surely, as a picture, the most romantically satisfying figure in the english novel since scott, with the single exception of thackeray's beatrix--and here i am not forgetting captain silver, david balfour, catriona, nor, in our own immediate time, young beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so unjustly obscure fiction, _the shadow of a titan_. as a picture, nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its romance and realism. from that first vision of him as he rides slowly through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: "... his hat, a gay sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. the bright colours of a mexican serape twisted on the cantle, the enormous silver buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle ..." to that last moment when--"... in the dimly lit room nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. then his head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the capatos of the cargadores died without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings"--we are conscious of his superb figure; and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the book assure us--"in that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from punta mala to azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent capatuz de cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love." his genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. and that soul is not given us--nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us. why is it that the slender sketch of old singleton in _the nigger of the narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more truly, and all the fine summoning of nostromo only leaves him beyond our grasp? we believe in nostromo, but we are told about him--we have not met him. nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the basest ingratitude. when we look back and survey that crowd, so various, so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the daily life of sulaco, or the verloc family (the most poignant scene in the whole of conrad's art--the drive in the cab of old mrs verloc, winnie and stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange gathering, the haldins, nikita, laspara, madame de s----, peter ivanovitch, razumov, at geneva, or the highly coloured figures in _romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in others), falk or amy foster, jacobus and his daughter, jasper and his lover, all these and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? it is, finally, a world that conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know the meredith planet, the hardy planet, the james planet. looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wildernesses. although each work, from the vast _nostromo_ to the minutely perfect _secret sharer_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. and in this, surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work. iii the poet i the poet in conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. the lyrical side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, _the secret agent_, and _under western eyes_, or such short stories as _the informer_, or _il conde_, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent. three elements in the work of conrad the poet as distinct from conrad the novelist deserve consideration--style, atmosphere and philosophy. in the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works and the later. here is a descriptive passage from conrad's second novel, _an outcast of the islands_: "he followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each other under the big tree of the enclosure. the solitary exile of the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. he seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering stars." and from his latest novel, _chance_: "the very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye. in the expiring diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible--almost palpable. young powell felt it. he felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable. the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe." it must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the two. nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. the first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied, something of the "purple patch." we feel that the prose is too dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly affected by the author's determination that it shall be fine. the rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in english, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual fact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture. such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the earlier novels and tales of conrad, in _almayer's folly, tales of unrest, the nigger of the narcissus, typhoon, youth, heart of darkness, lord jim_--prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds like an eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not believe. at its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous. for instance, in the tale called _the return_, there is the following passage:-"he saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. she swayed as if dazed. there was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere. then almost simultaneously he shouted, 'come back,' and she let go the handle of the door. she turned round in peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe--like a grave." the situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words--"moral annihilation," "devouring nowhere," "peaceful desperation," "last chance of life," "terrible," "like a grave." that he shouted gives a final touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage. often, in the earlier books, conrad's style has the awkward over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand him more easily. but there is also, in this earlier style, the marked effect of two influences. one influence is that of the french language and especially of the author of _madame bovary_. when we recollect that conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in french or english, we can understand this french inflection. flaubert's effect on his style is quite unmistakable. this is a sentence of flaubert's: "toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l'envanouissaient sous la poésie du rôle qui l'envahissait; et entrainée vers l'homme par l'illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide ..." and this a sentence of conrad's: "her hands slipped slowly off lingard's shoulders and her arms fell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if to her--to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature--had been revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting." conrad's sentence reads like a direct translation from the french, it is probable, however, that his debt to flaubert and the french language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. the influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and sentences as though he had, in the first years of his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone. the second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater importance--the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature that he had, for so many years, so directly served. if it were not for his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the sea and the forest. it is the poetry of the old testament of which we think in many pages of _almayer's folly_ and _an outcast of the island_, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous emotion. he was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first rapture. he was under the influence of these powers also in that, at that time, they were too strong for him. we feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. his style, in these earlier books, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him--often the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himself with sufficient pause and balance. but in his middle period, in the period of _youth, typhoon, heart of darkness_ and _nostromo_, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will and desire. compare, for a moment, this passage from _typhoon_ with that earlier one from _the outcast of the islands_ that i quoted above: "he watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. she moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest. it ceased suddenly. the still air moaned. above jakes' head a few stars shone into the pit of black vapours. the inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. the stars too seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow." that is poet's work, and poet's work at its finest. instead of impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made the very most of a rather thin moment--feels, indeed, himself that it is thin--we are here under the influence of something that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. the work is thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest material--and yet it remains, through all its discipline, spontaneous. these three tales, _typhoon, youth_ and _heart of darkness_, stand by themselves as the final expression of conrad's lyrical gift. we may remember such characters as mcwhirr, kurtz, marlowe, but they are figures as the old seneschal in _the eve of st agnes_ or the ancient mariner himself are figures. they are as surely complete poems, wrought and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as whitman's _when lilac first on the door-yard bloomed_ or keats' _nightingale_. their author was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist. the third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the things that he intends to do. he is now the slightly ironic artist whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. he is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. he will use them still, but only to show them that they are at his mercy. marlowe, his appointed minister, is older--he must look back now on the colours of _youth_ with an indulgent smile. and when marlowe is absent, in such novels as _the secret agent_ and _under western eyes_, in such a volume of stories as _a set of six_, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned--we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. nevertheless, in that passage from _chance_ quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of _an outcast of the islands_, the lyrical impulse still remains. yes, it is there, but--"young powell felt it." in that magical storm that was _typhoon_ god alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later experience young powell is our companion. ii the question of style devolves here directly into the question of atmosphere. there may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in the matter of atmosphere. there is the novelist who, intent upon his daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business. he produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an english railway station. there is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick slabs. there are the novelists whose theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of stating the facts. of this school are the realists and, in our own day, mr arnold bennett's brighton background in _hilda lessways_ or mrs wharton's new york background in _the house of mirth_ offer most successful examples of such realistic work. the fourth class provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation with the rest of life. our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the contemplation of some scene and is thence extended to the whole vista of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as confined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. such a moment is the death of bazarov in _fathers and children_, the searching of dmitri in _the brothers karamazov_, the scene at the theatre in _the ring and the book_, the london meeting between beauchamp and rené in _beauchamp's career_. it is not only that these scenes are "done" to the full extent of their "doing," it is also that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that unites them with all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; turgéniev, dostoievsky, browning, meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company. but it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply lyrical. mr chesterton, in his breathless _victorian age in literature_, has named this element glamour. in writing of the novels by george eliot he says: "indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a certain indescribable thing called _glamour_, which was the whole stock-in-trade of the brontës, which we feel in dickens when quilp clambers amid rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in thackeray, when edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of castlewood." now this matter of _glamour_ is not all, because dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. his pictures of quilp or the house of the dedlocks or jonas chuzzlewit's escape after the murder do not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate, that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential, it is certain also to have glamour. the potential qualities of conrad's atmosphere are amongst his very strongest gifts and, if we investigate the matter, we see that it is his union of romance and realism that gives such results. of almost no important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. in _the outcast of the islands_, when willems is exiled by captain lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the power of something stronger than ourselves. in _lord jim_ the contrast of jim with the officers of the _patna_ is a contrast not only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain's gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil, degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. in _the nigger of the narcissus_ the death of the negro, james wait, immediately affects the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the negro, that alarms the souls of donkin, of belfast, of singleton, of the boy charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than that single voyage of the _narcissus_. when winnie verloc, her old mother and the boy stevie take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us that the tears of "that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace" should move us as though mrs verloc were our nearest friend. that mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. such examples might be multiplied quite indefinitely. he has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because he is, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. we may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. "now see how firmly it stands," they say. "that last nail settled it." but conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers' later credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries. sometimes, as in _the return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. but, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of aladdin's cave! if he is tracing the tragedy of willems and almayer, a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. we see lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies lingard and almayer, so that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the cards with which lingard tries to build a house for almayer's baby are "a dirty double pack" with which he used to play chinese bézique--it bored almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a remarkable product of chinese genius. the atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which mrs willems is waiting for her abominable husband: "bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their european origin. the biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised clothes-peg. the folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. and on the tumbled blankets that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, joanna sat.... through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!" and this room is set in the very heart of the forests--"the forests unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven--and as indifferent." had i space i could multiply from every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse beating through realistic detail and transforming it. i will, however, select one book, a supreme example of this effect. what i say about _nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of conrad's. the theme of _nostromo_ is the domination of the silver of the sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. the light of the silver shines over the book. it is typified by "the white head of higuerota rising majestically upon the blue." conrad, then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. his atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until that last vision of all of "the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver." sulaco burns with colour. we can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, "great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black," the houses, "in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue," or, after dark, from mrs gould's balcony "towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their evening meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. a man appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. from the harbour end of the calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark shape of the rider." later there is that sinister glimpse of the plaza, "where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias ... and above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows of the intendencia." in its final created beauty sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose gates we watch grimm's princes and princesses passing--but the detail of it is built with careful realism demanded by the "architecture of manchester or birmingham." we wonder, as sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns for us. anthony trollope did, indeed, give us barchester, but barchester is a shadow beside sulaco. mr thomas hardy's wessex map is the most fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of stevenson's chart in _treasure island_. conrad, without any map at all, gives us a familiarity with a small town on the south american coast that far excels our knowledge of barsetshire, wessex and john silver's treasure. if any attentive reader of _nostromo_ were put down in sulaco tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. the detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but never intruding. we do not look back, when the novel is finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. we have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. we are led, at moments of the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in retrospect. there is, for instance, the aristocratic club, that "extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a high official of the holy office. the two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. you turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. the chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, don pépé moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's-length, through an old sta marta newspaper. his horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black brute, with a hammer head--you would have seen in the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of the side-walk!" how perfectly recollected is that passage! can we not hear the exclamation of some reader: "yes--those orange-trees! it was just like that when i was there!" how convinced we are of conrad's unimpeachable veracity! how like him are those remembered details, "the nailed doors," "the fine stone hands," "at arm's-length"!--and can we not sniff something of the author's impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that "hammer-headed horse" of whose adventures with don pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume! he is able, therefore, upon this foundation of a minute and scrupulous realism to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying truth. he does not, in _nostromo_ at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but he _is_ romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of keats or shelley. but with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy hirsch. we remember nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story. here, then, is the secret of conrad's atmosphere. he is the poet, working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. that intention is at the heart of his work from the first line of _almayer's folly_ to the last line of _victory. nostromo_ is not simply the history of certain lives that were concerned in a south american revolution. it _is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for its interpretation.... when, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain limitations. iii as we have already seen, conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men. it is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. he observes them, as they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very last. he admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end. there are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and it is, surely, conrad's harshest limitation that he should never be free from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. so bound is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his faith. we can remember many fine and courageous characters of his creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat. jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: "and that's the end. he passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.... he goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct." conrad's ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of jim's endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain--as vain as stein's butterflies. and, for the rest, as mr curle in his study of conrad has admirably observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by character, least fitted. nostromo, whose heart's desire it is that his merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure. mcwhirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous of god's splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he might as well have never been born. captain brierley, watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... the beast in the jungle is waiting ever ready to leap--the victim is always in his power. it comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. his men of brain--marlowe, decoud, stein--are melancholy and ironic: "if you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is." the only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination. those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. the men of the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. towards captain anthony, towards captain lingard he extends his love and pity. for verloc, for ossipon, for old de barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. for the fynes and their brethren he has contempt. for two women of the land, winnie verloc and mrs gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea captains. this then is quite simply his philosophy. it has no variation or relief. he will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than fate. his ironic melancholy does not, for an instant, hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his own stein: "he says of him that he is 'preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave ...' while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies." utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one english writer whom, in all other ways, conrad most obviously resembles--robert browning. as philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. as artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space than i can give it here. browning's interest in life was derived, on the novelist's side of him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet's side, in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs. conrad has not browning's clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. but he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest realism. browning's realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _sordello_ the most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. is not this exactly what we may say of _nostromo_? mr chesterton has written of browning: "he substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of watteau, and the 'blue spirt of a lighted match' for the monotony of the evening star." conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his mistress' window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain. the characters upon whom robert browning lavished his affection are precisely conrad's characters. is not waring conrad's man? and for the rest, is not mr sludge own brother to verloc and old de barrel? bishop blougram first cousin to the great personage in _the secret agent_, captain anthony brother to caponsacchi, mrs gould sister to pompilia? it is not only that browning and conrad both investigate these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. how deeply would nostromo, decoud, gould, monyngham, the verlocs, flora de barrel, mcwhirr, jim have interested browning! surely conrad has witnessed the revelation of caliban, of childe roland, of james lee's wife, of the figures in the arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at st praxed's church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these discoveries! finally, _the ring and the book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its statement as a "case" of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the simplicity of the characters of pompilia, caponsacchi and the pope, the last frantic appeal of guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that temple that has _chance, lord jim, nostromo_ amongst its other turrets, buttresses and towers. conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as i have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which browning carried romantic-realism showed the author of _almayer's folly_ the signs of the road that he was to follow. if, as has often been said, browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we not now say with equal justice that conrad is as truly poet as novelist? iv romance and realism i the terms, romance and realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of character. the purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in england at any rate, absolutely dead. mr frank swinnerton, in his study of _robert louis stevenson_, said: "stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of england, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. the art was jaded when reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. and if it is dead, stevenson killed it!" we may differ very considerably from mr swinnerton with regard to his estimate of stevenson's present and future literary value without denying that the date of the publication of _st ives_ was also the date of the death of the purely romantic novel. but, surely, here, as mr swinnerton himself infers, the term "romantic" is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular idea of romance. in exactly the same way the term "realism" has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: "i like romances," we hear the modern reader say, "because they take me away from real life, which i desire to forget." in the same way realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. "i like realism," admirers of a certain order of novel exclaim, "because it is so like life. it tells me just what i myself see every day--i know where i am." nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of romance and realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy everyone is almost impossible. i cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an ambition--i can only say that to myself realism is the study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence--romance is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. i do not mean that realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and recorded--it is the essence of observation. in the same way romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. it is, at any rate, understood here that the word romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary divorce from reality, nor does realism imply a detailed and dusty preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. it is possible for romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as realism, but it is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than observation. it is possible for realism to be as eloquent and potential as romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the english novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the french novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards realism, and that the influence of the russian novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in england during the last years, is all towards romantic-realism. if we wished to know exactly what is meant by romantic-realism, such a novel as _the brothers karamazov_, such a play as _the cherry orchard_ are there before us, as the best possible examples. we might say, in a word, that _karamazov_ has, in the england of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _madame bovary_.... ii it is joseph conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this development in the english novel. just as, in the early nineties, mr henry james and mr rudyard kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do mr joseph conrad and mr h. g. wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same position. joseph conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the french novel, showed that realism alone was not enough for him. that is to say that, in presenting the case of almayer, it was not enough for him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. those facts, sordid as they are, make the story of almayer's degradation sufficiently realistic, when it is merely recorded and perceived by any observer. but upon these recorded facts conrad's imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it into relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death. as i have said, the romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation of character. it had not been used for that purpose by sir walter scott, who was, indeed, the first english romantic-realist, but it was so used by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required ground. conrad had, from the first, a poet's--that is to say, a romantic--mind, and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of all honest men. in that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not abated one jot of his romance--_nostromo, lord jim, heart of darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences. the whole history of his development has for its key-stone this determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by his romance. he found in english fiction little that could assist him in this development; the russian novelists were to supply him with his clue. this whole question of russian influence is difficult to define, but that conrad has been influenced by turgéniev a little and by dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _crime and punishment, the idiot, the possessed, the brothers karamazov_ are romantic realism at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to attain. we will never see again heroes of the prince myshkin, dmitri karamazov, nicolas stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of dostoievsky's love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. that power of creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to conrad. captain anthony, nostromo, jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as "cases" involves on them. moreover, conrad does not love humanity. he feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of the land. dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his pursuit of the truth as stendhal or flaubert, he found humanity, as he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--conrad finds humanity pitiable because of its humanity. nevertheless he has been influenced by the russian writer continuously and sometimes obviously. in at least one novel, _under western eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. for that reason, perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though dostoievsky had given him razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. what, however, conrad has in common with the creator of raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his characters. conrad alone of all english novelists shares this zest with the great russian. dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet's cry for colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as turgéniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than they. they have, both of them, created characters simply because characters demanded to be created. we feel that emma bovary was dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. myshkin, the karamazovs, and, in their own degree, nostromo, almayer, mcwhirr, demanded that they should be flung upon the page. instead of seizing upon romance as a means of avoiding character, he has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that, through him, demand existence. this may be said to be the great thing that conrad has done for the english novel--he has brought the zest of creation back into it; the french novelists used life to perfect their art--the russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. that at this moment in russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of kouprin, artzybashev, sologub, merejkovsky, andreiev, shows exhaustion and sterility means nothing; the stream will soon run full again. meanwhile we, in england, know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love. iii finally, what will be the effect of the work of joseph conrad upon the english novel of the future? does this romantic-realism that he has provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? i think that it does. in the work of all of the more interesting younger english novelists--in the work of mr e. m. forster, mr d. h. lawrence, mr j. d. beresford, mr w. l. george, mr frank swinnerton, mr gilbert cannan, miss viola meynell, mr brett young--this influence is to be detected. even with such avowed realists as mr beresford, mr george and mr swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent a novel as mr swinnerton's _on the staircase_ with mr arnold bennett's _sacred and profane love_, or mr galsworthy's _man of property_--and mr e. m. forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose _longest journey_ and _howard's end_ may possibly provide the historian of english literature with dates as important as the publication of _almayer's folly_ in 1895. the answer to this question does not properly belong to this essay. it is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old realism can return. we have been shown in _nostromo_ something that has the colour of _treasure island_ and the reality of _new grub street_. if, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the english novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that at few periods in english literature has the novel shown more signs of a thrilling and original future. for signs of the possible development of conrad himself one may glance for a moment at his last novel, _victory_. the conclusion of _chance_ and the last volume of short stories had shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him, ultimately, from reality. _victory_, splendid tale though it is, does not entirely reassure us. the theme of the book is the pursuit of almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of heyst and lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and slime of mr jones and ricardo. conrad has here then returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and i feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. he prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe is prevented he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his characters. it is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the whole of conrad--the last conversation between heyst and lena--that we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. we see it again in the more fantastic characteristics of mr jones and ricardo, in the presence of the orang-outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. at the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of the thirst-maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its austerity and truth as ever it was. will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and incredibility? he has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline and restraint that were once his law. nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the _almayer's folly_ of 1895 to the _victory_ of 1915, one realises that it was, for the english novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure. a short bibliography of joseph conrad's principal writings [the date is given of the first edition of each book. new edition signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.] almayer's folly: a story of an eastern river _(unwin)_. 1895. new editions: _(nash)_. 1904; _(unwin)_. 1909, 1914, 1915. an outcast of the islands _(unwin)_. 1896. new edition, 1914. the nigger of the "narcissus": a tale of the sea _(heinemann)_. 1897. new edition, 1910. tales of unrest _(unwin)_. 1898. new edition, 1909. lord jim: a tale _(blackwood)_. 1900. new edition, 1914. the inheritors: an extravagant story. by joseph conrad and ford m. hueffer _(heinemann)_. 1901. youth: a narrative, and two other stories _(blackwood)_. 1902. typhoon and other stories _(heinemann)_. 1903. new edition, 1912. romance: a novel. by joseph conrad and ford madox hueffer _(smith, elder)_. 1903. new edition _(nelson)_. 1909. nostromo: a tale of the seaboard _(harper)_. 1904. the mirror of the sea: memories and impressions _(methuen)_. 1906. new editions, 1913, 1915. the secret agent: a simple tale _(methuen)_. 1907. new edition, 1914. a set of six: tales _(methuen)_. 1908. under western eyes _(methuen)_. 1911. new edition, 1915. some reminiscences _(nash)_. 1912. 'twixt land and sea: tales _(dent)_. 1912. new edition, 1914. chance: a tale in two parts _(methuen)_. 1914. within the tides: tales _(dent)_. 1915. victory: an island tale _(methuen)_. 1915. american bibliography almayer's folly: a story of an eastern river _(macmillan)_. 1895. new editions, 1912; _(doubleday)_. 1914. an outcast of the islands _(appleton)_. 1896. new edition _(doubleday)_. 1914. children of the sea: a tale of the forecastle _(dodd, mead)_. 1897. new edition, 1912. new edition under english title: "the nigger of the 'narcissus'" _(doubleday)_. 1914. tales of unrest _(scribner)_. 1898. lord jim _(doubleday)_ 1900. new edition, 1914. the inheritors. by joseph conrad and ford m. hueffer _(mcclure co.)_. 1901. typhoon _(putman)_. 1902. new edition _(doubleday)_. 1914. youth, and two other stories _(mcclure co_. afterwards transferred to _doubleday)_. 1903. falk: amy foster: to-morrow [three stories] _(mcclure co.)_. 1903. new edition _(doubleday)_. 1914. romance. by joseph conrad and ford madox hueffer _(mcclure co_. afterwards transferred to _doubleday)_. 1904. nostromo: a tale of the seaboard _(harper)_. 1904. the mirror of the sea: memories and impressions _(harper)_. 1906. the secret agent: a simple tale _(harper)_. 1907. a point of honour: a military tale _(mcclure co_. afterwards transferred to _doubleday)_. 1908. under western eyes: a novel _(harper)_. 1911. a personal record _(harper)_. 1912. 'twixt land and sea: tales _(doran)_. 1912. new edition _(doubleday)_. 1914. chance: a tale in two parts _(doubleday)_. 1914. a set of six [tales: one, "the duel," previously issued as "a point of honour"] _(doubleday)_. 1915. victory: an island tale _(doubleday)_. 1915. within the tides: tales _(doubleday)_. 1916. index _almayer's folly_ bennett, arnold beresford, j. d. _brothers karamazov, the_ browning _chance_ _cherry orchard, the_ chesterton, g. k. conrad, j., birth; naturalised curle, r. dickens dostoievsky eliot, george _end of the tether, the_ _evan harrington_ _eve of st agnes, the_ flaubert form forster, e. m. _freya of the seven islands_ galsworthy, j. george, w. l. hardy _heart of darkness_ hueffer, f. m. irony james, henry keats kipling, r. _lord jim_ lyrical impulse _madame bovary_ meredith method in fiction mid-victorian english novel _mirror of the sea, the_ nature _nigger of the narcissus, the_ _nostromo_ _outcast of the islands, an_ philosophy poland realism _return, the_ _richard feverel_ _romance_ romance. russian influence sea _secret agent, the_ _secret sharer, the_ _set of six, a_ shaw, bernard ships _smile of fortune, a_ _some reminiscences_ _sordello_ _spectator, the_ stevenson, robert louis style swinnerton, frank _tales of unrest_ tchekov themes tolstoi _t. p.'s weekly_ _tremolino_ trollope, anthony turgéniev _'twixt land and sea_ _typhoon_ _under western eyes_ _une vie_ _victory_ wells, h. g. wharton, mrs whitman _yellow book, the_ _youth_ arbor, michigan, 1966 notes on my books by joseph conrad garden city, n. y., and toronto doubleday, page & company mcmxxi copyright, 1920, 1921, by doubleday, page & company all rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the scandinavian notes on my books almayer's folly i am informed that in criticizing that literature which preys on strange people and prowls in far-off countries, under the shade of palms, in the unsheltered glare of sunbeaten beaches, amongst honest cannibals and the more sophisticated pioneers of our glorious virtues, a lady--distinguished in the world of letters--summed up her disapproval of it by saying that the tales it produced were "de-civilized." and in that sentence not only the tales but, i apprehend, the strange people and the far-off countries also, are finally condemned in a verdict of contemptuous dislike. a woman's judgment: intuitive, clever, expressed with felicitous charm--infallible. a judgment that has nothing to do with justice. the critic and the judge seems to think that in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. and yet it is not so. but the erring magistrate may plead in excuse the misleading nature of the evidence. the picture of life, there as here, is drawn with the same elaboration of detail, coloured with the same tints. only in the cruel serenity of the sky, under the merciless brilliance of the sun, the dazzled eye misses the delicate detail, sees only the strong outlines, while the colours, in the steady light, seem crude and-without shadow. nevertheless it is the same picture. and there is a bond between us and that humanity so far away. i am speaking here of men and women--not of the charming and graceful phantoms that move about in our mud and smoke and are softly luminous with the radiance of all our virtues; that are possessed of all refinements, of all sensibilities, of all wisdom--but, being only phantoms, possess no heart. the sympathies of those are (probably) with the immortals: with the angels above or the devils below. i am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea. for, their land--like ours--lies under the inscrutable eyes of the most high. their hearts--like ours--must endure the load of the gifts from heaven: the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions, the bitterness of our wisdom and the deceptive consolation of our folly. j. c. 1895. an outcast of the islands "an outcast of the islands" is my second novel in the absolute sense of the word; second in conception, second in execution, second as it were in its essence. there was no hesitation, half-formed plan, vague idea, or the vaguest reverie of anything else between it and "almayer's folly." the only doubt i suffered from, after the publication of "almayer's folly," was whether i should write another line for print. those days, now grown so dim, had their poignant moments. neither in my mind nor in my heart had i then given up the sea. in truth i was clinging to it desperately, all the more desperately because, against my will, i could not help feeling that there was something changed in my relation to it. "almayer's folly" had been finished and done with. the mood itself was gone. but it had left the memory of an experience that, both in thought and emotion, was unconnected with the sea, and i suppose that part of my moral being which is rooted in consistency was badly shaken. i was a victim of contrary stresses which produced a state of immobility. i gave myself up to indolence. since it was impossible for me to face both ways i had elected to face nothing. the discovery of new values in life is a very chaotic experience; there is a tremendous amount of jostling and confusion and a momentary feeling of darkness. i let my spirit float supine over that chaos. a phrase of edward garnett's is, as a matter of fact, responsible for this book. the first of the friends i made for myself by my pen it was but natural that he should be the recipient, at that time, of my confidences. one evening when we had dined together and he had listened to the account of my perplexities (i fear he must have been growing a little tired of them) he pointed out that there was no need to determine my future absolutely. then he added: "you have the style, you have the temperament; why not write another?" i believe that as far as one man may wish to influence another man's life edward garnett had a great desire that i should go on writing. at that time, and i may say, ever afterwards, he was always very patient and gentle with me. what strikes me most, however, in the phrase quoted above which was offered to me in a tone of detachment is not its gentleness but its effective wisdom. had he said, "why not go on writing," it is very probable he would have scared me away from pen and ink for ever; but there was nothing either to frighten one or arouse one's antagonism in the mere suggestion to "write another." and thus a dead point in the revolution of my affairs was insidiously got over. the word "another" did it. at about eleven o'clock of a nice london night, edward and i walked along interminable streets talking of many things, and i remember that on getting home i sat down and wrote about half a page of "an outcast of the islands" before i slept. this was committing myself definitely, i won't say to another life, but to another book. there is apparently something in my character which will not allow me to abandon for good any piece of work i have begun. i have laid aside many beginnings. i have laid them aside with sorrow, with disgust, with rage, with melancholy and even with self-contempt; but even at the worst i had an uneasy consciousness that i would have to go back to them. "an outcast of the islands" belongs to those novels of mine that were never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification of "exotic writer" i don't think the charge was at all justified. for the life of me i don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit in the conception or style of that novel. it is certainly the most _tropical_ of my eastern tales. the mere scenery got a great hold on me as i went on, perhaps because (i may just as well confess that) the story itself was never very near my heart. it engaged my imagination much more than my affection. as to my feeling for willems it was but the regard one cannot help having for one's own creation. obviously i could not be indifferent to a man on whose head i had brought so much evil simply by imagining him such as he appears in the novel--and that, too, on a very slight foundation. the man who suggested willems to me was not particularly interesting in himself. my interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange, dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out european living on the reluctant toleration of that settlement hidden in the heart of the forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white men's ship to visit. with his hollow, clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey moustache and eyes without any expression whatever, clad always in a spotless sleeping suit much befrogged in front, which left his lean neck wholly uncovered, and with his bare feet in a pair of straw slippers, he wandered silently amongst the houses in daylight, almost as dumb as an animal and apparently much more homeless. i don't know what he did with himself at night. he must have had a place, a hut, a palm-leaf shed, some sort of hovel where he kept his razor and his change of sleeping suits. an air of futile mystery hung over him, something not exactly dark but obviously ugly. the only definite statement i could extract from anybody was that it was he who had "brought the arabs into the river." that must have happened many years before. but how did he bring them into the river? he could hardly have done it in his arms like a lot of kittens. i knew that almayer founded the chronology of all his misfortunes on the date of that fateful advent; and yet the very first time we dined with almayer there was willems sitting at table with us in the manner of the skeleton at the feast, obviously shunned by everybody, never addressed by any one, and for all recognition of his existence getting now and then from almayer a venomous glance which i observed with great surprise. in the course of the whole evening he ventured one single remark which i didn't catch because his articulation was imperfect, as of a man who had forgotten how to speak. i was the only person who seemed aware of the sound. willems subsided. presently he retired, pointedly unnoticed--into the forest maybe? its immensity was there, within three hundred yards of the verandah, ready to swallow up anything. almayer conversing with my captain did not stop talking while he glared angrily at the retreating back. didn't that fellow bring the arabs into the river! nevertheless willems turned up next morning on almayer's verandah. from the bridge of the steamer i could see plainly these two, breakfasting together, tête à tête and, i suppose, in dead silence, one with his air of being no longer interested in this world and the other raising his eyes now and then with intense dislike. it was clear that in those days willems lived on almayer's charity. yet on returning two months later to sambir i heard that he had gone on an expedition up the river in charge of a steam-launch belonging to the arabs, to make some discovery or other. on account of the strange reluctance that everyone manifested to talk about willems it was impossible for me to get at the rights of that transaction. moreover, i was a newcomer, the youngest of the company, and, i suspect, not judged quite fit as yet for a full confidence. i was not much concerned about that exclusion. the faint suggestion of plots and mysteries pertaining to all matters touching almayer's affairs amused me vastly. almayer was obviously very much affected. i believe he missed willems immensely. he wore an air of sinister preoccupation and talked confidentially with my captain. i could catch only snatches of mumbled sentences. then one morning as i came along the deck to take my place at the breakfast table almayer checked himself in his low-toned discourse. my captain's face was perfectly impenetrable. there was a moment of profound silence and then as if unable to contain himself almayer burst out in a loud vicious tone: "one thing's certain; if he finds anything worth having up there they will poison him like a dog." disconnected though it was, that phrase, as food for thought, was distinctly worth hearing. we left the river three days afterwards and i never returned to sambir; but whatever happened to the protagonist of my willems nobody can deny that i have recorded for him a less squalid fate. j. c. 1919. nigger of the 'narcissus' to my readers in america from that evening when james wait joined the ship--late for the muster of the crew--to the moment when he left us in the open sea, shrouded in sailcloth, through the open port, i had much to do with him. he was in my watch. a negro in a british forecastle is a lonely being. he has no chums. yet james wait, afraid of death and making her his accomplice, was an impostor of some character--mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions. but in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's collective psychology and the pivot of the action. yet he, who in the family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the nigger, remains very precious to me. for the book written round him is not the sort of thing that can be attempted more than once in a life-time. it is the book by which, not as a novelist perhaps, but as an artist striving for the utmost sincerity of expression, i am willing to stand or fall. its pages are the tribute of my unalterable and profound affection for the ships, the seamen, the winds and the great sea--the moulders of my youth, the companions of the best years of my life. after writing the last words of that book, in the revulsion of feeling before the accomplished task, i understood that i had done with the sea, and that henceforth i had to be a writer. and almost without laying down the pen i wrote a preface, trying to express the spirit in which i was entering on the task of my new life. that preface on advice (which i now think was wrong) was never published with the book. but the late w. e. henley, who had the courage at that time (1897) to serialize my "nigger" in the _new review_ judged it worthy to be printed as an afterword at the end of the last instalment of the tale. i am glad that this book which means so much to me is coming out again, under its proper title of "the nigger of the _narcissus_" and under the auspices of my good friends and publishers messrs. doubleday, page & co. into the light of publicity. half the span of a generation has passed since w. e. henley, after reading two chapters, sent me a verbal message: "tell conrad that if the rest is up to the sample it shall certainly come out in the _new review_." the most gratifying recollection of my writer's life! and here is the suppressed preface. joseph conrad. 1914. preface a work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. and art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. it is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential--their one illuminating and convincing quality--the very truth of their existence. the artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts--whence, presently, emerging, they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. they speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism--but always to our credulity. and their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims. it is otherwise with the artist. confronted by the same enigmatical spectacle the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. his appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities--like the vulnerable body within a steel armour. his appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and sooner forgotten. yet its effect endures for ever. the changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. but the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition--and, therefore, more permanently enduring. he speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. it is only some such train of thought, or rather of feeling, that can in a measure explain the aim of the attempt, made in the tale which follows, to present an unrestful episode in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless. for, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. the motive, then, may be held to justify the matter of the work; but this preface, which is simply an avowal of endeavour, cannot end here--for the avowal is not yet complete. fiction--if it at all aspires to be art--appeals to temperament. and in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. all art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. it must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music--which is the art of arts. and it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance; it is only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. the sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose. and if his conscience is clear, his 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_. that--and no more, and it is everything. if i succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm--all you demand--and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. to snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. the task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. it is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth--disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. in a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. it is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. the enduring part of them--the truth which each only imperfectly veils--should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: realism, romanticism, naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism (which, like the poor, is exceedingly difficult to get rid of), all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him--even on the very threshold of the temple--to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work. in that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of art for art, itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. it sounds far off. it has ceased to be a cry, and is heard only as a whisper, often incomprehensible, but at times and faintly encouraging. sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. we watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. it may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. if we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. we understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength--and perhaps he had not the knowledge. we forgive, go on our way--and forget. and so it is with the workman of art. art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. and thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little about the aim--the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult--obscured by mists. it is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the laws of nature. it is not less great, but only more difficult. to arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile--such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. but sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. and when it is accomplished--behold!--all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile--and the return to an eternal rest. j. c. 1897. tales of unrest of the five stories in this volume the lagoon, the last in order, is the earliest in date. it is the first short story i ever wrote and marks, in a manner of speaking, the end of my first phase, the malayan phase with its special subject and its verbal suggestions. conceived in the same mood which produced "almayer's folly" and "an outcast of the islands," it is told in the same breath (with what was left of it, that is, after the end of "an outcast"), seen with the same vision rendered in the same method--if such a thing as method did exist then in my conscious relation to this new adventure of writing for print. i doubt it very much. one does one's work first and theorizes about it afterwards. it is a very amusing and egotistical occupation of no use whatever to any one and just as likely as not to lead to false conclusions. anybody can see that between the last paragraph of "an outcast" and the first of the lagoon there has been no change of pen, figuratively speaking. it happens also to be literally true. it was the same pen: a common steel pen. having been charged with a certain lack of emotional faculty i am glad to be able to say that on one occasion at least i did give way to a sentimental impulse. i thought the pen had been a good pen and that it had done enough for me, and so, with the idea of keeping it for a sort of memento on which i could look later with tender eyes, i put it into my waistcoat pocket. afterwards it used to turn up in all sorts of places, at the bottom of small drawers, among my studs in cardboard boxes, till at last it found permanent rest in a large wooden bowl containing some loose keys, bits of sealing wax, bits of string, small broken chains, a few buttons, and similar minute wreckage that washes out of a man's life into such receptacles. i would catch sight of it from time to time with a distinct feeling of satisfaction till, one day, i perceived with horror that there were two old pens in there. how the other pen found its way into the bowl instead of the fireplace or waste-paper basket i can't imagine, but there the two were, lying side by side, both encrusted with ink and completely undistinguishable from each other. it was very distressing, but being determined not to share my sentiment between two pens or run the risk of sentimentalizing over a mere stranger, i threw them both out of the window into a flower bed--which strikes me now as a poetical grave for the remnants of one's past. but the tale remained. it was first fixed in print in the _cornhill magazine_, being my first appearance in a serial of any kind; and i have lived long enough to see it most agreeably guyed by mr. max beerbohm in a volume of parodies entitled "a christmas garland," where i found myself in very good company. i was immensely gratified. i began to believe in my public existence. i have much to thank the lagoon for. my next effort in short story writing was a departure--i mean a departure from the malay archipelago. without premeditation, without sorrow, without rejoicing and almost without noticing it, i stepped into the very different atmosphere of an outpost of progress. i found there a different moral attitude. i seemed able to capture new reactions, new suggestions, and even new rhythms for my paragraphs. for a moment i fancied myself a new man--a most exciting illusion. it clung to me for some time, monstrous, half conviction and half hope as to its body with an iridescent tail of dreams and with a changeable head like a plastic mask. it was only later that i perceived that in common with the rest of men nothing could deliver me from my fatal consistency. we cannot escape from ourselves. an outpost of progress is the lightest part of the loot i carried off from central africa, the main portion being of course the heart of darkness. other men have found a lot of quite different things there and i have the comfortable conviction that what i took would not have been of much use to anybody else. and it must be said that it was but a very small amount of plunder. all of it could go into one's breast pocket when folded neatly. as for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials. the sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent which i do not possess. the idiots is such an obviously derivative piece of work that it is impossible for me to say anything about it here. the suggestion of it was not mental but visual: the actual idiots. it was after an interval of long groping amongst vague impulses and hesitations which ended in the production of "the nigger" that i turned to my third short story in the order of time, the first in this volume: karain: a memory. reading it after many years karain produced on me the effect of something seen through a pair of glasses from a rather advantageous position. in that story i had not gone back to the archipelago, i had only turned for another look at it. i admit that i was absorbed by the distant view, so absorbed that i didn't notice then that the _motif_ of the story is almost identical with the _motif_ of the lagoon. however, the idea at the back is very different; but the story is mainly made memorable to me by the fact that it was my first contribution to _blackwood's magazine_ and that it led to my personal acquaintance with mr. william blackwood whose guarded appreciation i felt nevertheless to be genuine, and prized accordingly. karain was begun on a sudden impulse only three days after i wrote the last line of "the nigger," and the recollection of its difficulties is mixed up with the worries of the unfinished return, the last pages of which i took up again at the time; the only instance in my life when i made an attempt to write with both hands at once as it were. indeed my innermost feeling, now, is that the return is a left-handed production. looking through that story lately i had the material impression of sitting under a large and expensive umbrella in the loud drumming of a furious rain-shower. it was very distracting. in the general uproar one could hear every individual drop strike on the stout and distended silk. mentally, the reading rendered me dumb for the remainder of the day, not exactly with astonishment but with a sort of dismal wonder. i don't want to talk disrespectfully of any pages of mine. psychologically there were no doubt good reasons for my attempt; and it was worth while, if only to see of what excesses i was capable in that sort of virtuosity. in this connection i should like to confess my surprise on finding that notwithstanding all its apparatus of analysis the story consists for the most part of physical impressions; impressions of sound and sight, railway station, streets, a trotting horse, reflections in mirrors and so on, rendered as if for their own sake and combined with a sublimated description of a desirable middle class town-residence which somehow manages to produce a sinister effect. for the rest any kind word about the return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for i know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in disillusion. j. c. lord jim when this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that i had been bolted away with. some reviewers maintained that the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer's control. one or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which seemed to amuse them. they pointed out the limitations of the narrative form. they argued that no man could have been expected to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. it was not, they said, very credible. after thinking it over for something like sixteen years i am not so sure about that. men have been known, both in tropics and in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night "swapping yarns." this, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners' endurance, the postulate must be accepted that the story _was_ interesting. it is the necessary preliminary assumption. if i hadn't believed that it _was_ interesting i could never have begun to write it. as to the mere physical possibility we all know that some speeches in parliament have taken nearer six than three hours in delivery; whereas all that part of the book which is marlow's narrative can be read through aloud, i should say, in less than three hours. besides--though i have kept strictly all such insignificant details out of the tale--we may presume that there must have been refreshments on that night, a glass of mineral water of some sort to help the narrator on. but, seriously, the truth of the matter is, that my first thought was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more. and that was a legitimate conception. after writing a few pages, however, i became for some reason discontented and i laid them aside for a time. i didn't take them out of the drawer till the late mr. william blackwood suggested i should give something again to his magazine. it was only then that i perceived that the pilgrim ship episode was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole "sentiment of existence" in a simple and sensitive character. but all these preliminary moods and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the time, and they do not appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so many years. the few pages i had laid aside were not without their weight in the choice of subject. but the whole was re-written deliberately. when i sat down to it i knew it would be a long book, though i didn't foresee that it would spread itself over thirteen numbers of _maga_. i have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine i liked best. i am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works. as a matter of principle i will have no favourites; but i don't go so far as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my "lord jim." i won't even say that i "fail to understand...." no! but once i had occasion to be puzzled and surprised. a friend of mine returning from italy had talked with a lady there who did not like the book. i regretted that, of course, but what surprised me was the ground of her dislike. "you know," she said, "it is all so morbid." the pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought. finally i arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibilities, the lady could not have been an italian. i wonder whether she was european at all? in any case, no latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. such a consciousness may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial; and, perhaps, my jim is not a type of wide commonness. but i can safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking. he's not a figure of northern mists either. one sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an eastern roadstead, i saw his form pass by--appealing--significant--under a cloud--perfectly silent. which is as it should be. it was for me, with all the sympathy of which i was capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. he was "one of us." j. c. june, 1917. youth the three stories in this volume lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. the only bond between them is that of the time in which they were written. they belong to the period immediately following the publication of "the nigger of the _narcissus_," and preceding the first conception of "nostromo," two books which, it seems to me, stand apart and by themselves in the body of my work. it is also the period during which i contributed to _maga_; a period dominated by "lord jim" and associated in my grateful memory with the late mr. william blackwood's encouraging and helpful kindness. "youth" was not my first contribution to _maga_. it was the second. but that story marks the first appearance in the world of the man marlow, with whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years. the origins of that gentleman (nobody as far as i know had ever hinted that he was anything but that)--his origins have been the subject of some literary speculation of, i am glad to say, a friendly nature. one would think that i am the proper person to throw a light on the matter; but in truth i find that it isn't so easy. it is pleasant to remember that nobody had charged him with fraudulent purposes or looked down on him as a charlatan; but apart from that he was supposed to be all sorts of things: a clever screen, a mere device, a "personator," a familiar spirit, a whispering "dæmon." i myself have been suspected of a meditated plan for his capture. that is not so. i made no plans. the man marlow and i came together in the casual manner of those health-resort acquaintances which sometimes ripen into friendships. this one has ripened. for all his assertiveness in matters of opinion he is not an intrusive person. he haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay our heads together in great comfort and harmony; but as we part at the end of a tale i am never sure that it may not be for the last time. yet i don't think that either of us would care much to survive the other. in his case, at any rate, his occupation would be gone and he would suffer from that extinction, because i suspect him of some vanity. i don't mean vanity in the solomonian sense. of all my people he's the one that has never been a vexation to my spirit. a most discreet, understanding man.... even before appearing in book-form "youth" was very well received. it lies on me to confess at last, and this is as good a place for it as another, that i have been all my life--all my two lives--the spoiled adopted child of great britain and even of the empire; for it was australia that gave me my first command. i break out into this declaration not because of a lurking tendency to megalomania, but, on the contrary, as a man who has no very notable illusions about himself. i follow the instinct of vain-glory and humility natural to all mankind. for it can hardly be denied that it is not their own deserts that men are most proud of, but rather of their prodigious luck, of their marvellous fortune: of that in their lives for which thanks and sacrifices must be offered on the altars of the inscrutable gods. heart of darkness also received a certain amount of notice from the first; and of its origins this much may be said: it is well known that curious men go prying into all sorts of places (where they have no business) and come out of them with all kinds of spoil. this story, and one other, not in this volume, are all the spoil i brought out from the centre of africa, where, really, i had no sort of business. more ambitious in its scope and longer in the telling, heart of darkness is quite as authentic in fundamentals as youth. it is, obviously, written in another mood. i won't characterize the mood precisely, but anybody can see that it is anything but the mood of wistful regret, of reminiscent tenderness. one more remark may be added. youth is a feat of memory. it is a record of experience; but that experience, in its facts, in its inwardness and in its outward colouring, begins and ends in myself. heart of darkness is experience, too; but it is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, i believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. there it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. it was like another art altogether. that sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, i hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck. after saying so much there remains the last tale of the book, still untouched. the end of the tether is a story of sea-life in a rather special way; and the most intimate thing i can say of it is this: that having lived that life fully, amongst its men, its thoughts and sensations, i have found it possible, without the slightest misgiving, in all sincerity of heart and peace of conscience, to conceive the existence of captain whalley's personality and to relate the manner of his end. this statement acquires some force from the circumstance that the pages of that story--a fair half of the book--are also the product of experience. that experience belongs (like "youth's") to the time before i ever thought of putting pen to paper. as to its "reality" that is for the readers to determine. one had to pick up one's facts here and there. more skill would have made them more real and the whole composition more interesting. but here we are approaching the veiled region of artistic values which it would be improper and indeed dangerous for me to enter. i have looked over the proofs, have corrected a misprint or two, have changed a word or two--and that's all. it is not very likely that i shall ever read the end of the tether again. no more need be said. it accords best with my feelings to part from captain whalley in affectionate silence. j. c. 1917. typhoon the main characteristic of this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book. the period is that which follows on my connection with _blackwood's magazine_. i had just finished writing the end of the tether and was casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of "youth" when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies from singapore to some port in northern china occurred to my recollection. years before i had heard it being talked about in the east as a recent occurrence. it was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. they have never had the time to get acquainted with them. life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster. i never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship's life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck. neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. in that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like. the financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men's idle talk for which it was not adapted. from the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement i might say, that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation. yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. i felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place. what was needed of course was captain macwhirr. directly i perceived him i could see that he was the man for the situation. i don't mean to say that i ever saw captain macwhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. macwhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. he is the product of twenty years of life. my own life. conscious invention had little to do with him. if it is true that captain macwhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which i find for my part extremely difficult to believe) i can also assure my readers that he is perfectly authentic. i may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while i confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my actual experience. at its first appearance "typhoon," the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. others picked out macwhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. neither was exclusively my intention. both the typhoon and captain macwhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction with which i approached the subject of the story. it was their opportunity. it was also my opportunity, and it would be vain to discourse about what i made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for themselves. this is a belated reflection. if it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away with the existence of this author's note; for, indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume. none of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word. experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture. each of them has its more than one intention. with each the question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for itself in words which, if i may say so without undue solemnity, were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations. and each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive reader. falk--the second story in the volume--offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject. but what is the subject of falk? i personally do not feel so very certain about it. he who reads must find out for himself. my intention in writing falk was not to shock anybody. as in most of my writings i insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. but in everything i have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions. i may safely say that falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. as he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale. if we go by mere facts then the subject is falk's attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side. falk shares with one other of my stories (the return in the "tales of unrest" volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. i think the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it indignantly on the sole ground that "the girl never says anything." this is perfectly true. from first to last hermann's niece utters no word in the tale--and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason that whenever she happens to come under the observation of the narrator she has either no occasion or is too profoundly moved to speak. the editor, who obviously had read the story, might have perceived that for himself. apparently he did not, and i refrained from pointing out the impossibility to him because, since he did not venture to say that "the girl" did not live, i felt no concern at his indignation. all the other stories were serialized. "typhoon" appeared in the early numbers of the _pall mall magazine_, then under the direction of the late mr. halkett. it was on that occasion too, that i saw for the first time my conceptions rendered by an artist in another medium. mr. maurice greiffenhagen knew how to combine in his illustrations the effect of his own most distinguished personal vision with an absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the writer. amy foster was published in _the illustrated london news_ with a fine drawing of amy on her day out giving tea to the children at her home in a hat with a big feather. to-morrow appeared first in the _pall mall magazine_. of that story i will only say that it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and that i was induced to dramatize it under the title of "one day more"; up to the present my only effort in that direction. i may also add that each of the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on various grounds as the "best of the lot" by different critics, who reviewed the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a sympathetic insight and a friendliness of expression for which i cannot be sufficiently grateful. j. c. 1919. nostromo "nostromo" is the most anxiously meditated of the longer novels which belong to the period following upon the publication of the "typhoon" volume of short stories. i don't mean to say that i became then conscious of any impending change in my mentality and in my attitude towards the tasks of my writing life. and perhaps there was never any change, except in that mysterious, extraneous thing which has nothing to do with the theories of art; a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration; a phenomenon for which i can not in any way be held responsible. what, however, did cause me some concern was that after finishing the last story of the "typhoon" volume it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about. this so strangely negative but disturbing mood lasted some little time; and then, as with many of my longer stories, the first hint for "nostromo" came to me in the shape of a vagrant anecdote completely destitute of valuable details. as a matter of fact in 1875 or '6, when very young, in the west indies or rather in the gulf of mexico, for my contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting, i heard the story of some man who was supposed to have stolen single-handed a whole lighter-full of silver, somewhere on the tierra firme seaboard during the troubles of a revolution. on the face of it this was something of a feat. but i heard no details, and having no particular interest in crime _qua_ crime i was not likely to keep that one in my mind. and i forgot it till twenty-six or seven years afterwards i came upon the very thing in a shabby volume picked up outside a second-hand book-shop. it was the life story of an american seaman written by himself with the assistance of a journalist. in the course of his wanderings that american sailor worked for some months on board a schooner, the master and owner of which was the thief of whom i had heard in my very young days. i have no doubt of that because there could hardly have been two exploits of the peculiar kind in the same part of the world and both connected with a south american revolution. the fellow had actually managed to steal a lighter with silver, and this, it seems only because he was implicitly trusted by his employers, who must have been singularly poor judges of character. in the sailor's story he is represented as an unmitigated rascal, a small cheat, stupidly ferocious, morose, of mean appearance, and altogether unworthy of the greatness this opportunity had thrust upon him. what was interesting was that he would boast of it openly. he used to say: "people think i make a lot of money in this schooner of mine. but that is nothing. i don't care for that. now and then i go away quietly and lift a bar of silver. i must get rich slowly--you understand." there was also another curious point about the man. once in the course of some quarrel the sailor threatened him: "what's to prevent me reporting ashore what you have told me about that silver?" the cynical ruffian was not alarmed in the least. he actually laughed. "you fool, if you dare talk like that on shore about me you will get a knife stuck in your back. every man, woman, and child in that port is my friend. and who's to prove the lighter wasn't sunk? i didn't show you where the silver is hidden. did i? so you know nothing. and suppose i lied? eh?" ultimately the sailor, disgusted with the sordid meanness of that impenitent thief, deserted from the schooner. the whole episode takes about three pages of his autobiography. nothing to speak of; but as i looked them over, the curious confirmation of the few casual words heard in my early youth evoked the memories of that distant time when everything was so fresh, so surprising, so venturesome, so interesting; bits of strange coasts under the stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men's passions in the dusk, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim.... perhaps, perhaps, there still was in the world something to write about. yet i did not see anything at first in the mere story. a rascal steals a large parcel of a valuable commodity--so people say. it's either true or untrue; and in any case it has no value in itself. to invent a circumstantial account of the robbery did not appeal to me, because my talents not running that way i did not think that the game was worth the candle. it was only when it dawned upon me that the purloiner of the treasure need not necessarily be a confirmed rogue, that he could be even a man of character, an actor and possibly a victim in the changing scenes of a revolution, it was only then that i had the first vision of a twilight country which was to become the province of sulaco, with its high shadowy sierra and its misty campo for mute witnesses of events flowing from the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil. such are in very truth the obscure origins of "nostromo"--the book. from that moment, i suppose, it had to be. yet even then i hesitate, as if warned by the instinct of self-preservation from venturing on a distant and toilsome journey into a land full of intrigues and revolutions. but it had to be done. it took the best part of the years 1903-4 to do; with many intervals of renewed hesitation, lest i should lose myself in the ever-enlarging vistas opening before me as i progressed deeper in my knowledge of the country. often, also, when i had thought myself to a standstill over the tangled-up affairs of the republic, i would, figuratively speaking, pack my bag, rush away from sulaco for a change of air and write a few pages of "the mirror of the sea." but generally, as i've said before, my sojourn on the continent of latin america, famed for its hospitality, lasted for about two years. on my return i found (speaking somewhat in the style of captain gulliver) my family all well, my wife heartily glad to learn that the fuss was all over, and our small boy considerably grown during my absence. my principal authority for the history of costaguana is, of course, my venerated friend, the late don josé avellanos, minister to the courts of england and spain, etc., etc., in his impartial and eloquent "history of fifty years of misrule." that work was never published--the reader will discover why--and i am in fact the only person in the world possessed of its contents. i have mastered them in not a few hours of earnest meditation, and i hope that my accuracy will be trusted. in justice to myself, and to allay the fears of prospective readers, i beg to point out that the few historical allusions are never dragged in for the sake of parading my unique erudition, but that each of them is closely related to actuality; either throwing a light on the nature of current events or affecting directly the fortunes of the people of whom i speak. as to their own histories i have tried to set them down, aristocracy and people, men and women, latin and anglo-saxon, bandit and politician, with as cool a hand as was possible in the heat and clash of my own conflicting emotions. and after all this is also the story of their conflicts. it is for the reader to say how far they are deserving of interest in their actions and in the secret purposes of their hearts revealed in the bitter necessities of the time. i confess that, for me, that time is the time of firm friendships and unforgotten hospitalities. and in my gratitude i must mention here mrs. gould, "the first lady of sulaco," whom we may safely leave to the secret devotion of dr. monygham, and charles gould, the idealist-creator of material interests whom we must leave to his mine--from which there is no escape in this world. about nostromo, the second of the two racially and socially contrasted men, both captured by the silver of the san tomé mine, i feel bound to say something more. i did not hesitate to make that central figure an italian. first of all the thing is perfectly credible: italians were swarming into the occidental province at the time, as anybody who will read further can see; and secondly, there was no one who could stand so well by the side of giorgio viola the garibaldino, the idealist of the old, humanitarian revolutions. for myself i needed there a man of the people as free as possible from his class-conventions and all settled modes of thinking. this is not a side snarl at conventions. my reasons were not moral but artistic. had he been an anglo-saxon he would have tried to get into local politics. but nostromo does not aspire to be a leader in a personal game. he does not want to raise himself above the mass. he is content to feel himself a power--within the people. but mainly nostromo is what he is because i received the inspiration for him in my early days from a mediterranean sailor. those who have read certain pages of mine will see at once what i mean when i say that dominic, the padrone of the _tremolino_, might under given circumstances have been a nostromo. at any rate dominic would have understood the younger man perfectly--if scornfully. he and i were engaged together in a rather absurd adventure, but the absurdity does not matter. it is a real satisfaction to think that in my very young days there must, after all, have been something in me worthy to command that man's half-bitter fidelity, his half-ironic devotion. many of nostromo's speeches i have heard first in dominic's voice. his hand on the tiller and his fearless eyes roaming the horizon from within the monkish hood shadowing his face, he would utter the usual exordium of his remorseless wisdom: "vous autres gentilhommes!" in a caustic tone that hangs on my ear yet. like nostromo! "you hombres finos!" very much like nostromo. but dominic the corsican nursed a certain pride of ancestry from which my nostromo is free; for nostromo's lineage had to be more ancient still. he is a man with the weight of countless generations behind him and no parentage to boast of.... like the people. in his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness and in his faithful devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a man of the people, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within. years afterwards, grown older as the famous captain fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending the lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a man of the people. in his mingled love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the people, their undoubted great man--with a private history of his own. one more figure of those stirring times i would like to mention: and that is antonia avellanos--the "beautiful antonia." whether she is a possible variation of latin-american girlhood i wouldn't dare to affirm. but, for me, she _is_. always a little in the background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) i hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what i am going to say. of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the occidental republic, she is the only one who has kept in my memory the aspect of continued life. antonia the aristocrat and nostromo the man of the people are the artisans of the new era, the true creators of the new state; he by his legendary and daring feat, she, like a woman, simply by the force of what she is: the only being capable of inspiring a sincere passion in the heart of a trifler. if anything could induce me to revisit sulaco (i should hate to see all these changes) it would be antonia. and the true reason for that--why not be frank about it?--the true reason is that i have modelled her on my first love. how we, a band of tallish school-boys, the chums of her two brothers, how we used to look up to that girl just out of the schoolroom herself, as the standard-bearer of a faith to which we all were born but which she alone knew how to hold aloft with an unflinching hope! she had perhaps more glow and less serenity in her soul than antonia, but she was an uncompromising puritan of patriotism with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. i was not the only one in love with her; but it was i who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities--very much like poor decoud--or stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. she did not quite understand--but never mind. that afternoon when i came in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye i received a hand-squeeze that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. she was softened at the last as though she had suddenly perceived (we were such children still!) that i was really going away for good, going very far away--even as far as sulaco, lying unknown, hidden from our eyes in the darkness of the placid gulf. that's why i long sometimes for another glimpse of the "beautiful antonia" (or can it be the other?) moving in the dimness of the great cathedral, saying a short prayer at the tomb of the first and last cardinal-archbishop of sulaco, standing absorbed in filial devotion before the monument of don josé avellanos, and, with a lingering, tender, faithful glance at the medallion-memorial to martin decoud, going out serenely into the sunshine of the plaza with her upright carriage and her white head; a relic of the past disregarded by men awaiting impatiently the dawns of other new eras, the coming of more revolutions. but this is the idlest of dreams; for i did understand perfectly well at the time that the moment the breath left the body of the magnificent capataz, the man of the people, freed at last from the toils of love and wealth, there was nothing more for me to do in sulaco. j. c. october, 1917. mirror of the sea less perhaps than any other book written by me, or anybody else, does this volume require a preface. yet since all the others including even the "personal record", which is but a fragment of biography, are to have their author's notes, i cannot possibly leave this one without, lest a false impression of indifference or weariness should be created. i can see only too well that it is not going to be an easy task. necessity--the mother of invention--being even unthinkable in this case, i do not know what to invent in the way of discourse; and necessity being also the greatest possible incentive to exertion i don't even know how to begin to exert myself. here too the natural inclination comes in. i have been all my life averse from exertion. under these discouraging circumstances i am, however, bound to proceed from a sense of duty. this note is a thing promised. in less than a minute's time by a few incautious words i entered into a bond which has lain on my heart heavily ever since. for, this book is a very intimate revelation; and what that is revealing can a few more pages add to some three hundred others of most sincere disclosures? i have attempted here to lay bare with the unreserve of a last hour's confession the terms of my relation with the sea, which beginning mysteriously, like any great passion the inscrutable gods send to mortals, went on unreasoning and invincible, surviving the test of disillusion, defying the disenchantment that lurks in every day of a strenuous life; went on full of love's delight and love's anguish, facing them in open-eyed exultation, without bitterness and without repining, from the first hour to the last. subjugated but never unmanned i surrendered my being to that passion which various and great like life itself had also its periods of wonderful serenity which even a fickle mistress can give sometimes on her soothed breast, full of wiles, full of fury, and yet capable of an enchanting sweetness. and if anybody suggest that this must be the lyric illusion of an old, romantic heart, i can answer that for twenty years i had lived like a hermit with my passion! beyond the line of the sea horizon the world for me did not exist as assuredly as it does not exist for the mystics who take refuge on the tops of high mountains. i am speaking now of that innermost life, containing the best and the worst that can happen to us in the temperamental depths of our being, where a man indeed must live alone but need not give up all hope of holding converse with his kind. this perhaps is enough for me to say on this particular occasion about these, my parting words, about this, my last mood in my great passion for the sea. i call it great because it was great to me. others may call it a foolish infatuation. those words have been applied to every love story. but whatever it may be the fact remains that it was something too great for words. this is what i always felt vaguely; and therefore the following pages rest like a true confession on matters of fact which to a friendly and charitable person may convey the inner truth of almost a life-time. from sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, yet it is a pretty long stretch of that sort of experience which teaches a man slowly to see and feel. it is for me a distinct period; and when i emerged from it into another air, as it were, and said to myself: "now i must speak of these things or remain unknown to the end of my days," it was with the ineradicable hope, that accompanies one through solitude as well as through a crowd, of ultimately, some day, at some moment, making myself understood. and i have been! i have been understood as completely as it is possible to be understood in this, our world, which seems to be mostly composed of riddles. there have been things said about this book which have moved me profoundly; the more profoundly because they were uttered by men whose occupation was avowedly to understand, and analyze, and expound--in a word, by literary critics. they spoke out according to their conscience, and some of them said things that made me feel both glad and sorry of ever having entered upon my confession. dimly or clearly, they perceived the character of my intention and ended by judging me worthy to have made the attempt. they saw it was of a revealing character, but in some cases they thought that the revelation was not complete. one of them said: "in reading these chapters one is always hoping for the revelation; but the personality is never quite revealed. we can only say that this thing happened to mr. conrad, that he knew such a man and that thus life passed him leaving those memories. they are the records of the events of his life, not in every instance striking or decisive events but rather those haphazard events which for no definite reason impress themselves upon the mind and recur in memory long afterward as symbols of one knows not what sacred ritual taking place behind the veil." to this i can only say that this book written in perfect sincerity holds back nothing--unless the mere bodily presence of the writer. within these pages i make a full confession not of my sins but of my emotions. it is the best tribute my piety can offer to the ultimate shapers of my character, convictions, and, in a sense, destiny--to the imperishable sea, to the ships that are no more and to the simple men who have had their day. j. c. 1919. the secret agent the origin of "the secret agent": subject, treatment, artistic purpose and every other motive that may induce an author to take up his pen, can, i believe, be traced to a period of mental and emotional reaction. the actual facts are that i began this book impulsively and wrote it continuously. when in due course it was bound and delivered to the public gaze i found myself reproved for having produced it at all. some of the admonitions were severe, others had a sorrowful note. i have not got them textually before me but i remember perfectly the general argument, which was very simple; and also my surprise at its nature. all this sounds a very old story now! and yet it is not such a long time ago. i must conclude that i had still preserved much of my pristine innocence in the year 1907. it seems to me now that even an artless person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the ground of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale. that, of course, is a serious objection. it was not universal. in fact, it seems ungracious to remember so little reproof amongst so much intelligent and sympathetic appreciation; and i trust that the readers of this preface will not hasten to put it down to wounded vanity of a natural disposition to ingratitude. i suggest that a charitable heart could very well ascribe my choice to natural modesty. yet it isn't exactly modesty that makes me select reproof for the illustration of my case. no, it isn't exactly modesty. i am not at all certain that i am modest; but those who have read so far through my work will credit me with enough decency, tact, savoir faire, what you will, to prevent me from making a song for my own glory out of the words of other people. no! the true motive of my selection lies in quite a different trait. i have always had a propensity to justify my action. not to defend. to justify. not to insist that i was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses. that kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. he loves the obvious. he shrinks from explanations. yet i will go on with mine. it's obvious that i need not have written that book. i was under no necessity to deal with that subject; using the word subject both in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of mankind. this i fully admit. but the thought of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to surprise my readers by a change of front, has never entered my head. in making this statement i expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt, prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in the outward circumstances of the setting. the inception of "the secret agent" followed immediately on a two years' period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote novel, "nostromo," with its far off latin-american atmosphere; and the profoundly personal "mirror of the sea." the first an intense creative effort on what i suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my life-time. it was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made me feel (the task once done) as if i were left behind, aimless amongst mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior, values. i don't know whether i really felt that i wanted a change, change in my imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. i rather think that a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. i don't remember anything definite happening. with "the mirror of the sea" finished in the full consciousness that i had dealt honestly with myself and my readers in every line of that book, i gave myself up to a not unhappy pause. then, while i was yet standing still, as it were, and certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly, the subject of "the secret agent"--i mean the tale--came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about i don't remember now. i remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically eager for self-destruction. that was what made for me its philosophical pretences so unpardonable. presently, passing to particular instances, we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the greenwich observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought. for perverse unreason has its own logical processes. but that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. as to the outer wall of the observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack. i pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: "oh, that fellow was half on idiot. his sister committed suicide afterwards." these were absolutely the only words that passed between us; for extreme surprise at this unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment and he began at once to talk of something else. it never occurred to me later to ask how he arrived at his knowledge. i am sure that if he had seen once in his life the back of an anarchist that must have been the whole extent of his connection with the underworld. he was, however, a man who liked to talk with all sorts of people, and he may have gathered those illuminating facts at second or third hand, from a crossing-sweeper, from a retired police officer, from some vague man in his club, or even, perhaps, from a minister of state met at some public or private reception. of the illuminating quality there could be no doubt whatever. one felt like walking out of a forest on to a plain--there was not much to see but one had plenty of light. no, there was not much to see and, frankly, for a considerable time i didn't even attempt to perceive anything. it was only the illuminating impression that remained. it remained satisfactory but in a passive way. then, about a week later, i came upon a book which as far as i know had never attained any prominence, the rather summary recollections of an assistant commissioner of police, an obviously able man with a strong religious strain in his character who was appointed to his post at the time of the dynamite outrages in london, away back in the eighties. the book was fairly interesting, very discreet of course; and i have by now forgotten the bulk of its contents. it contained no revelations, it ran over the surface agreeably, and that was all. i won't even try to explain why i should have been arrested by a little passage of about seven lines, in which the author (i believe his name was anderson) reproduced a short dialogue held in the lobby of the house of commons after some unexpected anarchist outrage, with the home secretary. i think it was sir william harcourt then. he was very much irritated and the official was very apologetic. the phrase, amongst the three which passed between them, that struck me most was sir w. harcourt's angry sally: "all that's very well. but your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping the home secretary in the dark." characteristic enough of sir w. harcourt's temper but not much in itself. there must have been, however, some sort of atmosphere in the whole incident because all of a sudden i felt myself stimulated. and then ensued in my mind what a student of chemistry would best understand from the analogy of the addition of the tiniest little drop of the right kind, precipitating the process of crystallization in a test tube containing some colourless solution. it was at first for me a mental change, disturbing a quieted-down imagination, in which strange forms, sharp in outline but imperfectly apprehended, appeared and claimed attention as crystals will do by their bizarre and unexpected shapes. one fell to musing before the phenomenon--even of the past: of south america, a continent of crude sunshine and brutal revolutions, of the sea, the vast expanse of salt waters, the mirror of heaven's frowns and smiles, the reflector of the world's light. then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven's frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world's light. there was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives. irresistibly the town became the background for the ensuing period of deep and tentative meditations. endless vistas opened before me in various directions. it would take years to find the right way! it seemed to take years!... slowly the dawning conviction of mrs. verloc's maternal passion grew up to a flame between me and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour and receiving from it in exchange some of its own sombre colouring. at last the story of winnie verloc stood out complete from the days of her childhood to the end, unproportioned as yet, with everything still on the first plan, as it were; but ready now to be dealt with. it was a matter of about three days. _this_ book is _that_ story, reduced to manageable proportions, its whole course suggested and centred round the absurd cruelty of the greenwich park explosion. i had there a task i will not say arduous but of the most absorbing difficulty. but it had to be done. it was a necessity. the figures grouped about mrs. verloc and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that "life doesn't stand much looking into," are the outcome of that very necessity. personally i have never had any doubt of the reality of mrs. verloc's story; but it had to be disengaged from its obscurity in that immense town, it had to be made credible, i don't mean so much as to her soul but as to her surroundings, not so much as to her psychology but as to her humanity. for the surroundings hints were not lacking. i had to fight hard to keep at arms-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over london in my early days, lest they should rush in and overwhelm each page of the story as these emerged one after another from a mood as serious in feeling and thought as any in which i ever wrote a line. in that respect i really think that "the secret agent" is a perfectly genuine piece of work. even the purely artistic purpose, that of applying an ironic method to a subject of that kind, was formulated with deliberation and in the earnest belief that ironic treatment alone would enable me to say all i felt i would have to say in scorn as well as in pity. it is one of the minor satisfactions of my writing life that having taken that resolve i did manage, it seems to me, to carry it right through to the end. as to the personages whom the absolute necessity of the case--mrs. verloc's case--brings out in front of the london background, from them, too, i obtained those little satisfactions which really count for so much against the mass of oppressive doubts that haunt so persistently on every attempt at creative work. for instance, of mr. vladimir himself (who was fair game for a caricatural presentation) i was gratified to hear that an experienced man of the world had said "that conrad must have been in touch with that sphere or else has an excellent intuition of things," because mr. vladimir was "not only possible in detail but quite right in essentials." then a visitor from america informed me that all sorts of revolutionary refugees in new york would have it that the book was written by somebody who knew a lot about them. this seemed to me a very high compliment, considering that, as a matter of hard fact, i had seen even less of their kind than the omniscient friend who gave me the first suggestion for the novel. i have no doubt, however, that there had been moments during the writing of the book when i was an extreme revolutionist, i won't say more convinced than they but certainly cherishing a more concentrated purpose than any of them had ever done in the whole course of his life. i don't say this to boast. i was simply attending to my business. in the matter of all my books i have always attended to my business. i have attended to it with complete self-surrender. and this statement, too, is not a boast. i could not have done otherwise. it would have bored me too much to make-believe. the suggestions for certain personages of the tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps, here and there, some reader may have recognized. they are not very recondite. but i am not concerned here to legitimize any of those people, and even as to my general view of the moral reactions as between the criminal and the police all i will venture to say is that it seems to me to be at least arguable. the twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book have not changed my attitude. i do not regret having written it. lately, circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. i have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. i confess that it makes a grisly skeleton. but still i will submit that telling winnie verloc's story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness and despair, and telling it as i have told it here, i have not intended to commit gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind. j. c. 1920. a set of six the six stories in this volume are the result of some three or four years of occasional work. the dates of their writing are far apart, their origins are various. none of them are connected directly with personal experiences. in all of them the facts are inherently true, by which i mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened. for instance, the last story in the volume the one i call pathetic, whose first title is il conde (mis-spelt by-the-by) is an almost verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old gentleman whom i met in italy. i don't mean to say it is only that. anybody can see that it is something more than a verbatim report, but where he left off and where i began must be left to the acute discrimination of the reader who may be interested in the problem. i don't mean to say that the problem is worth the trouble. what i am certain of, however, is that it is not to be solved, for i am not at all clear about it myself by this time. all i can say is that the personality of the narrator was extremely suggestive quite apart from the story he was telling me. i heard a few years ago that he had died far away from his beloved naples where that "abominable adventure" did really happen to him. thus the genealogy of il conde is simple. it is not the case with the other stories. various strains contributed to their composition, and the nature of many of those i have forgotten, not having the habit of making notes either before or after the fact. i mean the fact of writing a story. what i remember best about caspar ruiz is that it was written, or at any rate begun, within a month of finishing "nostromo," but apart from the locality, and that a pretty wide one (all the south american continent), the novel and the story have nothing in common, neither mood, nor intention and, certainly, not the style. the manner for the most part is that of general santierra, and that old warrior, i note with satisfaction, is very true to himself all through. looking now dispassionately at the various ways in which this story could have been presented i can't honestly think the general superfluous. it is he, an old man talking of the days of his youth, who characterizes the whole narrative and gives it an air of actuality which i doubt whether i could have achieved without his help. in the mere writing his existence of course was of no help at all, because the whole thing had to be carefully kept within the frame of his simple mind. but all this is but a laborious searching of memories. my present feeling is that the story could not have been told otherwise. the hint for gaspar ruiz, the man, i found in a book by captain basil hall, r. n., who was for some time, between the years 1824 and 1828, senior officer of a small british squadron on the west coast of south america. his book published in the thirties obtained a certain celebrity and i suppose is to be found still in some libraries. the curious who may be mistrusting my imagination are referred to that printed document, vol. ii, i forget the page, but it is somewhere not far from the end. another document connected with this story is a letter of a biting and ironic kind from a friend then in burma, passing certain strictures upon "the gentleman with the gun on his back" which i do not intend to make accessible to the public. yet the gun episode did really happen, or at least i am bound to believe it because i remember it, described in an extremely matter-of-fact tone, in some book i read in my boyhood; and i am not going to discard the beliefs of my boyhood for anybody on earth. the brute, which is the only sea-story in the volume, is, like il conde, associated with a direct narrative and based on a suggestion gathered on warm human lips. i will not disclose the real name of the criminal ship but the first i heard of her homicidal habits was from the late captain blake, commanding a london ship in which i served in 1884 as second officer. captain blake was, of all my commanders, the one i remember with the greatest affection. i have sketched in his personality, without however mentioning his name, in the first paper of "the mirror of the sea." in his young days he had had a personal experience of the brute and it is perhaps for that reason that i have put the story into the mouth of a young man and made of it what the reader will see. the existence of the brute was a fact. the end of the brute as related in the story is also a fact, well-known at the time though it really happened to another ship, of great beauty of form and of blameless character, which certainly deserved a better fate. i have unscrupulously adapted it to the needs of my story thinking that i had there something in the nature of poetical justice. i hope that little villainy will not cast a shadow upon the general honesty of my proceedings as a writer of tales. of the informer and the anarchist i will say next to nothing. the pedigree of these tales is hopelessly complicated and not worth disentangling at this distance of time. i found them and here they are. the discriminating reader will guess that i have found them within my mind; but how they or their elements came in there i have forgotten for the most part; and for the rest i really don't see why i should give myself away more than i have done already. it remains for me only now to mention the duel, the longest story in the book. that story attained the dignity of publication all by itself in a small illustrated volume, under the title, "the point of honour." that was many years ago. it has been since reinstated in its proper place, which is the place it occupies in this volume, in all the subsequent editions of my work. its pedigree is extremely simple. it springs from a ten-line paragraph in a small provincial paper published in the south of france. that paragraph, occasioned by a duel with a fatal ending between two well-known parisian personalities, referred for some reason or other to the "well-known fact" of two officers in napoleon's grand army having fought a series of duels in the midst of great wars and on some futile pretext. the pretext was never disclosed. i had therefore to invent it; and i think that, given the character of the two officers which i had to invent, too, i have made it sufficiently convincing by the mere force of its absurdity. the truth is that in my mind the story is nothing but a serious and even earnest attempt at a bit of historical fiction. i had heard in my boyhood a good deal of the great napoleonic legend. i had a genuine feeling that i would find myself at home in it, and the duel is the result of that feeling, or, if the reader prefers, of that presumption. personally i have no qualms of conscience about this piece of work. the story might have been better told of course. all one's work might have been better done; but this is the sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain for ever a private vision, an evanescent reverie. how many of those visions have i seen vanish in my time! this one, however, has remained, a testimony, if you like, to my courage or a proof of my rashness. what i care to remember best is the testimony of some french readers who volunteered the opinion that in those hundred pages or so i had managed to render "wonderfully" the spirit of the whole epoch. exaggeration of kindness no doubt; but even so i hug it still to my breast, because in truth that is exactly what i was trying to capture in my small net: the spirit of the epoch--never purely militarist in the long clash of arms, youthful, almost childlike in its exaltation of sentiment--naïvely heroic in its faith. j. c. 1920. under western eyes it must be admitted that by the mere force of circumstances "under western eyes" has become already a sort of historical novel dealing with the past. this reflection bears entirely upon the events of the tale; but being as a whole an attempt to render not so much the political state as the psychology of russia itself, i venture to hope that it has not lost all its interest. i am encouraged in this flattering belief by noticing that in many articles on russian affairs of the present day reference is made to certain sayings and opinions uttered in the pages that follow, in a manner testifying to the clearness of my vision and the correctness of my judgment. i need not say that in writing this novel i had no other object in view than to express imaginatively the general truth which underlies its action, together with my honest convictions as to the moral complexion of certain facts more or less known to the whole world. as to the actual creation i may say that when i began to write i had a distinct conception of the first part only, with the three figures of haldin, razumov, and councillor mikulin, defined exactly in my mind. it was only after i had finished writing the first part that the whole story revealed itself to me in its tragic character and in the march of its events as unavoidable and sufficiently ample in its outline to give free play to my creative instinct and to the dramatic possibilities of the subject. the course of action need not be explained. it has suggested itself more as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking. it is the result not of a special experience but of general knowledge, fortified by earnest meditation. my greatest anxiety was in being able to strike and sustain the note of scrupulous fairness. the obligation of absolute fairness was imposed on me historically and hereditarily, by the peculiar experience of race and family, and, in addition, by my primary conviction that truth alone is the justification of any fiction which can make the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time. i had never been called before to a greater effort of detachment: detachment from all passions, prejudices and even from personal memories. "under western eyes" on its first appearance in england was a failure with the public, perhaps because of that very detachment. i obtained my reward some six years later when i first heard that the book had found universal recognition in russia and had been re-published there in many editions. the various figures playing their part in the story also owe their existence to no special experience but to the general knowledge of the condition of russia and of the moral and emotional reactions of the russian temperament to the pressure of tyrannical lawlessness, which, in general human terms, could be reduced to the formula of senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny. what i was concerned with mainly was the aspect, the character, and the fate of the individuals as they appeared to the western eyes of the old teacher of languages. he himself has been much criticized; but i will not at this late hour undertake to justify his existence. he was useful to me and therefore i think that he must be useful to the reader both in the way of comment and by the part he plays in the development of the story. in my desire to produce the effect of actuality it seemed to me indispensable to have an eye-witness of the transactions in geneva. i needed also a sympathetic friend for miss haldin, who otherwise would have been too much alone and unsupported to be perfectly credible. she would have had no one to whom she could give a glimpse of her idealistic faith, of her great heart, and of her simple emotions. razumov is treated sympathetically. why should he not be? he is an ordinary young man, with a healthy capacity for work and sane ambitions. he has an average conscience. if he is slightly abnormal it is only in his sensitiveness to his position. being nobody's child he feels rather more keenly than another would that he is a russian--or he is nothing. he is perfectly right in looking on all russia as his heritage. the sanguinary futility of the crimes and the sacrifices seething in that amorphous mass envelops and crushes him. but i don't think that in his distraction he is ever monstrous. nobody is exhibited as a monster here--neither the simple-minded tekla nor the wrong-headed sophia antonovna. peter ivanovitch and madame de s. are fair game. they are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces deserve. as to nikita--nicknamed necator--he is the perfect flower of the terroristic wilderness. what troubled me most in dealing with him was not his monstrosity but his banality. he has been exhibited to the public eye for years in so-called "disclosures" in newspaper articles, in secret histories, in sensational novels. the most terrifying reflection (i am speaking now for myself) is that all these people are not the product of the exceptional but of the general--of the normality of their place, and time, and race. the ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. these people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names. the oppressors and the oppressed are all russians together; and the world is brought once more face to face with the truth of the saying that the tiger cannot change his stripes nor the leopard his spots. j. c. 1920. a personal record the re-issue of this book in a new form does not, strictly speaking, require another preface. but since this is distinctly a place for personal remarks i take the opportunity to refer in this author's note to two points arising from certain statements about myself i have noticed of late in the press. one of them bears upon the question of language. i have always felt myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position which outside the circus world cannot be regarded as desirable. it needs a special temperament for one to derive much gratification from the fact of being able to do freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, from mere vanity. the fact of my not writing in my native language has been of course commented upon frequently in reviews and notices of my various works and in the more extended critical articles. i suppose that was unavoidable; and indeed these comments were of the most flattering kind to one's vanity. but in that matter i have no vanity that could be flattered. i could not have it. the first object of this note is to disclaim any merit there might have been in an act of deliberate volition. the impression of my having exercised a choice between the two languages, french and english, both foreign to me, has got abroad somehow. that impression is erroneous. it originated, i believe, in an article written by sir hugh clifford and published in the year '98, i think, of the last century. some time before, sir hugh clifford came to see me. he is, if not the first, then one of the first two friends i made for myself by my work, the other being mr. cunninghame graham, who, characteristically enough, had been captivated by my story an outpost of progress. these friendships which have endured to this day i count amongst my precious possessions. mr. hugh clifford (he was not decorated then) had just published his first volume of malay sketches. i was naturally delighted to see him and infinitely gratified by the kind things he found to say about my first books and some of my early short stories, the action of which is placed in the malay archipelago. i remember that after saying many things which ought to have made me blush to the roots of my hair with outraged modesty, he ended by telling me with the uncompromising yet kindly firmness of a man accustomed to speak unpalatable truths even to oriental potentates (for their own good of course) that as a matter of fact i didn't know anything about malays. i was perfectly aware of this. i have never pretended to any such knowledge, and i was moved--i wonder to this day at my impertinence--to retort: "of course i don't know anything about malays. if i knew only one hundredth part of what you and frank swettenham know of malays i would make everybody sit up." he went on looking kindly (but firmly) at me and then we both burst out laughing. in the course of that most welcome visit twenty years ago, which i remember so well, we talked of many things; the characteristics of various languages was one of them, and it is on that day that my friend carried away with him the impression that i had exercised a deliberate choice between french and english. later, when moved by his friendship (no empty word to him) to write a study in the _north american review_ on joseph conrad he conveyed that impression to the public. this misapprehension, for it is nothing else, was no doubt my fault. i must have expressed myself badly in the course of a friendly and intimate talk when one doesn't watch one's phrases carefully. my recollection of what i meant to say is: that _had i been under the necessity_ of making a choice between the two, and though i knew french fairly well and was familiar with it from infancy, i would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly "crystallized." this, i believe, was the word i used. and then we passed to other matters. i had to tell him a little about myself; and what he told me of his work in the east, his own particular east of which i had but the mistiest, short glimpse, was of the most absorbing interest. the present governor of nigeria may not remember that conversation as well as i do, but i am sure that he will not mind this, what in diplomatic language is called "rectification" of a statement made to him by an obscure writer his generous sympathy had prompted him to seek out and make his friend. the truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in english is as natural as any other aptitude with which i might have been born. i have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. english was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. the merest idea of choice had never entered my head. and as to adoption--well, yes, there was adoption; but it was i who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly i came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms i truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character. it was a very intimate action and for that very reason it is too mysterious to explain. the task would be as impossible as trying to explain love at first sight. there was something in this conjunction of exulting, almost physical recognition, the same sort of emotional surrender and the same pride of possession, all united in the wonder of a great discovery; but there was on it none of that shadow of dreadful doubt that falls on the very flame of our perishable passions. one knew very well that this was for ever. a matter of discovery and not of inheritance, that very inferiority of the title makes the faculty still more precious, lays the possessor under a lifelong obligation to remain worthy of his great fortune. but it seems to me that all this sounds as if i were trying to explain--a task which i have just pronounced to be impossible. if in action we may admit with awe that the impossible recedes before men's indomitable spirit, the impossible in matters of analysis will always make a stand at some point or other. all i can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and falterings in my heart, is the right to be believed when i say that if i had not written in english i would not have written at all. the other remark which i wish to make here is also a rectification but of a less direct kind. it has nothing to do with the medium of expression. it bears on the matter of my authorship in another way. it is not for me to criticize my judges, the more so because i always felt that i was receiving more than justice at their hands. but it seems to me that their unfailingly interested sympathy has ascribed to racial and historical influences much, of what, i believe, appertains simply to the individual. nothing is more foreign than what in the literary world is called sclavonism, to the polish temperament with its tradition of self-government, its chivalrous view of moral restraints and an exaggerated respect for individual rights: not to mention the important fact that the whole polish mentality, western in complexion, had received its training from italy and france and, historically, had always remained, even in religious matters, in sympathy with the most liberal currents of european thought. an impartial view of humanity in all its degrees of splendour and misery together with a special regard for the rights of the unprivileged of this earth, not on any mystic ground but on the ground of simple fellowship and honourable reciprocity of services, was the dominant characteristic of the mental and moral atmosphere of the houses which sheltered my hazardous childhood:--matters of calm and deep conviction both lasting and consistent, and removed as far as possible from that humanitarianism that seems to be merely a matter of crazy nerves or a morbid conscience. one of the most sympathetic of my critics tried to account for certain characteristics of my work by the fact of my being, in his own words, "the son of a revolutionist." no epithet could be more inapplicable to a man with such a strong sense of responsibility in the region of ideas and action and so indifferent to the promptings of personal ambition as my father. why the description "revolutionary" should have been applied all through europe to the polish risings of 1831 and 1863 i really cannot understand. these risings were purely revolts against foreign domination. the russians themselves called them "rebellions," which, from their point of view, was the exact truth. amongst the men concerned in the preliminaries of the 1863 movement my father was no more revolutionary than the others, in the sense of working for the subversion of any social or political scheme of existence. he was simply a patriot in the sense of a man who believing in the spirituality of a national existence could not bear to see that spirit enslaved. called out publicly in a kindly attempt to justify the work of the son, that figure of my past cannot be dismissed without a few more words. as a child of course i knew very little of my father's activities, for i was not quite twelve when he died. what i saw with my own eyes was the public funeral, the cleared streets, the hushed crowds; but i understood perfectly well that this was a manifestation of the national spirit seizing a worthy occasion. that bareheaded mass of work people, youths of the university, women at the windows, school-boys on the pavement, could have known nothing positive about him except the fame of his fidelity to the one guiding emotion in their hearts. i had nothing but that knowledge myself; and this great silent demonstration seemed to me the most natural tribute in the world--not to the man but to the idea. what had impressed me much more intimately was the burning of his manuscripts a fortnight or so before his death. it was done under his own superintendence. i happened to go into his room a little earlier than usual that evening, and remaining unnoticed stayed to watch the nursing-sister feeding the blaze in the fireplace. my father sat in a deep armchair propped up with pillows. this is the last time i saw him out of bed. his aspect was to me not so much that of a man desperately ill, as mortally weary--a vanquished man. that act of destruction affected me profoundly by its air of surrender. not before death, however. to a man of such strong faith death could not have been an enemy. for many years i believed that every scrap of his writings had been burnt, but in july of 1914 the librarian of the university of cracow calling on me during our short visit to poland, mentioned the existence of a few manuscripts of my father and especially of a series of letters written before and during his exile to his most intimate friend who had sent them to the university for preservation. i went to the library at once, but had only time then for a mere glance. i intended to come back next day and arrange for copies being made of the whole correspondence. but next day there was war. so perhaps i shall never know now what he wrote to his most intimate friend in the time of his domestic happiness, of his new paternity, of his strong hopes--and later, in the hours of disillusion, bereavement and gloom. i had also imagined him to be completely forgotten forty-five years after his death. but this was not the case. some young men of letters had discovered him, mostly as a remarkable translator of shakespeare, victor hugo and alfred de vigny, to whose drama _chatterton_, translated by himself, he had written an eloquent preface defending the poet's deep humanity and his ideal of noble stoicism. the political side of his life was being recalled too; for some men of his time, his co-workers in the task of keeping the national spirit firm in the hope of an independent future, had been in their old age publishing their memoirs, where the part he played was for the first time publicly disclosed to the world. i learned then of things in his life i never knew before, things which outside the group of the initiated could have been known to no living being except my mother. it was thus that from a volume of posthumous memoirs dealing with those bitter years i learned the fact that the first inception of the secret national committee intended primarily to organize moral resistance to the augmented pressure of russianism arose on my father's initiative, and that its first meetings were held in our warsaw house, of which all i remember distinctly is one room, white and crimson, probably the drawing room. in one of its walls there was the loftiest of all archways. where it led to remains a mystery, but to this day i cannot get rid of the belief that all this was of enormous proportions, and that the people appearing and disappearing in that immense space were beyond the usual stature of mankind as i got to know it in later life. amongst them i remember my mother, a more familiar figure than the others, dressed in the black of the national mourning worn in defiance of ferocious police regulations. i have also preserved from that particular time the awe of her mysterious gravity which, indeed, was by no means smileless. for i remember her smiles, too. perhaps for me she could always find a smile. she was young then, certainly not thirty yet. she died four years later in exile. in the pages which follow i mentioned her visit to her brother's house about a year before her death. i also speak a little of my father as i remember him in the years following what was for him the deadly blow of her loss. and now, having been again evoked in answer to the words of a friendly critic, these shades may be allowed to return to their place of rest where their forms in life linger yet, dim but poignant, and awaiting the moment when their haunting reality, their last trace on earth, shall pass for ever with me out of the world. j. c. 1919. a familiar preface a personal record as a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. i defended myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted, "you know, you really must." it was not an argument, but i submitted at once. if one must!... you perceive the force of a word. he who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. the power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. i don't say this by way of disparagement. it is better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective. nothing humanely great--great, i mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. on the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as glory, for instance, or pity. i won't mention any more. they are not far to seek. shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. there's "virtue" for you if you like!... of course the accent must be attended to. the right accent. that's very important. the capacious lung, the thundering or the tender vocal chords. don't talk to me of your archimedes' lever. he was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. mathematics commands all my respect, but i have no use for engines. give me the right word and the right accent and i will move the world. what a dream for a writer! because written words have their accent, too. yes! let me only find the right word! surely it must be lying somewhere among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. it may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. but it's no good. i believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of hay at the first try. for myself, i have never had such luck. and then there is that accent. another difficulty. for who is going to tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world unmoved? once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and something of a literary man. he jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of posterity. among other sayings--i am quoting from memory--i remember this solemn admonition: "let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." the accent of heroic truth! this is very fine, but i am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose advice. most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision. nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. however humiliating for my self-esteem, i must confess that the counsels of marcus aurelius are not for me. they are more fit for a moralist than for an artist. truth of a modest sort i can promise you, and also sincerity. that complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends. "embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. i can't imagine among either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me. "to disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the mark. most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life have come to me through my books; and i know that a novelist lives in his work. he stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among imaginary things, happenings, and people. writing about them, he is only writing about himself. but the disclosure is not complete. he remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. in these personal notes there is no such veil. and i cannot help thinking of a passage in the "imitation of christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them." this is the danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise. while these reminiscent pages were appearing serially i was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes. it seems that i am not sufficiently literary. indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so much material for his hands. once before, some three years ago, when i published "the mirror of the sea," a volume of impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. practical remarks. but, truth to say, i have never understood the kind of thrift they recommend. i wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom i remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what i am. that seemed to me the only shape in which i could offer it to their shades. there could not be a question in my mind of anything else. it is quite possible that i am a bad economist; but it is certain that i am incorrigible. having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of sea life, i have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the call. there was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. having broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so mysteriously from my allegiance, i may safely say that through the blind force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant service my only home for a long succession of years. no wonder, then, that in my two exclusively sea books--"the nigger of the _narcissus_," and "the mirror of the sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "youth" and "typhoon")--i have tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their hands and the objects of their care. one's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. being neither quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, i have done none of these things, and i am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other. but resignation is not indifference. i would not like to be left standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying onward so many lives. i would fain claim for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion. it seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism i am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of what the french would call _sécheresse du c[oe]ur_. fifteen years of unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters. but this is more of a personal matter, reaching the man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. not that i feel hurt in the least. the charge--if it amounted to a charge at all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret. my answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. i would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. it is often merely temperamental. but it is not always a sign of coldness. it may be pride. there can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. nothing more humiliating! and this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt. no artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. in a task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work. and then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. the comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all. joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon. yes! i, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of imaginative literature. only, to be a great magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within one's breast. we have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. the most ordinary intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. i don't lay claim to particular wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. it may be my sea training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that i have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service. and i have carried my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. i, who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the beautiful--i have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, i suppose, i have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of pure esthetes. as in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook. but i have never been able to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general principle. whether there be any courage in making this admission i know not. after the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys with a tranquil mind. so i proceed in peace to declare that i have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. in order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. and surely this is no great sin. but the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. from laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and giggles. these may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals, condemn a man taking care of his own integrity. it is his clear duty. and least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. in that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. who then is going to say nay to his temptations if not his conscience? and besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly open talk--i think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. all intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. they can hurt no one. if they are mad, then so much the worse for the artist. indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their own reward. is it such a very mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? to try to go deeper is not to be insensible. an historian of hearts is not an historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears. the sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. they are worthy of respect, too. and he is not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham. not that i think resignation the last word of wisdom. i am too much the creature of my time for that. but i think that the proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will is--or even if they have a will of their own. and in this matter of life and art it is not the why that matters so much to our happiness as the how. as the frenchman said, "_il y a toujours la maniere_." very true. yes. there is the manner. the manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. the manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind. those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. it rests notably, among others, on the idea of fidelity. at a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention i have not been revolutionary in my writings. the revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. no doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect esthete, i am no better philosopher. all claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and danger from which a philosophical mind should be free.... i fear that trying to be conversational i have only managed to be unduly discursive. i have never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation--that art which, i understand, is supposed to be lost now. my young days, the days when one's habits and character are formed, have been rather familiar with long silences. such voices as broke into them were anything but conversational. no. i haven't got the habit. yet this discursiveness is not so irrelevant to the handful of pages which follow. they, too, have been charged with discursiveness, with disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime) with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety). i was told severely that the public would view with displeasure the informal character of my recollections. "alas!" i protested, mildly. "could i begin with the sacramental words, 'i was born on such a date in such a place'? the remoteness of the locality would have robbed the statement of all interest. i haven't lived through wonderful adventures to be related _seriatim_. i haven't known distinguished men on whom i could pass fatuous remarks. i haven't been mixed up with great or scandalous affairs. this is but a bit of psychological document, and even so, i haven't written it with a view to put forward any conclusion of my own." but my objector was not placated. these were good reasons for not writing at all--not a defence of what stood written already, he said. i admit that almost anything, anything in the world, would serve as a good reason for not writing at all. but since i have written them, all i want to say in their defence is that these memories put down without any regard for established conventions have not been thrown off without system and purpose. they have their hope and their aim. the hope that from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a personality; the man behind the books so fundamentally dissimilar as, for instance, "almayer's folly" and "the secret agent," and yet a coherent, justifiable personality both in its origin and in its action. this is the hope. the immediate aim, closely associated with the hope, is to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea. in the purposely mingled resonance of this double strain a friend here and there will perhaps detect a subtle accord. j. c. twixt land and sea the only bond between these three stories is, so to speak, geographical, for their scene, be it land, be it sea, is situated in the same region which may be called the region of the indian ocean with its off-shoots and prolongations north of the equator even as far as the gulf of siam. in point of time they belong to the period immediately after the publication of that novel with the awkward title "under western eyes" and, as far as the life of the writer is concerned, their appearance in a volume marks a definite change in the fortunes of his fiction. for there is no denying the fact that "under western eyes" found no favour in the public eye, whereas the novel called "chance" which followed "twixt land and sea" was received on its first appearance by many more readers than any other of my books. this volume of three tales was also well received, publicly and privately and from a publisher's point of view. this little success was a most timely tonic for my enfeebled bodily frame. for this may indeed be called the book of a man's convalescence, at least as to three-fourths of it; because the secret sharer, the middle story, was written much earlier than the other two. for in truth the memories of "under western eyes" are associated with the memory of a severe illness which seemed to wait like a tiger in the jungle on the turn of a path to jump on me the moment the last words of that novel were written. the memory of an illness is very much like the memory of a nightmare. on emerging from it in a much enfeebled state i was inspired to direct my tottering steps towards the indian ocean, a complete change of surroundings and atmosphere from the lake of geneva, as nobody would deny. begun so languidly and with such a fumbling hand that the first twenty pages or more had to be thrown into the waste-paper basket, a smile of fortune, the most purely indian ocean story of the three, has ended by becoming what the reader will see. i will only say for myself that ï have been patted on the back for it by most unexpected people, personally unknown to me, the chief of them of course being the editor of a popular illustrated magazine who published it serially in one mighty instalment. who will dare say after this that the change of air had not been an immense success? the origins of the middle story, the secret sharer, are quite other. it was written much earlier and was published first in _harper's magazine_, during the early part, i think, of 1911. or perhaps the latter part? my memory on that point is hazy. the basic fact of the tale i had in my possession for a good many years. it was in truth the common possession of the whole fleet of merchant ships trading to india, china, and australia: a great company the last years of which coincided with my first years on the wider seas. the fact itself happened on board a very distinguished member of it, _cutty sark_ by name and belonging to mr. willis, a notable ship-owner in his day, one of the kind (they are all underground now) who used personally to see his ships start on their voyages to those distant shores where they showed worthily the honoured house-flag of their owner. i am glad i was not too late to get at least one glimpse of mr. willis on a very wet and gloomy morning watching from the pier head of the new south dock one of his clippers starting on a china voyage--an imposing figure of a man under the invariable white hat so well known in the port of london, waiting till the head of his ship had swung down-stream before giving her a dignified wave of a big gloved hand. for all i know it may have been the _cutty sark_ herself though certainly not on that fatal voyage. i do not know the date of the occurrence on which the scheme of the secret sharer is founded; it came to light and even got into newspapers about the middle eighties, though i had heard of it before, as it were privately, among the officers of the great wool fleet in which my first years in deep water were served. it came to light under circumstances dramatic enough, i think, but which have nothing to do with my story. in the more specially maritime part of my writings this bit of presentation may take its place as one of my two calm-pieces. for, if there is to be any classification by subjects, i have done two storm-pieces in "the nigger of the _narcissus_" and in "typhoon"; and two calm-pieces: this one and "the shadow-line," a book which belongs to a later period. notwithstanding their autobiographical form the above two stories are not the record of personal experience. their quality, such as it is, depends on something larger if less precise: on the character, vision and sentiment of the first twenty independent years of my life. and the same may be said of the freya of the seven isles. i was considerably abused for writing that story on the ground of its cruelty, both in public prints and private letters. i remember one from a man in america who was quite furiously angry. he told me with curses and imprecations that i had no right to write such an abominable thing which, he said, had gratuitously and intolerably harrowed his feelings. it was a very interesting letter to read. impressive too. i carried it for some days in my pocket. had i the right? the sincerity of the anger impressed me. had i the right? had i really sinned as he said or was it only that man's madness? yet there was a method in his fury.... i composed in my mind a violent reply, a reply of mild argument, a reply of lofty detachment; but they never got on paper in the end and i have forgotten their phrasing. the very letter of the angry man has got lost somehow; and nothing remains now but the pages of the story which i cannot recall and would not recall if i could. but i am glad to think that the two women in this book: alice, the sullen, passive victim of her fate, and the actively individual freya, so determined to be the mistress of her own destiny, must have evoked some sympathies because of all my volumes of short stories this was the one for which there was the greatest immediate demand. j. c. 1920. chance "chance" is one of my novels that shortly after having been begun were laid aside for a few months. starting impetuously like a sanguine oarsman setting forth in the early morning i came very soon to a fork in the stream and found it necessary to pause and reflect seriously upon the direction i would take. either presented to me equal fascinations, at least on the surface, and for that very reason my hesitation extended over many days. i floated in the calm water of pleasant speculation, between the diverging currents or conflicting impulses, with an agreeable but perfectly irrational conviction that neither of those currents would take me to destruction. my sympathies being equally divided and the two forces being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end. it is a mighty force that of mere chance; absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being. it is very difficult to put one's finger on the imponderable, but i may venture to say that it is flora de barral who is really responsible for this novel which relates, in fact, the story of her life. at the crucial moment of my indecision flora de barral passed before me, but so swiftly that i failed at first to get hold of her. though loth to give her up i didn't see the way of pursuit clearly and was on the point of becoming discouraged when my natural liking for captain anthony came to my assistance. i said to myself that if that man was so determined to embrace a "wisp of mist" the best thing for me was to join him in that eminently practical and praiseworthy adventure. i simply followed captain anthony. each of us was bent on capturing his own dream. the reader will be able to judge of our success. captain anthony's determination led him a long and roundabout course and that is why this book is a long book. that the course was of my own choosing i will not deny. a critic had remarked that if i had selected another method of composition and taken a little more trouble the tale could have been told in about two hundred pages. i confess i do not perceive exactly the bearings of such criticism or even the use of such a remark. no doubt that by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper. for that matter, the whole history of mankind could be written thus if only approached with sufficient detachment. the history of men on this earth since the beginning of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: they were born, they suffered, they died.... yet it is a great tale! but in the infinitely minute stories about men and women it is my lot on earth to narrate i am not capable of such detachment. what makes this book memorable to me apart from the natural sentiment one has for one's creation is the response it provoked. the general public responded largely, more largely perhaps than to any other book of mine, in the only way the general public can respond, that is by buying a certain number of copies. this gave me a considerable amount of pleasure, because what i always feared most was drifting unconsciously into the position of a writer for a limited coterie; a position which would have been odious to me as throwing a doubt on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and in sincere emotions. regarded as a manifestation of criticism (for it would be outrageous to deny to the general public the possession of a critical mind) the reception was very satisfactory. i saw that i had managed to please a certain number of minds busy attending to their own very real affairs. it is agreeable to think one is able to please. from the minds whose business it is precisely to criticize such attempts to please, this book received an amount of discussion and of a rather searching analysis which not only satisfied that personal vanity i share with the rest of mankind but reached my deeper feelings and aroused my gratified interest. the undoubted sympathy informing the varied appreciations of that book was, i love to think, a recognition of my good faith in the pursuit of my art--the art of the novelist which a distinguished french writer at the end of a successful career complained of as being: _trop difficile!_ it is indeed too arduous in the sense that the effort must be invariably so much greater than the possible achievement. in that sort of foredoomed task which is in its nature very lonely also, sympathy is a precious thing. it can make the most severe criticism welcome. to be told that better things have been expected of one may be soothing in view of how much better things one had expected from oneself in this art which, in these days, is no longer justified by the assumption, somewhere and somehow, of a didactic purpose. i do not mean to hint that anybody had ever done me the injury (i don't mean insult, i mean injury) of charging a single one of my pages with didactic purpose. but every subject in the region of intellect and emotion must have a morality of its own if it is treated at all sincerely; and even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence. the varied shades of moral significance which have been discovered in my writings are very numerous. none of them, however, have provoked a hostile manifestation. it may have happened to me to sin against taste now and then, but apparently i have never sinned against the basic feelings and elementary convictions which make life possible to the mass of mankind and, by establishing a standard of judgment, set their idealism free to look for plainer ways, for higher feelings, for deeper purposes. i cannot say that any particular moral complexion has been put on this novel but i do not think that anybody had detected in it an evil intention. and it is only for their intentions that men can be held responsible. the ultimate effects of whatever they do are far beyond their control. in doing this book my intention was to interest people in my vision of things which is indissolubly allied to the style in which it is expressed. in other words i wanted to write a certain amount of pages in prose, which, strictly speaking, is my proper business. i have attended to it conscientiously with the hope of being entertaining or at least not insufferably boring to my readers. i can not sufficiently insist upon the truth that when i sit down to write my intentions are always blameless however deplorable the ultimate effect of the act may turn out to be. j. c. 1920. within the tides the tales collected in this book have elicited on their appearance two utterances in the shape of comment and one distinctly critical charge. a reviewer observed that i liked to write of men who go to sea or live on lonely islands untrammeled by the pressure of worldly circumstances because such characters allowed freer play to my imagination which in their case was only bounded by natural laws and the universal human conventions. there is a certain truth in this remark no doubt. it is only the suggestion of deliberate choice that misses its mark. i have not sought for special imaginative freedom or a larger play of fancy in my choice of characters and subjects. the nature of the knowledge, suggestions or hints used in my imaginative work has depended directly on the conditions of my active life. it depended more on contacts, and very slight contacts at that, than on actual experience; because my life as a matter of fact was far from being adventurous in itself. even now when i look back on it with a certain regret (who would not regret his youth?) and positive affection, its colouring wears the sober hue of hard work and exacting calls of duty, things which in themselves are not much charged with a feeling of romance. if these things appeal strongly to me even in retrospect it is, i suppose, because the romantic feeling of reality was in me an inborn faculty, that in itself may be a curse but when disciplined by a sense of personal responsibility and a recognition of the hard facts of existence shared with the rest of mankind becomes but a point of view from which the very shadows of life appear endowed with an internal glow. and such romanticism is not a sin. it is none the worse for the knowledge of truth. it only tries to make the best of it, hard as it may be; and in this hardness discovers a certain aspect of beauty. i am speaking here of romanticism in relation to life, not of romanticism in relation to imaginative literature, which, in its early days, was associated simply with mediæval subjects, or, at any rate, with subjects sought for in a remote past. my subjects are not mediæval and i have a natural right to them because my past is very much my own. if their course lie out of the beaten path of organized social life, it is, perhaps, because i myself did in a sort break away from it early in obedience to an impulse which must have been very genuine since it has sustained me through all the dangers of disillusion. but that origin of my literary work was very far from giving a larger scope to my imagination. on the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of everyday experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. the problem was to make unfamiliar things credible. to do that i had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in their proper atmosphere of actuality. this was the hardest task of all and the most important, in view of that conscientious rendering of truth in thought and fact which has been always my aim. the other utterance of the two i have alluded to above consisted in the observation that in this volume of mine the whole was greater than its parts. i pass it on to my readers merely remarking that if this is really so then i must take it as a tribute to my personality since those stories which by implication seem to hold so well together as to be surveyed en bloc and judged as the product of a single mood, were written at different times, under various influences and with the deliberate intention of trying several ways of telling a tale. the hints and suggestions for all of them had been received at various times and in distant parts of the globe. the book received a good deal of varied criticism, mainly quite justifiable, but in a couple of instances quite surprising in its objections. amongst them was the critical charge of false realism brought against the opening story: the planter of malata. i would have regarded it as serious enough if i had not discovered on reading further that the distinguished critic was accusing me simply of having sought to evade a happy ending out of a sort of moral cowardice, lest i should be condemned as a superficially sentimental person. where (and of what sort) there are to be found in the planter of malata any germs of happiness that could have fructified at the end i am at a loss to see. such criticism seems to miss the whole purpose and significance of a piece of writing the primary intention of which was mainly aesthetic; an essay in description and narrative around a given psychological situation. of more seriousness was the spoken criticism of an old and valued friend who thought that in the scene near the rock, which from the point of view of psychology is crucial, neither felicia moorsom nor geoffrey renouard find the right things to say to each other. i didn't argue the point at the time, for, to be candid, i didn't feel quite satisfied with the scene myself. on re-reading it lately for the purpose of this edition i have come to the conclusion that there is that much truth in my friend's criticism that i have made those people a little too explicit in their emotion and thus have destroyed to a certain extent the characteristic illusory glamour of their personalities. i regret this defect very much for i regard the planter of malata as a nearly successful attempt at doing a very difficult thing which i would have liked to have made as perfect as it lay in my power. yet considering the pitch and the tonality of the whole tale it is very difficult to imagine what else those two people could have found to say at that time and on that particular spot of the earth's surface. in the mood in which they both were, and given the exceptional state of their feelings, anything might have been said. the eminent critic who charged me with false realism, the outcome of timidity, was quite wrong. i should like to ask him what he imagines the, so to speak, lifelong embrace of felicia moorsom and geoffrey renouard could have been like? could it have been at all? would it have been credible? no! i did not shirk anything, either from timidity or laziness. perhaps a little mistrust of my own powers would not have been altogether out of place in this connection. but it failed me; and i resemble geoffrey renouard in so far that when once engaged in an adventure i cannot bear the idea of turning back. the moment had arrived for these people to disclose themselves. they had to do it. to render a crucial point of feelings in terms of human speech is really an impossible task. written words can only form a sort of translation. and if that translation happens, from want of skill or from over-anxiety, to be too literal, the people caught in the toils of passion, instead of disclosing themselves, which would be art, are made to give themselves away, which is neither art nor life. nor yet truth! at any rate not the whole truth; for it is truth robbed of all its necessary and sympathetic reservations and qualifications which give it its fair form, its just proportions, its semblance of human fellowship. indeed the task of the translator of passions into speech may be pronounced "too difficult." however, with my customary impenitence i am glad i have attempted the story with all its implications and difficulties, including the scene by the side of the gray rock crowning the height of malata. but i am not so inordinately pleased with the result as not to be able to forgive a patient reader who may find it somewhat disappointing. i have left myself no space to talk about the other three stories because i do not think that they call for detailed comment. each of them has its special mood and i have tried purposely to give each its special tone and a different construction of phrase. a reviewer asked in reference to the inn of the two witches whether i ever came across a tale called a very strange bed published in _household words_ in 1852 or 54. i never saw a number of _household words_ of that decade. a bed of the sort was discovered in an inn on the road between rome and naples at the end of the 18th century. where i picked up the information i cannot say now but i am certain it was not in a tale. this bed is the only "fact" of the witches' inn. the other two stories have considerably more "fact" in them, derived from my own personal knowledge. j. c. 1920 note to the first edition the last word of this novel was written on the 29th of may, 1914. and that last word was the single word of the title. those were the times of peace. now that the moment of publication approaches i have been considering the discretion of altering the title page. the word victory, the shining and tragic goal of noble effort, appeared too great, too august, to stand at the head of a mere novel. there was also the possibility of falling under the suspicion of commercial astuteness deceiving the public into the belief that the book had something to do with war. of that, however, i was not afraid very much. what influenced my decision most were the obscure promptings of that pagan residuum of awe and wonder which lurks still at the bottom of our old humanity. victory was the last word i had written in peace time. it was the last literary thought which had occurred to me before the doors of the temple of janus flying open with a crash shook the minds, the hearts, the consciences of men all over the world. such coincidence could not be treated lightly. and i made up my mind to let the word stand, in the same hopeful spirit in which some simple citizen of old rome would have "accepted the omen." the second point on which i wish to offer a remark is the existence (in the novel) of a person named schomberg. that i believe him to be true goes without saying. i am not likely to offer pinchbeck wares to my public consciously. schomberg is an old member of my company. a very subordinate personage in lord jim as far back as the year 1899, he became notably active in a certain short story of mine published in 1902. here he appears in a still larger part, true to life (i hope), but also true to himself. only, in this instance, his deeper passions come into play, and thus his grotesque psychology is completed at last. i don't pretend to say that this is the entire teutonic psychology; but it is indubitably the psychology of a teuton. my object in mentioning him here is to bring out the fact that, far from being the incarnation of recent animosities, he is the creature of my old, deep-seated and, as it were, impartial conviction. j. c. victory on approaching the task of writing this note for "victory" the first thing i am conscious of is the actual nearness of the book, its nearness to me personally, to the vanished mood in which it was written and to the mixed feelings aroused by the critical notices the book obtained when first published almost exactly a year after the beginning of the great war. the writing of it was finished in 1914 long before the murder of an austrian archduke sounded the first note of warning for a world already full of doubts and fears. the contemporaneous very short author's note which is preserved in this edition bears sufficient witness to the feelings with which i consented to the publication of the book. the fact of the book having been published in the united states early in the year made it difficult to delay its appearance in england any longer. it came out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. it seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing the truth of an indomitable faith could not but feel the edge of a sharp knife at its throat. the unchanging man of history is wonderfully adaptable both by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. the fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. were the trump of the last judgment to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of beethoven's sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. and with perfect propriety. for what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors? thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. the reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and which is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. it is only when the catastrophe matches the natural obscurity of our fate that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his detachment. it is very obvious that on the arrival of the gentlemanly mr. jones, the single-minded ricardo and the faithful pedro, heyst, the man of universal detachment, loses his mental self-possession, that fine attitude before the universally irremediable which wears the name of stoicism. it is all a matter of proportion. there should have been a remedy for that sort of thing. and yet there is no remedy. behind this minute instance of life's hazards heyst sees the power of blind destiny. besides, heyst in his fine detachment had lost the habit of asserting himself. i don't mean the courage of self-assertion, either moral or physical, but the mere way of it, the trick of the thing, the readiness of mind and the turn of the hand that come without reflection and lead the man to excellence in life, in art, in crime, in virtue and for the matter of that, even in love. thinking is the great enemy of perfection. the habit of profound reflection, i am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man. but i wouldn't be suspected even remotely of making fun of axel heyst. i have always liked him. the flesh and blood individual who stands behind the infinitely more familiar figure of the book i remember as a mysterious swede right enough. whether he was a baron, too, i am not so certain. he himself never laid a claim to that distinction. his detachment was too great to make any claims big or small on one's credulity. i will not say where i met him because i fear to give my readers a wrong impression, since a marked incongruity between a man and his surroundings is often a very misleading circumstance. we became very friendly for a time and i would not like to expose him to unpleasant suspicions though, personally, i am sure he would have been indifferent to suspicions as he was indifferent to all the other disadvantages of life. he was not the whole heyst of course; he is only the physical and moral foundation of my heyst laid on the ground of a short acquaintance. that it was short is certainly not my fault for he had charmed me by the mere amenity of his detachment which, in this case, i cannot help thinking he had carried to excess. he went away from his rooms without leaving a trace. i wondered where he had gone to--but now i know. he vanished from my ken only to drift into this adventure that, unavoidable, waited for him in a world which he persisted in looking upon as a malevolent shadow spinning in the sunlight. often in the course of years an expressed sentiment, the particular sense of a phrase heard casually, would recall him to my mind so that i have fastened on to him many words heard on other men's lips and belonging to other men's less perfect, less pathetic moods. the same observation will apply _mutatis mutandis_ to mr. jones, who is built on a much slenderer connection. mr. jones (or whatever his name was) did not drift away from me. he turned his back on me and walked out of the room. it was in a little hotel in the island of st. thomas in the west indies (in the year '75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave an almost gruesome significance. our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. one of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. i said: "a professional sharper?" and got for answer: "he's a terror; but i must say that up to a certain point he will play fair...." i wonder what the point was. i never saw him again because i believe he went straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other ports of call in the direction of aspinall. mr. jones' characteristic insolence belongs to another man of a quite different type. i will say nothing as to the origins of his mentality because i don't intend to make any damaging admissions. it so happened that the very same year ricardo--the physical ricardo--was a fellow passenger of mine on board an extremely small and extremely dirty little schooner, during a four days' passage between two places in the gulf of mexico whose names don't matter. for the most part he lay on deck aft as it were at my feet, and raising himself from time to time on his elbow would talk about himself and go on talking, not exactly to me or even at me (he would not even look up but kept his eyes fixed on the deck) but more as if communing in a low voice with his familiar devil. now and then he would give me a glance and make the hairs of his stiff little moustache stir quaintly. his eyes were green and every cat i see to this day reminds me of the exact contour of his face. what he was travelling for or what was his business in life he never confided to me. truth to say the only passenger on board that schooner who could have talked openly about his activities and purposes was a very snuffy and conversationally delightful friar, the superior of a convent, attended by a very young lay brother, of a particularly ferocious countenance. we had with us also, lying prostrate in the dark and unspeakable cuddy of that schooner, an old spanish gentleman, owner of much luggage and, as ricardo assured me, very ill indeed. ricardo seemed to be either a servant or the confidant of that aged and distinguished-looking invalid, who early on the passage held a long murmured conversation with the friar, and after that did nothing but groan feebly, smoke cigarettes and now and then call for martin in a voice full of pain. then he who had become ricardo in the book would go below into that beastly and noisome hole, remain there mysteriously, and coming up on deck again with a face on which nothing could be read, would as likely as not resume for my edification the exposition of his moral attitude toward life illustrated by striking particular instances of the most atrocious complexion. did he mean to frighten me? or seduce me? or astonish me? or arouse my admiration? all he did was to arouse my amused incredulity. as scoundrels go he was far from being a bore. for the rest my innocence was so great then that i could not take his philosophy seriously. all the time he kept one ear turned to the cuddy in the manner of a devoted servant, but i had the idea that in some way or other he had imposed the connection on the invalid for some end of his own. the reader therefore won't be surprised to hear that one morning i was told without any particular emotion by the padrone of the schooner that the "rich man" down there was dead: he had died in the night. i don't remember ever being so moved by the desolate end of a complete stranger. i looked down the skylight, and there was the devoted martin busy cording cowhide trunks belonging to the deceased whose white beard and hooked nose were the only parts i could make out in the dark depths of a horrible stuffy bunk. as it fell calm in the course of the afternoon and continued calm during all that night and the terrible, flaming day, the late rich man had to be thrown overboard at sunset, though as a matter of fact we were in sight of the low pestilential mangrove-lined coast of our destination. the excellent father superior mentioned to me with an air of immense commiseration: "the poor man has left a young daughter." who was to look after her i don't know, but i saw the devoted martin taking the trunks ashore with great care just before i landed myself. i would perhaps have tracked the ways of that man of immense sincerity for a little while but i had some of my own very pressing business to attend to, which in the end got mixed up with an earthquake and so i had no time to give to ricardo. the reader need not be told that i have not forgotten him, though. my contact with the faithful pedro was much shorter and my observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. it ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way. it was in a hovel of sticks and mats by the side of a path. as i went in there only to ask for a bottle of lemonade i have not to this day the slightest idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. it became manifest to me less than two minutes after i had set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely surprised of course i didn't stop to think it out. i took the nearest short cut--through the wall. this bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in haiti only a couple of months afterwards have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the end of my days. of the nigger i used to dream for years afterwards. of pedro never. the impression was less vivid. i got away from him too quickly. it seems to me but natural that those three buried in a corner of my memory should suddenly get out into the light of the world--so natural that i offer no excuse for their existence. they were there, they had to come out; and this is a sufficient excuse for a writer of tales who had taken to his trade without preparation or premeditation and without any moral intention but that which pervades the whole scheme of this world of senses. since this note is mostly concerned with personal contacts and the origins of the persons in the tale, i am bound also to speak of lena, because if i were to leave her out it would look like a slight; and nothing would be further from my thoughts than putting a slight on lena. if of all the personages involved in the "mystery of samburan" i have lived longest with heyst (or with him i call heyst) it was at her, whom i call lena, that i have looked the longest and with a most sustained attention. this attention originated in idleness for which i have a natural talent. one evening i wandered into a café, in a town not of the tropics but of the south of france. it was filled with tobacco smoke, the hum of voices, the rattling of dominoes and the sounds of strident music. the orchestra was rather smaller than the one that performed at schomberg's hotel, had the air more of a family party than of an enlisted band, and, i must confess, seemed rather more respectable than the zangiacomo musical enterprise. it was less pretentious also, more homely and familiar, so to speak, insomuch that in the intervals when all the performers left the platform one of them went amongst the marble tables collecting offerings of sous and francs in a battered tin receptacle recalling the shape of a sauceboat. it was a girl. her detachment from her task seems to me now to have equalled or even surpassed heyst's aloofness from all the mental degradations to which a man's intelligence is exposed in its way through life. silent and wide-eyed she went from table to table with the air of a sleep-walker and with no other sound but the slight rattle of the coins to attract attention. it was long after the sea-chapter of my life had been closed but it is difficult to discard completely the characteristics of half a life-time, and it was in something of the jack-ashore spirit that i dropped a five-franc piece into the sauceboat; whereupon the sleep-walker turned her head to gaze at me and said "merci, monsieur," in a tone in which there was no gratitude but only surprise. i must have been idle indeed to take the trouble to remark on such slight evidence that the voice was very charming and when the performers resumed their seats i shifted my position slightly in order not to have that particular performer hidden from me by the little man with the beard who conducted, and who might for all i know have been her father, but whose real mission in life was to be a model for the zangiacomo of "victory." having got a clear line of sight i naturally (being idle) continued to look at the girl through all the second part of the programme. the shape of her dark head inclined over the violin was fascinating, and, while resting between the pieces of that interminable programme she was, in her white dress and with her brown hands reposing in her lap, the very image of dreamy innocence. the mature, bad-tempered woman at the piano might have been her mother, though there was not the slightest resemblance between them. all i am certain of in their personal relation to each other is that cruel pinch on the upper part of the arm. that i am sure i have seen! there could be no mistake. i was in a too idle mood to imagine such a gratuitous barbarity. it may have been playfulness, yet the girl jumped up as if she had been stung by a wasp. it may have been playfulness. yet i saw plainly poor "dreamy innocence" rub gently the affected place as she filed off with the other performers down the middle aisle between the marble tables in the uproar of voices, the rattling of dominoes, through a blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke. i believe that those people left the town next day. or perhaps they had only migrated to the other big café, on the other side of the place de la comedie. it is very possible. i did not go across to find out. it was my perfect idleness that had invested the girl with a peculiar charm, and i did not want to destroy it by any superfluous exertion. the receptivity of my indolence made the impression so permanent that when the moment came for her meeting with heyst i felt that she would be heroically equal to every demand of the risky and uncertain future. i was so convinced of it that i let her go with heyst, i won't say without a pang but certainly without misgivings. and in view of her triumphant end what more could i have done for her rehabilitation and her happiness? j. c. 1920. the shadow-line this story, which i admit to be in its brevity a fairly complex piece of work, was not intended to touch on the supernatural. yet more than one critic has been inclined to take it in that way, seeing in it an attempt on my part to give the fullest scope to my imagination by taking it beyond the confines of the world of the living, suffering humanity. but as a matter of fact my imagination is not made of stuff so elastic as all that. i believe that if i attempted to put the strain of the supernatural on it it would fail deplorably and exhibit an unlovely gap. but i could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. the world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. no, i am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend so low as to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness. as to the effect of a mental or moral shock on a common mind that is quite a legitimate subject for study and description. mr. burns' moral being receives a severe shock in his relations with his late captain, and this in his diseased state turns into a mere superstitious fancy compounded of fear and animosity. this fact is one of the elements of the story, but there is nothing supernatural in it, nothing so to speak from beyond the confines of this world, which in all conscience holds enough mystery and terror in itself. perhaps if i had published this tale, which i have had for a long time in my mind, under the title of first command, no suggestion of the supernatural would have been found in it by any impartial reader, critical or otherwise. i will not consider here the origins of the feeling in which its actual title, the shadow-line, occurred to my mind. primarily the aim of this piece of writing was the presentation of certain facts which certainly were associated with the change from youth, carefree and fervent, to the more self-conscious and more poignant period of maturer life. nobody can doubt that before the supreme trial of a whole generation i had an acute consciousness of the minute and insignificant character of my own obscure experience. there could be no question here of any parallelism. that notion never entered my head. but there was a feeling of identity, though with an enormous difference of scale--as of one single drop measured against the bitter and stormy immensity of an ocean. and this was very natural too. for when we begin to meditate on the meaning of our own past it seems to fill all the world in its profundity and its magnitude. this book was written in the last three months of the year 1916. of all the subjects of which a writer of tales is more or less conscious within himself this is the only one i found it possible to attempt at the time. the depth and the nature of the mood with which i approached it is best expressed perhaps in the dedication which strikes me now as a most disproportionate thing--as another instance of the overwhelming greatness of our own emotion to ourselves. this much having been said i may pass on now to a few remarks about the mere material of the story. as to locality it belongs to that part of the eastern seas from which i have carried away into my writing life the greatest number of suggestions. from my statement that i thought of this story for a long time under the title of first command the reader may guess that it is concerned with my personal experience. and as a matter of fact it _is_ personal experience seen in perspective with the eye of the mind and coloured by that affection one can't help feeling for such events of one's life as one has no reason to be ashamed of. and that affection is as intense (i appeal here to universal experience) as the shame, and almost the anguish with which one remembers some unfortunate occurrences, down to mere mistakes in speech, that have been perpetrated by one in the past. the effect of perspective in memory is to make things loom large because the essentials stand out isolated from their surroundings of insignificant daily facts which have naturally faded out of one's mind. i remember that period of my sea-life with pleasure because begun inauspiciously it turned out in the end a success from a personal point of view, leaving a tangible proof in the terms of the letter the owners of the ship wrote to me two years afterwards when i resigned my command in order to come home. this resignation marked the beginning of another phase of my seaman's life, its terminal phase, if i may say so, which in its own way has coloured another portion of my writings. i didn't know then how near its end my sea-life was, and therefore i felt no sorrow except at parting with the ship. i was sorry also to break my connection with the firm which owned her and who were pleased to receive with friendly kindness and give their confidence to a man who had entered their service in an accidental manner and in very adverse circumstances. without disparaging the earnestness of my purpose i suspect now that luck had no small part in the success of the trust reposed in me. and one cannot help remembering with pleasure the time when one's best efforts were seconded by a run of luck. the words "_worthy of my undying regard_" selected by me for the motto on the title page are quoted from the text of the book itself; and, though one of my critics surmised that they applied to the ship, it is evident from the place where they stand that they refer to the men of that ship's company: complete strangers to their new captain and yet who stood by him so well during those twenty days that seemed to have been passed on the brink of a slow and agonizing destruction. and _that_ is the greatest memory of all! for surely it is a great thing to have commanded a handful of men worthy of one's undying regard. j. c. 1920. arrow of gold first note the pages which follow have been extracted from a pile of manuscript which was apparently meant for the eye of one woman only. she seems to have been the writer's childhood friend. they had parted as children, or very little more than children. years passed. then something recalled to the woman the companion of her young days and she wrote to him: "i have been hearing of you lately. i know where life has brought you. you certainly selected your own road. but to us, left behind, it always looked as if you had struck out into a pathless desert. we always regarded you as a person that must be given up for lost. but you have turned up again; and though we may never see each other, my memory welcomes you and i confess to you i should like to know the incidents on the road which has led you to where you are now." and he answers her: "i believe you are the only one now alive who remembers me as a child. i have heard of you from time to time, but i wonder what sort of person you are now. perhaps if i did know i wouldn't dare put pen to paper. but i don't know. i only remember that we were great chums. in fact, i chummed with you even more than with your brothers. but i am like the pigeon that went away in the fable of the two pigeons. if i once start to tell you i would want you to feel that you have been there yourself. i may overtax your patience with the story of my life so different from yours, not only in all the facts but altogether in spirit. you may not understand. you may even be shocked. i say all this to myself; but i know i shall succumb! i have a distinct recollection that in the old days, when you were about fifteen, you always could make me do whatever you liked." he succumbed. he begins his story for her with the minute narration of this adventure which took about twelve months to develop. in the form in which it is presented here it has been pruned of all allusions to their common past, of all asides, disquisitions, and explanations addressed directly to the friend of his childhood. and even as it is the whole thing is of considerable length. it seems that he had not only a memory but that he also knew how to remember. but as to that opinions may differ. this, his first great adventure, as he calls it, begins in marseilles. it ends there, too. yet it might have happened anywhere. this does not mean that the people concerned could have come together in pure space. the locality had a definite importance. as to the time, it is easily fixed by the events at about the middle years of the seventies, when don carlos de bourbon, encouraged by the general reaction of all europe against the excesses of communistic republicanism, made his attempt for the throne of spain, arms in hand, amongst the hills and gorges of guipuzcoa. it is perhaps the last instance of a pretender's adventure for a crown that history will have to record with the usual grave moral disapproval tinged by a shamefaced regret for the departing romance. historians are very much like other people. however, history has nothing to do with this tale. neither is the moral justification or condemnation of conduct aimed at here. if anything it is perhaps a little sympathy that the writer expects for his buried youth, as he lives it over again at the end of his insignificant course on this earth. strange person--yet perhaps not so very different from ourselves. a few words as to certain facts may be added. it may seem that he was plunged very abruptly into this long adventure. but from certain passages (suppressed here because mixed up with irrelevant matter) it appears clearly that at the time of the meeting in the café, mills had already gathered, in various quarters, a definite view of the eager youth who had been introduced to him in that ultra-legitimist salon. what mills had learned represented him as a young gentleman who had arrived furnished with proper credentials and who apparently was doing his best to waste his life in an eccentric fashion, with a bohemian set (one poet, at least, emerged out of it later) on one side, and on the other making friends with the people of the old town, pilots, coasters, sailors, workers of all sorts. he pretended rather absurdly to be a seaman himself and was already credited with an ill-defined and vaguely illegal enterprise in the gulf of mexico. at once it occurred to mills that this eccentric youngster was the very person for what the legitimist sympathizers had very much at heart just then; to organize a supply by sea of arms and ammunition to the carlist detachments in the south. it was precisely to confer on that matter with doña rita that captain blunt had been despatched from headquarters. mills got in touch with blunt at once and put the suggestion before him. the captain thought this the very thing. as a matter of fact, on that evening of carnival, those two, mills and blunt, had been actually looking everywhere for our man. they had decided that he should be drawn into the affair if it could be done. blunt naturally wanted to see him first. he must have estimated him a promising person, but, from another point of view, not dangerous. thus lightly was the notorious (and at the same time mysterious) monsieur george brought into the world; out of the contact of two minds which did not give a single thought to his flesh and blood. this purpose explains the intimate tone given to their first conversation and the sudden introduction of doña rita's history. mills, of course, wanted to hear all about it. as to captain blunt i suspect that, at the time, he was thinking of nothing else. in addition it was doña rita who would have to do the persuading; for, after all, such an enterprise with its ugly and desperate risks was not a trifle to put before a man--however young. it cannot be denied that mills seems to have acted somewhat unscrupulously. he himself appears to have had some doubt about it, at a given moment, as they were driving to the prado. but perhaps mills, with his penetration, understood very well the nature he was dealing with. he might even have envied it. but it's not my business to excuse mills. as to him whom we may regard as mills' victim it is obvious that he has never harboured a single reproachful thought. for him mills is not to be criticized. a remarkable instance of the great power of mere individuality over the young. * * * * * having named all the short prefaces written for my books, author's notes, this one too must have the same heading for the sake of uniformity if at the risk of some confusion. "the arrow of gold," as its sub-title states, is a story between two notes. but these notes are embodied in its very frame, belong to its texture, and their mission is to prepare and close the story. they are material to the comprehension of the experience related in the narrative and are meant to determine the time and place together with certain historical circumstances conditioning the existence of the people concerned in the transactions of the twelve months covered by the narrative. it was the shortest way of getting over the preliminaries of a piece of work which could not have been of the nature of a chronicle. "the arrow of gold" is my first after-the-war publication. the writing of it was begun in the autumn of 1917 and finished in the summer of 1918. its memory is associated with that of the darkest hour of the war, which, in accordance with the well known proverb, preceded the dawn--the dawn of peace. as i look at them now, these pages, written in the days of stress and dread, wear a look of strange serenity. they were written calmly, yet not in cold blood, and are perhaps the only kind of pages i could have written at that time full of menace, but also full of faith. the subject of this book i have been carrying about with me for many years, not so much a possession of my memory as an inherent part of myself. it was ever present to my mind and ready to my hand, but i was loth to touch it from a feeling of what i imagined to be mere shyness but which in reality was a very comprehensible mistrust of myself. in plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market-place. this being the product of my private garden my reluctance can be easily understood; though some critics have expressed their regret that i had not written this book fifteen years earlier i do not share that opinion. if i took it up so late in life it is because the right moment had not arrived till then. i mean the positive feeling of it, which is a thing that cannot be discussed. neither will i discuss here the regrets of those critics, which seem to me the most irrelevant thing that could have been said in connection with literary criticism. i never tried to conceal the origins of the subject matter of this book which i have hesitated so long to write; but some reviewers indulged themselves with a sense of triumph in discovering in it my dominic of "the mirror of the sea" under his own name (a truly wonderful discovery) and in recognizing the balancelle _tremolino_ in the unnamed little craft in which mr. george plied his fantastic trade and sought to allay the pain of his incurable wound. i am not in the least disconcerted by this display of perspicacity. it is the same man and the same balancelle. but for the purposes of a book like "the mirror of the sea" all i could make use of was the personal history of the little _tremolino_. the present work is not in any sense an attempt to develop a subject lightly touched upon in former years and in connection with quite another kind of love. what the story of the _tremolino_ in its anecdotic character has in common with the story of "the arrow of gold" is the quality of initiation (through an ordeal which required some resolution to face) into the life of passion. in the few pages at the end of "the mirror of the sea" and in the whole volume of "the arrow of gold," _that_ and no other is the subject offered to the public. the pages and the book form together a complete record; and the only assurance i can give my readers is, that as it stands here with all its imperfections it is given to them complete. i venture this explicit statement because, amidst much sympathetic appreciation, i have detected here and there a note, as it were, of suspicion. suspicion of facts concealed, of explanations held back, of inadequate motives. but what is lacking in the facts is simply what i did not know, and what is not explained is what i did not understand myself, and what seems inadequate is the fault of my imperfect insight. and all that i could not help. in the case of this book i was unable to supplement these deficiences by the exercise of my inventive faculty. it was never very strong; and on this occasion its use would have seemed exceptionally dishonest. it is from that ethical motive and not from timidity that i elected to keep strictly within the limits of unadorned sincerity and to try to enlist the sympathies of my readers without assuming lofty omniscience or descending to the subterfuge of exaggerated emotions. j. c. 1920. the rescue of the three long novels of mine which suffered an interruption, "the rescue" was the one that had to wait the longest for the good pleasure of the fates. i am betraying no secret when i state here that it had to wait precisely for twenty years. i laid it aside at the end of the summer of 1898 and it was about the end of the summer of 1918 that i took it up again with the firm determination to see the end of it and helped by the sudden feeling that i might be equal to the task. this does not mean that i turned to it with elation. i was well aware and perhaps even too much aware of the dangers of such an adventure. the amazingly sympathetic kindness which men of various temperaments, diverse views and different literary tastes have been for years displaying towards my work has done much for me, has done all--except giving me that overweening self-confidence which may assist an adventurer sometimes but in the long run ends by leading him to the gallows. as the characteristic i want most to impress upon these short author's notes prepared for my first collected edition is that of absolute frankness, i hasten to declare that i founded my hopes not on my supposed merits but on the continued goodwill of my readers. i may say at once that my hopes have been justified out of all proportion to my deserts. i met with the most considerate, most delicately expressed criticism free from all antagonism and in its conclusions showing an insight which in itself could not fail to move me deeply, but was associated also with enough commendation to make me feel rich beyond the dreams of avarice--i mean an artist's avarice which seeks its treasure in the hearts of men and women. no! whatever the preliminary anxieties might have been this adventure was not to end in sorrow. once more fortune favoured audacity; and yet i have never forgotten the jocular translation of _audaces fortuna juvat_ offered to me by my tutor when i was a small boy: "the audacious get bitten." however he took care to mention that there were various kinds of audacity. oh, there are, there are!... there is, for instance, the kind of audacity almost indistinguishable from impudence.... i must believe that in this case i have not been impudent for i am not conscious of having been bitten. the truth is that when "the rescue" was laid aside it was not laid aside in despair. several reasons contributed to this abandonment and, no doubt, the first of them was the growing sense of general difficulty in the handling of the subject. the contents and the course of the story i had clearly in my mind. but as to the way of presenting the facts, and perhaps in a certain measure as to the nature of the facts themselves, i had many doubts. i mean the telling, representative facts, helpful to carry on the idea, and, at the same time, of such a nature as not to demand an elaborate creation of the atmosphere to the detriment of the action. i did not see how i could avoid becoming wearisome in the presentation of detail and in the pursuit of clearness. i saw the action plainly enough. what i had lost for the moment was the sense of the proper formula of expression, of the only formula that would suit. this, of course, weakened my confidence in the intrinsic worth and in the possible interest of the story--that is in my invention. but i suspect that all the trouble was, in reality, the doubt of my prose, the doubt of its adequacy, of its power to master both the colours and the shades. it is difficult to describe, exactly as i remember it, the complex state of my feelings; but those of my readers who take an interest in artistic perplexities will understand me best when i point out that i dropped "the rescue" not to give myself up to idleness, regrets, or dreaming, but to begin "the nigger of the narcissus" and to go on with it without hesitation and without a pause. a comparison of any page of "the rescue" with any page of "the nigger" will furnish an ocular demonstration of the nature and the inward meaning of this first crisis of my writing life. for it was a crisis undoubtedly. the laying aside of a work so far advanced was a very awful decision to take. it was wrung from me by a sudden conviction that _there_ only was the road of salvation, the clear way out for an uneasy conscience. the finishing of "the nigger" brought to my troubled mind the comforting sense of an accomplished task, and the first consciousness of a certain sort of mastery which could accomplish something with the aid of propitious stars. why i did not return to "the rescue" at once then, was not for the reason that i had grown afraid of it. being able now to assume a firm attitude i said to myself deliberately: "that thing can wait." at the same time i was just as certain in my mind that "youth," a story which i had then, so to speak, on the tip of my pen, could _not_ wait. neither could heart of darkness be put off; for the practical reason that mr. wm. blackwood having requested me to write something for the no. m. of his magazine i had to stir up at once the subject of that tale which had been long lying quiescent in my mind, because, obviously, the venerable maga at her patriarchal age of 1000 numbers could not be kept waiting. then "lord jim," with about seventeen pages already written at odd times, put in his claim which was irresistible. thus every stroke of the pen was taking me further away from the abandoned "rescue," not without some compunction on my part but with a gradually diminishing resistance; till at last i let myself go as if recognizing a superior influence against which it was useless to contend. the years passed and the pages grew in number, and the long reveries of which they were the outcome stretched wide between me and the deserted "rescue" like the smooth hazy spaces of a dreamy sea. yet i never actually lost sight of that dark speck in the misty distance. it had grown very small but it asserted itself with the appeal of old associations. it seemed to me that it would be a base thing for me to slip out of the world leaving it out there all alone, waiting for its fate--that would never come! sentiment, pure sentiment as you see, prompted me in the last instance to face the pains and hazards of that return. as i moved slowly towards the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. there was nothing about it of a grim derelict. it had an air of expectant life. one after another i made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint smiles of amused recognition. they had known well enough that i was bound to come back to them. but their eyes met mine seriously as was only to be expected since i myself felt very serious as i stood amongst them again after years of absence. at once, without wasting words, we went to work together on our renewed life; and every moment i felt more strongly that they who had waited bore no grudge to the man who however widely he may have wandered at times had played truant only once in his life. j. c. 1920. notes on life and letters i don't know whether i ought to offer an apology for this collection which has more to do with life than with letters. its appeal is made to orderly minds. this, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up, which, from the nature of things, can not be regarded as premature. the fact is that i wanted to do it myself because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this volume. of course it may be said that i might have taken up a broom and used it without saying anything about it. that certainly is one way of tidying up. but it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. all those things had a place in my life. whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on the shelf--this shelf--i cannot say, and, frankly, i have not allowed my mind to dwell on the question. i was afraid of thinking myself into a mood that would hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing, whatever may be the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man. and so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year '20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: conrad literary, conrad political, conrad reminiscent, conrad controversial. well, yes! a one-man show--or is it merely the show of one man? the only thing that will not be found amongst those figures and things that have passed away will be conrad "_en pantoufles_." it is a constitutional inability. _schlafrock und pantoffeln!_ not that! never! i don't know whether i dare boast like a certain south american general who used to say that no emergency of war or peace had ever found him "with his boots off"; but i may say that whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, i always tried to pull on my boots first. i didn't want to do it, god knows! their editors, to whom i beg to offer my thanks here, made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. well, yes! bribery. what can you expect? i never pretended to be better than the people in the next street and even in the same street. this volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is as near as i shall ever come to déshabillé in public; and perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that cannot be helped: because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have observed in the ticking of the hall clock at home. for reasons like that. yes! it recedes. and this was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to my own eyes. the section within this volume called letters explains itself though i do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence. it claims nothing in its defence except the right of speech which i believe belongs to everybody outside a trappist monastery. the part i have ventured, for shortness' sake, to call life, may perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of the feelings to which the various papers included under that head owe their origin. and as they relate to events of which everyone has a date, they are in the nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction my thoughts were compelled to take at the various crossroads. if anybody detects any sort of consistency in the choice, this will be only proof positive that wisdom had nothing to do with it. whether right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only adds a deeper shade to its inherent mystery. the appearance of intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight is merely the result of the arrangement of words. the logic that may be found there is only the logic of the language. but i need not labour the point. there will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive the absence of all wisdom from these pages. but i believe sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine that very few will question their sincerity. whatever delusions i may have suffered from i have had no delusions as to the nature of the facts commented on here. i may have misjudged their import: but that is the sort of error for which one may expect a certain amount of toleration. the only paper of this collection which has never been published before is the note on the polish problem. it was written at the request of a friend to be shown privately, and its "protectorate" idea, sprung from a strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was shaped by the actual circumstances of the time. the time was about a month before the entrance of roumania into the war, and though, honestly, i had seen already the shadow of coming events i could not permit my misgivings to enter into and destroy the structure of my plan. i still believe that there was some sense in it. it may certainly be charged with the appearance of lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of many stones; but my object was practical and i had to consider warily the preconceived notions of the people to whom it was implicitly addressed and also their unjustifiable hopes. they were unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that? i mean who was wise enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their mental attitude? the whole atmosphere was poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible. they were also the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. for myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, i was careful not to allude to their character because i did not want the note to be thrown away unread. and then i had to remember that the impossible has sometimes the trick of coming to pass to the confusion of minds and often to the crushing of hearts. of the other papers i have nothing special to say. they are what they are, and i am by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed of insignificant indiscretions. and as to their appearance in this form i claim that indulgence to which all sinners against themselves are entitled. j. c. 1920. a book of prefaces by h. l. mencken published at the borzoi · new york · by alfred · a · knopf copyright, 1917, by alfred a. knopf, inc. _published september, 1917_ _second edition, 1918_ _third edition, august, 1920_ _reprinted, january, 1922_ _set up, electrotyped and printed by vail-ballou co., binghamton, n. y. paper (warren's) furnished by henry lindenmeyr & sons, new york, n. y. bound by the plimpton press, norwood, mass._ manufactured in the united states of america _by h. l. mencken_ ventures into verse george bernard shaw: his plays men versus the man _with r. r. la monte_ a little book in c major a book of calumny [_the above books are out of print_] the philosophy of friedrich nietzsche a book of burlesques in defense of women a book of prefaces prejudices: first series prejudices: second series the american language _new york: alfred a knopf_ preface to the fourth edition this fourth printing of "a book of prefaces" offers me temptation, as the third did, to revise the whole book, and particularly the chapters on conrad, dreiser and huneker, all of whom have printed important new books since the text was completed. in addition, huneker has died. but the changes that i'd make, after all, would be very slight, and so it seems better not to make them at all. from conrad have come "the arrow of gold" and "the rescue," not to mention a large number of sumptuous reprints of old magazine articles, evidently put between covers for the sole purpose of entertaining collectors. from dreiser have come "free," "twelve men," "hey, rub-a-dub-dub" and some chapters of autobiography. from huneker, before and after his death, have come "unicorns," "bedouins," "steeple-jack," "painted veils" and "variations." but not one of these books materially modifies the position of its author. "the arrow of gold," i suppose, has puzzled a good many of conrad's admirers, but certainly "the rescue" has offered ample proof that his old powers are not diminished. the dreiser books, like their predecessors that i discuss here, reveal the curious unevenness of the author. parts of "free" are hollow and irritating, and nearly all of "hey, rub-a-dub-dub" is feeble, but in "twelve men" there are some chapters that rank with the very best of "the titan" and "jennie gerhardt." the place of dreiser in our literature is frequently challenged, and often violently, but never successfully. as the years pass his solid dignity as an artist becomes more and more evident. huneker's last five works changed his position very little. "bedouins," "unicorns" and "variations" belong mainly to his journalism, but into "steeple-jack," and above all into "painted veils" he put his genuine self. i have discussed all of these books in other places, and paid my small tribute to the man himself, a light burning brightly through a dark night, and snuffed out only at the dawn. i should add that the prices of conrad first editions given on page 56 have been greatly exceeded during the past year or two. i should add also that the comstockian imbecilities described in chapter iv are still going on, and that the general trend of american legislation and jurisprudence is toward their indefinite continuance. h. l. m. baltimore, january 1, 1922. contents i. joseph conrad 11 ii. theodore dreiser 67 iii. james huneker 151 iv. puritanism as a literary force 197 index 285 a book of prefaces i joseph conrad § 1 "under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of tempered melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding...." i take the words from a little book on joseph conrad by wilson follett, privately printed, and now, i believe, out of print.[1] they define both the mood of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as criticisms of life. like dreiser, conrad is forever fascinated by the "immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of life--fascinated, and left wondering. one looks in vain for an attempt at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. dreiser, more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but conrad, from first to last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. his stories are not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. each protagonist is a new prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his helplessness. each goes down a greek route to defeat and disaster, leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. i can scarcely recall an exception. kurtz, lord jim, razumov, nostromo, captain whalley, yanko goorall, verloc, heyst, gaspar ruiz, almayer: one and all they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible forces that beset them. even in "youth," "typhoon," and "the shadow line," superficially stories of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the surface. captain mac whirr gets the _nan-shan_ to port at last, but it is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one of disdain, almost one of contempt. so, too, in "youth." a tale of the spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? i do not see it so. to me its significance, like that of "the shadow line," is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. the whole conradean system sums itself up in the title of "victory," an incomparable piece of irony. imagine a better label for that tragic record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm! mr. follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause of conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life--his double exile, first from poland, and then from the sea. but this is surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. neither exile, it must be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. conrad has been back to poland, and he is free to return to the ships whenever the spirit moves him. i see no reason for looking in such directions for his view of the world, nor even in the direction of his nationality. we detect certain curious qualities in every slav simply because he is more given than we are to revealing the qualities that are in all of us. introspection and self-revelation are his habit; he carries the study of man and fate to a point that seems morbid to westerners; he is forever gabbling about what he finds in his own soul. but in the last analysis his verdicts are the immemorial and almost universal ones. surely his resignationism is not a slavic copyright; all human philosophies and religions seem doomed to come to it at last. once it takes shape as the concept of nirvana, the desire for nothingness, the will to not-will. again, it is fatalism in this form or that--mohammedanism, agnosticism ... calvinism! yet again, it is the "out, out, brief candle!" of shakespeare, the "_eheu fugaces_" of horace, the "_vanitas vanitatum; omnia vanitas!_" of the preacher. or, to make an end, it is millenarianism, the theory that the world is going to blow up tomorrow, or the day after, or two weeks hence, and that all sweating and striving are thus useless. search where you will, near or far, in ancient or modern times, and you will never find a first-rate race or an enlightened age, in its moments of highest reflection, that ever gave more than a passing bow to optimism. even christianity, starting out as "glad tidings," has had to take on protective coloration to survive, and today its chief professors moan and blubber like johann in herod's rain-barrel. the sanctified are few and far between. the vast majority of us must suffer in hell, just as we suffer on earth. the divine grace, so omnipotent to save, is withheld from us. why? there, alas, is your insoluble mystery, your riddle of the universe!... this conviction that human life is a seeking without a finding, that its purpose is impenetrable, that joy and sorrow are alike meaningless, you will see written largely in the work of most great creative artists. it is obviously the final message, if any message is genuinely to be found there, of the nine symphonies of ludwig van beethoven, or, at any rate, of the three which show any intellectual content at all. mark twain, superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in secret, as nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "the mysterious stranger" and "what is man?" in shakespeare, as shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable obsession. and what else is there in balzac, goethe, swift, molière, turgenev, ibsen, dostoyevsky, romain rolland, anatole france? or in the zola of "l'assomoir," "germinal," "la débâcle," the whole rougon-macquart series? (the zola of "les quatres evangiles," and particularly of "fécondité," turned meliorist and idealist, and became ludicrous.) or in the hauptmann of "fuhrmann henschel," or in hardy, or in sudermann? (i mean, of course, sudermann the novelist. sudermann the dramatist is a mere mechanician.)... the younger men in all countries, in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. consider the last words of "riders to the sea." or gorky's "nachtasyl." or frank norris' "mcteague." or stephen crane's "the blue hotel." or the ironical fables of dunsany. or dreiser's "jennie gerhardt." or george moore's "sister teresa." conrad, more than any of the other men i have mentioned, grounds his work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of unintelligibility. the exact point of the story of kurtz, in "heart of darkness," is that it is pointless, that kurtz's death is as meaningless as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale negation of all morals. and this, no less, is the point of the story of falk, and of that of almayer, and of that of jim. mr. follett (he must be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns conrad "as a comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common war on despair." with even greater error, william lyon phelps argues that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] the one notion is as unsound as the other. conrad makes war on nothing; he is pre-eminently _not_ a moralist. he swings, indeed, as far from revolt and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize god. his undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral agnosticism. he neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and pities. like mark twain he might well say: "the more i see of men, the more they amuse me--and the more i pity them." he is _simpatico_ precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human volition and responsibility.... i have said that he does not criticize god. one may even imagine him pitying god.... § 2 but in this pity, i need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality. no man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his own werthers. no novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem emotion-squeezers of the kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and their naïve ethical cocksureness. the thing that sets off conrad from these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the greater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as a civilized man. it is the old difference between a huxley and a gladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merely comfortable, "_quid est veritas?_" and "thus saith the lord!" he brings into the english fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastly more fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusual sophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty rages and puerile certainties. the winds of doctrine, howling all about him, leave him absolutely unmoved. he belongs to no party and has nothing to teach, save only a mystery as old as man. in the midst of the hysterical splutterings and battle-cries of the kiplings and chestertons, the booming pedagogics of the wellses and shaws, and the smirking at key-holes of the bennetts and de morgans, he stands apart and almost alone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees every point and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoric indignation, that hyde park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freight and swamp the modern english novel. "at the centre of his web," says arthur symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity.... he calls up all the dreams and illusions by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly naked.... he shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of every vice and crime. he summons before him all the injustices that have come to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... and in all this there is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civilization, are equal and indifferent...."[3] obviously, no englishman! no need to explain (with something akin to apology) that his name is really not joseph conrad at all, but teodor josef konrad karzeniowski, and that he is a pole of noble lineage, with a vague touch of the asiatic in him. the anglo-saxon mind, in these later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view. put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and fury. that mind is essentially moral in cut; it is believing, certain, indignant; it is as incapable of skepticism, save as a passing coryza of the spirit, as it is of wit, which is skepticism's daughter. time was when this was not true, as congreve, pope, wycherley and even thackeray show, but that time was before the reform bill of 1832, the great intellectual levelling, the emancipation of the _chandala_. in these our days the englishman is an incurable foe of distinction, and being so he must needs take in with his mother's milk the delusions which go with that enmity, and particularly the master delusion that all human problems, in the last analysis, are readily soluble, and that all that is required for their solution is to take counsel freely, to listen to wizards, to count votes, to agree upon legislation. this is the prime and immovable doctrine of the _mobile vulgus_ set free; it is the loveliest of all the fruits of its defective powers of observation and reasoning, and above all, of its defective knowledge of demonstrated facts, especially in history. take away this notion that there is some mysterious infallibility in the sense of the majority, this theory that the consensus of opinion is inspired, and the idea of equality begins to wither; in fact, it ceases to have any intelligibility at all. but the notion is not taken away; it is nourished; it flourishes on its own effluvia. and out of it spring the two rules which give direction to all popular thinking, the first being that no concept in politics or conduct is valid (or more accurately respectable), which rises above the comprehension of the great masses of men, or which violates any of their inherent prejudices or superstitions, and the second being that the articulate individual in the mob takes on some of the authority and inspiration of the mob itself, and that he is thus free to set himself up as a soothsayer, so long as he does not venture beyond the aforesaid bounds--in brief, that one man's opinion, provided it observe the current decorum, is as good as any other man's. practically, of course, this is simply an invitation to quackery. the man of genuine ideas is hedged in by taboos; the quack finds an audience already agape. the reply to the invitation, in the domain of applied ethics, is the revived and reinforced _sklavenmoral_ that besets all of us of english speech--the huggermugger morality of timorous, whining, unintelligent and unimaginative men--envy turned into law, cowardice sanctified, stupidity made noble, puritanism. and in the theoretical field there is an even more luxuriant crop of bosh. mountebanks almost innumerable tell us what we should believe and practice, in politics, religion, philosophy and the arts. england and the united states, between them, house more creeds than all the rest of the world together, and they are more absurd. they rise, they flame, they fall and go out, but always there are new ones, always the latest is worse than the last. what modern civilization save this of ours could have produced christian science, or the new thought, or billy sundayism? what other could have yielded up the mawkish bumptiousness of the uplift? what other could accept gravely the astounding imbecilities of english philanthropy and american law? the native output of fallacy and sentimentality, in fact, is not enough to satisfy the stupendous craving of the mob unleashed; there must needs be a constant importation of the aberrant fancies of other peoples. let a new messiah leap up with a new message in any part of the world, and at once there is a response from the two great free nations. once it was tolstoi with a mouldy asceticism made of catacomb christianity and senile soul-sickness; again it was bergson, with a perfumed quasi-philosophy for the boudoirs of the faubourgs; yet again came rudolf eucken and pastor wagner, with their middle-class beeriness and banality. the list need go no further. it begins with preposterous indian swamis and yoghis (most of them, to do them justice, diligent jews from grand street or the bagnios of constantinople), and it ends with the fabulous ibsen of the symbols (no more the real ibsen than christ was a prohibitionist), the ellen key of the new gyneolatry and the signorina montessori of the magical method. it was a sure instinct that brought eusapia palladino to new york. it was the same sure instinct that brought hall caine. i have mentioned ibsen. a glance at the literature he has spawned in the vulgate is enough to show how much his falser aspects have intrigued the american mind and how little it has reacted to his shining skill as a dramatic craftsman--his one authentic claim upon fame. read jennette lee's "the ibsen secret,"[4] perhaps the most successful of all the ibsen gemaras in english, if you would know the virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation. and so in all the arts. whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever is facile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color, we embrace. ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignation precisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonic realism, his unsentimental logic. but the moment a meretricious and platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how he protested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabby culture. compare hauptmann and brieux, the one a great artist, the other no more than a raucous journalist. brieux's elaborate proofs that two and two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst plays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of a religious rite. but hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the nobel prize did not give him a vogue. run the roll: maeterlinck and his languishing supernaturalism, tagore and his asiatic wind music, selma lagerlöf and her old maid's mooniness, bernstein, molnar and company and their out-worn tricks--but i pile up no more names. consider one fact: the civilization that kissed maeterlinck on both cheeks, and tagore perhaps even more intimately, has yet to shake hands with anatole france.... this bemusement by superficial ideas, this neck-bending to quacks, this endless appetite for sesames and apocalypses, is depressingly visible in our native literature, as it is in our native theology, philosophy and politics. "the british and american mind," says w. l. george,[5] "has been long honey-combed with moral impulse, at any rate since the reformation; it is very much what the german mind was up to the middle of the nineteenth century." the artist, facing an audience which seems incapable of differentiating between æsthetic and ethical values, tends to become a preacher of sonorous nothings, and the actual moralist-propagandist finds his way into art well greased. no other people in christendom produces so vast a crop of tin-horn haruspices. we have so many orison swett mardens, martin tuppers, edwin markhams, gerald stanley lees, dr. frank cranes and dr. sylvanus stalls that their output is enough to supply the whole planet. we see, too, constantly, how thin is the barrier separating the chief anglo-saxon novelists and playwrights from the pasture of the platitudinarian. jones and pinero both made their first strikes, not as the artists they undoubtedly are, but as pinchbeck moralists, moaning over the sad fact that girls are seduced. shaw, a highly dexterous dramaturgist, smothers his dramaturgy in a pifflish iconoclasm that is no more than a disguise for puritanism. bennett and wells, competent novelists, turn easily from the novel to the volume of shoddy philosophizing. kipling, with "kim" behind him, becomes a vociferous leader-writer of the _daily mail_ school, whooping a pothouse patriotism, hurling hysterical objurgations at the foe. even w. l. george, potentially a novelist of sound consideration, drops his craft for the jehad of the suffragettes. doyle, barrie, caine, locke, barker, mrs. ward, beresford, hewlett, watson, quiller-couch--one and all, high and low, they are tempted by the public demand for sophistry, the ready market for pills. a henry bordeaux, in france, is an exception; in england he is the rule. the endless thirst to be soothed with cocksure asseverations, the great mob yearning to be dosed and comforted, is the undoing, over there, of three imaginative talents out of five. and, in america, of nearly five out of five. winston churchill may serve as an example. he is a literary workman of very decent skill; the native critics speak of him with invariable respect; his standing within the craft was shown when he was unanimously chosen first president of the authors' league of america. examine his books in order. they proceed steadily from studies of human character and destiny, the proper business of the novelist, to mere outpourings of social and economic panaceas, the proper business of leader writers, chautauquas rabble-rousers and hedge politicians. "the celebrity" and "richard carvel," within their limits, are works of art; "the inside of the cup" is no more than a compendium of paralogy, as silly and smattering as a speech by william jennings bryan or a shocker by jane addams. churchill, with the late jack london to bear him company, may stand for a large class; in its lower ranks are such men as reginald wright kauffman and will levington comfort. still more typical of the national taste for moral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists and eye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-school romantics and the christian endeavor society sentimentalists. of the former i give you george barr mccutcheon, owen wister, the late richard harding davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanely translated to the moving pictures. of the latter i give you the fair authors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishly praised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later howells, the virtuous, kittenish howells, floating about in the air above them. no other country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness or in its banality. it is native and peculiar to a civilization which erects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-ridden into a national way of life.... § 3 my business, however, is not with the culture of anglo-saxondom, but only with conrad's place therein. that place is isolated and remote; he is neither of it nor quite in it. in the midst of a futile meliorism which deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like some sinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a flickering and impenetrable grin. "to read him," says arthur symons, "is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness." there is no need to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in a chance passerby, a bit uncertain of the door. it was not an artistic choice that made him write english instead of french; it was a choice with its roots in considerations far afield. but once made, it concerned him no further. in his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all himself; in his last he is a stranger still--strange in his manner of speech, strange in his view of life, strange, above all, in his glowing and gorgeous artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty _per se_, his absolute detachment from that heresy which would make it no more than a servant to some bald and depressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the uncomprehending. he is, like dunsany, a pure artist. his work, as he once explained, is not to edify, to console, to improve or to encourage, but simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own eager sense of the wonder and prodigality of life as men live it in the world, and of its unfathomable romance and mystery. "my task," he went on, "is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you _see_. that--and no more, and it is everything."...[6] this detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic purpose, this repudiation of the rôle of propagandist, this avowal of what nietzsche was fond of calling innocence, explains the failure of conrad to fit into the pigeon-holes so laboriously prepared for him by critics who must shelve and label or be damned. he is too big for any of them, and of a shape too strange. he stands clear, not only of all the schools and factions that obtain in latter-day english fiction, but also of the whole stream of english literature since the restoration. he is as isolated a figure as george moore, and for much the same reason. both are exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public enemies, for both war upon the philosophies that caress the herd. is conrad the beyond-kipling, as the early criticism of him sought to make him? nonsense! as well speak of mark twain as the beyond-petroleum v. nasby (as, indeed, was actually done). he is not only a finer artist than kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. kipling, within his limits, shows a talent of a very high order. he is a craftsman of the utmost deftness. he gets his effects with almost perfect assurance. moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions. but once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their emptiness becomes immediately apparent. the ideas in them are not the ideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a mob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. reduce any of them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as it is intelligible at all, will be ridiculous. it is precisely here that conrad leaps immeasurably ahead. his ideas are not only sound; they are acute and unusual. they plough down into the sub-strata of human motive and act. they unearth conditions and considerations that lie concealed from the superficial glance. they get at the primary reactions. in particular and above all, they combat the conception of man as a pet and privy councillor of the gods, working out his own destiny in a sort of vacuum and constantly illumined by infallible revelations of his duty, and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitive and responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in the end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the same inscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors and irresolutions, and surrounded by the same terror and darkness.... but is the conrad i here describe simply a new variety of moralist, differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he preaches? surely not. he is no more a moralist than an atheist is a theologian. his attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps especially including, those to which, in moments of æsthetic detachment, he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. it is this constant falling back upon "i do not know," this incessant conversion of the easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact, that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite his skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power to tell a thumping tale. he is talked of, he brings forth a mass of punditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would be absurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon the great class of normal novel-readers that arnold bennett once made, or h. g. wells, or william de morgan in his brief day, or even such cheap-jacks as anthony hope hawkins and william j. locke. his show fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable. and in particular it is unbearable to women. one rarely meets a woman who, stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthusiasm for a conrad book, or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. the feminine mind, which rules in english fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than conrad has to offer. it seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. it protects itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. women, one may say, have to subscribe to absurdities in order to account for themselves at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which sends them to priests, as to other quacks. this is not because they are unintelligent, but rather because they have that sharp and sure sort of intelligence which is instinctive, and which passes under the name of intuition. it teaches them that the taboos which surround them, however absurd at bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and curiosity with unescapable dudgeon, and so they become partisans of the existing order, and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. they may be menaced by phantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. a woman who reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "victory" would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "jenseits von gut und böse" or "the inestimable life of the great gargantua." as for conrad, he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly. his women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a game played by the gods. the effort to erect them into the customary "sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fire of the plain facts. he sees quite accurately, it seems to me, how vastly the rôle of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount to in the authentic struggle of man. his heroes are moved by avarice, by ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" which passes for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passion which is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popular novels and on the stage. if they yield to amour at all, it is only at the urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e.g._, a fantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of heyst, or the thirst for dominion, as in the case of kurtz. the one exception is offered by razumov--and razumov is conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of a sentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. dreiser has shown much the same process in witla and cowperwood, but he is less free from the conventional obsession than conrad; he takes a love affair far more naïvely, and hence far more seriously. i used to wonder why conrad never tackled a straight-out story of adultery under christianity, the standard matter of all our more pretentious fiction and drama. i was curious to see what his ethical agnosticism would make of it. the conclusion i came to at first was that his failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that he hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in the department where they were most powerfully maintained. but it seems to me now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but of disdain. he has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. his whole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing notion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. the current gyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current program of rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. he not only sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded by petty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have us believe; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behind him as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. love, in his stories, is either a feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. in "heart of darkness," perhaps, we get his typical view of it. over all the frenzy and horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heart back in brussels. here we have his measure of the master sentimentality of them all.... § 4 as for conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form, his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "lord jim," for example, starts out in the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological discussion by the mythical marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "and that's the end. he passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "falk" is also a story within a story; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man over fifty." in "amy foster" romance is filtered through the prosaic soul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told the tale of horatius at the bridge. in "under western eyes" the obfuscation is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of the "high gifts of imagination and expression." in "youth" and "heart of darkness" the chronicler and speculator is the shadowy marlow, a "cloak to goe inbisabell" for conrad himself. in "chance" there are two separate stories, imperfectly welded together. elsewhere there are hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the socratic manner. and almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh. in "heart of darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the mouth of the great river, and in "falk" we are on the twenty-fourth before we get a glimpse of falk. "chance" is nearly half done before the drift of the action is clearly apparent. in "almayer's folly" we are thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning until we come to "an outcast of the islands," a later book. as in structure, so in detail. conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look about. whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon as they are made. even the author's own story, "a personal record" (in the english edition, "some reminiscences") starts near the end, and then goes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning. in the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault. the kipling-wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing has accustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapid tempo. moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty and directness of statement; they expect an author to account for his characters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. this omniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that i have been discussing. an author who knows just what is the matter with the world may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matter with his hero. neither sort of assurance, i need not say, is to be found in conrad. he is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a doctor. one constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is as much puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, is feeling his way among shadowy evidences. the discoveries that we make, about lord jim, about nostromo or about kurtz, come as fortuitously and as unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of our world. the picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenly and completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the end. but in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealing, lies two-thirds of conrad's art, or his craft, or his trick, or whatever you choose to call it. what he shows us is blurred at the edges, but so is life itself blurred at the edges. we see least clearly precisely what is nearest to us, and is hence most real to us. a man may profess to understand the president of the united states, but he seldom alleges, even to himself, that he understands his own wife. in the character and in its reactions, in the act and in the motive: always that tremulousness, that groping, that confession of final bewilderment. "he passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart...." and the cloud enshrouds the inner man as well as the outer, the secret springs of his being as well as the overt events of his life. "his meanest creatures," says arthur symons, "have in them a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, or mistake, some sin or crime, to redeem." what is lord jim, scoundrel and poltroon or gallant knight? what is captain macwhirr, hero or simply ass? what is falk, beast or idealist? one leaves "heart of darkness" in that palpitating confusion which is shot through with intense curiosity. kurtz is at once the most abominable of rogues and the most fantastic of dreamers. it is impossible to differentiate between his vision and his crimes, though all that we look upon as order in the universe stands between them. in dreiser's novels there is the same anarchy of valuations, and it is chiefly responsible for the rage he excites in the unintelligent. the essential thing about cowperwood is that he is two diverse beings at once; a puerile chaser of women and a great artist, a guinea pig and half a god. the essential thing about carrie meeber is that she remains innocent in the midst of her contaminations, that the virgin lives on in the kept woman. this is not the art of fiction as it is conventionally practised and understood. it is not explanation, labelling, assurance, moralizing. in the cant of newspaper criticism, it does not "satisfy." but the great artist is never one who satisfies in that feeble sense; he leaves the business to mountebanks who do it better. "my purpose," said ibsen, "is not to answer questions; it is to ask them." the spectator must bring something with him beyond the mere faculty of attention. if, coming to conrad, he cannot, he is at the wrong door. § 5 conrad's predilection for barbarous scenes and the more bald and shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. his own road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. he moved among men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of sentimentality, to shield them. the struggle for existence, as he saw it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the carnivora of the jungle. some of his stories, and among them his very best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. he himself is the enchanted boy of "youth"; he is the ship-master of "heart of darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is visibly present in most of the tales of the sea. and what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere body of reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. he came to his writing years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises of market places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets pen to paper. a conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon him save it be colossal. when his men combat, not nature, but other men, they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailors battling with a tempest. "the secret agent" and "under western eyes" fill the dull back streets of london and geneva with pursuits, homicides and dynamitings. "nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries and carnalities. "a point of honor" is coloured by the senseless, insatiable ferocity of gobineau's "renaissance." "victory" ends with a massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood. whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man under civilization, conrad fails. "the return" is a thoroughly infirm piece of writing--a second rate magazine story. one concludes at once that the author himself does not believe in it. "the inheritors" is worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a bore. it is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the conrad gallery in such scenes. think of captain macwhirr reacting to social tradition, lord jim immersed in the class war, lena hermann seduced by the fashions, almayer a candidate for office! as well think of huckleberry finn at harvard, or tom jones practising law. these things do not interest conrad, chiefly, i suppose, because he does not understand them. his concern, one may say, is with the gross anatomy of passion, not with its histology. he seeks to depict emotion, not in its ultimate attenuation, but in its fundamental innocence and fury. inevitably, his materials are those of what we call melodrama; he is at one, in the bare substance of his tales, with the manufacturers of the baldest shockers. but with a difference!--a difference, to wit, of approach and comprehension, a difference abysmal and revolutionary. he lifts melodrama to the dignity of an important business, and makes it a means to an end that the mere shock-monger never dreams of. in itself, remember, all this up-roar and blood-letting is not incredible, nor even improbable. the world, for all the pressure of order, is still full of savage and stupendous conflicts, of murders and debaucheries, of crimes indescribable and adventures almost unimaginable. one cannot reasonably ask a novelist to deny them or to gloss over them; all one may demand of him is that, if he make artistic use of them, he render them understandable--that he logically account for them, that he give them plausibility by showing their genesis in intelligible motives and colourable events. the objection to the conventional melodramatist is that he fails to do this. it is not that his efforts are too florid, but that his causes are too puny. for all his exuberance of fancy, he seldom shows us a downright impossible event; what he does constantly show us is an inadequate and hence unconvincing motive. in a cheap theatre we see a bad actor, imperfectly disguised as a viscount, bind a shrieking young woman to the railroad tracks, with an express train approaching. why does he do it? the melodramatist offers a double-headed reason, the first part being that the viscount is an amalgam of satan and don juan and the second being that the young woman prefers death to dishonour. both parts are absurd. our eyes show us at once that the fellow is far more the floorwalker, the head barber, the knight of pythias than either the satan or the don juan, and our experience of life tells us that young women in yellow wigs do not actually rate their virginity so dearly. but women are undoubtedly done to death in this way--not every day, perhaps, but now and then. men bind them, trains run over them, the newspapers discuss the crime, the pursuit of the felon, the ensuing jousting of the jurisconsults. why, then? the true answer, when it is forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's answer. it may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the normal laws of cause and effect. it may be an answer made up largely, or even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of lunacy. that is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama and reality. the events of the two may be, and often are identical. it is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar and incommensurate. here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between the stories of conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashy confections of the literary artisans--_e.g._, sienkiewicz, dumas, lew wallace, and their kind. conrad's materials, at bottom, are almost identical with those of the artisans. he, too, has his chariot races, his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. he, too, takes us through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. but always he illuminates the nude and amazing event with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of its workings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it. always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomes almost inevitability. his "nostromo," for example, in its externals, is a mere tale of south american turmoil; its materials are those of "soldiers of fortune." but what a difference in method, in point of approach, in inner content! davis was content to show the overt act, scarcely accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of conventional romance. conrad penetrates to the motive concealed in it, the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness, habit and aberration underlying it. the one achieved an agreeable romance, and an agreeable romance only. the other achieves an extraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the latin-american temperament--a full length exposure of the perverse passions and incomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue one another like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit upon the men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon the institutions under which they live. i do not say that conrad is always exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is accurate. in the first case i know that he often is not, in the second case i do not know whether he is or he isn't. but i do say that, within the scope of his vision, he is wholly convincing; that the men and women he sets into his scene show ineluctably vivid and persuasive personality; that the theories he brings forward to account for their acts are intelligible; that the effects of those acts, upon actors and immediate spectators alike, are such as might be reasonably expected to issue; that the final impression is one of searching and indubitable veracity. one leaves "nostromo" with a memory as intense and lucid as that of a real experience. the thing is not mere photography. it is interpretative painting at its highest. in all his stories you will find this same concern with the inextricable movement of phenomena and noumena between event and event, this same curiosity as to first causes and ultimate effects. sometimes, as in "the point of honor" and "the end of the tether," he attempts to work out the obscure genesis, in some chance emotion or experience, of an extraordinary series of transactions. at other times, as in "typhoon," "youth," "falk" and "the shadow line," his endeavour is to determine the effect of some gigantic and fortuitous event upon the mind and soul of a given man. at yet other times, as in "almayer's folly," "lord jim" and "under western eyes," it is his aim to show how cause and effect are intricately commingled, so that it is difficult to separate motive from consequence, and consequence from motive. but always it is the process of mind rather than the actual act that interests him. always he is trying to penetrate the actor's mask and interpret the actor's frenzy. it is this concern with the profounder aspects of human nature, this bold grappling with the deeper and more recondite problems of his art, that gives him consideration as a first-rate artist. he differs from the common novelists of his time as a beethoven differs from a mendelssohn. some of them are quite his equals in technical skill, and a few of them, notably bennett and wells, often show an actual superiority, but when it comes to that graver business which underlies all mere virtuosity, he is unmistakably the superior of the whole corps of them. this superiority is only the more vividly revealed by the shop-worn shoddiness of most of his materials. he takes whatever is nearest to hand, out of his own rich experience or out of the common store of romance. he seems to disdain the petty advantages which go with the invention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented snarls of circumstance. all the classical doings of anarchists are to be found in "the secret agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, of late, to so-called reds. "youth," as a story, is no more than an orthodox sea story, and w. clark russell contrived better ones. in "chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. in "victory" there are villains worthy of jack b. yeats' melodramas of the spanish main. in "nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of richard harding davis and o. henry. and in "under western eyes" the protagonist is one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situation at the heart of all the military melodramas ever written. but what conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbish from the lumber room of the imagination! consider, for example, "under western eyes," by no means the best of his stories. the plot is that of "shenandoah" and "held by the enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowed with a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents are followed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossal panorama of holy russia! it is always this background, this complex of obscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that conrad spends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage. it is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. it is not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowy accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the individual's destiny. here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait of razumov, glowing with life. but here, far more importantly, we also have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the russian character, with all its confused mingling of western realism and oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of all that we celts and saxons and latins hold to be true of human motive and human act. russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of the tale. in the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of the east, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding asia. and in the sea stories we have, perhaps for the first time in english fiction, a vast and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal striving and of his eternal impotence. here, at last, the colossus has found its interpreter. there is in "typhoon" and "the nigger of the narcissus," and, above all, in "the mirror of the sea," a poetic evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside the ancient sagas. conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill that is superb and incomparable. he challenges at once the pictorial vigour of hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of lafcadio hearn, and surpasses them both. and beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of that inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. the sea to him is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost a god. he sees it as the eternal enemy, deceitful in its caresses, sudden in its rages, relentless in its enmities, and forever a mystery. § 6 conrad's first novel, "almayer's folly," was printed in 1895. he tells us in "a personal record" that it took him seven years to write it--seven years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of learning how to write. he was, at this time thirty-eight years old. seventeen years before, landing in england to fit himself for the british merchant service, he had made his first acquaintance with the english language. the interval had been spent almost continuously at sea--in the eastern islands, along the china coast, on the congo and in the south atlantic. that he hesitated between french and english is a story often told, but he himself is authority for the statement that it is more symbolical than true. flaubert, in those days, was his idol, as we know, but the speech of his daily business won, and english literature reaped the greatest of all its usufructs from english sea power. to this day there are marks of his origins in his style. his periods, more than once, have an inept and foreign smack. in fishing for the right phrase one sometimes feels that he finds a french phrase, or even a polish phrase, and that it loses something by being done into english. the credit for discovering "almayer's folly," as the publishers say, belongs to edward garnett, then a reader for t. fisher unwin. the book was brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention. the first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousand copies; at all events, specimens of it are now very hard to find, and collectors pay high prices for them. when "an outcast of the islands" followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of the author, and one of them was sir (then mr.) hugh clifford, a former governor of the federated malay states and himself the author of several excellent books upon the malay. clifford gave conrad encouragement privately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority of english critics remained unaware of him. after an interval of two years, during which he struggled between his desire to write and the temptation to return to the sea, he published "the nigger of the narcissus."[7] it made a fair success of esteem, but still there was no recognition of the author's true stature. then followed "tales of unrest" and "lord jim," and after them the feeblest of all the conrad books, "the inheritors," written in collaboration with ford madox hueffer. it is easy to see in this collaboration, and no less in the character of the book, an indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of downright loss of hope. but success, in fact, was just around the corner. in 1902 came "youth," and straightway conrad was the lion of literary london. the chorus of approval that greeted it was almost a roar; all sorts of critics and reviewers, from h. g. wells to w. l. courtney, and from john galsworthy to w. robertson nicoll, took a hand. writing home to the _new york times_, w. l. alden reported that he had "not heard one dissenting voice in regard to the book," but that the praise it received "was unanimous," and that the newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one another "in their efforts to express their admiration for it." this benign whooping, however, failed to awaken the enthusiasm of the mass of novel-readers and brought but meagre orders from the circulating libraries. "typhoon" came upon the heels of "youth," but still the sales of the conrad books continued small and the author remained in very uncomfortable circumstances. even after four or five years he was still so poor that he was glad to accept a modest pension from the british civil list. this official recognition of his genius, when it came at last, seems to have impressed the public, characteristically enough, far more than his books themselves had done, and the foundations were thus laid for that wider recognition of his genius which now prevails. but getting him on his legs was slow work, and such friends as hueffer, clifford and galsworthy had to do a lot of arduous log-rolling. even after the splash made by "youth" his publishing arrangements seem to have remained somewhat insecure. his first eleven books show six different imprints; it was not until his twelfth that he settled down to a publisher. his american editions tell an even stranger story. the first six of them were brought out by six different publishers; the first eight by no less than seven. but today he has a regular american publisher at last, and in england a complete edition of his works is in progress. thanks to the indefatigable efforts of that american publisher (who labours for gene stratton-porter and gerald stanley lee in the same manner) conrad has been forced upon the public notice in the united states, and it is the fashion among all who pretend to aesthetic consciousness to read him, or, at all events, to talk about him. his books have been brought together in a uniform edition for the newly intellectual, bound in blue leather, like the "complete library sets" of kipling, o. henry, guy de maupassant and paul de kock. the more literary newspapers print his praises; he is hymned by professorial critics as a prophet of virtue; his genius is certificated by such diverse authorities as hildegarde hawthorne and louis joseph vance; i myself lately sat on a conrad committee, along with booth tarkington, david belasco, irvin cobb, walter pritchard eaton and hamlin garland--surely an astounding posse of _literati_! moreover, conrad himself shows a disposition to reach out for a wider audience. his "victory," first published in _munsey's magazine_, revealed obvious efforts to be intelligible to the general. a few more turns of the screw and it might have gone into the _saturday evening post_, between serials by harris dickson and rex beach. meanwhile, in the shadow of this painfully growing celebrity as a novelist, conrad takes on consideration as a bibelot, and the dealers in first editions probably make more profit out of some of his books than ever he has made himself. his manuscripts are cornered, i believe, by an eminent collector of literary curiosities in new york, who seems to have a contract with the novelist to take them as fast as they are produced--perhaps the only arrangement of the sort in literary history. his first editions begin to bring higher premiums than those of any other living author. considering the fact that the oldest of them is less than twenty-five years old, they probably set new records for the trade. even the latest in date are eagerly sought, and it is not uncommon to see an english edition of a conrad book sold at an advance in new york within a month of its publication.[8] as i hint, however, there is not much reason to believe that this somewhat extravagant fashion is based upon any genuine liking, or any very widespread understanding. the truth is that, for all the adept tub-thumping of publishers, conrad's sales still fall a good deal behind those of even the most modest of best-seller manufacturers, and that the respect with which his successive volumes are received is accompanied by enthusiasm in a relatively narrow circle only. a clan of conrad fanatics exists, and surrounding it there is a body of readers who read him because it is the intellectual thing to do, and who talk of him because talking of him is expected. but beyond that he seems to make little impression. when "victory" was printed in _munsey's magazine_ it was a failure; no other single novel, indeed, contributed more toward the abandonment of the policy of printing a complete novel in each issue. the other popular magazines show but small inclination for conrad manuscripts. some time ago his account of a visit to poland in war-time was offered on the american market by an english author's agent. at the start a price of $2,500 was put upon it, but after vainly inviting buyers for a couple of months it was finally disposed of to a literary newspaper which seldom spends so much as $2,500, i daresay, for a whole month's supply of copy. in the united states, at least, novelists are made and unmade, not by critical majorities, but by women, male and female. the art of fiction among us, as henry james once said, "is almost exclusively feminine." in the books of such a man as william dean howells it is difficult to find a single line that is typically and exclusively masculine. one could easily imagine edith wharton, or mrs. watts, or even agnes repplier, writing all of them. when a first-rate novelist emerges from obscurity it is almost always by some fortuitous plucking of the dexter string. "sister carrie," for example, has made a belated commercial success, not because its dignity as a human document is understood, but because it is mistaken for a sad tale of amour, not unrelated to "the woman thou gavest me" and "dora thorne." in conrad there is no such sweet bait for the fair and sentimental. the sedentary multipara, curled up in her boudoir on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in his grim tales. the conrad philosophy is harsh, unyielding, repellent. the conrad heroes are nearly all boors and ruffians. their very love-making has something sinister and abhorrent in it; one cannot imagine them in the moving pictures, played by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. more, i venture that the censors would object to them, even disguised as floor-walkers. surely that would be a besotted board which would pass the irregular amours of lord jim, the domestic brawls of almayer, the revolting devil's mass of kurtz, falk's disgusting feeding in the southern ocean, or the butchery on heyst's island. stevenson's "treasure island" has been put upon the stage, but "an outcast of the islands" would be as impossible there as "barry lyndon" or "la terre." the world fails to breed actors for such rôles, or stage managers to penetrate such travails of the spirit, or audiences for the revelation thereof. with the conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a barabbasian silo, there arises a considerable conrad literature, most of it quite valueless. huneker's essay, in "ivory, apes and peacocks,"[9] gets little beyond the obvious; william lyon phelps, in "the advance of the english novel," achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] frederic taber cooper tries to estimate such things as "the secret agent" and "under western eyes" in terms of the harvard enlightenment;[11] john galsworthy wastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even sir hugh clifford, for all his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to conrad's principles of malay psychology.[13] who cares? conrad is his own god, and creates his own malay! the best of the existing studies of conrad, despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, is in the book of wilson follett, before mentioned. the worst is in the official biography by richard curle,[14] for which conrad himself obtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumed to lie. if it does, then its absurdities are nothing new, for we all know what a botch ibsen made of accounting for himself. but, even so, the assumption stretches the probabilities more than once. surely it is hard to think of conrad putting "lord jim" below "chance" and "the secret agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce moral issue." nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense--save it be an american critic's doctrine that "conrad denounces pessimism." "lord jim" no more raises a moral issue than "the titan." it is, if anything, a devastating exposure of a moral issue. its villain is almost heroic; its hero, judged by his peers, is a scoundrel.... hugh walpole, himself a competent novelist, does far better in his little volume, "joseph conrad."[15] in its brief space he is unable to examine all of the books in detail, but he at least manages to get through a careful study of conrad's method, and his professional skill and interest make it valuable. § 7 there is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. they are bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob emotion, error. the question whether this or that man is great or small is one which only posterity can answer. a silly begging of the question, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? shakespeare's ghost has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. even today, it must notice a difference in flitting from london to berlin. the shade of milton has been tricked in the same way. so, also, has johann sebastian bach's. it needed a mendelssohn to rescue it from coventry--and now mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the shadows in his turn. we are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine. my own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that i know, is that conrad's figure stands out from the field like the alps from the piedmont plain. he not only has no masters in the novel; he has scarcely a colourable peer. perhaps thomas hardy and anatole france--old men both, their work behind them. but who else? james is dead. meredith is dead. so is george moore, though he lingers on. so are all the russians of the first rank; andrieff, gorki and their like are light cavalry. in sudermann, germany has a writer of short stories of very high calibre, but where is the german novelist to match conrad? clara viebig? thomas mann? gustav frenssen? arthur schnitzler? surely not! as for the italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd harlequins. as for the spaniards and the scandinavians, they would pass for geniuses only in suburbia. in america, setting aside an odd volume here and there, one can discern only dreiser--and of dreiser's limitations i shall discourse anon. there remains england. england has the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman novelists comparable to wells, bennett, benson, walpole, beresford, george, galsworthy, hichens, de morgan, miss sinclair, hewlett and company. they have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say, dickens, or bulwer-lytton, or sienkiewicz, or zola. but the literary _grande passion_ is simply not in them. they get nowhere with their suave and interminable volumes. their view of the world and its wonders is narrow and superficial. they are, at bottom, no more than clever mechanicians. as galsworthy has said, conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them all. one might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant, a cosmic artist. his mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures up the general out of the particular. what he sees and describes in his books is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods. "in the novels of conrad," says galsworthy, "nature is first, man is second." but not a mute, a docile second! he may think, as walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that they are too weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. it is the challenging that engrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder. it is as futile, in the end, as hamlet's or faust's--but still a gallant and a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, an enterprise "inscrutable ... and excessively romantic."... if you want to get his measure, read "youth" or "falk" or "heart of darkness," and then try to read the best of kipling. i think you will come to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the difference between an adroit artisan's bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity and passion of a first-rate artist. footnotes: [1] joseph conrad: a short study of his intellectual and emotional attitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels, by wilson follett; new york, doubleday, page & co. (1915). [2] the advance of the english novel. new york, dodd, mead & co., 1916, p. 215. [3] conrad, in the _forum_, may, 1915. [4] new york and london. g. p. putnam's sons, 1907. [5] the intelligence of woman. boston, little, brown & co., 1916, p. 6-7. [6] in _the new review_, dec., 1897. [7] printed in the united states as children of the sea, but now restored to its original title. [8] here are some actual prices from booksellers' catalogues: 1914 1916 1920 almayer's folly (1895) $12. $24. $40. an outcast of the islands (1896) 11.50 20. 35. the nigger of the narcissus (1898) 7.50 20. 35. tales of unrest (1898) 12.50 20. 35. lord jim (1900) 7.50 22.50 25. the inheritors (1901) 12. 20. 30. youth (1902) 5. 7.50 25. typhoon (1903) 4. 5.50 16. romance (1903) 5. 7.50 9. nostromo (1904) 2.50 4.50 7.50 the mirror of the sea (1906) 5. 11. 15. a set of six (1908) 3. 7.50 10. under western eyes (1911) 4.50 4.50 6. some reminiscences (1912) 4.50 9. 15. chance (1913) 2. 5. 15. victory (1915) 2. 2.50 4.25 [9] new york, chas. scribner's sons, 1915, pp. 1-21. [10] new york, dodd, mead & co., 1916, pp. 192-217. [11] some english story tellers: a book of the younger novelists; new york, henry holt & co., 1912, pp. 1-30. [12] a disquisition on conrad, _fortnightly review_, april, 1908. [13] the genius of mr. joseph conrad, _north american review_, june, 1904. [14] joseph conrad: a study; new york, doubleday, page & co., 1914. [15] joseph conrad; london, nisbet & co. (1916). ii theodore dreiser § 1 out of the desert of american fictioneering, so populous and yet so dreary, dreiser stands up--a phenomenon unescapably visible, but disconcertingly hard to explain. what forces combined to produce him in the first place, and how has he managed to hold out so long against the prevailing blasts--of disheartening misunderstanding and misrepresentation, of puritan suspicion and opposition, of artistic isolation, of commercial seduction? there is something downright heroic in the way the man has held his narrow and perilous ground, disdaining all compromise, unmoved by the cheap success that lies so inviting around the corner. he has faced, in his day, almost every form of attack that a serious artist can conceivably encounter, and yet all of them together have scarcely budged him an inch. he still plods along in the laborious, cheerless way he first marked out for himself; he is quite as undaunted by baited praise as by bludgeoning, malignant abuse; his later novels are, if anything, more unyieldingly dreiserian than his earliest. as one who has long sought to entice him in this direction or that, fatuously presuming to instruct him in what would improve him and profit him, i may well bear a reluctant and resigned sort of testimony to his gigantic steadfastness. it is almost as if any change in his manner, any concession to what is usual and esteemed, any amelioration of his blind, relentless exercises of _force majeure_, were a physical impossibility. one feels him at last to be authentically no more than a helpless instrument (or victim) of that inchoate flow of forces which he himself is so fond of depicting as at once the answer to the riddle of life, and a riddle ten times more vexing and accursed. and his origins, as i say, are quite as mysterious as his motive power. to fit him into the unrolling chart of american, or even of english fiction is extremely difficult. save one thinks of h. b. fuller (whose "with the procession" and "the cliff-dwellers" are still remembered by huneker, but by whom else?[16]), he seems to have had no fore-runner among us, and for all the discussion of him that goes on, he has few avowed disciples, and none of them gets within miles of him. one catches echoes of him, perhaps, in willa sibert cather, in mary s. watts, in david graham phillips, in sherwood anderson and in joseph medill patterson, but, after all, they are no more than echoes. in robert herrick the thing descends to a feeble parody; in imitators further removed to sheer burlesque. all the latter-day american novelists of consideration are vastly more facile than dreiser in their philosophy, as they are in their style. in the fact, perhaps, lies the measure of their difference. what they lack, great and small, is the gesture of pity, the note of awe, the profound sense of wonder--in a phrase, that "soberness of mind" which william lyon phelps sees as the hallmark of conrad and hardy, and which even the most stupid cannot escape in dreiser. the normal american novel, even in its most serious forms, takes colour from the national cocksureness and superficiality. it runs monotonously to ready explanations, a somewhat infantile smugness and hopefulness, a habit of reducing the unknowable to terms of the not worth knowing. what it cannot explain away with ready formulae, as in the later winston churchill, it snickers over as scarcely worth explaining at all, as in the later howells. such a brave and tragic book as "ethan frome" is so rare as to be almost singular, even with mrs. wharton. there is, i daresay, not much market for that sort of thing. in the arts, as in the concerns of everyday, the american seeks escape from the insoluble by pretending that it is solved. a comfortable phrase is what he craves beyond all things--and comfortable phrases are surely not to be sought in dreiser's stock. i have heard argument that he is a follower of frank norris, and two or three facts lend it a specious probability. "mcteague" was printed in 1899; "sister carrie" a year later. moreover, norris was the first to see the merit of the latter book, and he fought a gallant fight, as literary advisor to doubleday, page & co., against its suppression after it was in type. but this theory runs aground upon two circumstances, the first being that dreiser did not actually read "mcteague," nor, indeed, grow aware of norris, until after "sister carrie" was completed, and the other being that his development, once he began to write other books, was along paths far distant from those pursued by norris himself. dreiser, in truth, was a bigger man than norris from the start; it is to the latter's unending honour that he recognized the fact instanter, and yet did all he could to help his rival. it is imaginable, of course, that norris, living fifteen years longer, might have overtaken dreiser, and even surpassed him; one finds an arrow pointing that way in "vandover and the brute" (not printed until 1914). but it swings sharply around in "the epic of the wheat." in the second volume of that incomplete trilogy, "the pit," there is an obvious concession to the popular taste in romance; the thing is so frankly written down, indeed, that a play has been made of it, and broadway has applauded it. and in "the octopus," despite some excellent writing, there is a descent to a mysticism so fantastic and preposterous that it quickly passes beyond serious consideration. norris, in his day, swung even lower--for example, in "a man's woman" and in some of his short stories. he was a pioneer, perhaps only half sure of the way he wanted to go, and the evil lures of popular success lay all about him. it is no wonder that he sometimes seemed to lose his direction. émile zola is another literary father whose paternity grows dubious on examination. i once printed an article exposing what seemed to me to be a zolaesque attitude of mind, and even some trace of the actual zola manner, in "jennie gerhardt"; there came from dreiser the news that he had never read a line of zola, and knew nothing about his novels. not a complete answer, of course; the influence might have been exerted at second hand. but through whom? i confess that i am unable to name a likely medium. the effects of zola upon anglo-saxon fiction have been almost _nil_; his only avowed disciple, george moore, has long since recanted and reformed; he has scarcely rippled the prevailing romanticism.... thomas hardy? here, i daresay, we strike a better scent. there are many obvious likenesses between "tess of the d'urbervilles" and "jennie gerhardt" and again between "jude the obscure" and "sister carrie." all four stories deal penetratingly and poignantly with the essential tragedy of women; all disdain the petty, specious explanations of popular fiction; in each one finds a poetical and melancholy beauty. moreover, dreiser himself confesses to an enchanted discovery of hardy in 1896, three years before "sister carrie" was begun. but it is easy to push such a fact too hard, and to search for likenesses and parallels that are really not there. the truth is that dreiser's points of contact with hardy might be easily matched by many striking points of difference, and that the fundamental ideas in their novels, despite a common sympathy, are anything but identical. nor does one apprehend any ponderable result of dreiser's youthful enthusiasm for balzac, which antedated his discovery of hardy by two years. he got from both men a sense of the scope and dignity of the novel; they taught him that a story might be a good one, and yet considerably more than a story; they showed him the essential drama of the commonplace. but that they had more influence in forming his point of view, or even in shaping his technique, than any one of half a dozen other gods of those young days--this i scarcely find. in the structure of his novels, and in their manner of approach to life no less, they call up the work of dostoyevsky and turgenev far more than the work of either of these men--but of all the russians save tolstoi (as of flaubert) dreiser himself tells us that he was ignorant until ten years after "sister carrie." in his days of preparation, indeed, his reading was so copious and so disorderly that antagonistic influences must have well-nigh neutralized one another, and so left the curious youngster to work out his own method and his own philosophy. stevenson went down with balzac, poe with hardy, dumas _fils_ with tolstoi. there were even months of delight in sienkiewicz, lew wallace and e. p. roe! the whole repertory of the pedagogues had been fought through in school and college: dickens, thackeray, hawthorne, washington irving, kingsley, scott. only irving and hawthorne seem to have made deep impressions. "i used to lie under a tree," says dreiser, "and read 'twice told tales' by the hour. i thought 'the alhambra' was a perfect creation, and i still have a lingering affection for it." add bret harte, george ebers, william dean howells, oliver wendell holmes, and you have a literary stew indeed!... but for all its bubbling i see a far more potent influence in the chance discovery of spencer and huxley at twenty-three--the year of choosing! who, indeed, will ever measure the effect of those two giants upon the young men of that era--spencer with his inordinate meticulousness, his relentless pursuit of facts, his overpowering syllogisms, and huxley with his devastating agnosticism, his insatiable questionings of the old axioms, above all, his brilliant style? huxley, it would appear, has been condemned to the scientific hulks, along with bores innumerable and unspeakable; one looks in vain for any appreciation of him in treatises on beautiful letters.[17] and yet the man was a superb artist in works, a master-writer even more than a master-biologist, one of the few truly great stylists that england has produced since the time of anne. one can easily imagine the effect of two such vigorous and intriguing minds upon a youth groping about for self-understanding and self-expression. they swept him clean, he tells us, of the lingering faith of his boyhood--a mediaeval, rhenish catholicism;--more, they filled him with a new and eager curiosity, an intense interest in the life that lay about him, a desire to seek out its hidden workings and underlying causes. a young man set afire by huxley might perhaps make a very bad novelist, but it is a certainty that he could never make a sentimental and superficial one. there is no need to go further than this single moving adventure to find the genesis of dreiser's disdain of the current platitudes, his sense of life as a complex biological phenomenon, only dimly comprehended, and his tenacious way of thinking things out, and of holding to what he finds good. ah, that he had learned from huxley, not only how to inquire, but also how to report! that he had picked up a talent for that dazzling style, so sweet to the ear, so damnably persuasive, so crystal-clear! but the more one examines dreiser, either as writer or as theorist of man, the more his essential isolation becomes apparent. he got a habit of mind from huxley, but he completely missed huxley's habit of writing. he got a view of woman from hardy, but he soon changed it out of all resemblance. he got a certain fine ambition and gusto out of balzac, but all that was french and characteristic he left behind. so with zola, howells, tolstoi and the rest. the tracing of likenesses quickly becomes rabbinism, almost cabalism. the differences are huge and sprout up in all directions. nor do i see anything save a flaming up of colonial passion in the current efforts to fit him into a german frame, and make him an agent of prussian frightfulness in letters. such childish gabble one looks for in the new york _times_, and there is where one actually finds it. even the literary monthlies have stood clear of it; it is important only as material for that treatise upon the patrioteer and his bawling which remains to be written. the name of the man, true enough, is obviously germanic, and he has told us himself, in "a traveler at forty," how he sought out and found the tombs of his ancestors in some little town of the rhine country. there are more of these genealogical revelations in "a hoosier holiday," but they show a rhenish strain that was already running thin in boyhood. no one, indeed, who reads a dreiser novel can fail to see the gap separating the author from these half-forgotten forbears. he shows even less of german influence than of english influence. there is, as a matter of fact, little in modern german fiction that is intelligibly comparable to "jennie gerhardt" and "the titan," either as a study of man or as a work of art. the naturalistic movement of the eighties was launched by men whose eyes were upon the theatre, and it is in that field that nine-tenths of its force has been spent. "german naturalism," says george madison priest, quoting gotthold klee's "grunzüge der deutschen literaturgeschichte" "created a new type only in the drama."[18] true enough, it has also produced occasional novels, and some of them are respectable. gustav frenssen's "jörn uhl" is a specimen: it has been done into english. another is clara viebig's "das tägliche brot," which ludwig lewisohn compares to george moore's "esther waters." yet another is thomas mann's "buddenbrooks." but it would be absurd to cite these works as evidences of a national quality, and doubly absurd to think of them as inspiring such books as "jennie gerhardt" and "the titan," which excel them in everything save workmanship. the case of mann reveals a tendency that is visible in nearly all of his contemporaries. starting out as an agnostic realist not unlike the arnold bennett of "the old wives' tale," he has gradually taken on a hesitating sort of romanticism, and in one of his later books, "königliche hoheit" (in english, "royal highness") he ends upon a note of sentimentalism borrowed from wagner's "ring." fräulein viebig has also succumbed to banal and extra-artistic purposes. her "die wacht am rhein," for all its merits in detail, is, at bottom, no more than an eloquent hymn to patriotism--a theme which almost always baffles novelists. as for frenssen, he is a parson by trade, and carries over into the novel a good deal of the windy moralizing of the pulpit. all of these german naturalists--and they are the only german novelists worth considering--share the weakness of zola, their _stammvater_. they, too, fall into the morass that engulfed "fécondité," and make sentimental propaganda. i go into this matter in detail, not because it is intrinsically of any moment, but because the effort to depict dreiser as a secret agent of the wilhelmstrasse, told off to inject subtle doses of _kultur_ into a naïve and pious people, has taken on the proportions of an organized movement. the same critical imbecility which detects naught save a tom cat in frank cowperwood can find naught save an abhorrent foreigner in cowperwood's creator. the truth is that the trembling patriots of letters, male and female, are simply at their old game of seeing a man under the bed. dreiser, in fact, is densely ignorant of german literature, as he is of the better part of french literature, and of much of english literature. he did not even read hauptmann until after "jennie gerhardt" had been written, and such typical german moderns as ludwig thoma, otto julius bierbaum and richard dehmel remain as strange to him as heliogabalus. § 2 in his manner, as opposed to his matter, he is more the teuton, for he shows all of the racial patience and pertinacity and all of the racial lack of humour. writing a novel is as solemn a business to him as trimming a beard is to a german barber. he blasts his way through his interminable stories by something not unlike main strength; his writing, one feels, often takes on the character of an actual siege operation, with tunnellings, drum fire, assaults in close order and hand-to-hand fighting. once, seeking an analogy, i called him the hindenburg of the novel. if it holds, then "the 'genius'" is his poland. the field of action bears the aspect, at the end, of a hostile province meticulously brought under the yoke, with every road and lane explored to its beginning, and every crossroads village laboriously taken, inventoried and policed. here is the very negation of gallic lightness and intuition, and of all other forms of impressionism as well. here is no series of illuminating flashes, but a gradual bathing of the whole scene with white light, so that every detail stands out. and many of those details, of course, are trivial; even irritating. they do not help the picture; they muddle and obscure it; one wonders impatiently what their meaning is, and what the purpose may be of revealing them with such a precise, portentous air.... turn to page 703 of "the 'genius.'" by the time one gets there, one has hewn and hacked one's way through 702 large pages of fine print--97 long chapters, more than 250,000 words. and yet, at this hurried and impatient point, with the _coda_ already begun, dreiser halts the whole narrative to explain the origin, nature and inner meaning of christian science, and to make us privy to a lot of chatty stuff about mrs. althea jones, a professional healer, and to supply us with detailed plans and specifications of the apartment house in which she lives, works her tawdry miracles, and has her being. here, in sober summary, are the particulars: 1. that the house is "of conventional design." 2. that there is "a spacious areaway" between its two wings. 3. that these wings are "of cream-coloured pressed brick." 4. that the entrance between them is "protected by a handsome wrought-iron door." 5. that to either side of this door is "an electric lamp support of handsome design." 6. that in each of these lamp supports there are "lovely cream-coloured globes, shedding a soft lustre." 7. that inside is "the usual lobby." 8. that in the lobby is "the usual elevator." 9. that in the elevator is the usual "uniformed negro elevator man." 10. that this negro elevator man (name not given) is "indifferent and impertinent." 11. that a telephone switchboard is also in the lobby. 12. that the building is seven stories in height. in "the financier" there is the same exasperating rolling up of irrelevant facts. the court proceedings in the trial of cowperwood are given with all the exactness of a parliamentary report in the london _times_. the speeches of the opposing counsel are set down nearly in full, and with them the remarks of the judge, and after that the opinion of the appellate court on appeal, with the dissenting opinions as a sort of appendix. in "sister carrie" the thing is less savagely carried out, but that is not dreiser's fault, for the manuscript was revised by some anonymous hand, and the printed version is but little more than half the length of the original. in "the titan" and "jennie gerhardt" no such brake upon exuberance is visible; both books are crammed with details that serve no purpose, and are as flat as ditch-water. even in the two volumes of personal record, "a traveler at forty" and "a hoosier holiday," there is the same furious accumulation of trivialities. consider the former. it is without structure, without selection, without reticence. one arises from it as from a great babbling, half drunken. on the one hand the author fills a long and gloomy chapter with the story of the borgias, apparently under the impression that it is news, and on the other hand he enters into intimate and inconsequential confidences about all the persons he meets en route, sparing neither the innocent nor the obscure. the children of his english host at bridgely level strike him as fantastic little creatures, even as a bit uncanny--and he duly sets it down. he meets an englishman on a french train who pleases him much, and the two become good friends and see rome together, but the fellow's wife is "obstreperous" and "haughty in her manner" and so "loud-spoken in her opinions" that she is "really offensive"--and down it goes. he makes an impression on a mlle. marcelle in paris, and she accompanies him from monte carlo to ventimiglia, and there gives him a parting kiss and whispers, "_avril-fontainebleau_"--and lo, this sweet one is duly spread upon the minutes. he permits himself to be arrested by a fair privateer in piccadilly, and goes with her to one of the dens of sin that suffragettes see in their nightmares, and cross-examines her at length regarding her ancestry, her professional ethics and ideals, and her earnings at her dismal craft--and into the book goes a full report of the proceedings. he is entertained by an eminent dutch jurist in amsterdam--and upon the pages of the chronicle it appears that the gentleman is "waxy" and "a little pedantic," and that he is probably the sort of "thin, delicate, well barbered" professor that ibsen had in mind when he cast about for a husband for the daughter of general gabler. such is the art of writing as dreiser understands it and practises it--an endless piling up of minutiae, an almost ferocious tracking down of ions, electrons and molecules, an unshakable determination to tell it all. one is amazed by the mole-like diligence of the man, and no less by his exasperating disregard for the ease of his readers. a dreiser novel, at least of the later canon, cannot be read as other novels are read--on a winter evening or summer afternoon, between meal and meal, travelling from new york to boston. it demands the attention for almost a week, and uses up the faculties for a month. if, reading "the 'genius,'" one were to become engrossed in the fabulous manner described in the publishers' advertisements, and so find oneself unable to put it down and go to bed before the end, one would get no sleep for three days and three nights. worse, there are no charms of style to mitigate the rigours of these vast steppes and pampas of narration. joseph joubert's saying that "words should stand out well from the paper" is quite incomprehensible to dreiser; he never imitates flaubert by writing for "_la respiration et l'oreille_." there is no painful groping for the inevitable word, or for what walter pater called "the gipsy phrase"; the common, even the commonplace, coin of speech is good enough. on the first page of "jennie gerhardt" one encounters "frank, open countenance," "diffident manner," "helpless poor," "untutored mind," "honest necessity," and half a dozen other stand-bys of the second-rate newspaper reporter. in "sister carrie" one finds "high noon," "hurrying throng," "unassuming restaurant," "dainty slippers," "high-strung nature," and "cool, calculating world"--all on a few pages. carrie's sister, minnie hanson, "gets" the supper. hanson himself is "wrapped up" in his child. carrie decides to enter storm and king's office, "no matter what." in "the titan" the word "trig" is worked to death; it takes on, toward the end, the character of a banal and preposterous refrain. in the other books one encounters mates for it--words made to do duty in as many senses as the american verb "to fix" or the journalistic "to secure."... i often wonder if dreiser gets anything properly describable as pleasure out of this dogged accumulation of threadbare, undistinguished, uninspiring nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, participles and conjunctions. to the man with an ear for verbal delicacies--the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said--there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident. a phrase springs up full blown, sweet and caressing. but what joy can there be in rolling up sentences that have no more life and beauty in them, intrinsically, than so many election bulletins? where is the thrill in the manufacture of such a paragraph as that in which mrs. althea jones' sordid habitat is described with such inexorable particularity? or in the laborious confection of such stuff as this, from book i, chapter iv, of "the 'genius'"?: the city of chicago--who shall portray it! this vast ruck of life that had sprung suddenly into existence upon the dank marshes of a lake shore! or this from the epilogue to "the financier": there is a certain fish whose scientific name is _mycteroperca bonaci_, and whose common name is black grouper, which is of considerable value as an afterthought in this connection, and which deserves much to be better known. it is a healthy creature, growing quite regularly to a weight of two hundred and fifty pounds, and living a comfortable, lengthy existence because of its very remarkable ability to adapt itself to conditions.... or this from his pamphlet, "life, art and america":[19] alas, alas! for art in america. it has a hard stubby row to hoe. but i offer no more examples. every reader of the dreiser novels must cherish astounding specimens--of awkward, platitudinous marginalia, of whole scenes spoiled by bad writing, of phrases as brackish as so many lumps of sodium hyposulphite. here and there, as in parts of "the titan" and again in parts of "a hoosier holiday," an evil conscience seems to haunt him and he gives hard striving to his manner, and more than once there emerges something that is almost graceful. but a backsliding always follows this phosphorescence of reform. "the 'genius,'" coming after "the titan," marks the high tide of his bad writing. there are passages in it so clumsy, so inept, so irritating that they seem almost unbelievable; nothing worse is to be found in the newspapers. nor is there any compensatory deftness in structure, or solidity of design, to make up for this carelessness in detail. the well-made novel, of course, can be as hollow as the well-made play of scribe--but let us at least have a beginning, a middle and an end! such a story as "the 'genius'" is as gross and shapeless as brünnhilde. it billows and bulges out like a cloud of smoke, and its internal organization is almost as vague. there are episodes that, with a few chapters added, would make very respectable novels. there are chapters that need but a touch or two to be excellent short stories. the thing rambles, staggers, trips, heaves, pitches, struggles, totters, wavers, halts, turns aside, trembles on the edge of collapse. more than once it seems to be foundering, both in the equine and in the maritime senses. the tale has been heard of a tree so tall that it took two men to see to the top of it. here is a novel so brobdingnagian that a single reader can scarcely read his way through it.... § 3 of the general ideas which lie at the bottom of all of dreiser's work it is impossible to be in ignorance, for he has exposed them at length in "a hoosier holiday" and summarized them in "life, art and america." in their main outlines they are not unlike the fundamental assumptions of joseph conrad. both novelists see human existence as a seeking without a finding; both reject the prevailing interpretations of its meaning and mechanism; both take refuge in "i do not know." put "a hoosier holiday" beside conrad's "a personal record," and you will come upon parallels from end to end. or better still, put it beside hugh walpole's "joseph conrad," in which the conradean metaphysic is condensed from the novels even better than conrad has done it himself: at once you will see how the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions, each a rebel against the current assurance and superficiality, each an alien to his place and time, touch each other in a hundred ways. "conrad," says walpole, "is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men." and then, in amplification: "it is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a limitless and angry sea.... from his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. he admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end."... substitute the name of dreiser for that of conrad, and you will have to change scarcely a word. perhaps one, to wit, "clever." i suspect that dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it "stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." the struggle of man, as he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless. there is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe. he can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder. the waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every instant. their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably fortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars.... so at bottom. but to look into the blackness steadily, of course, is almost beyond the endurance of man. in the very moment that its impenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with pale beams of false light. all religions, i daresay, are thus projected from the questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also all great agnosticisms. nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the pythagorean concept of _der ewigen wiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. to it, after a while, he added explanations almost christian--a whole repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. the late mark twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring idea: that men are to some unimaginably vast and incomprehensible being what the unicellular organisms of his body are to man, and so on _ad infinitum_. dreiser occasionally inclines to much the same hypothesis; he likens the endless reactions going on in the world we know, the myriadal creation, collision and destruction of entities, to the slow accumulation and organization of cells _in utero_. he would make us specks in the insentient embryo of some gigantic presence whose form is still unimaginable and whose birth must wait for eons and eons. again, he turns to something not easily distinguishable from philosophical idealism, whether out of berkeley or fichte it is hard to make out--that is, he would interpret the whole phenomenon of life as no more than an appearance, a nightmare of some unseen sleeper or of men themselves, an "uncanny blur of nothingness"--in euripides' phrase, "a song sung by an idiot, dancing down the wind." yet again, he talks vaguely of the intricate polyphony of a cosmic orchestra, cacophonous to our dull ears. finally, he puts the observed into the ordered, reading a purpose in the displayed event: "life was intended to sting and hurt".... but these are only gropings, and not to be read too critically. from speculations and explanations he always returns, conrad-like, to the bald fact: to "the spectacle and stress of life." all he can make out clearly is "a vast compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or impulses of individuals." that compulsion springs "from the settling processes of forces which we do not in the least understand, over which we have no control, and in whose grip we are as grains of dust or sand, blown hither and thither, for what purpose we cannot even suspect."[20] man is not only doomed to defeat, but denied any glimpse or understanding of his antagonist. here we come upon an agnosticism that has almost got beyond curiosity. what good would it do us, asks dreiser, to know? in our ignorance and helplessness, we may at least get a slave's consolation out of cursing the unknown gods. suppose we saw them striving blindly, too, and pitied them?... but, as i say, this scepticism is often tempered by guesses at a possibly hidden truth, and the confession that this truth may exist reveals the practical unworkableness of the unconditioned system, at least for dreiser. conrad is far more resolute, and it is easy to see why. he is, by birth and training, an aristocrat. he has the gift of emotional detachment. the lures of facile doctrine do not move him. in his irony there is a disdain which plays about even the ironist himself. dreiser is a product of far different forces and traditions, and is capable of no such escapement. struggle as he may, and fume and protest as he may, he can no more shake off the chains of his intellectual and cultural heritage than he can change the shape of his nose. what that heritage is you may find out in detail by reading "a hoosier holiday," or in summary by glancing at the first few pages of "life, art and america." briefly described, it is the burden of a believing mind, a moral attitude, a lingering superstition. one-half of the man's brain, so to speak, wars with the other half. he is intelligent, he is thoughtful, he is a sound artist--but there come moments when a dead hand falls upon him, and he is once more the indiana peasant, snuffing absurdly over imbecile sentimentalities, giving a grave ear to quackeries, snorting and eye-rolling with the best of them. one generation spans too short a time to free the soul of man. nietzsche, to the end of his days, remained a prussian pastor's son, and hence two-thirds a puritan; he erected his war upon holiness, toward the end, into a sort of holy war. kipling, the grandson of a methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals. and that other english novelist who springs from the servants' hall--let us not be surprised or blame him if he sometimes writes like a bounder. the truth about dreiser is that he is still in the transition stage between christian endeavour and civilization, between warsaw, indiana and the socratic grove, between being a good american and being a free man, and so he sometimes vacillates perilously between a moral sentimentalism and a somewhat extravagant revolt. "the 'genius,'" on the one hand, is almost a tract for rectitude, a warning to the young; its motto might be _scheut die dirnen_! and on the other hand, it is full of a laborious truculence that can only be explained by imagining the author as heroically determined to prove that he is a plain-spoken fellow and his own man, let the chips fall where they may. so, in spots, in "the financier" and "the titan," both of them far better books. there is an almost moral frenzy to expose and riddle what passes for morality among the stupid. the isolation of irony is never reached; the man is still evangelical; his ideas are still novelties to him; he is as solemnly absurd in some of his floutings of the code américain as he is in his respect for bouguereau, or in his flirtings with the new thought, or in his naïve belief in the importance of novel-writing. somewhere or other i have called all this the greenwich village complex. it is not genuine artists, serving beauty reverently and proudly, who herd in those cockroached cellars and bawl for art; it is a mob of half-educated yokels and cockneys to whom the very idea of art is still novel, and intoxicating--and more than a little bawdy. not that dreiser actually belongs to this ragamuffin company. far from it, indeed. there is in him, hidden deep-down, a great instinctive artist, and hence the makings of an aristocrat. in his muddled way, held back by the manacles of his race and time, and his steps made uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating. there is vastly more intuition in him than intellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as conrad's is masculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. the view of life that got into "sister carrie," his first book, was not the product of a conscious thinking out of carrie's problems. it simply got itself there by the force of the artistic passion behind it; its coherent statement had to wait for other and more reflective days. the thing began as a vision, not as a syllogism. here the name of franz schubert inevitably comes up. schubert was an ignoramus, even in music; he knew less about polyphony, which is the mother of harmony, which is the mother of music, than the average conservatory professor. but nevertheless he had such a vast instinctive sensitiveness to musical values, such a profound and accurate feeling for beauty in tone, that he not only arrived at the truth in tonal relations, but even went beyond what, in his day, was known to be the truth, and so led an advance. likewise, giorgione da castelfranco and masaccio come to mind: painters of the first rank, but untutored, unsophisticated, uncouth. dreiser, within his limits, belongs to this sabot-shod company of the elect. one thinks of conrad, not as artist first, but as savant. there is something of the icy aloofness of the laboratory in him, even when the images he conjures up pulsate with the very glow of life. he is almost as self-conscious as the beethoven of the last quartets. in dreiser the thing is more intimate, more disorderly, more a matter of pure feeling. he gets his effects, one might almost say, not by designing them, but by living them. but whatever the process, the power of the image evoked is not to be gainsaid. it is not only brilliant on the surface, but mysterious and appealing in its depths. one swiftly forgets his intolerable writing, his mirthless, sedulous, repellent manner, in the face of the athenian tragedy he instils into his seduced and soul-sick servant girls, his barbaric pirates of finances, his conquered and hamstrung supermen, his wives who sit and wait. he has, like conrad, a sure talent for depicting the spirit in disintegration. old gerhardt, in "jennie gerhardt," is alone worth all the _dramatis personae_ of popular american fiction since the days of "rob o' the bowl"; howells could no more have created him, in his rodinesque impudence of outline, than he could have created tartuffe or gargantua. such a novel as "sister carrie" stands quite outside the brief traffic of the customary stage. it leaves behind it an unescapable impression of bigness, of epic sweep and dignity. it is not a mere story, not a novel in the customary american meaning of the word; it is at once a psalm of life and a criticism of life--and that criticism loses nothing by the fact that its burden is despair. here, precisely, is the point of dreiser's departure from his fellows. he puts into his novels a touch of the eternal _weltschmerz_. they get below the drama that is of the moment and reveal the greater drama that is without end. they arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of the recognition of elemental and universal tragedy. his aim is not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condition human destiny. one cannot imagine him consenting to conan doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted with characteristic approval by the new york _times_: "to amuse mankind, to help the sick and the dull and the weary." nor is his purpose to instruct; if he is a pedagogue it is only incidentally and as a weakness. the thing he seeks to do is to stir, to awaken, to move. one does not arise from such a book as "sister carrie" with a smirk of satisfaction; one leaves it infinitely touched. § 4 it is, indeed, a truly amazing first book, and one marvels to hear that it was begun lightly. dreiser in those days (_circa_ 1899), had seven or eight years of newspaper work behind him, in chicago, st. louis, toledo, cleveland, buffalo, pittsburgh and new york, and was beginning to feel that reaction of disgust which attacks all newspaper men when the enthusiasm of youth wears out. he had been successful, but he saw how hollow that success was, and how little surety it held out for the future. the theatre was what chiefly lured him; he had written plays in his nonage, and he now proposed to do them on a large scale, and so get some of the easy dollars of broadway. it was an old friend from toledo, arthur henry, who turned him toward story-writing. the two had met while henry was city editor of the _blade_, and dreiser a reporter looking for a job.[21] a firm friendship sprang up, and henry conceived a high opinion of dreiser's ability, and urged him to try a short story. dreiser was distrustful of his own skill, but henry kept at him, and finally, during a holiday the two spent together at maumee, ohio, he made the attempt. henry had the manuscript typewritten and sent it to _ainslee's magazine_. a week or so later there came a cheque for $75. this was in 1898. dreiser wrote four more stories during the year following, and sold them all. henry now urged him to attempt a novel, but again his distrust of himself held him back. henry finally tried a rather unusual argument: he had a novel of his own on the stocks,[22] and he represented that he was in difficulties with it and in need of company. one day, in september, 1899, dreiser took a sheet of yellow paper and wrote a title at random. that title was "sister carrie," and with no more definite plan than the mere name offered the book began. it went ahead steadily enough until the middle of october, and had come by then to the place where carrie meets hurstwood. at that point dreiser left it in disgust. it seemed pitifully dull and inconsequential, and for two months he put the manuscript away. then, under renewed urgings by henry, he resumed the writing, and kept on to the place where hurstwood steals the money. here he went aground upon a comparatively simple problem; he couldn't devise a way to manage the robbery. late in january he gave it up. but the faithful henry kept urging him, and in march he resumed work, and soon had the story finished. the latter part, despite many distractions, went quickly. once the manuscript was complete, henry suggested various cuts, and in all about 40,000 words came out. the fair copy went to the harpers. they refused it without ceremony and soon afterward dreiser carried the manuscript to doubleday, page & co. he left it with frank doubleday, and before long there came notice of its acceptance, and, what is more, a contract. but after the story was in type it fell into the hands of the wife of one of the members of the firm, and she conceived so strong a notion of its immorality that she soon convinced her husband and his associates. there followed a series of acrimonious negotiations, with dreiser holding resolutely to the letter of his contract. it was at this point that frank norris entered the combat--bravely but in vain. the pious barabbases, confronted by their signature, found it impossible to throw up the book entirely, but there was no nomination in the bond regarding either the style of binding or the number of copies to be issued, and so they evaded further dispute by bringing out the book in a very small edition and with modest unstamped covers. copies of this edition are now eagerly sought by book-collectors, and one in good condition fetches $25 or more in the auction rooms. even the second edition (1907), bearing the imprint of b. w. dodge & co., carries an increasing premium. the passing years work strange farces. the harpers, who had refused "sister carrie" with a spirit bordering upon indignation in 1900, took over the rights of publication from b. w. dodge & co., in 1912, and reissued the book in a new (and extremely hideous) format, with a publisher's note containing smug quotations from the encomiums of the _fortnightly review_, the _athenaeum_, the _spectator_, the _academy_ and other london critical journals. more, they contrived humorously to push the date of their copyright back to 1900. but this new enthusiasm for artistic freedom did not last long. they had published "jennie gerhardt" in 1911 and they did "the financier" in 1912, but when "the titan" followed, in 1914, they were seized with qualms, and suppressed the book after it had got into type. in this emergency the english firm of john lane came to the rescue, only to seek cover itself when the comstocks attacked "the 'genius,'" two years later.... for his high services to american letters, walter h. page, of doubleday, page & co., was made ambassador to england, where "sister carrie" is regarded (according to the harpers), as "the best story, on the whole, that has yet come out of america." a curious series of episodes. another proof, perhaps, of that cosmic imbecility upon which dreiser is so fond of discoursing.... but of all this i shall say more later on, when i come to discuss the critical reception of the dreiser novels, and the efforts made by the new york society for the suppression of vice to stop their sale. the thing to notice here is that the author's difficulties with "sister carrie" came within an ace of turning him from novel-writing completely. stray copies of the suppressed first edition, true enough, fell into the hands of critics who saw the story's value, and during the first year or two of the century it enjoyed a sort of esoteric vogue, and encouragement came from unexpected sources. moreover, a somewhat bowdlerized english edition, published by william heinemann in 1901, made a fair success, and even provoked a certain mild controversy. but the author's income from the book remained almost _nil_, and so he was forced to seek a livelihood in other directions. his history during the next ten years belongs to the tragicomedy of letters. for five of them he was a grub street hack, turning his hand to any literary job that offered. he wrote short stories for the popular magazines, or special articles, or poems, according as their needs varied. he concocted fabulous tales for the illustrated supplements of the sunday newspapers. he rewrote the bad stuff of other men. he returned to reporting. he did odd pieces of editing. he tried his hand at one-act plays. he even ventured upon advertisement writing. and all the while, the best that he could get out of his industry was a meagre living. in 1905, tiring of the uncertainties of this life, he accepted a post on the staff of street & smith, the millionaire publishers of cheap magazines, servant-girl romances and dime-novels, and here, in the very slums of letters, he laboured with tongue in cheek until the next year. the tale of his duties will fill, i daresay, a volume or two in the autobiography on which he is said to be working; it is a chronicle full of achieved impossibilities. one of his jobs, for example, was to reduce a whole series of dime-novels, each 60,000 words in length, to 30,000 words apiece. he accomplished it by cutting each one into halves, and writing a new ending for the first half and a new beginning for the second, with new titles for both. this doubling of their property aroused the admiration of his employers; they promised him an assured and easy future in the dime-novel business. but he tired of it, despite this revelation of a gift for it, and in 1906 he became managing editor of the _broadway magazine_, then struggling into public notice. a year later he transferred his flag to the butterick building, and became chief editor of the _delineator_, the _designer_ and other such gospels for the fair. here, of course, he was as much out of water as in the dime-novel foundry of street & smith, but at all events the pay was good, and there was a certain leisure at the end of the day's work. in 1907, as part of his duties, he organized the national child rescue campaign, which still rages as the _delineator's_ contribution to the uplift. at about the same time he began "jennie gerhardt." it is curious to note that, during these same years, arnold bennett was slaving in london as the editor of _woman_. dreiser left the _delineator_ in 1910, and for the next half year or so endeavoured to pump vitality into the _bohemian magazine_, in which he had acquired a proprietary interest. but the _bohemian_ soon departed this life, carrying some of his savings with it, and he gave over his enforced leisure to "jennie gerhardt," completing the book in 1911. its publication by the harpers during the same year worked his final emancipation from the editorial desk. it was praised, and what is more, it sold, and royalties began to come in. a new edition of "sister carrie" followed in 1912, with "the financier" hard upon its heels. since then dreiser has devoted himself wholly to serious work. "the financier" was put forth as the first volume of "a trilogy of desire"; the second volume, "the titan," was published in 1914; the third is yet to come. "the 'genius'" appeared in 1915; "the bulwark" is just announced. in 1912, accompanied by grant richards, the london publisher, dreiser made his first trip abroad, visiting england, france, italy and germany. his impressions were recorded in "a traveler at forty," published in 1913. in the summer of 1915, accompanied by franklin booth, the illustrator, he made an automobile journey to his old haunts in indiana, and the record is in "a hoosier holiday," published in 1916. his other writings include a volume of "plays of the natural and the supernatural" (1916); "life, art and america," a pamphlet against puritanism in letters (1917); a dozen or more short stories and novelettes, a few poems, and a three-act drama, "the hand of the potter." dreiser was born at terre haute, indiana, on august 27, 1871, and, like most of us, is of mongrel blood, with the german, perhaps, predominating. he is a tall man, awkward in movement and nervous in habit; the boon of beauty has been denied him. the history of his youth is set forth in full in "a hoosier holiday." it is curious to note that he is a brother to the late paul dresser, author of "the banks of the wabash" and other popular songs, and that he himself, helping paul over a hard place, wrote the affecting chorus: oh, the moon is fair tonight along the wabash, from the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming ... but no doubt you know it. § 5 the work of dreiser, considered as craftsmanship pure and simple, is extremely uneven, and the distance separating his best from his worst is almost infinite. it is difficult to believe that the novelist who wrote certain extraordinarily vivid chapters in "jennie gerhardt," and "a hoosier holiday," and, above all, in "the titan," is the same who achieved the unescapable dulness of parts of "the financier" and the general stupidity and stodginess of "the 'genius.'" moreover, the tide of his writing does not rise or fall with any regularity; he neither improves steadily nor grows worse steadily. only half an eye is needed to see the superiority of "jennie gerhardt," as a sheer piece of writing, to "sister carrie," but on turning to "the financier," which followed "jennie gerhardt" by an interval of but one year, one observes a falling off which, at its greatest, is almost indistinguishable from a collapse. "jennie gerhardt" is suave, persuasive, well-ordered, solid in structure, instinct with life. "the financier," for all its merits in detail, is loose, tedious, vapid, exasperating. but had any critic, in the autumn of 1912, argued thereby that dreiser was finished, that he had shot his bolt, his discomfiture would have come swiftly, for "the titan," which followed in 1914, was almost as well done as "the financier" had been ill done, and there are parts of it which remain, to this day, the very best writing that dreiser has ever achieved. but "the 'genius'"? ay, in "the 'genius'" the pendulum swings back again! it is flaccid, elephantine, doltish, coarse, dismal, flatulent, sophomoric, ignorant, unconvincing, wearisome. one pities the jurisconsult who is condemned, by comstockian clamour, to plough through such a novel. in it there is a sort of humourless _reductio ad absurdum_, not only of the dreiser manner, but even of certain salient tenets of the dreiser philosophy. at its best it has a moral flavour. at its worst it is almost maudlin.... the most successful of the dreiser novels, judged by sales, is "sister carrie," and the causes thereof are not far to seek. on the one hand, its suppression in 1900 gave it a whispered fame that was converted into a public celebrity when it was republished in 1907, and on the other hand it shares with "jennie gerhardt" the capital advantage of having a young and appealing woman for its chief figure. the sentimentalists thus have a heroine to cry over, and to put into a familiar pigeon-hole; carrie becomes a sort of pollyanna. more, it is, at bottom, a tale of love--the one theme of permanent interest to the average american novel-reader, the chief stuffing of all our best-selling romances. true enough, it is vastly more than this--there is in it, for example, the astounding portrait of hurstwood--, but it seems to me plain that its relative popularity is by no means a test of its relative merit, and that the causes of that popularity must be sought in other directions. its defect, as a work of art, is a defect of structure. like norris' "mcteague" it has a broken back. in the midst of the story of carrie, dreiser pauses to tell the story of hurstwood--a memorably vivid and tragic story, to be sure, but still one that, considering artistic form and organization, does damage to the main business of the book. its outstanding merit is its simplicity, its unaffected seriousness and fervour, the spirit of youth that is in it. one feels that it was written, not by a novelist conscious of his tricks, but by a novice carried away by his own flaming eagerness, his own high sense of the interest of what he was doing. in this aspect, it is perhaps more typically dreiserian than any of its successors. and maybe we may seek here for a good deal of its popular appeal, for there is a contagion in naïveté as in enthusiasm, and the simple novel-reader may recognize the kinship of a simple mind in the novelist. but it is in "jennie gerhardt" that dreiser first shows his true mettle.... "the power to tell the same story in two forms," said george moore, "is the sign of the true artist." here dreiser sets himself that difficult task, and here he carries it off with almost complete success. reduce the story to a hundred words, and the same words would also describe "sister carrie." jennie, like carrie, is a rose grown from turnip-seed. over each, at the start, hangs poverty, ignorance, the dumb helplessness of the shudra, and yet in each there is that indescribable something, that element of essential gentleness, that innate inward beauty which levels all barriers of caste, and makes esther a fit queen for ahasuerus. some frenchman has put it into a phrase: "_une âme grande dans un petit destin_"--a great soul in a small destiny. jennie has some touch of that greatness; dreiser is forever calling her "a big woman"; it is a refrain almost as irritating as the "trig" of "the titan." carrie, one feels, is of baser metal; her dignity never rises to anything approaching nobility. but the history of each is the history of the other. jennie, like carrie, escapes from the physical miseries of the struggle for existence only to taste the worse miseries of the struggle for happiness. don't mistake me; we have here no maudlin tales of seduced maidens. seduction, in truth, is far from tragedy for either jennie or carrie. the gain of each, until the actual event has been left behind and obliterated by experiences more salient and poignant, is greater than her loss, and that gain is to the soul as well as to the creature. with the rise from want to security, from fear to ease, comes an awakening of the finer perceptions, a widening of the sympathies, a gradual unfolding of the delicate flower called personality, an increased capacity for loving and living. but with all this, and as a part of it, there comes, too, an increased capacity for suffering--and so in the end, when love slips away and the empty years stretch before, it is the awakened and supersentient woman that pays for the folly of the groping, bewildered girl. the tragedy of carrie and jennie, in brief, is not that they are degraded, but that they are lifted up, not that they go to the gutter, but that they escape the gutter and glimpse the stars. but if the two stories are thus variations upon the same sombre theme, if each starts from the same place and arrives at the same dark goal, if each shows a woman heartened by the same hopes and tortured by the same agonies, there is still a vast difference between them, and that difference is the measure of the author's progress in his craft during the eleven years between 1900 and 1911. "sister carrie," at bottom, is no more than a first sketch, a rough piling up of observations and ideas, disordered and often incoherent. in the midst of the story, as i have said, the author forgets it, and starts off upon another. in "jennie gerhardt" there is no such flaccidity of structure, no such vacillation in aim, no such proliferation of episode. considering that it is by dreiser, it is extraordinarily adept and intelligent in design; only in "the titan" has he ever done so well. from beginning to end the narrative flows logically, steadily, congruously. episodes there are, of course, but they keep their proper place and bulk. it is always jennie that stands at the centre of the traffic; it is in jennie's soul that every scene is ultimately played out. her father and mother; senator brander, the god of her first worship; her daughter vesta, and lester kane, the man who makes and mars her--all these are drawn with infinite painstaking, and in every one of them there is the blood of life. but it is jennie that dominates the drama from curtain to curtain. not an event is unrelated to her; not a climax fails to make clearer the struggles going on in her mind and heart. it is in "jennie gerhardt" that dreiser's view of life begins to take on coherence and to show a general tendency. in "sister carrie" the thing is still chiefly representation and no more; the image is undoubtedly vivid, but its significance, in the main, is left undisplayed. in "jennie gerhardt" this pictorial achievement is reinforced by interpretation; one carries away an impression that something has been said; it is not so much a visual image of jennie that remains as a sense of the implacable tragedy that engulfs her. the book is full of artistic passion. it lives and glows. it awakens recognition and feeling. its lucid ideational structure, even more than the artless gusto of "sister carrie," produces a penetrating and powerful effect. jennie is no mere individual; she is a type of the national character, almost the archetype of the muddled, aspiring, tragic, fate-flogged mass. and the scene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. the chicago of those great days of feverish money-grabbing and crazy aspiration may well stand as the epitome of america, and it is made clearer here than in any other american novel--clearer than in "the pit" or "the cliff-dwellers"--clearer than in any book by an easterner--almost as clear as the paris of balzac and zola. finally, the style of the story is indissolubly wedded to its matter. the narrative, in places, has an almost scriptural solemnity; in its very harshness and baldness there is something subtly meet and fitting. one cannot imagine such a history done in the strained phrases of meredith or the fugal manner of henry james. one cannot imagine that stark, stenographic dialogue adorned with the tinsel of pretty words. the thing, to reach the heights it touches, could have been done only in the way it has been done. as it stands, i would not take anything away from it, not even its journalistic banalities, its lack of humour, its incessant returns to c major. a primitive and touching poetry is in it. it is a novel, i am convinced, of the first consideration.... in "the financier" this poetry is almost absent, and that fact is largely to blame for the book's lack of charm. by the time we see him in "the titan" frank cowperwood has taken on heroic proportions and the romance of great adventure is in him, but in "the financier" he is still little more than an extra-pertinacious money-grubber, and not unrelated to the average stock broker or corner grocer. true enough, dreiser says specifically that he is more, that the thing he craves is not money but power--power to force lesser men to execute his commands, power to surround himself with beautiful and splendid things, power to amuse himself with women, power to defy and nullify the laws made for the timorous and unimaginative. but the intent of the author never really gets into his picture. his cowperwood in this first stage is hard, commonplace, unimaginative. in "the titan" he flowers out as a blend of revolutionist and voluptuary, a highly civilized lorenzo the magnificent, an immoralist who would not hesitate two minutes about seducing a saint, but would turn sick at the thought of harming a child. but in "the financier" he is still in the larval state, and a repellent sordidness hangs about him. moreover, the story of his rise is burdened by two defects which still further corrupt its effect. one lies in the fact that dreiser is quite unable to get the feel, so to speak, of philadelphia, just as he is unable to get the feel of new york in "the 'genius.'" the other is that the style of the writing in the book reduces the dreiserian manner to absurdity, and almost to impossibility. the incredibly lazy, involved and unintelligent description of the trial of cowperwood i have already mentioned. we get, in this lumbering chronicle, not a cohesive and luminous picture, but a dull, photographic representation of the whole tedious process, beginning with an account of the political obligations of the judge and district attorney, proceeding to a consideration of the habits of mind of each of the twelve jurymen, and ending with a summary of the majority and minority opinions of the court of appeals, and a discussion of the motives, ideals, traditions, prejudices, sympathies and chicaneries behind them, each and severally. when cowperwood goes into the market, his operations are set forth in their last detail; we are told how many shares he buys, how much he pays for them, what the commission is, what his profit comes to. when he comes into chance contact with a politician, we hear all about that politician, including his family affairs. when he builds and furnishes a house, the chief rooms in it are inventoried with such care that not a chair or a rug or a picture on the wall is overlooked. the endless piling up of such non-essentials cripples and incommodes the story; its drama is too copiously swathed in words to achieve a sting; the dreiser manner devours and defeats itself. but none the less the book has compensatory merits. its character sketches, for all the cloud of words, are lucid and vigorous. out of that enormous complex of crooked politics and crookeder finance, cowperwood himself stands out in the round, comprehensible and alive. and all the others, in their lesser measures, are done almost as well--cowperwood's pale wife, whimpering in her empty house; aileen butler, his mistress; his doddering and eternally amazed old father; his old-fashioned, stupid, sentimental mother; stener, the city treasurer, a dish-rag in the face of danger; old edward malia butler, that barbarian in a boiled shirt, with his homeric hatred and his broken heart. particularly old butler. the years pass and he must be killed and put away, but not many readers of the book, i take it, will soon forget him. dreiser is at his best, indeed, when he deals with old men. in their tragic helplessness they stand as symbols of that unfathomable cosmic cruelty which he sees as the motive power of life itself. more, even, than his women, he makes them poignant, vivid, memorable. the picture of old gerhardt is full of a subtle brightness, though he is always in the background, as cautious and penny-wise as an ancient crow, trotting to his lutheran church, pathetically ill-used by the world he never understands. butler is another such, different in externals, but at bottom the same dismayed, questioning, pathetic old man.... in "the titan" there is a tightening of the screws, a clarifying of the action, an infinite improvement in the manner. the book, in truth, has the air of a new and clearer thinking out of "the financier," as "jennie gerhardt" is a new thinking out of "sister carrie." with almost the same materials, the thing is given a new harmony and unity, a new plausibility, a new passion and purpose. in "the financier" the artistic voluptuary is almost completely overshadowed by the dollar-chaser; in "the titan" we begin to see clearly that grand battle between artist and man of money, idealist and materialist, spirit and flesh, which is the informing theme of the whole trilogy. the conflict that makes the drama, once chiefly external, now becomes more and more internal; it is played out within the soul of the man himself. the result is a character sketch of the highest colour and brilliance, a superb portrait of a complex and extremely fascinating man. of all the personages in the dreiser books, the cowperwood of "the titan" is perhaps the most radiantly real. he is accounted for in every detail, and yet, in the end, he is not accounted for at all; there hangs about him, to the last, that baffling mysteriousness which hangs about those we know most intimately. there is in him a complete and indubitable masculinity, as the eternal feminine is in jennie. his struggle with the inexorable forces that urge him on as with whips, and lure him with false lights, and bring him to disillusion and dismay, is as typical as hers is, and as tragic. in his ultimate disaster, so plainly foreshadowed at the close, there is the clearest of all projections of the ideas that lie at the bottom of all dreiser's work. cowperwood, above any of them, is his protagonist. the story, in its plan, is as transparent as in its burden. it has an austere simplicity in the telling that fits the directness of the thing told. dreiser, as if to clear decks, throws over all the immemorial baggage of the novelist, making short shrift of "heart interest," conventional "sympathy," and even what ordinarily passes for romance. in "sister carrie," as i have pointed out, there is still a sweet dish for the sentimentalists; if they don't like the history of carrie as a work of art they may still wallow in it as a sad, sad love story. carrie is appealing, melting; she moves, like marguerite gautier, in an atmosphere of romantic depression. and jennie gerhardt, in this aspect, is merely carrie done over--a carrie more carefully and objectively drawn, perhaps, but still conceivably to be mistaken for a "sympathetic" heroine in a best-seller. a lady eating chocolates might jump from "laddie" to "jennie gerhardt" without knowing that she was jumping ten thousand miles. the tear jugs are there to cry into. even in "the financier" there is still a hint of familiar things. the first mrs. cowperwood is sorely put upon; old butler has the markings of an irate father; cowperwood himself suffers the orthodox injustice and languishes in a cell. but no one, i venture, will ever fall into any such mistake in identity in approaching "the titan." not a single appeal to facile sentiment is in it. it proceeds from beginning to end in a forthright, uncompromising, confident manner. it is an almost purely objective account, as devoid of cheap heroics as a death certificate, of a strong man's contest with incontestable powers without and no less incontestable powers within. there is nothing of the conventional outlaw about him; he does not wear a red sash and bellow for liberty; fate wrings from him no melodramatic defiances. in the midst of the battle he views it with a sort of ironical detachment, as if lifted above himself by the sheer aesthetic spectacle. even in disaster he asks for no quarter, no generosity, no compassion. up or down, he keeps his zest for the game that is being played, and is sufficient unto himself. such a man as this cowperwood of the chicago days, described romantically, would be indistinguishable from the wicked earls and seven-foot guardsmen of ouida, robert w. chambers and the duchess. but described realistically and coldbloodedly, with all that wealth of minute and apparently inconsequential detail which dreiser piles up so amazingly, he becomes a figure astonishingly vivid, lifelike and engrossing. he fits into no _a priori_ theory of conduct or scheme of rewards and punishments; he proves nothing and teaches nothing; the forces which move him are never obvious and frequently unintelligible. but in the end he seems genuinely a man--a man of the sort we see about us in the real world--not a patent and automatic fellow, reacting docilely and according to a formula, but a bundle of complexities and contradictions, a creature oscillating between the light and the shadow--at bottom, for all his typical representation of a race and a civilization, a unique and inexplicable personality. more, he is a man of the first class, an achilles of his world; and here the achievement of dreiser is most striking, for he succeeds where all fore-runners failed. it is easy enough to explain how john smith courted his wife, and even how william brown fought and died for his country, but it is inordinately difficult to give plausibility to the motives, feelings and processes of mind of a man whose salient character is that they transcend all ordinary experience. too often, even when made by the highest creative and interpretative talent, the effort has resolved itself into a begging of the question. shakespeare made hamlet comprehensible to the groundlings by diluting that half of him which was shakespeare with a half which was a college sophomore. in the same way he saved lear by making him, in large part, a tedious and obscene old donkey--the blood brother of any average ancient of any average english tap-room. tackling caesar, he was rescued by brutus' knife. george bernard shaw, facing the same difficulty, resolved it by drawing a composite portrait of two or three london actor-managers and half a dozen english politicians. but dreiser makes no such compromise. he bangs into the difficulties of his problem head on, and if he does not solve it absolutely, he at least makes an extraordinarily close approach to a solution. in "the financier" a certain incredulity still hangs about cowperwood; in "the titan" he suddenly comes unquestionably real. if you want to get the true measure of this feat, put it beside the failure of frank norris with curtis jadwin in "the pit."... "the 'genius,'" which interrupted the "trilogy of desire," marks the nadir of dreiser's accomplishment, as "the titan" marks its apogee. the plan of it, of course, is simple enough, and it is one that dreiser, at his best, might have carried out with undoubted success. what he is trying to show, in brief, is the battle that goes on in the soul of every man of active mind between the desire for self-expression and the desire for safety, for public respect, for emotional equanimity. it is, in a sense, the story of cowperwood told over again, but with an important difference, for eugene witla is a much less self-reliant and powerful fellow than cowperwood, and so he is unable to muster up the vast resolution of spirits that he needs to attain happiness. "the titan" is the history of a strong man. "the 'genius'" is the history of a man essentially weak. eugene witla can never quite choose his route in life. he goes on sacrificing ease to aspiration and aspiration to ease to the end of the chapter. he vacillates abominably and forever between two irreconcilable desires. even when, at the close, he sinks into a whining sort of resignation, the proud courage of cowperwood is not in him; he is always a bit despicable in his pathos. as i say, a story of simple outlines, and well adapted to the dreiserian pen. but it is spoiled and made a mock of by a donkeyish solemnity of attack which leaves it, on the one hand, diffuse, spineless and shapeless, and on the other hand, a compendium of platitudes. it is as if dreiser, suddenly discovering himself a sage, put off the high passion of the artist and took to pounding a pulpit. it is almost as if he deliberately essayed upon a burlesque of himself. the book is an endless emission of the obvious, with touches of the scandalous to light up its killing monotony. it runs to 736 pages of small type; its reading is an unbearable weariness to the flesh; in the midst of it one has forgotten the beginning and is unconcerned about the end. mingled with all the folderol, of course, there is stuff of nobler quality. certain chapters stick in the memory; whole episodes lift themselves to the fervid luminosity of "jennie gerhardt"; there are character sketches that deserve all praise; one often pulls up with a reminder that the thing is the work of a proficient craftsman. but in the main it lumbers and jolts, wabbles and bores. a sort of ponderous imbecility gets into it. both in its elaborate devices to shake up the pious and its imposing demonstrations of what every one knows, it somehow suggests the advanced thinking of greenwich village. i suspect, indeed, that the _vin rouge_ was in dreiser's arteries as he concocted it. he was at the intellectual menopause, and looking back somewhat wistfully and attitudinizingly toward the goatish days that were no more. but let it go! a novelist capable of "jennie gerhardt" has rights, privileges, prerogatives. he may, if he will, go on a spiritual drunk now and then, and empty the stale bilges of his soul. thackeray, having finished "vanity fair" and "pendennis," bathed himself in the sheep's milk of "the newcomes," and after "the virginians" he did "the adventures of philip." zola, with "germinal," "la débâcle" and "la terre" behind him, recreated himself horribly with "fécondité." tolstoi, after "anna karenina," wrote "what is art?" ibsen, after "et dukkehjem" and "gengangere," wrote "vildanden." the good god himself, after all the magnificence of kings and chronicles, turned dr. frank crane and so botched his writ with proverbs.... a weakness that we must allow for. whenever dreiser, abandoning his fundamental scepticism, yields to the irrepressible human (and perhaps also divine) itch to label, to moralize, to teach, he becomes a bit absurd. observe "the 'genius,'" and parts of "a hoosier holiday" and of "a traveler at forty," and of "plays of the natural and the supernatural." but in this very absurdity, it seems to me, there is a subtle proof that his fundamental scepticism is sound.... i mention the "plays of the natural and the supernatural." they are ingenious and sometimes extremely effective, but their significance is not great. the two that are "of the natural" are "the girl in the coffin" and "old ragpicker," the first a laborious evocation of the gruesome, too long by half, and the other an experiment in photographic realism, with a pair of policemen as its protagonists. all five plays "of the supernatural" follow a single plan. in the foreground, as it were, we see a sordid drama played out on the human plane, and in the background (or in the empyrean above, as you choose) we see the operation of the god-like imbecilities which sway and flay us all. the technical trick is well managed. it would be easy for such four-dimensional pieces to fall into burlesque, but in at least two cases, to wit, in "the blue sphere" and "in the dark," they go off with an air. superficially, these plays "of the supernatural" seem to show an abandonment to the wheezy, black bombazine mysticism which crops up toward the end of "the 'genius.'" but that mysticism, at bottom, is no more than the dreiserian scepticism made visible. "for myself," says dreiser somewhere, "i do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is." and in another place: "i admit a vast compulsion which has nothing to do with the individual desires or tastes or impulses." the jokers behind the arras pull the strings. it is pretty, but what is it all about?... the criticism which deals only with externals sees "sister carrie" as no more than a deft adventure into realism. dreiser is praised, when he is praised at all, for making carrie so clear, for understanding her so well. but the truth is, of course, that his achievement consists precisely in making patent the impenetrable mystery of her, and of the tangled complex of striving and aspiration of which she is so helplessly a part. it is in this sense that "sister carrie" is a profound work. it is not a book of glib explanations, of ready formulae; it is, above all else, a book of wonder.... of "a traveler at forty" i have spoken briefly. it is heavy with the obvious; the most interesting thing in it is the fact that dreiser had never seen st. peter's or piccadilly circus until he was too old for either reverence or romance. "a hoosier holiday" is far more illuminating, despite its platitudinizing. slow in tempo, discursive, reflective, intimate, the book covers a vast territory, and lingers in pleasant fields. one finds in it an almost complete confession of faith, artistic, religious, even political. and not infrequently that confession takes the form of ingenuous confidences--about the fortunes of the house of dreiser, the dispersed dreiser clan, the old neighbours in indiana, new friends made along the way. in "a traveler at forty" dreiser is surely frank enough in his vivisections; he seldom forgets a vanity or a wart. in "a hoosier holiday" he goes even further; he speculates heavily about all his _dramatis personae_, prodding into the motives behind their acts, wondering what they would do in this or that situation, forcing them painfully into laboratory jars. they become, in the end, not unlike characters in a novel; one misses only the neatness of a plot. strangely enough, the one personage of the chronicle who remains dim throughout is the artist, franklin booth, dreiser's host and companion on the long motor ride from new york to indiana, and the maker of the book's excellent pictures. one gets a brilliant etching of booth's father, and scarcely less vivid portraits of speed, the chauffeur; of various persons encountered on the way, and of friends and relatives dredged up out of the abyss of the past. but of booth one learns little save that he is a christian scientist and a fine figure of a man. there must have been much talk during those two weeks of careening along the high-road, and booth must have borne some part in it, but what he said is very meagrely reported, and so he is still somewhat vague at the end--a personality sensed but scarcely apprehended. however, it is dreiser himself who is the chief character of the story, and who stands out from it most brilliantly. one sees in the man all the special marks of the novelist: his capacity for photographic and relentless observation, his insatiable curiosity, his keen zest in life as a spectacle, his comprehension of and sympathy for the poor striving of humble folks, his endless mulling of insoluble problems, his recurrent philistinism, his impatience of restraints, his fascinated suspicion of messiahs, his passion for physical beauty, his relish for the gaudy drama of big cities; his incurable americanism. the panorama that he enrols runs the whole scale of the colours; it is a series of extraordinarily vivid pictures. the sombre gloom of the pennsylvania hills, with wilkes-barre lying among them like a gem; the procession of little country towns, sleepy and a bit hoggish; the flash of buffalo, cleveland, indianapolis; the gargantuan coal-pockets and ore-docks along the erie shore; the tinsel summer resorts; the lush indiana farmlands, with their stodgy, bovine people--all of these things are sketched in simply, and yet almost magnificently. i know, indeed, of no book which better describes the american hinterland. here we have no idle spying by a stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. almost every mile of the road travelled has been dreiser's own road in life. he knew those unkempt indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the indiana woods; he came to toledo, cleveland, buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his existence are out there. and so he does his chronicle _con amore_, with many a sentimental dredging up of old memories, old hopes and old dreams. save for passages in "the titan," "a hoosier holiday" marks the high tide of dreiser's writing--that is, as sheer writing. his old faults are in it, and plentifully. there are empty, brackish phrases enough, god knows--"high noon" among them. but for all that, there is an undeniable glow in it; it shows, in more than one place, an approach to style; the mere wholesaler of words has become, in some sense a connoisseur, even a voluptuary. the picture of wilkes-barre girt in by her hills is simply done, and yet there is imagination in it, and touches of brilliance. the sombre beauty of the pennsylvania mountains is vividly transferred to the page. the towns by the wayside are differentiated, swiftly drawn, made to live. there are excellent sketches of people--a courtly hotelkeeper in some god-forsaken hamlet, his self-respect triumphing over his wallow; a group of babbling civil war veterans, endlessly mouthing incomprehensible jests; the half-grown beaux and belles of the summer resorts, enchanted and yet a bit staggered by the awakening of sex; booth _père_ and his sinister politics; broken and forgotten men in the indiana towns; policemen, waitresses, farmers, country characters; dreiser's own people--the boys and girls of his youth; his brother paul, the indiana schneckenburger and francis scott key; his sisters and brothers; his beaten, hopeless, pious father; his brave and noble mother. the book is dedicated to this mother, now long dead, and in a way it is a memorial to her, a monument to affection. life bore upon her cruelly; she knew poverty at its lowest ebb and despair at its bitterest; and yet there was in her a touch of fineness that never yielded, a gallant spirit that faced and fought things through. one thinks, somehow, of the mother of gounod.... her son has not forgotten her. his book is her epitaph. he enters into her presence with love and with reverence and with something not far from awe.... as for the rest of the dreiser compositions, i leave them to your curiosity. § 6 dr. william lyon phelps, the lampson professor of english language and literature at yale, opens his chapter on mark twain in his "essays on modern novelists" with a humorous account of the critical imbecility which pursued mark in his own country down to his last years. the favourite national critics of that era (and it extended to 1895, at the least) were wholly blind to the fact that he was a great artist. they admitted him, somewhat grudgingly, a certain low dexterity as a clown, but that he was an imaginative writer of the first rank, or even of the fifth rank, was something that, in their insanest moments, never so much as occurred to them. phelps cites, in particular, an ass named professor richardson, whose "american literature," it appears, "is still a standard work" and "a deservedly high authority"--apparently in colleges. in the 1892 edition of this _magnum opus_, mark is dismissed with less than four lines, and ranked below irving, holmes and lowell--nay, actually below artemus ward, josh billings and petroleum v. nasby! the thing is fabulous, fantastic, _unglaublich_--but nevertheless true. lacking the "higher artistic or moral purpose of the greater humourists" (_exempli gratia_, rabelais, molière, aristophanes!!), mark is dismissed by this professor balderdash as a hollow buffoon.... but stay! do not laugh yet! phelps himself, indignant at the stupidity, now proceeds to credit mark with a moral purpose!... turn to "the mysterious stranger," or "what is man?"... college professors, alas, never learn anything. the identical gentleman who achieved this discovery about old mark in 1910, now seeks to dispose of dreiser in the exact manner of richardson. that is to say, he essays to finish him by putting him into coventry, by loftily passing over him. "do not speak of him," said kingsley of heine; "he was a wicked man!" search the latest volume of the phelps revelation, "the advance of the english novel," and you will find that dreiser is not once mentioned in it. the late o. henry is hailed as a genius who will have "abiding fame"; henry sydnor harrison is hymned as "more than a clever novelist," nay, "a valuable ally of the angels" (the right-thinker complex! art as a form of snuffling!), and an obscure pagliaccio named charles d. stewart is brought forward as "the american novelist most worthy to fill the particular vacancy caused by the death of mark twain"--but dreiser is not even listed in the index. and where phelps leads with his baton of birch most of the other drovers of rah-rah boys follow. i turn, for example, to "an introduction to american literature," by henry s. pancoast, a.m., l.h.d., dated 1912. there are kind words for richard harding davis, for amélie rives, and even for will n. harben, but not a syllable for dreiser. again, there is a "a history of american literature," by reuben post halleck, a.m., ll.d., dated 1911. lew wallace, marietta holley, owen wister and augusta evans wilson have their hearings, but not dreiser. yet again, there is "a history of american literature since 1870," by prof. fred lewis pattee,[23] instructor in "the english language and literature" somewhere in pennsylvania. pattee has praises for marion crawford, margaret deland and f. hopkinson smith, and polite bows for richard harding davis and robert w. chambers, but from end to end of his fat tome i am unable to find the slightest mention of dreiser. so much for one group of heroes of the new dunciad. that it includes most of the acknowledged heavyweights of the craft--the babbitts, mores, brownells and so on--goes without saying; as van wyck brooks has pointed out,[24] these magnificoes are austerely above any consideration of the literature that is in being. the other group, more courageous and more honest, proceeds by direct attack; dreiser is to be disposed of by a moral _attentat_. its leaders are two more professors, stuart p. sherman and h. w. boynton, and in its ranks march the lady critics of the newspapers, with much shrill, falsetto clamour. sherman is the only one of them who shows any intelligible reasoning. boynton, as always, is a mere parroter of conventional phrases, and the objections of the ladies fade imperceptibly into a pious indignation which is indistinguishable from that of the professional suppressors of vice. what, then, is sherman's complaint? in brief, that dreiser is a liar when he calls himself a realist; that he is actually a naturalist, and hence accursed. that "he has evaded the enterprise of representing human conduct, and confined himself to a representation of animal behaviour." that he "imposes his own naturalistic philosophy" upon his characters, making them do what they ought not to do, and think what they ought not to think. that "he has just two things to tell us about frank cowperwood: that he has a rapacious appetite for money, and a rapacious appetite for women." that this alleged "theory of animal behaviour" is not only incorrect but downright immoral, and that "when one-half the world attempts to assert it, the other half rises in battle."[25] only a glance is needed to show the vacuity of all this _brutum fulmen_. dreiser, in point of fact, is scarcely more the realist or the naturalist, in any true sense, than h. g. wells or the later george moore, nor has he ever announced himself in either the one character or the other--if there be, in fact, any difference between them that any one save a pigeon-holding pedagogue can discern. he is really something quite different, and, in his moments, something far more stately. his aim is not merely to record, but to translate and understand; the thing he exposes is not the empty event and act, but the endless mystery out of which it springs; his pictures have a passionate compassion in them that it is hard to separate from poetry. if this sense of the universal and inexplicable tragedy, if this vision of life as a seeking without a finding, if this adept summoning up of moving images, is mistaken by college professors for the empty, meticulous nastiness of zola in "pot-bouille"--in nietzsche's phrase, for "the delight to stink"--then surely the folly of college professors, as vast as it seems, has been underestimated. what is the fact? the fact is that dreiser's attitude of mind, his manner of reaction to the phenomena he represents, the whole of his alleged "naturalistic philosophy," stems directly, not from zola, flaubert, augier and the younger dumas, but from the greeks. in the midst of democratic cocksureness and christian sentimentalism, of doctrinaire shallowness and professorial smugness, he stands for a point of view which at least has something honest and courageous about it; here, at all events, he is a realist. let him put a motto to his books, and it might be: [greek: _iô geneai brotôn, hôs umas isa chai to mêden zôsas enarithmô._ ] if you protest against that as too harsh for christians and college professors, right-thinkers and forward-lookers, then you protest against "oedipus rex."[26] as for the animal behaviour prattle of the learned head-master, it reveals, on the one hand, only the academic fondness for seizing upon high-sounding but empty phrases and using them to alarm the populace, and on the other hand, only the academic incapacity for observing facts correctly and reporting them honestly. the truth is, of course, that the behaviour of such men as cowperwood and witla and of such women as carrie and jennie, as dreiser describes it, is no more merely animal than the behaviour of such acknowledged and undoubted human beings as woodrow wilson and jane addams. the whole point of the story of witla, to take the example which seems to concern the horrified watchmen most, is this: that his life is a bitter conflict between the animal in him and the aspiring soul, between the flesh and the spirit, between what is weak in him and what is strong, between what is base and what is noble. moreover, the good, in the end, gets its hooks into the bad: as we part from witla he is actually bathed in the tears of remorse, and resolved to be a correct and godfearing man. and what have we in "the financier" and "the titan"? a conflict, in the ego of cowperwood, between aspiration and ambition, between the passion for beauty and the passion for power. is either passion animal? to ask the question is to answer it. i single out dr. sherman, not because his pompous syllogisms have any plausibility in fact or logic, but simply because he may well stand as archetype of the booming, indignant corrupter of criteria, the moralist turned critic. a glance at his paean to arnold bennett[27] at once reveals the true gravamen of his objection to dreiser. what offends him is not actually dreiser's shortcoming as an artist, but dreiser's shortcoming as a christian and an american. in bennett's volumes of pseudo-philosophy--_e.g._, "the plain man and his wife" and "the feast of st. friend"--he finds the intellectual victuals that are to his taste. here we have a sweet commingling of virtuous conformity and complacent optimism, of sonorous platitude and easy certainty--here, in brief, we have the philosophy of the english middle classes--and here, by the same token, we have the sort of guff that the half-educated of our own country can understand. it is the calm, superior num-skullery that was victorian; it is by samuel smiles out of hannah more. the offence of dreiser is that he has disdained this revelation and gone back to the greeks. lo, he reads poetry into "the appetite for women"--he rejects the pauline doctrine that all love is below the diaphragm! he thinks of ulysses, not as a mere heretic and criminal, but as a great artist. he sees the life of man, not as a simple theorem in calvinism, but as a vast adventure, an enchantment, a mystery. it is no wonder that respectable school-teachers are against him.... the comstockian attack upon "the 'genius'" seems to have sprung out of the same muddled sense of dreiser's essential hostility to all that is safe and regular--of the danger in him to that mellowed methodism which has become the national ethic. the book, in a way, was a direct challenge, for though it came to an end upon a note which even a methodist might hear as sweet, there were undoubted provocations in detail. dreiser, in fact, allowed his scorn to make off with his taste--and _es ist nichts fürchterlicher als einbildungskraft ohne geschmack_. the comstocks arose to the bait a bit slowly, but none the less surely. going through the volume with the terrible industry of a sunday-school boy dredging up pearls of smut from the old testament, they achieved a list of no less than 89 alleged floutings of the code--75 described as lewd and 14 as profane. an inspection of these specifications affords mirth of a rare and lofty variety; nothing could more cruelly expose the inner chambers of the moral mind. when young witla, fastening his best girl's skate, is so overcome by the carnality of youth that he hugs her, it is set down as lewd. on page 51, having become an art student, he is fired by "a great, warm-tinted nude of bouguereau"--lewd again. on page 70 he begins to draw from the figure, and his instructor cautions him that the female breast is round, not square--more lewdness. on page 151 he kisses a girl on mouth and neck and she cautions him: "be careful! mamma may come in"--still more. on page 161, having got rid of mamma, she yields "herself to him gladly, joyously" and he is greatly shocked when she argues that an artist (she is by way of being a singer) had better not marry--lewdness doubly damned. on page 245 he and his bride, being ignorant, neglect the principles laid down by dr. sylvanus stall in his great works on sex hygiene--lewdness most horrible! but there is no need to proceed further. every kiss, hug and tickle of the chin in the chronicle is laboriously snouted out, empanelled, exhibited. every hint that witla is no vestal, that he indulges his unchristian fleshliness, that he burns in the manner of i corinthians, vii, 9, is uncovered to the moral inquisition. on the side of profanity there is a less ardent pursuit of evidences, chiefly, i daresay, because their unearthing is less stimulating. (beside, there is no law prohibiting profanity in books: the whole inquiry here is but so much _lagniappe_.) on page 408, in describing a character called daniel c. summerfield, dreiser says that the fellow is "very much given to swearing, more as a matter of habit than of foul intention," and then goes on to explain somewhat lamely that "no picture of him would be complete without the interpolation of his various expressions." they turn out to be _god damn_ and _jesus christ_--three of the latter and five or six of the former. all go down; the pure in heart must be shielded from the knowledge of them. (but what of the immoral french? they call the english _goddams_.) also, three plain _damns_, eight _hells_, one _my god_, five _by gods_, one _go to the devil_, one _god almighty_ and one plain _god_. altogether, 31 specimens are listed. "the 'genius'" runs to 350,000 words. the profanity thus works out to somewhat less than one word in 10,000.... alas, the comstockian proboscis, feeling for such offendings, is not as alert as when uncovering more savoury delicacies. on page 191 i find an overlooked _by god_. on page 372 there are _oh god, god curse her_, and _god strike her dead_. on page 373 there are _ah god, oh god_ and three other invocations of god. on page 617 there is _god help me_. on page 720 there is _as god is my judge_. on page 723 there is _i'm no damned good_.... but i begin to blush. when the comstock society began proceedings against "the 'genius,'" a group of english novelists, including arnold bennett, h. g. wells, w. l. george and hugh walpole, cabled an indignant caveat. this bestirred the author's league of america to activity, and its executive committee issued a minute denouncing the business. later on a protest of american _literati_ was circulated, and more than 400 signed, including such highly respectable authors as winston churchill, percy mackaye, booth tarkington and james lane allen, and such critics as lawrence gilman, clayton hamilton and james huneker, and the editors of such journals as the _century_, the _atlantic monthly_ and the _new republic_. among my literary lumber is all the correspondence relating to this protest, not forgetting the letters of those who refused to sign, and some day i hope to publish it, that posterity may not lose the joy of an extremely diverting episode. the case attracted wide attention and was the theme of an extraordinarily violent discussion, but the resultant benefits to dreiser were more than counterbalanced, i daresay, by the withdrawal of "the 'genius'" itself.[28] § 7 dreiser, like mark twain and emerson before him, has been far more hospitably greeted in his first stage, now drawing to a close, in england than in his own country. the cause of this, i daresay, lies partly in the fact that "sister carrie" was in general circulation over there during the seven years that it remained suppressed on this side. it was during these years that such men as arnold bennett, theodore watts-dunton, frank harris and h. g. wells, and such critical journals as the _spectator_, the _saturday review_ and the _athenaeum_ became aware of him, and so laid the foundations of a sound appreciation of his subsequent work. since the beginning of the war, certain english newspapers have echoed the alarmed american discovery that he is a literary agent of the wilhelmstrasse, but it is to the honour of the english that this imbecility has got no countenance from reputable authority and has not injured his position. at home, as i have shown, he is less fortunate. when criticism is not merely an absurd effort to chase him out of court because his ideas are not orthodox, as the victorians tried to chase out darwin and swinburne, and their predecessors pursued shelley and byron, it is too often designed to identify him with some branch or other of "radical" poppycock, and so credit him with purposes he has never imagined. thus chautauqua pulls and greenwich village pushes. in the middle ground there proceeds the pedantic effort to dispose of him by labelling him. one faction maintains that he is a realist; another calls him a naturalist; a third argues that he is really a disguised romanticist. this debate is all sound and fury, signifying nothing, but out of it has come a valuation by lawrence gilman[29] which perhaps strikes very close to the truth. he is, says mr. gilman, "a sentimental mystic who employs the mimetic gestures of the realist." this judgment is apt in particular and sound in general. no such thing as a pure method is possible in the novel. plain realism, as in gorky's "nachtasyl" and the war stories of ambrose bierce, simply wearies us by its vacuity; plain romance, if we ever get beyond our nonage, makes us laugh. it is their artistic combination, as in life itself, that fetches us--the subtle projection of the concrete muddle that is living against the ideal orderliness that we reach out for--the eternal war of experience and aspiration--the contrast between the world as it is and the world as it might be or ought to be. dreiser describes the thing that he sees, laboriously and relentlessly, but he never forgets the dream that is behind it. "he gives you," continues mr. gilman, "a sense of actuality; but he gives you more than that: out of the vast welter and surge, the plethoric irrelevancies, ... emerges a sense of the infinite sadness and mystery of human life."...[30] "to see truly," said renan, "is to see dimly." dimness or mystery, call it what you will: it is in all these overgrown and formless, but profoundly moving books. just what do they mean? just what is dreiser driving at? that such questions should be asked is only a proof of the straits to which pedagogy has brought criticism. the answer is simple: he is driving at nothing, he is merely trying to represent what he sees and feels. his moving impulse is no flabby yearning to teach, to expound, to make simple; it is that "obscure inner necessity" of which conrad tells us, the irresistible creative passion of a genuine artist, standing spell-bound before the impenetrable enigma that is life, enamoured by the strange beauty that plays over its sordidness, challenged to a wondering and half-terrified sort of representation of what passes understanding. and _jenseits von gut und böse_. "for myself," says dreiser, "i do not know what truth is, what beauty is, what love is, what hope is. i do not believe any one absolutely and i do not doubt any one absolutely. i think people are both evil and well-intentioned." the hatching of the dreiser bugaboo is here; it is the flat rejection of the rubber-stamp formulae that outrages petty minds; not being "good," he must be "evil"--as william blake said of milton, a true poet is always "of the devil's party." but in that very groping toward a light but dimly seen there is a measure, it seems to me, of dreiser's rank and consideration as an artist. "now comes the public," says hermann bahr, "and demands that we explain what the poet is trying to say. the answer is this: if we knew exactly he would not be a poet...." footnotes: [16] fuller's comparative obscurity is one of the strangest phenomena of american letters. despite his high achievement, he is seldom discussed, or even mentioned. back in 1899 he was already so far forgotten that william archer mistook his name, calling him henry y. puller. _vide_ archer's pamphlet, the american language; new york, 1899. [17] for example, in the cambridge history of english literature, which runs to fourteen large volumes and a total of nearly 10,000 pages, huxley receives but a page and a quarter of notice, and his remarkable mastery of english is barely mentioned in passing. his two debates with gladstone, in which he did some of the best writing of the century, are not noticed at all. [18] a brief history of german literature; new york, chas. scribner's sons, 1909. [19] new york, 1917; reprinted from _the seven arts_ for feb., 1917. [20] life, art and america, p. 5. [21] the episode is related in a hoosier holiday. [22] a princess of arcady, published in 1900. [23] new york, the century co., 1916. [24] in _the seven arts_, may, 1917. [25] the _nation_, dec. 2, 1915. [26] 1186-1189. so translated by floyd dell: "o ye deathward-going tribes of man, what do your lives mean except that they go to nothingness?" [27] the new york _evening post_, dec. 31, 1915. [28] despite the comstockian attack, dreiser is still fairly well represented on the shelves of american public libraries. a canvas of the libraries of the 25 principal cities gives the following result, an x indicating that the corresponding book is catalogued, and a that is not: sister carrie | jennie gerhardt | | the financier | | | the titan | | | | a traveler at forty | | | | | the "genius" | | | | | | plays of the natural | | | | | | | a hoosier holiday | | | | | | | | new york x x x x x x boston x x chicago x x x x x x x x philadelphia x x x x x x x x washington x x baltimore x pittsburgh x x x x x new orleans denver x x x x x x x x san francisco x x x x x x st. louis x x x x x x cleveland x x x x x x providence los angeles x x x x x x x x indianapolis x x x x x x louisville x x x x x x x st. paul x x x x x minneapolis x x x x x cincinnati x x x x x x kansas city x x x x x x x x milwaukee x x x newark x x x x x x x x detroit x x x x x x x seattle x x x x x hartford x this table shows that but two libraries, those of providence and new orleans, bar dreiser altogether. the effect of alarms from newspaper reviewers is indicated by the scant distribution of the "genius," which is barred by 14 of the 25. it should be noted that some of these libraries issue certain of the books only under restrictions. this i know to be the case in louisville, los angeles, newark and cleveland. the newark librarian informs me that jennie gerhardt is to be removed altogether, presumably in response to some protest from local comstocks. in chicago the "genius" has been stolen, and on account of the withdrawal of the book the public library has been unable to get another copy. [29] the _north american review_, feb., 1916. [30] another competent valuation, by randolph bourne, is in _the dial_, june 14, 1917. iii james huneker § 1 edgar allan poe, i am fond of believing, earned as a critic a good deal of the excess of praise that he gets as a romancer and a poet, and another over-estimated american dithyrambist, sidney lanier, wrote the best textbook of prosody in english;[31] but in general the critical writing done in the united states has been of a low order, and most american writers of any genuine distinction, like most american painters and musicians, have had to wait for understanding until it appeared abroad. the case of emerson is typical. at thirty, he was known in new england as a heretical young clergyman and no more, and his fame threatened to halt at the tea-tables of the boston brahmins. it remained for landor and carlyle, in a strange land, to discern his higher potentialities, and to encourage him to his real life-work. mark twain, as i have hitherto shown, suffered from the same lack of critical perception at home. he was quickly recognized as a funny fellow, true enough, but his actual stature was not even faintly apprehended, and even after "huckleberry finn" he was still bracketed with such laborious farceurs as artemus ward. it was sir walter besant, an englishman, who first ventured to put him on his right shelf, along with swift, cervantes and molière. as for poe and whitman, the native recognition of their genius was so greatly conditioned by a characteristic horror of their immorality that it would be absurd to say that their own country understood them. both were better and more quickly apprehended in france, and it was in france, not in america, that each founded a school. what they had to teach we have since got back at second hand--the tale of mystery, which was poe's contribution, through gaboriau and boisgobey; and _vers libre_, which was whitman's, through the french _imagistes_. the cause of this profound and almost unbroken lack of critical insight and enterprise, this puerile philistinism and distrust of ideas among us, is partly to be found, it seems to me, in the fact that the typical american critic is quite without any adequate cultural equipment for the office he presumes to fill. dr. john dewey, in some late remarks upon the american universities, has perhaps shown the cause thereof. the trouble with our educational method, he argues, is that it falls between the two stools of english humanism and german relentlessness--that it produces neither a man who intelligently feels nor a man who thoroughly knows. criticism, in america, is a function of this half-educated and conceited class; it is not a popular art, but an esoteric one; even in its crassest journalistic manifestations it presumes to a certain academic remoteness from the concerns and carnalities of everyday. in every aspect it shows the defects of its practitioners. the american critic of beautiful letters, in his common incarnation, is no more than a talented sophomore, or, at best, a somewhat absurd professor. he suffers from a palpable lack of solid preparation; he has no background of moving and illuminating experience behind him; his soul has not sufficiently adventured among masterpieces, nor among men. imagine a taine or a sainte-beuve or a macaulay--man of the world, veteran of philosophies, "lord of life"--and you imagine his complete antithesis. even on the side of mere professional knowledge, the primary material of his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. the grand sweep and direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the surface, chasing bits of driftwood. the literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges--worse, in high schools. it must be dead before he is aware of it. and in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. an exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge it of all its remaining validity and significance before adopting it. this has been true since the earliest days. emerson himself, though a man of unusual discernment and a diligent drinker from german spigots, nevertheless remained a _dilettante_ in both aesthetics and metaphysics to the end of his days, and the incompleteness of his equipment never showed more plainly than in his criticism of books. lowell, if anything, was even worse; his aesthetic theory, first and last, was nebulous and superficial, and all that remains of his pleasant essays today is their somewhat smoky pleasantness. he was a charles dudley warner in nobler trappings, but still, at bottom, a charles dudley warner. as for poe, though he was by nature a far more original and penetrating critic than either emerson or lowell, he was enormously ignorant of good books, and moreover, he could never quite throw off a congenital vulgarity of taste, so painfully visible in the strutting of his style. the man, for all his grand dreams, had a shoddy soul; he belonged authentically to the era of cuspidors, "females" and sons of temperance. his occasional affectation of scholarship has deceived no one. it was no more than yankee bluster; he constantly referred to books that he had never read. beside, the typical american critic of those days was not poe, but his arch-enemy, rufus wilmot griswold, that almost fabulous ass--a baptist preacher turned taster of the beautiful. imagine a baptist valuing balzac, or molière, or shakespeare, or goethe--or rabelais! coming down to our own time, one finds the same endless amateurishness, so characteristic of everything american, from politics to cookery--the same astounding lack of training and vocation. consider the solemn ponderosities of the pious old maids, male and female, who write book reviews for the newspapers. here we have a heavy pretension to culture, a campus cocksureness, a laborious righteousness--but of sound aesthetic understanding, of alertness and hospitality to ideas, not a trace. the normal american book reviewer, indeed, is an elderly virgin, a superstitious bluestocking, an apostle of vassar _kultur_; and her customary attitude of mind is one of fascinated horror. (the hamilton wright mabie complex! the "white list" of novels!) william dean howells, despite a certain jauntiness and even kittenishness of manner, was spiritually of that company. for all his phosphorescent heresies, he was what the up-lifters call a right-thinker at heart, and soaked in the national tradition. he was easiest intrigued, not by force and originality, but by a sickly, _ladies' home journal_ sort of piquancy; it was this that made him see a genius in the philadelphia zola, w. b. trites, and that led him to hymn an abusive business letter by frank a. munsey, author of "the boy broker" and "afloat in a great city," as a significant human document. moreover howells ran true to type in another way, for he long reigned as the leading anglo-saxon authority on the russian novelists without knowing, so far as i can make out, more than ten words of russian. in the same manner, we have had enthusiasts for d'annunzio and mathilde serao who knew no italian, and celebrants of maeterlinck and verhaeren whose french was of the finishing school, and ibsen authorities without a single word of dano-norwegian--i met one once who failed to recognize "et dukkehjem" as the original title of "a doll's house,"--and performers upon hauptmann who could no more read "die weber" than they could decipher a tablet of tiglath-pileser iii. here and there, of course, a more competent critic of beautiful letters flings out his banner--for example, john macy, ludwig lewisohn, andré tridon, francis hackett, van wyck brooks, burton rascoe, e. a. boyd, llewellyn jones, otto heller, j. e. spingarn, lawrence gilman, the late j. percival pollard. well-informed, intelligent, wide-eyed men--but only four of them even americans, and not one of them with a wide audience, or any appreciable influence upon the main stream of american criticism. pollard's best work is buried in the perfumed pages of _town topics_; his book on the munich wits and dramatists[32] is almost unknown. heller and lewisohn make their way slowly; a patriotic wariness, i daresay, mixes itself up with their acceptance. gilman disperses his talents; he is quite as much musician as critic of the arts. as for macy, i recently found his "the spirit of american literature,"[33] by long odds the soundest, wisest book on its subject, selling for fifty cents on a fifth avenue remainder counter. how many remain? a few competent reviewers who are primarily something else--harvey, aikin, untermeyer and company. a few youngsters on the newspapers, struggling against the business office. and then a leap to the victorians, the crêpe-clad pundits, the bombastic word-mongers of the campus school--h. w. boynton, w. c. brownell, paul elmer more, william lyon phelps, frederick taber cooper _et al._ here, undoubtedly, we have learning of a sort. more, it appears, once taught sanskrit to the adolescent suffragettes of bryn mawr--an enterprise as stimulating (and as intelligible) as that of setting off fire-works in a blind asylum. phelps sits in a chair at yale. boynton is a master of arts in english literature, whatever that may mean. brownell is both l.h.d. and litt.d., thus surpassing samuel johnson by one point, and hazlitt, coleridge and malone by two. but the learning of these august _umbilicarii_, for all its pretensions, is precisely the sterile, foppish sort one looks for in second-rate college professors. the appearance is there, but not the substance. one ingests a horse-doctor's dose of words, but fails to acquire any illumination. read more on nietzsche[34] if you want to find out just how stupid criticism can be, and yet show the outward forms of sense. read phelps' "the advance of the english novel"[35] if you would see a fine art treated as a moral matter, and great works tested by the criteria of a small-town sunday-school, and all sorts of childish sentimentality whooped up. and plough through brownell's "standards,"[36] if you have the patience, and then try to reduce its sonorous platitudes to straight-forward and defensible propositions. § 2 now for the exception. he is, of course, james gibbons huneker, the solitary iokanaan in this tragic aesthetic wilderness, the only critic among us whose vision sweeps the whole field of beauty, and whose reports of what he sees there show any genuine gusto. that gusto of his, i fancy, is two-thirds of his story. it is unquenchable, contagious, inflammatory; he is the only performer in the commissioned troupe who knows how to arouse his audience to anything approaching enthusiasm. the rest, even including howells, are pedants lecturing to the pure in heart, but huneker makes a joyous story of it; his exposition, transcending the merely expository, takes on the quality of an adventure hospitably shared. one feels, reading him, that he is charmed by the men and women he writes about, and that their ideas, even when he rejects them, give him an agreeable stimulation. and to the charm that he thus finds and exhibits in others, he adds the very positive charm of his own personality. he seems a man who has found the world fascinating, if perhaps not perfect; a friendly and good-humoured fellow; no frigid scholiast, but something of an epicure; in brief, the reverse of the customary maker of books about books. compare his two essays on ibsen, in "egoists" and "iconoclasts," to the general body of american writing upon the great norwegian. the difference is that between a portrait and a bertillon photograph, richard strauss and czerny, a wedding and an autopsy. huneker displays ibsen, not as a petty mystifier of the women's clubs, but as a literary artist of large skill and exalted passion, and withal a quite human and understandable man. these essays were written at the height of the symbolism madness; in their own way, they even show some reflection of it; but taking them in their entirety, how clearly they stand above the ignorant obscurantism of the prevailing criticism of the time--how immeasurably superior they are, for example, to that favourite hymn-book of the ibsenites, "the ibsen secret" by jennette lee! for the causes of this difference one need not seek far. they are to be found in the difference between the bombastic half-knowledge of a school teacher and the discreet and complete knowledge of a man of culture. huneker is that man of culture. he has reported more of interest and value than any other american critic, living or dead, but the essence of his criticism does not lie so much in what he specifically reports as in the civilized point of view from which he reports it. he is a true cosmopolitan, not only in the actual range of his adventurings, but also and more especially in his attitude of mind. his world is not america, nor europe, nor christendom, but the whole universe of beauty. as jules simon said of taine: "_aucun écrivain de nos jours n'a ... découvert plus d'horizons variés et immenses_." need anything else be said in praise of a critic? and does an extravagance or an error here and there lie validly against the saying of it? i think not. i could be a professor if i would and show you slips enough--certain ponderous nothings in the ibsen essays, already mentioned; a too easy bemusement at the hands of shaw; a vacillating over wagner; a habit of yielding to the hocus-pocus of the mystics, particularly maeterlinck. on the side of painting, i am told, there are even worse aberrations; i know too little about painting to judge for myself. but the list, made complete, would still not be over-long, and few of its items would be important. huneker, like the rest of us, has sinned his sins, but his judgments, in the overwhelming main, hold water. he has resisted the lure of all the wild movements of the generation; the tornadoes of doctrine have never knocked him over. nine times out of ten, in estimating a new man in music or letters, he has come curiously close to the truth at the first attempt. and he has always announced it in good time; his solo has always preceded the chorus. he was, i believe, the first american (not forgetting william morton payne and hjalmar hjorth boyesen, the pioneers) to write about ibsen with any understanding of the artist behind the prophet's mask; he was the first to see the rising star of nietzsche (this was back in 1888); he was beating a drum for shaw the critic before ever shaw the dramatist and mob philosopher was born (_circa_ 1886-1890); he was writing about hauptmann and maeterlinck before they had got well set on their legs in their own countries; his estimate of sudermann, bearing date of 1905, may stand with scarcely the change of a word today; he did a lot of valiant pioneering for strindberg, hervieu, stirner and gorki, and later on helped in the pioneering for conrad; he was in the van of the macdowell enthusiasts; he fought for the ideas of such painters as davies, lawson, luks, sloan and prendergest (americans all, by the way: an answer to the hollow charge of exotic obsession) at a time when even manet, monet and degas were laughed at; he was among the first to give a hand to frank norris, theodore dreiser, stephen crane and h. b. fuller. in sum, he gave some semblance of reality in the united states, after other men had tried and failed, to that great but ill-starred revolt against victorian pedantry, formalism and sentimentality which began in the early 90's. it would be difficult, indeed, to overestimate the practical value to all the arts in america of his intellectual alertness, his catholic hospitality to ideas, his artistic courage, and above all, his powers of persuasion. it was not alone that he saw clearly what was sound and significant; it was that he managed, by the sheer charm of his writings, to make a few others see and understand it. if the united states is in any sort of contact today, however remotely, with what is aesthetically going on in the more civilized countries--if the puritan tradition, for all its firm entrenchment, has eager and resourceful enemies besetting it--if the pall of harvard quasiculture, by the oxford manner out of calvinism, has been lifted ever so little--there is surely no man who can claim a larger share of credit for preparing the way.... § 3 huneker comes out of philadelphia, that depressing intellectual slum, and his first writing was for the philadelphia _evening bulletin_. he is purely irish in blood, and is of very respectable ancestry, his maternal grandfather and godfather having been james gibbons, the irish poet and patriot, and president of the fenian brotherhood in america. once, in a review of "the pathos of distance," i ventured the guess that there was a german strain in him somewhere, and based it upon the beery melancholy visible in parts of that book. who but a german sheds tears over the empty bottles of day before yesterday, the adelaide neilson of 1877? who but a german goes into woollen undershirts at 45, and makes his will, and begins to call his wife "mamma"? the green-sickness of youth is endemic from pole to pole, as much so as measles; but what race save the wicked one is floored by a blue distemper in middle age, with sentimental burblings _a cappella_, hallucinations of lost loves, and an unquenchable lacrymorrhea?... i made out a good case, but i was wrong, and the penalty came swiftly and doubly, for on the one hand the boston _transcript_ sounded an alarm against both huneker and me as german spies, and on the other hand huneker himself proclaimed that, even spiritually, he was less german than magyar, less "hun" than hun. "i am," he said, "a celto-magyar: pilsner at donneybrook fair. even the german beer and cuisine are not in it with the austro-hungarian." here, i suspect, he meant to say czech instead of magyar, for isn't pilsen in bohemia? moreover, turn to the chapter on prague in "new cosmopolis," and you will find out in what highland his heart really is. in this book, indeed, is a vast hymn to all things czechic--the pilsen _urquell_, the muffins stuffed with poppy-seed jam, the spiced chicken liver _en casserole_, the pretty bohemian girls, the rose and golden glory of hradschin hill.... one thinks of other strange infatuations: the polish conrad's for england, the scotch mackay's for germany, the low german brahms' for italy. huneker, i daresay, is the first celto-czech--or celto-magyar, as you choose. (maybe the name suggests something. it is not to be debased to _hoon_-eker, remember, but kept at _hun_-eker, rhyming initially with _nun_ and _gun_.) an unearthly marriage of elements, by all the gods! but there are pretty children of it.... philadelphia humanely disgorged huneker in 1878. his father designed him for the law, and he studied the institutes at the philadelphia law academy, but like schumann, he was spoiled for briefs by the stronger pull of music and the _cacoëthes scribendi_. (grandpa john huneker had been a composer of church music, and organist at st. mary's.) in the year mentioned he set out for paris to see liszt; his aim was to make himself a piano virtuoso. his name does not appear on his own exhaustive list of liszt pupils, but he managed to quaff of the pierian spring at second-hand, for he had lessons from theodore ritter (_né_ bennet), a genuine pupil of the old walrus, and he was also taught by the venerable georges mathias, a pupil of chopin. these days laid the foundations for two subsequent books, the "chopin: the man and his music" of 1900, and the "franz liszt" of 1911. more, they prepared the excavations for all of the others, for huneker began sending home letters to the philadelphia _bulletin_ on the pictures that he saw, the books that he read and the music that he heard in paris, and out of them gradually grew a body of doctrine that was to be developed into full-length criticism on his return to the united states. he stayed in paris until the middle 80's, and then settled in new york. all the while his piano studies continued, and in new york he became a pupil of rafael joseffy. he even became a teacher himself and was for ten years on the staff of the national conservatory, and showed himself at all the annual meetings of the music teachers' association. but bit by bit criticism elbowed out music-making, as music-making had elbowed out criticism with schumann and berlioz. in 1886 or thereabout he joined the _musical courier_; then he went, in succession, to the old _recorder_, to the _morning advertiser_, to the _sun_, to the _times_, and finally to the philadelphia _press_ and the new york _world_. various weeklies and monthlies have also enlisted him: _mlle. new york_, the _atlantic monthly_, the _smart set_, the _north american review_ and _scribner's_. he has even stooped to _puck_, vainly trying to make an american _simplicissimus_ of that dull offspring of synagogue and barbershop. he has been, in brief, an extremely busy and not too fastidious journalist, writing first about one of the arts, and then about another, and then about all seven together. but music has been the steadiest of all his loves; his first three books dealt almost wholly with it; of his complete canon more than half have to do with it. § 4 his first book, "mezzotints in modern music," published in 1899, revealed his predilections clearly, and what is more, his critical insight and sagacity. one reads it today without the slightest feeling that it is an old story; some of the chapters, obviously reworkings of articles for the papers, must go back to the middle 90's, and yet the judgments they proclaim scarcely call for the change of a word. the single noticeable weakness is a too easy acquiescence in the empty showiness of saint-saëns, a tendency to bow to the celebrated french parlour magician too often. here, i daresay, is an echo of old paris days, for camille was a hero on the seine in 1880, and there was even talk of pitting him against wagner. the estimates of other men are judiciously arrived at and persuasively stated. tschaikowsky is correctly put down as a highly talented but essentially shallow fellow--a blubberer in the regalia of a philosopher. brahms, then still under attack by henry t. finck, of the _evening post_ (the press-agent of massenet: ye gods, what harvard can do, even to a würtemberger!) is subjected to a long, an intelligent and an extremely friendly analysis; no better has got into english since, despite too much stress on the piano music. and richard strauss, yet a nine days' wonder, is described clearly and accurately, and his true stature indicated. the rest of the book is less noteworthy; huneker says the proper things about chopin, liszt and wagner, and adds a chapter on piano methods, the plain fruit of his late pedagogy. but the three chapters i have mentioned are enough; they fell, in their time, into a desert of stupidity; they set a standard in musical criticism in america that only huneker himself has ever exceeded. the most popular of his music books, of course, is the "chopin" (1900). next to "iconoclasts," it is the best seller of them all. more, it has been done into german, french and italian, and is chiefly responsible for huneker's celebrity abroad as the only critic of music that america has ever produced. superficially, it seems to be a monument of pedantry, a meticulous piling up of learning, but a study of it shows that it is very much more than that. compare it to sir george grove's staggering tome on the beethoven symphonies if you want to understand the difference between mere scholastic diligence and authentic criticism. the one is simply a top-heavy mass of disorderly facts and worshipping enthusiasm; the other is an analysis that searches out every nook and corner of the subject, and brings it into coherence and intelligibility. the chopin rhapsodist is always held in check by the sound musician; there is a snouting into dark places as well as a touching up of high lights. i myself am surely no disciple of the polish tuberose--his sweetness, in fact, gags me, and i turn even to moszkowski for relief--but i have read and re-read this volume with endless interest, and i find it more bethumbed than any other huneker book in my library, saving only "iconoclasts" and "old fogy." here, indeed, huneker is on his own ground. one often feels, in his discussions of orchestral music, that he only thinks orchestrally, like schumann, with an effort--that all music, in his mind, gets itself translated into terms of piano music. in dealing with chopin no such transvaluation of values is necessary; the raw materials are ready for his uses without preparation; he is wholly at home among the black keys and white. his "liszt" is a far less noteworthy book. it is, in truth, scarcely a book at all, but merely a collection of notes for a book, some of them considerably elaborated, but others set down in the altogether. one reads it because it is about liszt, the most fantastic figure that ever came out of hungary, half devil and half clown; not because there is any conflagration of ideas in it. the chapter that reveals most of huneker is the appendix on latter-day piano virtuosi, with its estimates of such men as de pachmann, rosenthal, paderewski and hofmann. much better stuff is to be found in "overtones," "the pathos of distance" and "ivory, apes and peacocks"--brilliant, if not always profound studies of strauss, wagner, schoenberg, moussorgsky, and even verdi. but if i had my choice of the whole shelf, it would rest, barring the "chopin," on "old fogy"--the _scherzo_ of the hunekeran symphony, the critic taking a holiday, the devil's mass in the tonal sanctuary. in it huneker is at his very choicest, making high-jinks with his davidsbund of one, rattling the skeletons in all the musical closets of the world. here, throwing off his critic's black gown, his lays about him right and left, knocking the reigning idols off their perches; resurrecting the old, old dead and trying to pump the breath into them; lambasting on one page and lauding on the next; lampooning his fellow critics and burlesquing their rubber stamp fustian; extolling dussek and damning wagner; swearing mighty oaths by mozart, and after him, strauss--not richard, but johann! the old fogy, of course, is the thinnest of disguises, a mere veil of gossamer for "editor" huneker. that huneker in false whiskers is inimitable, incomparable, almost indescribable. on the one hand, he is a prodigy of learning, a veritable warehouse of musical information, true, half-true and apocryphal; on the other hand, he is a jester who delights in reducing all learning to absurdity. reading him somehow suggests hearing a bach mass rescored for two fifes, a tambourine in b, a wind machine, two tenor harps, a contrabass oboe, two banjos, eight tubas and the usual clergy and strings. the substance is there; every note is struck exactly in the middle--but what outlandish tone colours, what strange, unearthly sounds! it is not bach, however, who first comes to mind when huneker is at his tricks, but papa haydn--the haydn of the surprise symphony and the farewell. there is the same gargantuan gaiety, the same magnificent irreverence. haydn did more for the symphony than any other man, but he also got more fun out of it than any other man. "old fogy," of course, is not to be taken seriously: it is frankly a piece of fooling. but all the same a serious idea runs through the book from end to end, and that is the idea that music is getting too subjective to be comfortable. the makers of symphonies tend to forget beauty altogether; their one effort is to put all their own petty trials and tribulations, their empty theories and speculations into cacophony. even so far back as beethoven's day that autobiographical habit had begun. "beethoven," says old fogy, is "dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centred egotist. he is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein--misery, corruption, slighting selfishness and ugliness." old ludwig's groans, of course, we can stand. he was not only a great musician, but also a great man. it is just as interesting to hear him sigh and complain as it would be to hear the private prayers of julius caesar. but what of tschaikowsky, with his childish slavic whining? what of liszt, with his cheap playacting, his incurable lasciviousness, his plebeian warts? what of wagner, with his delight in imbecile fables, his popinjay vanity, his soul of a _schnorrer_? what of richard strauss, with his warmed-over nietzscheism, his flair for the merely horrible? old fogy sweeps them all into his ragbag. if art is to be defined as beauty seen through a temperament, then give us more beauty and cleaner temperaments! back to the old gods, mozart and bach, with a polite bow to brahms and a sentimental tear for chopin! beethoven tried to tell his troubles in his music; mozart was content to ravish the angels of their harps. and as for johann sebastian, "there was more real musical feeling, uplifting and sincerity in the old thomas-kirche in leipzig ... than in all your modern symphony and oratorio machine-made concerts put together." all this is argued, to be sure, in extravagant terms. wagner is a mere ghoul and impostor: "the flying dutchman" is no more than a parody on weber, and "parsifal" is "an outrage against religion, morals and music." daddy liszt is "the inventor of the liszt pupil, a bad piano player, a venerable man with a purple nose--a cyrano de cognac nose." tschaikowsky is the slav gone crazy on vodka. he transformed hamlet into "a yelling man" and romeo and juliet into "two monstrous cossacks, who gibber and squeak at each other while reading some obscene volume." "his manfred is a libel on byron, who was a libel on god." and even schumann is a vanishing star, a literary man turned composer, a pathological case. but, as i have said, a serious idea runs through all this concerto for slapstick and seltzer siphon, and to me, at least, that idea has a plentiful reasonableness. we are getting too much melodrama, too much vivisection, too much rebellion--and too little music. turn from tschaikowsky's pathétique or from any of his wailing tone-poems to schubert's c major, or to mozart's jupiter, or to beethoven's _kleine sinfonie in f dur_: it is like coming out of a _kaffeeklatsch_ into the open air, almost like escaping from a lunatic asylum. the one unmistakable emotion that much of this modern music from the steppes and morgues and _biertische_ engenders is a longing for form, clarity, coherence, a self-respecting tune. the snorts and moans of the pothouse werthers are as irritating, in the long run, as the bawling of a child, the squeak of a pig under a gate. one yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them with both ears open, and then recapitulates them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up. § 5 so much for "old fogy" and the musical books. they constitute, not only the best body of work that huneker himself has done, but the best body of musical criticism that any american has done. musical criticism, in our great calvinist republic, confines itself almost entirely to transient reviewing, and even when it gets between covers, it keeps its trivial quality. consider, for example, the published work of henry edward krehbiel, for long the _doyen_ of the new york critics. i pick up his latest book, "a second book of operas,"[37] open it at random, and find this: on january 31, 1893, the philadelphia singers, aided by the new york symphony society, gave a performance of the opera, under the auspices of the young men's hebrew association, for the benefit of its charities, at the carnegie music hall, new york. mr. walter damrosch was to have conducted, but was detained in washington by the funeral of mr. blaine, and mr. hinrichs took his place. o doctor _admirabilis, acutus et illuminatissimus_! needless to say the universities have not overlooked this geyser of buttermilk: he is an honourary a.m. of yale. his most respectable volume, that on negro folksong, impresses one principally by its incompleteness. it may be praised as a sketch, but surely not as a book. the trouble with krehbiel, of course, is that he mistakes a newspaper morgue for parnassus. he has all of the third-rate german's capacity for unearthing facts, but he doesn't know how either to think or to write, and so his criticism is mere pretence and pishposh. w. j. henderson, of the _sun_, doesn't carry that handicap. he is as full of learning as krehbiel, as his books on singing and on the early italian opera show, but he also wields a slippery and intriguing pen, and he could be hugely entertaining if he would. instead, he devotes himself to manufacturing primers for the newly intellectual. i can find little of the charm of his _sun_ articles in his books. lawrence gilman? a sound musician but one who of late years has often neglected music for the other arts. philip h. goepp? his three volumes on the symphonic repertoire leave twice as much to be said as they say. carl van vechten? a very promising novice, but not yet at full growth. philip hale? his gigantic annotations scarcely belong to criticism at all; they are musical talmudism. beside, they are buried in the program books of the boston symphony orchestra, and might as well be inscribed on the temple walls of baalbec. as for upton and other such fellows, they are merely musical chautauquans, and their tedious commentaries have little more value than the literary criticisms in the religious weeklies. one of them, a harvard _maestro_, has published a book on the orchestra in which, on separate pages, the reader is solemnly presented with pictures of first and second violins! it seems to me that huneker stands on a higher level than any of these industrious gentlemen, and that his writings on music are of much more value, despite his divided allegiance among the _beaux arts_. whatever may be said against him, it must at least be admitted that he knows chopin, and that he has written the best volumes upon the tuberculous pole in english. vladimir de pachmann, that king of all chopin players, once bore characteristic testimony to the fact--i think it was in london. the program was heavy with the études and ballades, and huneker sat in the front row of fanatics. after a storm of applause de pachmann rose from the piano stool, levelled a bony claw at huneker, and pronounced his dictum: "_he_ knows more than _all_ of you." joseffy seems to have had the same opinion, for he sought the aid of his old pupil in preparing his new edition of chopin, the first volume of which is all he lived to see in print.... and, beyond all the others, huneker disdains writing for the kindergarten. there is no stooping in his discourse; he frankly addresses himself to an audience that has gone through the forms, and so he avoids the tediousness of the a b c expositors. he is the only american musical critic, save van vechten, who thus assumes invariably that a musical audience exists, and the only one who constantly measures up to its probable interests, supposing it to be there. such a book as "old fogy," for all its buffoonery, is conceivable only as the work of a sound musician. its background is one of the utmost sophistication; in the midst of its wildest extravagances there is always a profound knowledge of music on tap, and a profound love of it to boot. here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, huneker's delight in the things he deals with is obvious. it is not a seminary that he keeps, but a sort of club of tone enthusiasts, and membership in it is infinitely charming. § 6 this capacity for making the thing described seem important and delightful, this quality of infectious gusto, this father-talent of all the talents that a critic needs, sets off his literary criticism no less than his discourse on music and musicians. such a book as "iconoclasts" or "egoists" is full of useful information, but it is even more full of agreeable adventure. the style is the book, as it is the man. it is arch, staccato, ironical, witty, galloping, playful, polyglot, allusive--sometimes, alas, so allusive as to reduce the drama leaguer and women's clubber to wonderment and ire. in writing of plays or of books, as in writing of cities, tone-poems or philosophies, huneker always assumes that the elements are already well-grounded, that he is dealing with the initiated, that a pause to explain would be an affront. sad work for the philistines--but a joy to the elect! all this polyphonic allusiveness, this intricate fuguing of ideas, is not to be confused, remember, with the hollow showiness of the academic soothsayer. it is as natural to the man, as much a part of him as the clanging latin of johnson, or, to leap from art to art huneker-wise, the damnable cross-rhythms of brahms. he could no more write without his stock company of heretic sages than he could write without his ration of malt. and, on examination, all of them turned out to be real. they are far up dark alleys, but they are there!... and one finds them, at last, to be as pleasant company as the multilingual puns of nietzsche or debussy's chords of the second. as for the origin of that style, it seems to have a complex ancestry. huneker's first love was poe, and even today he still casts affectionate glances in that direction, but there is surely nothing of poe's elephantine labouring in his skipping, _pizzicato_ sentences. then came carlyle--the carlyle of "sartor resartus"--a god long forgotten. huneker's mother was a woman of taste; on reading his first scribblings, she gave him cardinal newman, and bade him consider the queen's english. newman achieved a useful purging; the style that remained was ready for flaubert. from the author of "l'education sentimentale," i daresay, came the deciding influence, with nietzsche's staggering brilliance offering suggestions later on. thus huneker, as stylist, owes nearly all to france, for nietzsche, too, learned how to write there, and to the end of his days he always wrote more like a frenchman than a german. his greatest service to his own country, indeed, was not as anarch, but as teacher of writing. he taught the germans that their language had a snap in it as well as sighs and gargles--that it was possible to write german and yet not wander in a wood. there are whole pages of nietzsche that suggest such things, say, as the essay on maurice barrès in "egoists," with its bold tropes, its rapid gait, its sharp _sforzandos_. and you will find old friedrich at his tricks from end to end of "old fogy." of the actual contents of such books as "egoists" and "iconoclasts" it is unnecessary to say anything. one no longer reads them for their matter, but for their manner. every flapper now knows all that is worth knowing about ibsen, strindberg, maeterlinck and shaw, and a great deal that is not worth knowing. we have disentangled hauptmann from sudermann, and, thanks to dr. lewisohn, may read all his plays in english. even henry becque has got into the vulgate and is familiar to the drama league. as for anatole france, his "revolt of the angels" is on the shelves of the carnegie libraries, and the comstocks have let it pass. new gods whoop and rage in valhalla: verhaeren, artzibashef, przybyszewski. huneker, alas, seems to drop behind the procession. he writes nothing about these second-hand third-raters. he has come to wedekind, schnitzler, schoenberg, korngold and moussorgsky, and he has discharged a few rounds of shrapnel at the gallo-asiatic petti-coat philosopher, henri bergson, but here he has stopped, as he has stopped at matisse, picasso, epstein and augustus john in painting. as he says himself, "one must get off somewhere."... particularly if one grows weary of criticism--and in huneker, of late, i detect more than one sign of weariness. youth is behind him, and with it some of its zest for exploration and combat. "the pathos of distance" is a phrase that haunts him as poignantly as it haunted nietzsche, its maker. not so long ago i tried to induce him to write some new old fogy sketches, nominating puccini, strawinsky, schoenberg, korngold, elgar. he protested that the mood was gone from him forever, that he could not turn the clock back twenty years. his late work in _puck_, the _times_ and the _sun_, shows an unaccustomed acquiescence in current valuations. he praises such one-day masterpieces as mcfee's "casuals of the sea"; he is polite to the gaudy heroines of the opera-house; he gags a bit at wright's "modern painting"; he actually makes a gingery curtsy to frank jewett mather, a princeton professor.... the pressure in the gauges can't keep up to 250 pounds forever. man must tire of fighting after awhile, and seek his ease in his inn.... perhaps the post-bellum transvaluation of all values will bring huneker to his feet again, and with something of the old glow and gusto in him. and if the new men do not stir up, then assuredly the wrecks of the ancient cities will: the paris of his youth; munich, dresden, vienna, brussels, london; above all, prague. go to "new cosmopolis" and you will find where his heart lies, or, if not his heart, then at all events his oesophagus and pylorus.... here, indeed, the thread of his meditations is a thread of nutriment. however diverted by the fragrance of the dutch woods, the church bells of belgium, the music of stuttgart, the bad pictures of dublin, the plays of paris, the musty romance of old wien, he always comes back anon to such ease as a man may find in his inn. "the stomach of vienna," he says, "first interested me, not its soul." and so, after a dutiful genuflexion to st. stephen's ("old steffel," as the viennese call it), he proceeds to investigate the paprika-chicken, the _gulyas_, the _risi-bisi_, the _apfelstrudel_, the _kaiserschmarrn_ and the native and authentic _wienerschnitzel_. and from food to drink--specifically, to the haunts of pilsner, to "certain semi-sacred houses where the ritual of beer-drinking is observed," to the shrines at which beer maniacs meet, to "a little old house near a greek church" where "the best-kept pilsner in vienna may be found." the best-kept pilsner in vienna! the phrase enchants like an entrance of the horns. the best caviare in russia, the worst actor on broadway, the most virtuous angel in heaven! such superlatives are transcendental. and yet,--so rare is perfection in this world!--the news swiftly follows, unexpected, disconcerting, that the best pilsner in vienna is far short of the ideal. for some undetermined reason--the influence of the american tourist? the decay of the austrian national character?--the vienna _bierwirte_ freeze and paralyze it with too much ice, so that it chills the nerves it should caress, and fills the heart below with heaviness and repining. avoid vienna, says huneker, if you are one who understands and venerates the great bohemian brew! and if, deluded, you find yourself there, take the first _d-zug_ for prague, that lovely city, for in it you will find the pilsen _urquell_, and in the pilsen _urquell_ you will find the best pilsner in christendom--its colour a phosphorescent, translucent, golden yellow, its foam like whipped cream, its temperature exactly and invariably right. not even at pilsen itself (which the bohemians call plezen) is the emperor of malt liquors more stupendously grateful to the palate. write it down before you forget: the pilsen _urquell_, prague, bohemia, 120 miles s. s. e. of dresden, on the river moldau (which the natives call the vitava). ask for fräulein ottilie. mention the name of herr huneker, the american _schriftsteller_. of all the eminent and noble cities between the alleghenies and the balkans, prague seems to be huneker's favourite. he calls it poetic, precious, delectable, original, dramatic--a long string of adjectives, each argued for with eloquence that is unmistakably sincere. he stands fascinated before the towers and pinnacles of the hradschin, "a miracle of tender rose and marble white with golden spots of sunshine that would have made claude monet envious." he pays his devotions to the chapel of st. wenceslaus, "crammed with the bones of buried kings," or, at any rate, to the shrine of st. john nepomucane, "composed of nearly two tons of silver." he is charmed by the beauty of the stout, black-haired, red-cheeked bohemian girls, and hopes that enough of them will emigrate to the united states to improve the fading pulchritude of our own houris. but most of all, he has praises for the bohemian cuisine, with its incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable pilsner of prague. this pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. in the midst of dutch tulip-beds, dublin cobblestones, madrid sunlight and atlantic city leg-shows, one hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra. the cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes clearly, sometimes in scarcely recognizable augmentation. it is heard again in the wood-wind; the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in the violas; it rises to a stately choral in the brass. and chiefly it is in minor. chiefly it is sounded by one who longs for the pilsen _urquell_ in a far land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling people, and in an atmosphere as hostile to the recreations of the palate as it is to the recreations of the intellect. as i say, this huneker is a foreigner and hence accursed. there is something about him as exotic as a samovar, as essentially un-american as a bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue. he is filled to the throttle with strange and unnational heresies. he ranks beethoven miles above the native gods, and not only beethoven, but also bach and brahms, and not only bach and brahms, but also berlioz, bizet, bruch and bülow and perhaps even balakirew, bellini, balfe, borodin and boïeldieu. he regards budapest as a more civilized city than his native philadelphia, stendhal as a greater literary artist than washington irving, "künstler leben" as better music than "there is sunlight in my soul." irish? i still doubt it, despite the _stammbaum_. who ever heard of an irish epicure, an irish _flâneur_, or, for that matter, an irish contrapuntist? the arts of the voluptuous category are unknown west of cherbourg; one leaves them behind with the french pilot. even the czech-irish hypothesis (or is it magyar-irish?) has a smell of the lamp. perhaps it should be irish-czech.... § 7 there remain the books of stories, "visionaries" and "melomaniacs." it is not surprising to hear that both are better liked in france and germany than in england and the united states. ("visionaries" has even appeared in bohemian.) both are made up of what the germans call _kultur-novellen_--that is, stories dealing, not with the emotions common to all men, but with the clash of ideas among the civilized and godless minority. in some of them, _e.g._, "rebels of the moon," what one finds is really not a story at all, but a static discussion, half aesthetic and half lunatic. in others, _e.g._, "isolde's mother," the whole action revolves around an assumption incomprehensible to the general. one can scarcely imagine most of these tales in the magazines. they would puzzle and outrage the readers of gouverneur morris and gertrude atherton, and the readers of howells and mrs. wharton no less. their point of view is essentially the aesthetic one; the overwhelming importance of beauty is never in any doubt. and the beauty thus vivisected and fashioned into new designs is never the simple wordsworthian article, of fleecy clouds and primroses all compact; on the contrary, it is the highly artificial beauty of pigments and tone-colours, of cézanne landscapes and the second act of "tristan and isolde," of dunsanyan dragons and paracelsian mysteries. here, indeed, huneker riots in the aesthetic occultism that he loves. music slides over into diabolism; the pobloff symphony rends the firmament of heaven; the ghost of chopin drives mychowski to drink; a single drum-beat finishes the estimable consort of the composer of the tympani symphony. in "the eighth deadly sin" we have a paean to perfume--the only one, so far as i know, in english. in "the hall of the missing footsteps" we behold the reaction of hasheesh upon chopin's ballade in f major.... strangely-flavoured, unearthly, perhaps unhealthy stuff. i doubt that it will ever be studied for its style in our new schools of literature; a devilish cunning if often there, but it leaves a smack of the pharmacopoeia. however, as george gissing used to say, "the artist should be free from everything like moral prepossession." this lets in the antichrist.... huneker himself seems to esteem these fantastic tales above all his other work. story-writing, indeed, was his first love, and his opus 1 a bad imitation of poe, by name "the comet," was done in philadelphia so long ago as july 4, 1876. (temperature, 105 degrees fahrenheit.) one rather marvels that he has never attempted a novel. it would have been as bad, perhaps, as "love among the artists," but certainly no bore. he might have given george moore useful help with "evelyn innes" and "sister teresa": they are about music, but not by a musician. as for me, i see no great talent for fiction _qua_ fiction in these two volumes of exotic tales. they are interesting simply because huneker the story teller so often yields place to huneker the playboy of the arts. such things as "antichrist" and "the woman who loved chopin" are no more, at bottom, than second-rate anecdotes; it is the filling, the sauce, the embroidery that counts. but what filling! what sauce! what embroidery!... one never sees more of huneker.... § 8 he must stand or fall, however, as critic. it is what he has written about other men, not what he has concocted himself, that makes a figure of him, and gives him his unique place in the sterile literature of the republic's second century. he stands for a _weltanschauung_ that is not only un-national, but anti-national; he is the chief of all the curbers and correctors of the american philistine; in praising the arts he has also criticized a civilization. in the large sense, of course, he has had but small influence. after twenty years of earnest labour, he finds himself almost as alone as a methodist in bavaria. the body of native criticism remains as i have described it; an endless piling up of platitudes, an homeric mass of false assumptions and jejune conclusions, an insane madness to reduce beauty to terms of a petty and pornographic morality. one might throw a thousand bricks in any american city without striking a single man who could give an intelligible account of either hauptmann or cézanne, or of the reasons for holding schumann to have been a better composer than mendelssohn. the boys in our colleges are still taught that whittier was a great poet and fennimore cooper a great novelist. nine-tenths of our people--perhaps ninety-nine hundredths of our native-born--have yet to see their first good picture, or to hear their first symphony. our chamberses and richard harding davises are national figures; our norrises and dreisers are scarcely tolerated. of the two undoubted world figures that we have contributed to letters, one was allowed to die like a stray cat up an alley and the other was mistaken for a cheap buffoon. criticism, as the average american "intellectual" understands it, is what a frenchman, a german or a russian would call donkeyism. in all the arts we still cling to the ideals of the dissenting pulpit, the public cemetery, the electric sign, the bordello parlour. but for all that, i hang to a somewhat battered optimism, and one of the chief causes of that optimism is the fact that huneker, after all these years, yet remains unhanged. a picturesque and rakish fellow, a believer in joy and beauty, a disdainer of petty bombast and moralizing, a sworn friend of all honest purpose and earnest striving, he has given his life to a work that must needs bear fruit hereafter. while the college pedagogues of the brander matthews type still worshipped the dead bones of scribe and sardou, robertson and bulwer-lytton, he preached the new and revolutionary gospel of ibsen. in the golden age of rosa bonheur's "the horse fair," he was expounding the principles of the post-impressionists. in the midst of the sousa marches he whooped for richard strauss. before the rev. professors had come to schopenhauer, or even to spencer, he was hauling ashore the devil-fish, nietzsche. no stranger poisons have ever passed through the customs than those he has brought in his baggage. no man among us has ever urged more ardently, or with sounder knowledge or greater persuasiveness, that catholicity of taste and sympathy which stands in such direct opposition to the booming certainty and snarling narrowness of little bethel. if he bears a simple label, indeed, it is that of anti-philistine. and the philistine he attacks is not so much the vacant and harmless fellow who belongs to the odd fellows and recreates himself with _life_ and _leslie's weekly_ in the barber shop, as that more belligerent and pretentious donkey who presumes to do battle for "honest" thought and a "sound" ethic--the "forward looking" man, the university ignoramus, the conservator of orthodoxy, the rattler of ancient phrases--what nietzsche called "the philistine of culture." it is against this fat milch cow of wisdom that huneker has brandished a spear since first there was a huneker. he is a sworn foe to "the traps that snare the attention from poor or mediocre workmanship--the traps of sentimentalism, of false feeling, of cheap pathos, of the cheap moral." he is on the trail of those pious mountebanks who "clutter the marketplaces with their booths, mischievous half-art and tubs of tripe and soft soap." superficially, as i say, he seems to have made little progress in this benign _pogrom_. but under the surface, concealed from a first glance, he has undoubtedly left a mark--faint, perhaps, but still a mark. to be a civilized man in america is measurably less difficult, despite the war, than it used to be, say, in 1890. one may at least speak of "die walküre" without being laughed at as a half-wit, and read stirner without being confused with castro and raisuli, and argue that huxley got the better of gladstone without being challenged at the polls. i know of no man who pushed in that direction harder than james huneker. footnotes: [31] the science of english verse; new york, scribner, 1880. [32] masks and minstrels of new germany; boston, john w. luce & co., 1911. [33] new york, doubleday, page & co., 1913. [34] the drift of romanticism; boston, houghton mifflin co., 1913. [35] new york, dodd, mead & co., 1916. [36] new york, chas. scribner's sons, 1917. [37] new york, the macmillan co., 1917. iv puritanism as a literary force § 1 "calvinism," says dr. leon kellner, in his excellent little history of american literature,[38] "is the natural theology of the disinherited; it never flourished, therefore, anywhere as it did in the barren hills of scotland and in the wilds of north america." the learned doctor is here speaking of theology in what may be called its narrow technical sense--that is, as a theory of god. under calvinism, in the new world as well as in the old, it became no more than a luxuriant demonology; even god himself was transformed into a superior sort of devil, ever wary and wholly merciless. that primitive demonology still survives in the barbaric doctrines of the methodists and baptists, particularly in the south; but it has been ameliorated, even there, by a growing sense of the divine grace, and so the old god of plymouth rock, as practically conceived, is now scarcely worse than the average jail warden or italian padrone. on the ethical side, however, calvinism is dying a much harder death, and we are still a long way from the enlightenment. save where continental influences have measurably corrupted the puritan idea--_e.g._, in such cities as new york, san francisco and new orleans,--the prevailing american view of the world and its mysteries is still a moral one, and no other human concern gets half the attention that is endlessly lavished upon the problem of conduct, particularly of the other fellow. it needed no official announcement to define the function and office of the republic as that of an international expert in morals, and the mentor and exemplar of the more backward nations. within, as well as without, the eternal rapping of knuckles and proclaiming of new austerities goes on. the american, save in moments of conscious and swiftly lamented deviltry, casts up all ponderable values, including even the values of beauty, in terms of right and wrong. he is beyond all things else, a judge and a policeman; he believes firmly that there is a mysterious power in law; he supports and embellishes its operation with a fanatical vigilance. naturally enough, this moral obsession has given a strong colour to american literature. in truth, it has coloured it so brilliantly that american literature is set off sharply from all other literatures. in none other will you find so wholesale and ecstatic a sacrifice of aesthetic ideas, of all the fine gusto of passion and beauty, to notions of what is meet, proper and nice. from the books of grisly sermons that were the first american contribution to letters down to that amazing literature of "inspiration" which now flowers so prodigiously, with two literary ex-presidents among its chief virtuosi, one observes no relaxation of the moral pressure. in the history of every other literature there have been periods of what might be called moral innocence--periods in which a naif _joie de vivre_ has broken through all concepts of duty and responsibility, and the wonder and glory of the universe have been hymned with unashamed zest. the age of shakespeare comes to mind at once: the violence of the puritan reaction offers a measure of the pendulum's wild swing. but in america no such general rising of the blood has ever been seen. the literature of the nation, even the literature of the enlightened minority, has been under harsh puritan restraints from the beginning, and despite a few stealthy efforts at revolt--usually quite without artistic value or even common honesty, as in the case of the cheap fiction magazines and that of smutty plays on broadway, and always very short-lived--it shows not the slightest sign of emancipating itself today. the american, try as he will, can never imagine any work of the imagination as wholly devoid of moral content. it must either tend toward the promotion of virtue, or be suspect and abominable. if any doubt of this is in your mind, turn to the critical articles in the newspapers and literary weeklies; you will encounter enough proofs in a month's explorations to convince you forever. a novel or a play is judged among us, not by its dignity of conception, its artistic honesty, its perfection of workmanship, but almost entirely by its orthodoxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract. a digest of the reviews of such a book as david graham phillips' "susan lenox" or of such a play as ibsen's "hedda gabler" would make astounding reading for a continental european. not only the childish incompetents who write for the daily press, but also most of our critics of experience and reputation, seem quite unable to estimate a piece of writing as a piece of writing, a work of art as a work of art; they almost inevitably drag in irrelevant gabble as to whether this or that personage in it is respectable, or this or that situation in accordance with the national notions of what is edifying and nice. fully nine-tenths of the reviews of dreiser's "the titan," without question the best american novel of its year, were devoted chiefly to indignant denunciations of the morals of frank cowperwood, its central character. that the man was superbly imagined and magnificently depicted, that he stood out from the book in all the flashing vigour of life, that his creation was an artistic achievement of a very high and difficult order--these facts seem to have made no impression upon the reviewers whatever. they were puritans writing for puritans, and all they could see in cowperwood was an anti-puritan, and in his creator another. it will remain for europeans, i daresay, to discover the true stature of "the titan," as it remained for europeans to discover the true stature of "sister carrie." just how deeply this corrective knife has cut you may find plainly displayed in dr. kellner's little book. he sees the throttling influence of an ever alert and bellicose puritanism, not only in our grand literature, but also in our petit literature, our minor poetry, even in our humour. the puritan's utter lack of aesthetic sense, his distrust of all romantic emotion, his unmatchable intolerance of opposition, his unbreakable belief in his own bleak and narrow views, his savage cruelty of attack, his lust for relentless and barbarous persecution--these things have put an almost unbearable burden upon the exchange of ideas in the united states, and particularly upon that form of it which involves playing with them for the mere game's sake. on the one hand, the writer who would deal seriously and honestly with the larger problems of life, particularly in the rigidly-partitioned ethical field, is restrained by laws that would have kept a balzac or a zola in prison from year's end to year's end; and on the other hand the writer who would proceed against the reigning superstitions by mockery has been silenced by taboos that are quite as stringent, and by an indifference that is even worse. for all our professed delight in and capacity for jocosity, we have produced so far but one genuine wit--ambrose bierce--and, save to a small circle, he remains unknown today. our great humourists, including even mark twain, have had to take protective colouration, whether willingly or unwillingly, from the prevailing ethical foliage, and so one finds them levelling their darts, not at the stupidities of the puritan majority, but at the evidences of lessening stupidity in the anti-puritan minority. in other words, they have done battle, not against, but _for_ philistinism--and philistinism is no more than another name for puritanism. both wage a ceaseless warfare upon beauty in its every form, from painting to religious ritual, and from the drama to the dance--the first because it holds beauty to be a mean and stupid thing, and the second because it holds beauty to be distracting and corrupting. mark twain, without question, was a great artist; there was in him something of that prodigality of imagination, that aloof engrossment in the human comedy, that penetrating cynicism, which one associates with the great artists of the renaissance. but his nationality hung around his neck like a millstone; he could never throw off his native philistinism. one ploughs through "the innocents abroad" and through parts of "a tramp abroad" with incredulous amazement. is such coarse and ignorant clowning to be accepted as humour, as great humour, as the best humour that the most humorous of peoples has produced? is it really the mark of a smart fellow to lift a peasant's cackle over "lohengrin"? is titian's chromo of moses in the bullrushes seriously to be regarded as the noblest picture in europe? is there nothing in latin christianity, after all, save petty grafting, monastic scandals and the worship of the knuckles and shin-bones of dubious saints? may not a civilized man, disbelieving in it, still find himself profoundly moved by its dazzling history, the lingering remnants of its old magnificence, the charm of its gorgeous and melancholy loveliness? in the presence of all beauty of man's creation--in brief, of what we roughly call art, whatever its form--the voice of mark twain was the voice of the philistine. a literary artist of very high rank himself, with instinctive gifts that lifted him, in "huckleberry finn" to kinship with cervantes and aristophanes, he was yet so far the victim of his nationality that he seems to have had no capacity for distinguishing between the good and the bad in the work of other men of his own craft. the literary criticism that one occasionally finds in his writings is chiefly trivial and ignorant; his private inclination appears to have been toward such romantic sentimentality as entrances school-boys; the thing that interested him in shakespeare was not the man's colossal genius, but the absurd theory that bacon wrote his plays. had he been born in france (the country of his chief abomination!) instead of in a puritan village of the american hinterland, i venture that he would have conquered the world. but try as he would, being what he was, he could not get rid of the puritan smugness and cocksureness, the puritan distrust of new ideas, the puritan incapacity for seeing beauty as a thing in itself, and the full peer of the true and the good. it is, indeed, precisely in the works of such men as mark twain that one finds the best proofs of the puritan influence in american letters, for it is there that it is least expected and hence most significant. our native critics, unanimously puritans themselves, are anaesthetic to the flavour, but to dr. kellner, with his half-european, half-oriental culture, it is always distinctly perceptible. he senses it, not only in the harsh calvinistic fables of hawthorne and the pious gurglings of longfellow, but also in the poetry of bryant, the tea-party niceness of howells, the "maiden-like reserve" of james lane allen, and even in the work of joel chandler harris. what! a southern puritan? well, why not? what could be more erroneous than the common assumption that puritanism is exclusively a northern, a new england, madness? the truth is that it is as thoroughly national as the kindred belief in the devil, and runs almost unobstructed from portland to portland and from the lakes to the gulf. it is in the south, indeed, and not in the north, that it takes on its most bellicose and extravagant forms. between the upper tier of new england and the potomac river there was not a single prohibition state--but thereafter, alas, they came in huge blocks! and behind that infinitely prosperous puritanism there is a long and unbroken tradition. berkeley, the last of the cavaliers, was kicked out of power in virginia so long ago as 1650. lord baltimore, the proprietor of maryland, was brought to terms by the puritans of the severn in 1657. the scotch covenanter, the most uncompromising and unenlightened of all puritans, flourished in the carolinas from the start, and in 1698, or thereabout, he was reinforced from new england. in 1757 a band of puritans invaded what is now georgia--and georgia has been a puritan barbarism ever since. even while the early (and half-mythical) cavaliers were still in nominal control of all these southern plantations, they clung to the sea-coast. the population that moved down the chain of the appalachians during the latter part of the eighteenth century, and then swept over them into the mississippi valley, was composed almost entirely of puritans--chiefly intransigeants from new england (where unitarianism was getting on its legs), kirk-crazy scotch, and that plupious beauty-hating folk, the scotch-irish. "in the south today," said john fiske a generation ago, "there is more puritanism surviving than in new england." in that whole region, an area three times as large as france or germany, there is not a single orchestra capable of playing beethoven's c minor symphony, or a single painting worth looking at, or a single public building or monument of any genuine distinction, or a single factory devoted to the making of beautiful things, or a single poet, novelist, historian, musician, painter or sculptor whose reputation extends beyond his own country. between the mason and dixon line and the mouth of the mississippi there is but one opera-house, and that one was built by a frenchman, and is now, i believe, closed. the only domestic art this huge and opulent empire knows is in the hands of mexican greasers; its only native music it owes to the despised negro; its only genuine poet was permitted to die up an alley like a stray dog. § 2 in studying the anatomy and physiology of american puritanism, and its effects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two main streams of influence. on the one hand, there is the influence of the original puritans--whether of new england or of the south--, who came to the new world with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity, positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able to force it almost unchanged upon the whole population, and to endow it with such vitality that it successfully resisted alien opposition later on. and on the other hand, one sees a complex of social and economic conditions which worked in countless irresistible ways against the rise of that dionysian spirit, that joyful acquiescence in life, that philosophy of the _ja-sager_, which offers to puritanism, today as in times past, its chief and perhaps only effective antagonism. in other words, the american of the days since the revolution has had puritanism diligently pressed upon him from without, and at the same time he has led, in the main, a life that has engendered a chronic hospitality to it, or at all events to its salient principles, within. dr. kellner accurately describes the process whereby the aesthetic spirit, and its concomitant spirit of joy, were squeezed out of the original new englanders, so that no trace of it showed in their literature, or even in their lives, for a century and a half after the first settlements. "absorption in god," he says, "seems incompatible with the presentation (_i.e._, aesthetically) of mankind. the god of the puritans was in this respect a jealous god who brooked no sort of creative rivalry. the inspired moments of the loftiest souls were filled with the thought of god and his designs; spiritual life was wholly dominated by solicitude regarding salvation, the hereafter, grace; how could such petty concerns as personal experience of a lyric nature, the transports or the pangs of love, find utterance? what did a lyric occurrence like the first call of the cuckoo, elsewhere so welcome, or the first sight of the snowdrop, signify compared with the last sunday's sermon and the new interpretation of the old riddle of evil in the world? and apart from the fact that everything of a personal nature must have appeared so trivial, all the sources of secular lyric poetry were offensive and impious to puritan theology.... one thing is an established fact: up to the close of the eighteenth century america had no belletristic literature." this puritan bedevilment by the idea of personal sin, this reign of the god-crazy, gave way in later years, as we shall see, to other and somewhat milder forms of pious enthusiasm. at the time of the revolution, indeed, the importation of french political ideas was accompanied by an importation of french theological ideas, and such men as franklin and jefferson dallied with what, in those days at least, was regarded as downright atheism. even in new england this influence made itself felt; there was a gradual letting down of calvinism to the softness of unitarianism, and that change was presently to flower in the vague temporizing of transcendentalism. but as puritanism, in the strict sense, declined in virulence and took deceptive new forms, there was a compensating growth of its brother, philistinism, and by the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the distrust of beauty, and of the joy that is its object, was as firmly established throughout the land as it had ever been in new england. the original puritans had at least been men of a certain education, and even of a certain austere culture. they were inordinately hostile to beauty in all its forms, but one somehow suspects that much of their hostility was due to a sense of their weakness before it, a realization of its disarming psychical pull. but the american of the new republic was of a different kidney. he was not so much hostile to beauty as devoid of any consciousness of it; he stood as unmoved before its phenomena as a savage before a table of logarithms. what he had set up on this continent, in brief, was a commonwealth of peasants and small traders, a paradise of the third-rate, and its national philosophy, almost wholly unchecked by the more sophisticated and civilized ideas of an aristocracy, was precisely the philosophy that one finds among peasants and small traders at all times and everywhere. the difference between the united states and any other nation did not lie in any essential difference between american peasants and other peasants, but simply in the fact that here, alone, the voice of the peasant was the single voice of the nation--that here, alone, the only way to eminence and public influence was the way of acquiescence in the opinions and prejudices of the untutored and philistine mob. jackson was the _stammvater_ of the new statesmen and philosophers; he carried the mob's distrust of good taste even into the field of conduct; he was the first to put the rewards of conformity above the dictates of common decency; he founded a whole hierarchy of philistine messiahs, the roaring of which still belabours the ear. once established, this culture of the intellectually disinherited tended to defend and perpetuate itself. on the one hand, there was no appearance of a challenge from within, for the exigent problems of existence in a country that was yet but half settled and organized left its people with no energy for questioning what at least satisfied their gross needs, and so met the pragmatic test. and on the other hand, there was no critical pressure from without, for the english culture which alone reached over the sea was itself entering upon its victorian decline, and the influence of the native aristocracy--the degenerating _junkers_ of the great estates and the boorish magnates of the city _bourgeoisie_--was quite without any cultural direction at all. the chief concern of the american people, even above the bread-and-butter question, was politics. they were incessantly hag-ridden by political difficulties, both internal and external, of an inordinate complexity, and these occupied all the leisure they could steal from the sordid work of everyday. more, their new and troubled political ideas tended to absorb all the rancorous certainty of their fading religious ideas, so that devotion to a theory or a candidate became translated into devotion to a revelation, and the game of politics turned itself into a holy war. the custom of connecting purely political doctrines with pietistic concepts of an inflammable nature, then firmly set up by skilful persuaders of the mob, has never quite died out in the united states. there has not been a presidential contest since jackson's day without its armageddons, its marching of christian soldiers, its crosses of gold, its crowns of thorns. the most successful american politicians, beginning with the anti-slavery agitators, have been those most adept at twisting the ancient gauds and shibboleths of puritanism to partisan uses. every campaign that we have seen for eighty years has been, on each side, a pursuit of bugaboos, a denunciation of heresies, a snouting up of immoralities. but it was during the long contest against slavery, beginning with the appearance of william lloyd garrison's _liberator_ in 1831 and ending at appomattox, that this gigantic supernaturalization of politics reached its most astounding heights. in those days, indeed, politics and religion coalesced in a manner not seen in the world since the middle ages, and the combined pull of the two was so powerful that none could quite resist it. all men of any ability and ambition turned to political activity for self-expression. it engaged the press to the exclusion of everything else; it conquered the pulpit; it even laid its hand upon industry and trade. drawing the best imaginative talent into its service--jefferson and lincoln may well stand as examples--it left the cultivation of belles lettres, and of all the other arts no less, to women and admittedly second-rate men. and when, breaking through this taboo, some chance first-rate man gave himself over to purely aesthetic expression, his reward was not only neglect, but even a sort of ignominy, as if such enterprises were not fitting for males with hair on their chests. i need not point to poe and whitman, both disdained as dreamers and wasters, and both proceeded against with the utmost rigours of outraged philistinism. in brief, the literature of that whole period, as algernon tassin shows in "the magazine in america,"[39] was almost completely disassociated from life as men were then living it. save one counts in such crude politico-puritan tracts as "uncle tom's cabin," it is difficult to find a single contemporaneous work that interprets the culture of the time, or even accurately represents it. later on, it found historians and anatomists, and in one work, at least, to wit, "huckleberry finn," it was studied and projected with the highest art, but no such impulse to make imaginative use of it showed itself contemporaneously, and there was not even the crude sentimentalization of here and now that one finds in the popular novels of today. fenimore cooper filled his romances, not with the people about him, but with the indians beyond the sky-line, and made them half-fabulous to boot. irving told fairy tales about the forgotten knickerbockers; hawthorne turned backward to the puritans of plymouth rock; longfellow to the acadians and the prehistoric indians; emerson took flight from earth altogether; even poe sought refuge in a land of fantasy. it was only the frank second-raters--_e.g._, whittier and lowell--who ventured to turn to the life around them, and the banality of the result is a sufficient indication of the crudeness of the current taste, and the mean position assigned to the art of letters. this was pre-eminently the era of the moral tale, the sunday-school book. literature was conceived, not as a thing in itself, but merely as a hand-maiden to politics or religion. the great celebrity of emerson in new england was not the celebrity of a literary artist, but that of a theologian and metaphysician; he was esteemed in much the same way that jonathan edwards had been esteemed. even down to our own time, indeed, his vague and empty philosophizing has been put above his undeniable capacity for graceful utterance, and it remained for dr. kellner to consider him purely as a literary artist, and to give him due praise for his skill. the civil war brought that era of sterility to an end. as i shall show later on, the shock of it completely reorganized the american scheme of things, and even made certain important changes in the national puritanism, or, at all events, in its machinery. whitman, whose career straddled, so to speak, the four years of the war, was the leader--and for a long while, the only trooper--of a double revolt. on the one hand he offered a courageous challenge to the intolerable prudishness and dirty-mindedness of puritanism, and on the other hand he boldly sought the themes and even the modes of expression of his poetry in the arduous, contentious and highly melodramatic life that lay all about him. whitman, however, was clearly before his time. his countrymen could see him only as immoralist; save for a pitiful few of them, they were dead to any understanding of his stature as artist, and even unaware that such a category of men existed. he was put down as an invader of the public decencies, a disturber of the public peace; even his eloquent war poems, surely the best of all his work, were insufficient to get him a hearing; the sentimental rubbish of "the blue and the gray" and the ecstatic supernaturalism of "the battle hymn of the republic" were far more to the public taste. where whitman failed, indeed, all subsequent explorers of the same field have failed with him, and the great war has left no more mark upon american letters than if it had never been fought. nothing remotely approaching the bulk and beam of tolstoi's "war and peace," or, to descend to a smaller scale, zola's "the attack on the mill," has come out of it. its appeal to the national imagination was undoubtedly of the most profound character; it coloured politics for fifty years, and is today a dominating influence in the thought of whole sections of the american people. but in all that stirring up there was no upheaval of artistic consciousness, for the plain reason that there was no artistic consciousness there to heave up, and all we have in the way of civil war literature is a few conventional melodramas, a few half-forgotten short stories by ambrose bierce and stephen crane, and a half dozen idiotic popular songs in the manner of randall's "maryland, my maryland." in the seventies and eighties, with the appearance of such men as henry james, william dean howells, mark twain and bret harte, a better day seemed to be dawning. here, after a full century of infantile romanticizing, were four writers who at least deserved respectful consideration as literary artists, and what is more, three of them turned from the conventionalized themes of the past to the teeming and colourful life that lay under their noses. but this promise of better things was soon found to be no more than a promise. mark twain, after "the gilded age," slipped back into romanticism tempered by philistinism, and was presently in the era before the civil war, and finally in the middle ages, and even beyond. harte, a brilliant technician, had displayed his whole stock when he had displayed his technique: his stories were not even superficially true to the life they presumed to depict; one searched them in vain for an interpretation of it; they were simply idle tales. as for howells and james, both quickly showed that timorousness and reticence which are the distinguishing marks of the puritan, even in his most intellectual incarnations. the american scene that they depicted with such meticulous care was chiefly peopled with marionettes. they shrunk, characteristically, from those larger, harsher clashes of will and purpose which one finds in all truly first-rate literature. in particular, they shrunk from any interpretation of life which grounded itself upon an acknowledgment of its inexorable and inexplicable tragedy. in the vast combat of instincts and aspirations about them they saw only a feeble jousting of comedians, unserious and insignificant. of the great questions that have agitated the minds of men in howells' time one gets no more than a faint and far-away echo in his novels. his investigations, one may say, are carried on _in vacuo_; his discoveries are not expressed in terms of passion, but in terms of giggles. in the followers of howells and james one finds little save an empty imitation of their emptiness, a somewhat puerile parodying of their highly artful but essentially personal technique. to wade through the books of such characteristic american fictioneers as frances hodgson burnett, mary e. wilkins freeman, f. hopkinson smith, alice brown, james lane allen, winston churchill, ellen glasgow, gertrude atherton and sarah orne jewett is to undergo an experience that is almost terrible. the flow of words is completely purged of ideas; in place of them one finds no more than a romantic restatement of all the old platitudes and formulae. to call such an emission of graceful poppycock a literature, of course, is to mouth an absurdity, and yet, if the college professors who write treatises on letters are to be believed, it is the best we have to show. turn, for example, to "a history of american literature since 1870," by prof. fred lewis pattee, one of the latest and undoubtedly one of the least unintelligent of these books. in it the gifted pedagogue gives extended notice to no less than six of the nine writers i have mentioned, and upon all of them his verdicts are flattering. he bestows high praises, direct and indirect, upon mrs. freeman's "grim and austere" manner, her "repression," her entire lack of poetical illumination. he compares miss jewett to both howells and hawthorne, not to mention mrs. gaskell--and addison! he grows enthusiastic over a hollow piece of fine writing by miss brown. and he forgets altogether to mention dreiser, or sinclair, or medill patterson, or harry leon wilson, or george ade!... so much for the best. the worst is beyond description. france has her brieux and her henry bordeaux; germany has her mühlbach, her stars of the _gartenlaube_; england contributes caine, corelli, oppenheim and company. but it is in our country alone that banality in letters takes on the proportions of a national movement; it is only here that a work of the imagination is habitually judged by its sheer emptiness of ideas, its fundamental platitudinousness, its correspondence with the imbecility of mob thinking; it is only here that "glad" books run up sales of hundreds of thousands. richard harding davis, with his ideals of a floor-walker; gene stratton-porter, with her snuffling sentimentality; robert w. chambers, with his "society" romances for shop-girls; irvin cobb, with his laboured, _ayers' almanac_ jocosity; the authors of the _saturday evening post_ school, with their heroic drummers and stockbrokers, their ecstatic celebration of the stupid, the sordid, the ignoble--these, after all, are our typical _literati_. the puritan fear of ideas is the master of them all. some of them, in truth, most of them, have undeniable talent; in a more favourable environment not a few of them might be doing sound work. but they see how small the ring is, and they make their tricks small to fit it. not many of them ever venture a leg outside. the lash of the ringmaster is swift, and it stings damnably.... i say not many; i surely do not mean none at all. as a matter of fact, there have been intermittent rebellions against the prevailing pecksniffery and sentimentality ever since the days of irving and hawthorne. poe led one of them--as critic more than as creative artist. his scathing attacks upon the gerald stanley lees, the hamilton wright mabies and the george e. woodberrys of his time keep a liveliness and appositeness that the years have not staled; his criticism deserves to be better remembered. poe sensed the philistine pull of a puritan civilization as none had before him, and combated it with his whole artillery of rhetoric. another rebel, of course, was whitman; how he came to grief is too well known to need recalling. what is less familiar is the fact that both the _atlantic monthly_ and the _century_ (first called _scribner's_) were set up by men in revolt against the reign of mush, as _putnam's_ and the _dial_ had been before them. the salutatory of the _dial_, dated 1840, stated the case against the national mugginess clearly. the aim of the magazine, it said, was to oppose "that rigour of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone" and to give expression to "new views and the dreams of youth." alas, for these brave _révoltés_! _putnam's_ succumbed to the circumambient rigours and duly turned to stone, and is now no more. the _atlantic_, once so heretical, has become as respectable as the new york _evening post_. as for the _dial_, it was until lately the very pope of orthodoxy and jealously guarded the college professors who read it from the pollution of ideas. only the _century_ has kept the faith unbrokenly. it is, indeed, the one first-class american magazine that has always welcomed newcomers, and that maintains an intelligent contact with the literature that is in being, and that consistently tries to make the best terms possible with the dominant philistinism. it cannot go the whole way without running into danger; let it be said to the credit of its editors that they have more than once braved that danger. the tale might be lengthened. mark twain, in his day, felt the stirrings of revolt, and not all his philistinism was sufficient to hold him altogether in check. if you want to find out about the struggle that went on within him, read the biography by albert bigelow paine, or, better still, "the mysterious stranger" and "what is man?" alive, he had his position to consider; dead, he now speaks out. in the preface to "what is man?" dated 1905, there is a curious confession of his incapacity for defying the taboos which surrounded him. the studies for the book, he says, were begun "twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago"--the period of "a tramp abroad" and "the prince and the pauper." it was actually written "seven years ago"--that is, just after "following the equator" and "personal recollections of joan of arc." and why did it lie so long in manuscript, and finally go out stealthily, under a private imprint?[40] simply because, as mark frankly confesses, he "dreaded (_and could not bear_) the disapproval of the people around" him. he knew how hard his fight for recognition had been; he knew what direful penalties outraged orthodoxy could inflict; he had in him the somewhat pathetic discretion of a respectable family man. but, dead, he is safely beyond reprisal, and so, after a prudent interval, the faithful paine begins printing books in which, writing knowingly behind six feet of earth, he could set down his true ideas without fear. some day, perhaps, we shall have his microbe story, and maybe even his picture of the court of elizabeth. a sneer in prof. pattee's history, before mentioned, recalls the fact that hamlin garland was also a rebel in his day and bawled for the truth with a capital t. that was in 1893. two years later the guardians of the national rectitude fell afoul of "rose of dutchers' coolly" and garland began to think it over; today he devotes himself to the safer enterprise of chasing spooks; his name is conspicuously absent from the dreiser protest. nine years before his brief offending john hay had set off a discreet bomb in "the bread-winners"--anonymously because "my standing would be seriously compromised" by an avowal. six years later frank norris shook up the phelpses and mores of the time with "mcteague." since then there have been assaults timorous and assaults head-long--by bierce, by dreiser, by phillips, by fuller--by mary maclanes and by upton sinclairs--by ploughboy poets from the middle west and by jitney geniuses in greenwich village--assaults gradually tapering off to a mere sophomoric brashness and deviltry. and all of them like snow-ballings of verdun. all of them petered out and ineffectual. the normal, the typical american book of today is as fully a remouthing of old husks as the normal book of griswold's day. the whole atmosphere of our literature, in william james' phrase, is "mawkish and dishwatery." books are still judged among us, not by their form and organization as works of art, their accuracy and vividness as representations of life, their validity and perspicacity as interpretations of it, but by their conformity to the national prejudices, their accordance with set standards of niceness and propriety. the thing irrevocably demanded is a "sane" book; the ideal is a "clean," an "inspiring," a "glad" book. § 3 all this may be called the puritan impulse from within. it is, indeed, but a single manifestation of one of the deepest prejudices of a religious and half-cultured people--the prejudice against beauty as a form of debauchery and corruption--the distrust of all ideas that do not fit readily into certain accepted axioms--the belief in the eternal validity of moral concepts--in brief, the whole mental sluggishness of the lower orders of men. but in addition to this internal resistance, there has been laid upon american letters the heavy hand of a puritan authority from without, and no examination of the history and present condition of our literature could be of any value which did not take it constantly into account, and work out the means of its influence and operation. that authority, as i shall show, transcends both in power and in alertness the natural reactions of the national mind, and is incomparably more potent in combating ideas. it is supported by a body of law that is unmatched in any other country of christendom, and it is exercised with a fanatical harshness and vigilance that make escape from its operations well nigh impossible. some of its effects, both direct and indirect, i shall describe later, but before doing so it may be well to trace its genesis and development. at bottom, of course, it rests upon the inherent puritanism of the people; it could not survive a year if they were opposed to the principle visible in it. that deep-seated and uncorrupted puritanism, that conviction of the pervasiveness of sin, of the supreme importance of moral correctness, of the need of savage and inquisitorial laws, has been a dominating force in american life since the very beginning. there has never been any question before the nation, whether political or economic, religious or military, diplomatic or sociological, which did not resolve itself, soon or late, into a purely moral question. nor has there ever been any surcease of the spiritual eagerness which lay at the bottom of the original puritan's moral obsession: the american has been, from the very start, a man genuinely interested in the eternal mysteries, and fearful of missing their correct solution. the frank theocracy of the new england colonies had scarcely succumbed to the libertarianism of a godless crown before there came the great awakening of 1734, with its orgies of homiletics and its restoration of talmudism to the first place among polite sciences. the revolution, of course, brought a set-back: the colonists faced so urgent a need of unity in politics that they declared a sort of _treuga dei_ in religion, and that truce, armed though it was, left its imprint upon the first amendment to the constitution. but immediately the young republic emerged from the stresses of adolescence, a missionary army took to the field again, and before long the asbury revival was paling that of whitefield, wesley and jonathan edwards, not only in its hortatory violence but also in the length of its lists of slain. thereafter, down to the outbreak of the civil war, the country was rocked again and again by furious attacks upon the devil. on the one hand, this great campaign took a purely theological form, with a hundred new and fantastic creeds as its fruits; on the other hand, it crystallized into the hysterical temperance movement of the 30's and 40's, which penetrated to the very floor of congress and put "dry" laws upon the statute-books of ten states; and on the third hand, as it were, it established a prudery in speech and thought from which we are yet but half delivered. such ancient and innocent words as "bitch" and "bastard" disappeared from the american language; bartlett tells us, indeed, in his "dictionary of americanisms,"[41] that even "bull" was softened to "male cow." this was the golden age of euphemism, as it was of euphuism; the worst inventions of the english mid-victorians were adopted and improved. the word "woman" became a term of opprobrium, verging close upon downright libel; legs became the inimitable "limbs"; the stomach began to run from the "bosom" to the pelvic arch; pantaloons faded into "unmentionables"; the newspapers spun their parts of speech into such gossamer webs as "a statutory offence," "a house of questionable repute" and "an interesting condition." and meanwhile the good templars and sons of temperance swarmed in the land like a plague of celestial locusts. there was not a hamlet without its uniformed phalanx, its affecting exhibit of reformed drunkards. the kentucky legislature succumbed to a travelling recruiting officer, and two-thirds of the members signed the pledge. the national house of representatives took recess after recess to hear eminent excoriators of the rum demon, and more than a dozen of its members forsook their duties to carry the new gospel to the bucolic heathen--the vanguard, one may note in passing, of the innumerable chautauquan caravan of later years. beneath all this bubbling on the surface, of course, ran the deep and swift undercurrent of anti-slavery feeling--a tide of passion which historians now attempt to account for on economic grounds, but which showed no trace of economic origin while it lasted. its true quality was moral, devout, ecstatic; it culminated, to change the figure, in a supreme discharge of moral electricity, almost fatal to the nation. the crack of that great spark emptied the jar; the american people forgot all about their pledges and pruderies during the four years of civil war. the good templars, indeed, were never heard of again, and with them into memory went many other singular virtuosi of virtue--for example, the millerites. but almost before the last smoke of battle cleared away, a renaissance of puritan ardour began, and by the middle of the 70's it was in full flower. its high points and flashing lighthouses halt the backward-looking eye; the moody and sankey uproar, the triumphal entry of the salvation army, the recrudescence of the temperance agitation and its culmination in prohibition, the rise of the young men's christian association and of the sunday-school, the almost miraculous growth of the christian endeavour movement, the beginnings of the vice crusade, the renewed injection of moral conceptions and rages into party politics (the "crime" of 1873!), the furious preaching of baroque utopias, the invention of muckraking, the mad, glad war of extermination upon the mormons, the hysteria over the breckenridge-pollard case and other like causes, the enormous multiplication of moral and religious associations, the spread of zoöphilia, the attack upon mammon, the dawn of the uplift, and last but far from least, comstockery. in comstockery, if i do not err, the new puritanism gave a sign of its formal departure from the old, and moral endeavour suffered a general overhauling and tightening of the screws. the difference between the two forms is very well represented by the difference between the program of the half-forgotten good templars and the program set forth in the webb law of 1913, or by that between the somewhat diffident prudery of the 40's and the astoundingly ferocious and uncompromising vice-crusading of today. in brief, a difference between the _re_nunciation and _de_nunciation, asceticism and mohammedanism, the hair shirt and the flaming sword. the distinguishing mark of the elder puritanism, at least after it had attained to the stature of a national philosophy, was its appeal to the individual conscience, its exclusive concern with the elect, its strong flavour of self-accusing. even the rage against slavery was, in large measure, an emotion of the mourners' bench. the thing that worried the more ecstatic abolitionists was their sneaking sense of responsibility, the fear that they themselves were flouting the fire by letting slavery go on. the thirst to punish the concrete slave-owner, as an end in itself, did not appear until opposition had added exasperation to fervour. in most of the earlier harangues against his practice, indeed, you will find a perfect willingness to grant that slave-owner's good faith, and even to compensate him for his property. but the new puritanism--or, perhaps more accurately, considering the shades of prefixes, the neo-puritanism--is a frank harking back to the primitive spirit. the original puritan of the bleak new england coast was not content to flay his own wayward carcass: full satisfaction did not sit upon him until he had jailed a quaker. that is to say, the sinner who excited his highest zeal and passion was not so much himself as his neighbour; to borrow a term from psychopathology, he was less the masochist than the sadist. and it is that very peculiarity which sets off his descendant of today from the ameliorated puritan of the era between the revolution and the civil war. the new puritanism is not ascetic, but militant. its aim is not to lift up saints but to knock down sinners. its supreme manifestation is the vice crusade, an armed pursuit of helpless outcasts by the whole military and naval forces of the republic. its supreme hero is comstock himself, with his pious boast that the sinners he jailed during his astounding career, if gathered into one penitential party, would have filled a train of sixty-one coaches, allowing sixty to the coach. so much for the general trend and tenor of the movement. at the bottom of it, it is plain, there lies that insistent presentation of the idea of sin, that enchantment by concepts of carnality, which has engaged a certain type of man, to the exclusion of all other notions, since the dawn of history. the remote ancestors of our puritan-philistines of today are to be met with in the old testament and the new, and their nearer grandfathers clamoured against the snares of the flesh in all the councils of the early church. not only western christianity has had to reckon with them: they have brothers today among the mohammedan sufi and in obscure buddhist sects, and they were the chief preachers of the russian raskol, or reformation. "the ironsides of cromwell and the puritans of new england," says heard, in his book on the russian church, "bear a strong resemblance to the old believers." but here, in the main, we have asceticism more than puritanism, as it is now visible; here the sinner combated is chiefly the one within. how are we to account for the wholesale transvaluation of values that came after the civil war, the transfer of ire from the old adam to the happy rascal across the street, the sinister rise of a new inquisition in the midst of a growing luxury that even the puritans themselves succumbed to? the answer is to be sought, it seems to me, in the direction of the golden calf--in the direction of the fat fields of our midlands, the full nets of our lakes and coasts, the factory smoke of our cities--even in the direction of wall street, that devil's chasm. in brief, puritanism has become bellicose and tyrannical by becoming rich. the will to power has been aroused to a high flame by an increase in the available draught and fuel, as militarism is engendered and nourished by the presence of men and materials. wealth, discovering its power, has reached out its long arms to grab the distant and innumerable sinner; it has gone down into its deep pockets to pay for his costly pursuit and flaying; it has created the puritan _entrepreneur_, the daring and imaginative organizer of puritanism, the baron of moral endeavour, the invincible prophet of new austerities. and, by the same token, it has issued its letters of marque to the puritan mercenary, the professional hound of heaven, the moral _junker_, the comstock, and out of his skill at his trade there has arisen the whole machinery, so complicated and so effective, of the new holy office. poverty is a soft pedal upon all branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual, and even the original puritans, for all their fire, felt its throttling caress. i think it is bill nye who has humorously pictured their arduous life: how they had to dig clams all winter that they would have strength enough to plant corn, and how they had to hoe corn all summer that they would have strength enough to dig clams. that low ebb of fortune worked against the full satisfaction of their zeal in two distinct ways. on the one hand, it kept them but ill-prepared for the cost of offensive enterprise: even their occasional missionarying raids upon the indians took too much productive energy from their business with the corn and the clams. and on the other hand, it kept a certain restraining humility in their hearts, so that for every quaker they hanged, they let a dozen go. poverty, of course, is no discredit, but at all events, it is a subtle criticism. the man oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more ambitious forms of moral adventure. he not only lacks the means; he is also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the secure and lofty point of departure. if he is haunted by notions of the sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worst manifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tend to take his thoughts from the other fellow. it is by no arbitrary fiat, indeed, that the brothers of all the expiatory orders are vowed to poverty. history teaches us that wealth, whenever it has come to them by chance, has put an end to their soul-searching. the puritans of the elder generations, with few exceptions, were poor. nearly all americans, down to the civil war, were poor. and being poor, they subscribed to a _sklavenmoral_. that is to say, they were spiritually humble. their eyes were fixed, not upon the abyss below them, but upon the long and rocky road ahead of them. their moral passion spent most of its force in self-accusing, self-denial and self-scourging. they began by howling their sins from the mourners' bench; they came to their end, many of them, in the supreme immolation of battle. but out of the war came prosperity, and out of prosperity came a new morality, to wit, the _herrenmoral_. many great fortunes were made in the war itself; an uncountable number got started during the two decades following. what is more, this material prosperity was generally dispersed through all classes: it affected the common workman and the remote farmer quite as much as the actual merchant and manufacturer. its first effect, as we all know, was a universal cockiness, a rise in pretensions, a comforting feeling that the republic was a success, and with it, its every citizen. this change made itself quickly obvious, and even odious, in all the secular relations of life. the american became a sort of braggart playboy of the western world, enormously sure of himself and ludicrously contemptuous of all other men. and on the ghostly side there appeared the same accession of confidence, the same sure assumption of authority, though at first less self-evidently and offensively. the religion of the american thus began to lose its inward direction; it became less and less a scheme of personal salvation and more and more a scheme of pious derring-do. the revivals of the 70's had all the bounce and fervour of those of half a century before, but the mourners' bench began to lose its standing as their symbol, and in its place appeared the collection basket. instead of accusing himself, the convert volunteered to track down and bring in the other fellow. his enthusiasm was not for repentance, but for what he began to call service. in brief, the national sense of energy and fitness gradually superimposed itself upon the national puritanism, and from that marriage sprung a keen _wille zur macht_, a lusty will to power.[42] the american puritan, by now, was not content with the rescue of his own soul; he felt an irresistible impulse to hand salvation on, to disperse and multiply it, to ram it down reluctant throats, to make it free, universal and compulsory. he had the men, he had the guns and he had the money too. all that was needed was organization. the rescue of the unsaved could be converted into a wholesale business, unsentimentally and economically conducted, and with all the usual aids to efficiency, from skilful sales management to seductive advertising, and from rigorous accounting to the diligent shutting off of competition. out of that new will to power came many enterprises more or less futile and harmless, with the "institutional" church at their head. piety was cunningly disguised as basketball, billiards and squash; the sinner was lured to grace with turkish baths, lectures on foreign travel, and free instructions in stenography, rhetoric and double-entry book-keeping. religion lost all its old contemplative and esoteric character, and became a frankly worldly enterprise, a thing of balance-sheets and ponderable profits, heavily capitalized and astutely manned. there was no longer any room for the spiritual type of leader, with his white choker and his interminable fourthlies. he was displaced by a brisk gentleman in a "business suit" who looked, talked and thought like a seller of mexican mine stock. scheme after scheme for the swift evangelization of the nation was launched, some of them of truly astonishing sweep and daring. they kept pace, step by step, with the mushroom growth of enterprise in the commercial field. the y. m. c. a. swelled to the proportions of a standard oil company, a united states steel corporation. its huge buildings began to rise in every city; it developed a swarm of specialists in new and fantastic moral and social sciences; it enlisted the same gargantuan talent which managed the railroads, the big banks and the larger national industries. and beside it rose the young people's society of christian endeavour, the sunday-school associations and a score of other such grandiose organizations, each with its seductive baits for recruits and money. even the enterprises that had come down from an elder and less expansive day were pumped up and put on a wall street basis: the american bible society, for example, began to give away bibles by the million instead of by the thousand, and the venerable tract society took on the feverish ardour of a daily newspaper, even of a yellow journal. down into our own day this trustification of pious endeavour has gone on. the men and religion forward movement proposed to convert the whole country by 12 o'clock noon of such and such a day; the order of gideons plans to make every traveller read the bible (american revised version!) whether he will or not; in a score of cities there are committees of opulent devotees who take half-pages in the newspapers, and advertise the decalogue and the beatitudes as if they were commodities of trade. thus the national energy which created the beef trust and the oil trust achieved equal marvels in the field of religious organization and by exactly the same methods. one needs be no psychologist to perceive in all this a good deal less actual religious zeal than mere lust for staggering accomplishment, for empty bigness, for the unprecedented and the prodigious. many of these great religious enterprises, indeed, soon lost all save the faintest flavour of devotion--for example, the y. m. c. a., which is now no more than a sort of national club system, with its doors open to any one not palpably felonious. (i have drunk cocktails in y. m. c. a. lamaseries, and helped fallen lamas to bed.) but while the war upon godlessness thus degenerated into a secular sport in one direction, it maintained all its pristine quality, and even took on a new ferocity in another direction. here it was that the lamp of american puritanism kept on burning; here, it was, indeed, that the lamp became converted into a huge bonfire, or rather a blast-furnace, with flames mounting to the very heavens, and sinners stacked like cordwood at the hand of an eager black gang. in brief, the new will to power, working in the true puritan as in the mere religious sportsman, stimulated him to a campaign of repression and punishment perhaps unequalled in the history of the world, and developed an art of militant morality as complex in technique and as rich in professors as the elder art of iniquity. if we take the passage of the comstock postal act, on march 3, 1873, as a starting point, the legislative stakes of this new puritan movement sweep upward in a grand curve to the passage of the mann and webb acts, in 1910 and 1913, the first of which ratifies the seventh commandment with a salvo of artillery, and the second of which put the overwhelming power of the federal government behind the enforcement of the prohibition laws in the so-called "dry" states. the mind at once recalls the salient campaigns of this war of a generation: first the attack upon "vicious" literature, begun by comstock and the new york society for the suppression of vice, but quickly extending to every city in the land; then the long fight upon the open gambling house, culminating in its practical disappearance; then the recrudesence of prohibition, abandoned at the outbreak of the civil war, and the attempt to enforce it in a rapidly growing list of states; then the successful onslaught upon the louisiana lottery, and upon its swarm of rivals and successors; then the gradual stamping-out of horse-racing, until finally but two or three states permitted it, and the consequent attack upon the pool-room; then the rise of a theatre-censorship in most of the large cities, and of a moving picture censorship following it; then the revival of sabbatarianism, with the lord's day alliance, a canadian invention, in the van; then the gradual tightening of the laws against sexual irregularity, with the unenforceable new york adultery act as a typical product; and lastly, the general ploughing up and emotional discussion of sexual matters, with compulsory instruction in "sex hygiene" as its mildest manifestation and the mediaeval fury of the vice crusade as its worst. differing widely in their targets, these various puritan enterprises had one character in common: they were all efforts to combat immorality with the weapons designed for crime. in each of them there was a visible effort to erect the individual's offence against himself into an offence against society. beneath all of them there was the dubious principle--the very determining principle, indeed, of puritanism--that it is competent for the community to limit and condition the private acts of its members, and with it the inevitable corollary that there are some members of the community who have a special talent for such legislation, and that their arbitrary fiats are, and of a right ought to be, binding upon all. § 4 this is the essential fact of the new puritanism; its recognition of the moral expert, the professional sinhound, the virtuoso of virtue. under the original puritan theocracy, as in scotland, for example, the chase and punishment of sinners was a purely ecclesiastical function, and during the slow disintegration of the theocracy the only change introduced was the extension of that function to lay helpers, and finally to the whole body of laymen. this change, however, did not materially corrupt the ecclesiastical quality of the enterprise: the leader in the so-called militant field still remained the same man who led in the spiritual field. but with the capitalization of puritan effort there came a radical overhauling of method. the secular arm, as it were, conquered as it helped. that is to say, the special business of forcing sinners to be good was taken away from the preachers and put into the hands of laymen trained in its technique and mystery, and there it remains. the new puritanism has created an army of gladiators who are not only distinct from the hierarchy, but who, in many instances, actually command and intimidate the hierarchy. this is conspicuously evident in the case of the anti-saloon league, an enormously effective fighting organization, with a large staff of highly accomplished experts in its service. these experts do not wait for ecclesiastical support, nor even ask for it; they force it. the clergyman who presumes to protest against their war upon the saloon, even upon the quite virtuous ground that it is not effective enough, runs a risk of condign and merciless punishment. so plainly is this understood, indeed, that in more than one state the clergy of the puritan denominations openly take orders from these specialists in excoriation, and court their favour without shame. here a single moral enterprise, heavily capitalized and carefully officered, has engulfed the entire puritan movement, and a part has become more than the whole.[43] in a dozen other directions this tendency to transform a religious business into a purely secular business, with lay backers and lay officers, is plainly visible. the increasing wealth of puritanism has not only augmented its scope and its daring, but it has also had the effect of attracting clever men, of no particular spiritual enthusiasm, to its service. moral endeavour, in brief, has become a recognized trade, or rather a profession, and there have appeared men who pretend to a special and enormous knowledge of it, and who show enough truth in their pretension to gain the unlimited support of puritan capitalists. the vice crusade, to mention one example, has produced a large crop of such self-constituted experts, and some of them are in such demand that they are overwhelmed with engagements. the majority of these men have wholly lost the flavour of sacerdotalism. they are not pastors, but detectives, statisticians and mob orators, and not infrequently their secularity becomes distressingly evident. their aim, as they say, is to do things. assuming that "moral sentiment" is behind them, they override all criticism and opposition without argument, and proceed to the business of dispersing prostitutes, of browbeating and terrorizing weak officials, and of forcing legislation of their own invention through city councils and state legislatures. their very cocksureness is their chief source of strength. they combat objection with such violence and with such a devastating cynicism that it quickly fades away. the more astute politicians, in the face of so ruthless a fire, commonly profess conversion and join the colours, just as their brethren went over to prohibition in the "dry" states, and the newspapers seldom hold out much longer. the result is that the "investigation" of the social evil becomes an orgy, and that the ensuing "report" of the inevitable "vice commission" is made up of two parts sensational fiction and three parts platitude. of all the vice commissions that have sat of late in the united states, not one has done its work without the aid of these singularly confident experts, and not one has contributed an original and sagacious idea, nor even an idea of ordinary common sense, to the solution of the problem. i need not go on piling up examples of this new form of puritan activity, with its definite departure from a religious foundation and its elaborate development as an everyday business. the impulse behind it i have called a _wille zur macht_, a will to power. in terms more homely, it was described by john fiske as "the disposition to domineer," and in his usual unerring way, he saw its dependence on the gratuitous assumption of infallibility. but even stronger than the puritan's belief in his own inspiration is his yearning to make some one jump. in other words, he has an ineradicable liking for cruelty in him: he is a sportsman even before he is a moralist, and very often his blood-lust leads him into lamentable excesses. the various vice crusades afford innumerable cases in point. in one city, if the press dispatches are to be believed, the proscribed women of the tenderloin were pursued with such ferocity that seven of them were driven to suicide. and in another city, after a campaign of repression so unfortunate in its effects that there were actually protests against it by clergymen elsewhere, a distinguished (and very friendly) connoisseur of such affairs referred to it ingenuously as more fun "than a fleet of aeroplanes." such disorderly combats with evil, of course, produce no permanent good. it is a commonplace, indeed, that a city is usually in worse condition after it has been "cleaned up" than it was before, and i need not point to new york, los angeles and des moines for the evidence as to the social evil, and to any large city, east, west, north, south, for the evidence as to the saloon. but the puritans who finance such enterprises get their thrills, not out of any possible obliteration of vice, but out of the galloping pursuit of the vicious. the new puritan gives no more serious thought to the rights and feelings of his quarry than the gunner gives to the rights and feelings of his birds. from the beginning of the prohibition campaign, for example, the principle of compensation has been violently opposed, despite its obvious justice, and a complaisant judiciary has ratified the puritan position. in england and on the continent that principle is safeguarded by the fundamental laws, and during the early days of the anti-slavery agitation in this country it was accepted as incontrovertible, but if any american statesman were to propose today that it be applied to the license-holder whose lawful franchise has been taken away from him arbitrarily, or to the brewer or distiller whose costly plant has been rendered useless and valueless, he would see the days of his statesmanship brought to a quick and violent close. but does all this argue a total lack of justice in the american character, or even a lack of common decency? i doubt that it would be well to go so far in accusation. what it does argue is a tendency to put moral considerations above all other considerations, and to define morality in the narrow puritan sense. the american, in other words, thinks that the sinner has no rights that any one is bound to respect, and he is prone to mistake an unsupported charge of sinning, provided it be made violently enough, for actual proof and confession. what is more, he takes an intense joy in the mere chase: he has the true puritan taste for an _auto da fé_ in him. "i am ag'inst capital punishment," said mr. dooley, "but we won't get rid av it so long as the people enjie it so much." but though he is thus an eager spectator, and may even be lured into taking part in the pursuit, the average american is not disposed to initiate it, nor to pay for it. the larger puritan enterprises of today are not popular in the sense of originating in the bleachers, but only in the sense of being applauded from the bleachers. the burdens of the fray, both of toil and of expense, are always upon a relatively small number of men. in a state rocked and racked by a war upon the saloon, it was recently shown, for example, that but five per cent. of the members of the puritan denominations contributed to the war-chest. and yet the anti-saloon league of that state was so sure of support from below that it presumed to stand as the spokesman of the whole christian community, and even ventured to launch excommunications upon contumacious christians, both lay and clerical, who objected to its methods. moreover, the great majority of the persons included in the contributing five per cent. gave no more than a few cents a year. the whole support of the league devolved upon a dozen men, all of them rich and all of them puritans of purest ray serene. these men supported a costly organization for their private entertainment and stimulation. it was their means of recreation, their sporting club. they were willing to spend a lot of money to procure good sport for themselves--_i.e._, to procure the best crusading talent available--and they were so successful in that endeavour that they enchanted the populace too, and so shook the state. naturally enough, this organization of puritanism upon a business and sporting basis has had a tendency to attract and create a type of "expert" crusader whose determination to give his employers a good show is uncontaminated by any consideration for the public welfare. the result has been a steady increase of scandals, a constant collapse of moral organizations, a frequent unveiling of whited sepulchres. various observers have sought to direct the public attention to this significant corruption of the new puritanism. the new york _sun_, for example, in the course of a protest against the appointment of a vice commission for new york, has denounced the paid agents of private reform organizations as "notoriously corrupt, undependable and dishonest," and the rev. dr. w. s. rainsford, supporting the charge, has borne testimony out of his own wide experience to their lawlessness, their absurd pretensions to special knowledge, their habit of manufacturing evidence, and their devious methods of shutting off criticism. but so far, at all events, no organized war upon them has been undertaken, and they seem to flourish more luxuriantly year after year. the individual whose common rights are invaded by such persons has little chance of getting justice, and less of getting redress. when he attempts to defend himself he finds that he is opposed, not only by a financial power that is ample for all purposes of the combat and that does not shrink at intimidating juries, prosecuting officers and judges, but also by a shrewdness which shapes the laws to its own uses, and takes full advantage of the miserable cowardice of legislatures. the moral gladiators, in brief, know the game. they come before a legislature with a bill ostensibly designed to cure some great and admitted evil, they procure its enactment by scarcely veiled insinuations that all who stand against it must be apologists for the evil itself, and then they proceed to extend its aims by bold inferences, and to dragoon the courts into ratifying those inferences, and to employ it as a means of persecution, terrorism and blackmail. the history of the mann act offers a shining example of this purpose. it was carried through congress, over the veto of president taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or i. naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly deadly weapon in the hands of professional puritans and of denouncers of delinquency even less honest. "blackmailers of both sexes have arisen," says mr. justice mckenna, "using the terrors of the construction now sanctioned by the [supreme] court as a help--indeed, the means--for their brigandage. the result is grave and should give us pause."[44] but that is as far as objection has yet gone; the majority of the learned jurist's colleagues swallowed both the statute and its consequences.[45] there is, indeed, no sign as yet of any organized war upon the alliance between the blackmailing puritan and the pseudo-puritan blackmailer. it must wait until a sense of reason and justice shows itself in the american people, strong enough to overcome their prejudice in favour of the moralist on the one hand, and their delight in barbarous pursuits and punishments on the other. i see but faint promise of that change today. § 5 i have gone into the anatomy and physiology of militant puritanism because, so far as i know, the inquiry has not been attempted before, and because a somewhat detailed acquaintance with the forces behind so grotesque a manifestation as comstockery, the particular business of the present essay, is necessary to an understanding of its workings, and of its prosperity, and of its influence upon the arts. save one turn to england or to the british colonies, it is impossible to find a parallel for the astounding absolutism of comstock and his imitators in any civilized country. no other nation has laws which oppress the arts so ignorantly and so abominably as ours do, nor has any other nation handed over the enforcement of the statutes which exist to agencies so openly pledged to reduce all aesthetic expression to the service of a stupid and unworkable scheme of rectitude. i have before me as i write a pamphlet in explanation of his aims and principles, prepared by comstock himself and presented to me by his successor. its very title is a sufficient statement of the puritan position: "morals, not art or literature."[46] the capitals are in the original. and within, as a sort of general text, the idea is amplified: "it is a question of peace, good order and morals, and not art, literature or science." here we have a statement of principle that, at all events, is at least quite frank. there is not the slightest effort to beg the question; there is no hypocritical pretension to a desire to purify or safeguard the arts; they are dismissed at once as trivial and degrading. and jury after jury has acquiesced in this; it was old anthony's boast, in his last days, that his percentage of convictions, in 40 years, had run to 98.5.[47] comstockery is thus grounded firmly upon that profound national suspicion of the arts, that truculent and almost unanimous philistinism, which i have described. it would be absurd to dismiss it as an excrescence, and untypical of the american mind. but it is typical, too, in the manner in which it has gone beyond that mere partiality to the accumulation of a definite power, and made that power irresponsible and almost irresistible. it was comstock himself, in fact, who invented the process whereby his followers in other fields of moral endeavour have forced laws into the statute books upon the pretence of putting down john doe, an acknowledged malefactor, and then turned them savagely upon richard roe, a peaceable, well-meaning and hitherto law-abiding man. and it was comstock who first capitalized moral endeavour like baseball or the soap business, and made himself the first of its kept professors, and erected about himself a rampart of legal and financial immunity which rid him of all fear of mistakes and their consequences, and so enabled him to pursue his jehad with all the advantages in his favour. he was, in brief, more than the greatest puritan gladiator of his time; he was the copernicus of a quite new art and science, and he devised a technique and handed down a professional ethic that no rival has been able to better. the whole story is naïvely told in "anthony comstock, fighter,"[48] a work which passed under the approving eye of the old war horse himself and is full of his characteristic pecksniffery.[49] his beginnings, it appears, were very modest. when he arrived in new york from the connecticut hinterland, he was a penniless and uneducated clod-hopper, just out of the union army, and his first job was that of a porter in a wholesale dry-goods house. but he had in him several qualities of the traditional yankee which almost always insure success, and it was not long before he began to make his way. one of these qualities was a talent for bold and ingratiating address; another was a vast appetite for thrusting himself into affairs, a yearning to run things--what the puritan calls public spirit. the two constituted his fortune. the second brought him into intimate relations with the newly-organized young men's christian association, and led him to the discovery of a form of moral endeavour that was at once novel and fascinating--the unearthing and denunciation of "immoral" literature. the first, once he had attracted attention thereby, got him the favourable notice, and finally the unlimited support, of the late morris k. jesup, one of the earliest and perhaps the greatest of the moral _entrepreneurs_ that i have described. jesup was very rich, and very eager to bring the whole nation up to grace by _force majeure_. he was the banker of at least a dozen grandiose programs of purification in the seventies and eighties. in comstock he found precisely the sort of field agent that he was looking for, and the two presently constituted the most formidable team of professional reformers that the country had ever seen. the story of the passage of the act of congress of march 3, 1873,[50] under cover of which the comstock society still carries on its campaigns of snouting and suppression, is a classical tale of puritan impudence and chicanery. comstock, with jesup and other rich men backing him financially and politically,[51] managed the business. first, a number of spectacular raids were made on the publishers of such pornographic books as "the memoirs of fanny hill" and "only a boy." then the newspapers were filled with inflammatory matter about the wide dispersal of such stuff, and its demoralizing effects upon the youth of the republic. then a committee of self-advertising clergymen and "christian millionaires" was organized to launch a definite "movement." and then a direct attack was made upon congress, and, to the tune of fiery moral indignation, the bill prepared by comstock himself was forced through both houses. all opposition, if only the opposition of inquiry, was overborne in the usual manner. that is to say, every congressman who presumed to ask what it was all about, or to point out obvious defects in the bill, was disposed of by the insinuation, or even the direct charge, that he was a covert defender of obscene books, and, by inference, of the carnal recreations described in them. we have grown familiar of late with this process: it was displayed at full length in the passage of the mann act, and again when the webb act and the prohibition amendment were before congress. in 1873 its effectiveness was helped out by its novelty, and so the comstock bill was rushed through both houses in the closing days of a busy session, and president grant accommodatingly signed it. once it was upon the books, comstock made further use of the prevailing uproar to have himself appointed a special agent of the postoffice department to enforce it, and with characteristic cunning refused to take any salary. had his job carried a salary, it would have excited the acquisitiveness of other virtuosi; as it was, he was secure. as for the necessary sinews of war, he knew well that he could get them from jesup. within a few weeks, indeed, the latter had perfected a special organization for the enforcement of the new statute, and it still flourishes as the new york society for the suppression of vice; or, as it is better known, the comstock society. the new federal act, dealing only with the mails, left certain loopholes; they were plugged up by fastening drastic amendments upon the new york code of criminal procedure--amendments forced through the legislature precisely as the federal act had been forced through congress.[52] with these laws in his hands comstock was ready for his career. it was his part of the arrangement to supply the thrills of the chase; it was jesup's part to find the money. the partnership kept up until the death of jesup, in 1908, and after that comstock readily found new backers. even his own death, in 1915, did not materially alter a scheme of things which offered such admirable opportunities for the exercise of the puritan love of spectacular and relentless pursuit, the puritan delusion of moral grandeur and infallibility, the puritan will to power. ostensibly, as i have said, the new laws were designed to put down the traffic in frankly pornographic books and pictures--a traffic which, of course, found no defenders--but comstock had so drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle his enterprises scarcely knew limits. having disposed of "the confessions of maria monk" and "night life in paris," he turned to rabelais and the decameron, and having driven these ancients under the book-counters, he pounced upon zola, balzac and daudet, and having disposed of these too, he began a _pogrom_ which, in other hands, eventually brought down such astounding victims as thomas hardy's "jude the obscure" and harold frederic's "the damnation of theron ware." all through the eighties and nineties this ecstatic campaign continued, always increasing in violence and effectiveness. comstock became a national celebrity; his doings were as copiously reported by the newspapers as those of p. t. barnum or john l. sullivan. imitators sprang up in all the larger cities: there was hardly a public library in the land that did not begin feverishly expurgating its shelves; the publication of fiction, and particularly of foreign fiction, took on the character of an extra hazardous enterprise. not, of course, that the reign of terror was not challenged, and comstock himself denounced. so early as 1876 a national organization demanding a reasonable amendment of the postal laws got on its legs; in the late eighties "citizen" george francis train defied the whirlwind by printing the old testament as a serial; many indignant victims, acquitted by some chance in the courts, brought suit against comstock for damages. moreover, an occasional judge, standing out boldly against the usual intimidation, denounced him from the bench; one of them, judge jenkins, accused him specifically of "fraud and lying" and other "dishonest practices."[53] but the spirit of american puritanism was on his side. his very extravagances at once stimulated and satisfied the national yearning for a hot chase, a good show--and in the complaints of his victims, that the art of letters was being degraded, that the country was made ridiculous, the newspaper-reading populace could see no more than an affectation. the reform organization of 1876 lasted but five years; and then disbanded without having accomplished anything; train was put on trial for "debauching the young" with an "obscene" serial;[54] juries refused to bring in punitive verdicts against the master showman. in carrying on this way of extermination upon all ideas that violated their private notions of virtue and decorum, comstock and his followers were very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. it prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all matter of an "obscene, lewd, lascivious ... or filthy" character, but conveniently failed to define these adjectives. as a result, of course, it was possible to bring an accusation against practically _any_ publication that aroused the comstockian blood-lust, however innocently, and to subject the persons responsible for it to costly, embarrassing and often dangerous persecution. no man, said dr. johnson, would care to go on trial for his life once a week, even if possessed of absolute proofs of his innocence. by the same token, no man wants to be arraigned in a criminal court, and displayed in the sensational newspapers, as a purveyor of indecency, however strong his assurance of innocence. comstock made use of this fact in an adroit and characteristically unconscionable manner. he held the menace of prosecution over all who presumed to dispute his tyranny, and when he could not prevail by a mere threat, he did not hesitate to begin proceedings, and to carry them forward with the aid of florid proclamations to the newspapers and ill concealed intimidations of judges and juries. the last-named business succeeded as it always does in this country, where the judiciary is quite as sensitive to the suspicion of sinfulness as the legislative arm. a glance at the decisions handed down during the forty years of comstock's chief activity shows a truly amazing willingness to accommodate him in his pious enterprises. on the one hand, there was gradually built up a court-made definition of obscenity which eventually embraced almost every conceivable violation of puritan prudery, and on the other hand the victim's means of defence were steadily restricted and conditioned, until in the end he had scarcely any at all. this is the state of the law today. it is held in the leading cases that anything is obscene which may excite "impure thoughts" in "the minds ... of persons that are susceptible to impure thoughts,"[55] or which "tends to deprave the minds" of any who, because they are "young and inexperienced," are "open to such influences"[56]--in brief, that anything is obscene that is not fit to be handed to a child just learning to read, or that may imaginably stimulate the lubricity of the most foul-minded. it is held further that words that are perfectly innocent in themselves--"words, abstractly considered, [that] may be free from vulgarism"--may yet be assumed, by a friendly jury, to be likely to "arouse a libidinous passion ... in the mind of a modest woman." (i quote exactly! the court failed to define "modest woman.")[57] yet further, it is held that any book is obscene "which is unbecoming, immodest...."[58] obviously, this last decision throws open the door to endless imbecilities, for its definition merely begs the question, and so makes a reasonable solution ten times harder. it is in such mazes that the comstocks safely lurk. almost any printed allusion to sex may be argued against as unbecoming in a moral republic, and once it is unbecoming it is also obscene. in meeting such attacks the defendant must do his fighting without weapons. he cannot allege in his defence that the offending work was put forth for a legitimate, necessary and decent purpose;[59] he cannot allege that a passage complained of is from a standard work, itself in general circulation;[60] he cannot offer evidence that the person to whom a book or picture was sold or exhibited was not actually depraved by it, or likely to be depraved by it;[61] he cannot rest his defence on its lack of such effect upon the jurymen themselves;[62] he cannot plead that the alleged obscenity, in point of fact, is couched in decent and unobjectionable language;[63] he cannot plead that the same or a similar work has gone unchallenged elsewhere;[64] he cannot argue that the circulation of works of the same class has set up a presumption of toleration, and a tacit limitation of the definition of obscenity.[65] the general character of a book is not a defence of a particular passage, however unimportant; if there is the slightest descent to what is "unbecoming," the whole may be ruthlessly condemned.[66] nor is it an admissible defence to argue that the book was not generally circulated, and that the copy in evidence was obtained by an _agent provocateur_, and by false representations.[67] finally, all the decisions deny the defendant the right to introduce any testimony, whether expert or otherwise, that a book is of artistic value and not pornographic, and that its effect upon normal persons is not pernicious. upon this point the jury is the sole judge, and it cannot be helped to its decision by taking other opinions, or by hearing evidence as to what is the general opinion. occasionally, as i have said, a judge has revolted against this intolerable state of the court-and comstock-made law, and directed a jury to disregard these astounding decisions.[68] in a recent new york case judge samuel seabury actually ruled that "it is no part of the duty of courts to exercise a censorship over literary productions."[69] but in general the judiciary has been curiously complaisant, and more than once a puritan on the bench has delighted the comstocks by prosecuting their case for them.[70] with such decisions in their hands and such aid from the other side of the bar, it is no wonder that they enter upon their campaigns with impudence and assurance. all the odds are in their favour from the start. they have statutes deliberately designed to make the defence onerous; they are familiar by long experience with all the tricks and surprises of the game; they are sheltered behind organizations, incorporated without capital and liberally chartered by trembling legislatures, which make reprisals impossible in case of failure; above all, they have perfected the business of playing upon the cowardice and vanity of judges and prosecuting officers. the newspapers, with very few exceptions, give them ready aid. theoretically, perhaps, many newspaper editors are opposed to comstockery, and sometimes they denounce it with great eloquence, but when a good show is offered they are always in favour of the showman[71]--and the comstocks are showmen of undoubted skill. they know how to make a victim jump and writhe in the ring; they have a talent for finding victims who are prominent enough to arrest attention; they shrewdly capitalize the fact that the pursuer appears more heroic than the prey, and the further fact that the newspaper reader is impatient of artistic pretensions and glad to see an artist made ridiculous. and behind them there is always the steady pressure of puritan prejudice--the puritan feeling that "immorality" is the blackest of crimes, and that its practitioner has no rights. it was by making use of these elements that comstock achieved his prodigies, and it is by making use of them that his heirs and assigns keep up the sport today. their livelihood depends upon the money they can raise among the righteous, and the amount they can raise depends upon the quality of the entertainment they offer. hence their adept search for shining marks. hence, for example, the spectacular raid upon the art students' league, on august 2, 1906. hence the artful turning to their own use of the vogue of such sensational dramatists as eugène brieux and george bernard shaw, and of such isolated plays as "trilby" and "sapho." hence the barring from the mails of the inflammatory report of the chicago vice commission--a strange, strange case of dog eating dog. but here we have humour. there is, however, no humour in the case of a serious author who sees his work damaged and perhaps ruined by a malicious and unintelligent attack, and himself held up to public obloquy as one with the vendors of pamphlets of flagellation and filthy "marriage guides." he finds opposing him a flat denial of his decent purpose as an artist, and a stupid and ill-natured logic that baffles sober answer.[72] he finds on his side only the half-hearted support of a publisher whose interest in a single book is limited to his profits from it, and who desires above all things to evade a nuisance and an expense. not a few publishers, knowing the constant possibility of sudden and arbitrary attack, insert a clause in their contracts whereby an author must secure them against damage from any "immoral" matter in his book. they read and approve the manuscript, they print the book and sell it--but if it is unlucky enough to attract the comstockian lightning, the author has the whole burden to bear,[73] and if they seek safety and economy by yielding, as often happens, he must consent to the mutilation or even the suppression of his work. the result is that a writer in such a situation, is practically beaten before he can offer a defence. the professional book-baiters have laws to their liking, and courts pliant to their exactions; they fill the newspapers with inflammatory charges before the accused gets his day in court; they have the aid of prosecuting officers who fear the political damage of their enmity, and of the enmity of their wealthy and influential backers; above all, they have the command of far more money than any author can hope to muster. finally, they derive an advantage from two of the most widespread of human weaknesses, the first being envy and the second being fear. when an author is attacked, a good many of his rivals see only a personal benefit in his difficulties, and not a menace to the whole order, and a good many others are afraid to go to his aid because of the danger of bringing down the moralists' rage upon themselves. both of these weaknesses revealed themselves very amusingly in the dreiser case, and i hope to detail their operations at some length later on, when i describe that _cause célèbre_ in a separate work. now add to the unfairness and malignancy of the attack its no less disconcerting arbitrariness and fortuitousness, and the path of the american author is seen to be strewn with formidable entanglements indeed. with the law what it is, he is quite unable to decide _a priori_ what is permitted by the national delicacy and what is not, nor can he get any light from the recorded campaigns of the moralists. they seem to strike blindly, unintelligently, without any coherent theory or plan. "trilby" is assaulted by the united comstockery of a dozen cities, and "the yoke" somehow escapes. "hagar revelly" is made the subject of a double prosecution in the state and federal courts, and "love's pilgrimage" and "one man" go unmolested. the publisher of przybyszewski's "homo sapiens" is forced to withdraw it; the publisher of artzibashef's "sanine" follows it with "the breaking point." the serious work of a forel is brought into court as pornography, and the books of havelock ellis are barred from the mails; the innumerable volumes on "sex hygiene" by tawdry clergymen and smutty old maids are circulated by the million and without challenge. frank harris is deprived of a publisher for his "oscar wilde: his life and confession" by threats of immediate prosecution; the newspapers meanwhile dedicate thousands of columns to the filthy amusements of harry thaw. george moore's "memoirs of my dead life" are bowdlerized, james lane allen's "a summer in arcady" is barred from libraries, and a book by d. h. lawrence is forbidden publication altogether; at the same time half a dozen cheap magazines devoted to sensational sex stories attain to hundreds of thousands of circulation. a serious book by david graham phillips, published serially in a popular monthly, is raided the moment it appears between covers; a trashy piece of nastiness by elinor glyn goes unmolested. worse, books are sold for months and even years without protest, and then suddenly attacked; dreiser's "the 'genius,'" kreymborg's "edna" and forel's "the sexual question" are examples. still worse, what is held to be unobjectionable in one state is forbidden in another as _contra bonos mores_.[74] altogether, there is madness, and no method in it. the livelihoods and good names of hard-striving and decent men are at the mercy of the whims of a horde of fanatics and mountebanks, and they have no way of securing themselves against attack, and no redress for their loss when it comes. § 6 so beset, it is no wonder that the typical american maker of books becomes a timorous and ineffective fellow, whose work tends inevitably toward a feeble superficiality. sucking in the puritan spirit with the very air he breathes, and perhaps burdened inwardly with an inheritance of the actual puritan stupidity, he is further kept upon the straight path of chemical purity by the very real perils that i have just rehearsed. the result is a literature full of the mawkishness that the late henry james so often roared against--a literature almost wholly detached from life as men are living it in the world--in george moore's phrase, a literature still at nurse. it is on the side of sex that the appointed virtuosi of virtue exercise their chief repressions, for it is sex that especially fascinates the lubricious puritan mind; but the conventual reticence that thus becomes the enforced fashion in one field extends itself to all others. our fiction, in general, is marked by an artificiality as marked as that of eighteenth century poetry or the later georgian drama. the romance in it runs to set forms and stale situations; the revelation, by such a book as "the titan," that there may be a glamour as entrancing in the way of a conqueror of men as in the way of a youth with a maid, remains isolated and exotic. we have no first-rate political or religious novel; we have no first-rate war story; despite all our national engrossment in commercial enterprise, we have few second-rate tales of business. romance, in american fiction, still means only a somewhat childish amorousness and sentimentality--the love affairs of paul and virginia, or the pale adulteries of their elders. and on the side of realism there is an almost equal vacuity and lack of veracity. the action of all the novels of the howells school goes on within four walls of painted canvas; they begin to shock once they describe an attack of asthma or a steak burning below stairs; they never penetrate beneath the flow of social concealments and urbanities to the passions that actually move men and women to their acts, and the great forces that circumscribe and condition personality. so obvious a piece of reporting as upton sinclair's "the jungle" or robert herrick's "together" makes a sensation; the appearance of a "jennie gerhardt" or a "hagar revelly" brings forth a growl of astonishment and rage. in all this dread of free inquiry, this childish skittishness in both writers and public, this dearth of courage and even of curiosity, the influence of comstockery is undoubtedly to be detected. it constitutes a sinister and ever-present menace to all men of ideas; it affrights the publisher and paralyzes the author; no one on the outside can imagine its burden as a practical concern. i am, in moments borrowed from more palatable business, the editor of an american magazine, and i thus know at first hand what the burden is. that magazine is anything but a popular one, in the current sense. it sells at a relatively high price; it contains no pictures or other baits for the childish; it is frankly addressed to a sophisticated minority. i may thus assume reasonably, i believe, that its readers are not sex-curious and itching adolescents, just as my colleague of the _atlantic monthly_ may assume reasonably that his readers are not italian immigrants. nevertheless, as a practical editor, i find that the comstocks, near and far, are oftener in my mind's eye than my actual patrons. the thing i always have to decide about a manuscript offered for publication, before ever i give any thought to its artistic merit and suitability, is the question whether its publication will be permitted--not even whether it is intrinsically good or evil, moral or immoral, but whether some roving methodist preacher, self-commissioned to keep watch on letters, will read indecency into it. not a week passes that i do not decline some sound and honest piece of work for no other reason. i have a long list of such things by american authors, well-devised, well-imagined, well-executed, respectable as human documents and as works of art--but never to be printed in mine or any other american magazine. it includes four or five short stories of the very first rank, and the best one-act play yet done, to my knowledge, by an american. all of these pieces would go into type at once on the continent; no sane man would think of objecting to them; they are no more obscene, to a normal adult, than his own bare legs. but they simply cannot be printed in the united states, with the law what it is and the courts what they are. i know many other editors. all of them are in the same boat. some of them try to get around the difficulty by pecksniffery more or less open--for example, by fastening a moral purpose upon works of art, and hawking them as uplifting.[75] others, facing the intolerable fact, yield to it with resignation. and if they didn't? well, if one of them didn't, any professional moralist could go before a police magistrate, get a warrant upon a simple affidavit, raid the office of the offending editor, seize all the magazines in sight, and keep them impounded until after the disposition of the case. editors cannot afford to take this risk. magazines are perishable goods. even if, after a trial has been had, they are returned, they are worthless save as waste paper. and what may be done with copies found in the actual office of publication may be done too with copies found on news-stands, and not only in one city, but in two, six, a dozen, a hundred. all the costs and burdens of the contest are on the defendant. let him be acquitted with honour, and invited to dinner by the judge, he has yet lost his property, and the comstock hiding behind the warrant cannot be made to pay. in this concealment, indeed, lurk many sinister things--not forgetting personal enmity and business rivalry. the actual complainant is seldom uncovered; comstockery, taking on a semi-judicial character, throws its chartered immunity around the whole process. a hypothetical outrage? by no means. it has been perpetrated, in one american city or another, upon fully half of the magazines of general circulation published today. its possibility sticks in the consciousness of every editor and publisher like a recurrent glycosuria.[76] but though the effects of comstockery are thus abominably insane and irritating, the fact is not to be forgotten that, after all, the thing is no more than an effect itself. the fundamental causes of all the grotesque (and often half-fabulous) phenomena flowing out of it are to be sought in the habits of mind of the american people. they are, as i have shown, besotted by moral concepts, a moral engrossment, a delusion of moral infallibility. in their view of the arts they are still unable to shake off the naïve suspicion of the fathers.[77] a work of the imagination can justify itself, in their sight, only if it show a moral purpose, and that purpose must be obvious and unmistakable. even in their slow progress toward a revolt against the ancestral philistinism, they cling to this ethical bemusement: a new gallery of pictures is welcomed as "improving," to hear beethoven "makes one better." any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail--the principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into human motives and acts--is received with the utmost hostility. to attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace--and the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal. these symptoms, it seems to me, are only partly racial, despite the persistent survival of that third-rate english strain which shows itself so ingenuously in the colonial spirit, the sense of inferiority, the frank craving for praise from home. the race, in truth, grows mongrel, and the protest against that mongrelism only serves to drive in the fact. but a mongrel race is necessarily a race still in the stage of reaching out for culture; it has not yet formulated defensible standards; it must needs rest heavily upon the superstitions that go with inferiority. the reformation brought scotland among the civilized nations, but it took scotland a century and a half to live down the reformation.[78] dogmatism, conformity, philistinism, the fear of rebels, the crusading spirit; these are the marks of an upstart people, uncertain of their rank in the world and even of their direction.[79] a cultured european, reading a typical american critical journal, must needs conceive the united states, says h. g. wells, as "a vain, garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most negative description ... the aunt errant of christendom."[80] there is always that blushful shyness, that timorous uncertainty, broken by sudden rages, sudden enunciations of impeccable doctrine, sudden runnings amuck. formalism is the hall-mark of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the other. the american is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of innocence. he can never fathom william blake's notion that "the lust of the goat is also to the glory of god." he must be correct, or, in his own phrase, he must bust. _via trita est tutissima._ the new generation, urged to curiosity and rebellion by its mounting sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented, policed. the ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. "we are looking at this particular book," said comstock's successor of "the 'genius,'" "from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers of immature mind."[81] to be curious is to be lewd; to know is to yield to fornication. here we have the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a chance word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the mind of a "modest" woman. not only youth must be safeguarded, but also the "female," the untrustworthy one, the temptress. "modest," is a euphemism; it takes laws to keep her "pure." the "locks of chastity" rust in the cluny museum; in place of them we have comstockery.... but, as i have said in hymning huneker, there is yet the munyonic consolation. time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals. we have yet no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of a revolt, or, at all events, of a protest. we have already reached, in howells, our hannah more; in clemens, our swift; in henry james, our horace walpole; in woodberry, robinson _et al._, our cowpers, southeys and crabbes; perhaps we might even make a composite and call it our johnson. we are sweating through our eighteenth century, our era of sentiment, our spiritual measles. maybe a new day is not quite so far off as it seems to be, and with it we may get our hardy, our conrad, our swinburne, our thomas, our moore, our meredith and our synge. the end footnotes: [38] american literature, tr. by julia franklin; new york, doubleday, page & co., 1915. [39] new york, dodd, mead & co., 1916. [40] the first edition for public sale did not appear until june, 1917, and in it the preface was suppressed. [41] second edition; boston, little, brown & co., 1859, xxvi. [42] _cf._ the puritan, by owen hatteras, _the smart set_, july, 1916; and the puritan's will to power, by randolph s. bourne, _the seven arts_, april, 1917. [43] an instructive account of the organization and methods of the anti-saloon league, a thoroughly typical puritan engine, is to be found in alcohol and society, by john koren; new york, henry holt & co., 1916. [44] u. s. rep., vol. 242, no. 7, p. 502. [45] the majority opinion, written by mr. justice day, is given in u. s. rep., vol. 242, no. 7, pp. 482-496. [46] new york, (1914). [47] i quote from page 157 of anthony comstock, fighter, the official biography. on page 239 the number of his prosecutions is given as 3,646, with 2,682 convictions, which works out to but 73 per cent. he is credited with having destroyed 50 tons of books, 28,425 pounds of stereotype plates, 16,900 photographic negatives, and 3,984,063 photographs--enough to fill "sixteen freight cars, fifteen loaded with ten tons each, and the other nearly full." [48] by charles gallaudet trumbull; new york, fleming h. revell co. (1913). [49] an example: "all the evil men in new york cannot harm a hair of my head, were it not the will of god. if it be his will, what right have i or any one to say aught? i am only a speck, a mite, before god, yet not a hair of my head can be harmed unless it be his will. oh, to live, to feel, to be--thy will be done!" (pp. 84-5). again: "i prayed that, if my bill might not pass, i might go back to new york submissive to god's will, feeling that it was for the best. i asked for forgiveness and asked that my bill might pass, if possible; but over and above all, that the will of god be done" (p. 6). nevertheless, comstock neglected no chance to apply his backstairs pressure to the members of both houses. [50] now, with amendments, sections 211, 212 and 245 of the united states criminal code. [51] _vide_ anthony comstock, fighter, pp. 81, 85, 94. [52] now sections 1141, 1142 and 1143 of the penal laws of new york. [53] u. s. _vs._ casper, reported in the _twentieth century_, feb. 11, 1892. [54] the trial court dodged the issue by directing the jury to find the prisoner not guilty on the ground of insanity. the necessary implication, of course, was that the publication complained of was actually obscene. in 1895, one wise, of clay center, kansas, sent a quotation from the bible through the mails, and was found guilty of mailing obscene matter. see the free press anthology, compiled by theodore schroeder; new york, truth seeker pub. co., 1909, p. 258. [55] u. s. _vs._ bennett, 16 blatchford, 368-9 (1877). [56] _idem_, 362; people _vs._ muller, 96 n. y., 411; u. s. _vs._ clark, 38 fed. rep. 734. [57] u. s. _vs._ moore, 129 fed., 160-1 (1904). [58] u. s. _vs._ heywood, judge's charge, boston, 1877. quoted in u. s. _vs._ bennett, 16 blatchford. [59] u. s. _vs._ slenker, 32 fed. rep., 693; people _vs._ muller, 96 n. y. 408-414; anti-vice motion picture co. _vs._ bell, reported in the _new york law journal_, sept. 22, 1916; sociological research film corporation _vs._ the city of new york, 83 misc. 815; steele _vs._ bannon, 7 l. r. c. l. series, 267; u. s. _vs._ means, 42 fed. rep. 605, etc. [60] u. s. _vs._ cheseman, 19 fed. rep., 597 (1884). [61] people _vs._ muller, 96 n. y., 413. [62] u. s. _vs._ bennett, 16 blatchford, 368-9. [63] u. s. _vs._ smith, 45 fed. rep. 478. [64] u. s. _vs._ bennett, 16 blatchford, 360-1; people _vs._ berry, 1 n. y., crim. r., 32. [65] people _vs._ muller, 32 hun., 212-215. [66] u. s. _vs._ bennett, 16 blatchford, 361. [67] u. s. _vs._ moore, 16 fed. rep., 39; u. s. _vs._ wright, 38 fed. rep., 106; u. s. _vs._ dorsey, 40 fed. rep., 752; u. s. _vs._ baker, 155 mass., 287; u. s. _vs._ grimm, 15 supreme court rep., 472. [68] various cases in point are cited in the brief on behalf of plaintiff in dreiser _vs._ john lane co., app. div. 1st dept. n. y., 1917. i cite a few: people _vs._ eastman, 188 n. y., 478; u. s. _vs._ swearingen, 161 u. s., 446; people _vs._ tylkoff, 212 n. y., 197; in the matter of worthington co., 62 st. rep. 116-7; st. hubert guild _vs._ quinn, 64 misc., 336-341. but nearly all such decisions are in new york cases. in the federal courts the comstocks usually have their way. [69] st. hubert guild _vs._ quinn, 64 misc., 339. [70] for example, judge chas. l. benedict, sitting in u. s. _vs._ bennett, _op. cit._ this is a leading case, and the comstocks make much of it. nevertheless, a contemporary newspaper denounces judge benedict for his "intense bigotry" and alleges that "the only evidence which he permitted to be given was on the side of the prosecution." (port jervis, n. y., _evening gazette_, march 22, 1879.) moreover, a juror in the case, alfred a. valentine, thought it necessary to inform the newspapers that he voted guilty only in obedience to judicial instructions. [71] _vide_ newspaper morals, by h. l. mencken, the _atlantic monthly_, march, 1914. [72] as a fair specimen of the sort of reasoning that prevails among the consecrated brethren i offer the following extract from an argument against birth control delivered by the present active head of the new york society for the suppression of vice before the women's city club of new york, nov. 17, 1916: "natural and inevitable conditions, over which we can have no control, will assert themselves wherever population becomes too dense. this has been exemplified time after time in the history of the world where over-population has been corrected by manifestations of nature or by war, flood or pestilence.... belgium may have been regarded as an over-populated country. is it a coincidence that, during the past two years, the territory of belgium has been devastated and its population scattered throughout the other countries of the world?" [73] for example, the printed contract of the john lane co., publisher of dreiser's the "genius," contains this provision: "the author hereby guarantees ... that the work ... contains nothing of a scandalous, an immoral or a libelous nature." the contract for the publication of the "genius" was signed on july 30, 1914. the manuscript had been carefully read by representatives of the publisher, and presumably passed as not scandalous or immoral, inasmuch as the publication of a scandalous or immoral book would have exposed the publisher to prosecution. about 8,000 copies were sold under this contract. two years later, in july, 1916, the society for the suppression of vice threatened to begin a prosecution unless the book was withdrawn. it was withdrawn forthwith, and dreiser was compelled to enter suit for a performance of the contract. the withdrawal, it will be noticed, was not in obedience to a court order, but followed a mere comstockian threat. yet dreiser was at once deprived of his royalties, and forced into expensive litigation. had it not been that eminent counsel volunteered for his defence, his personal means would have been insufficient to have got him even a day in court. [74] the chief sufferers from this conflict are the authors of moving pictures. what they face at the hands of imbecile state boards of censorship is described at length by channing pollock in an article entitled "swinging the censor" in the _bulletin_ of the authors' league of america for march, 1917. [75] for example, the magazine which printed david graham phillips' susan lenox: her rise and fall as a serial prefaced it with a moral encomium by the rev. charles h. parkhurst. later, when the novel appeared in book form, the comstocks began an action to have it suppressed, and forced the publisher to bowdlerize it. [76] an account of a typical prosecution, arbitrary, unintelligent and disingenuous, is to be found in sumner and indecency, by frank harris, in _pearson's magazine_ for june, 1917, p. 556. [77] for further discussions of this point consult art in america, by aleister crowley, _the english review_, nov., 1913; life, art and america, by theodore dreiser, _the seven arts_, feb., 1917; and the american; his ideas of beauty, by h. l. mencken, _the smart set_, sept., 1913. [78] _vide_ the cambridge history of english literature, vol. xi, p. 225. [79] the point is discussed by h. v. routh in the cambridge history of english literature, vol. xi, p. 290. [80] in boon; new york, george h. doran co., 1915. [81] in a letter to felix shay, nov. 24, 1916. index abolitionists, 213, 231 agnosticism, 14, 17 alden, w. l., on conrad, 53 "almayer's folly," 12, 16, 37, 42, 47, 51, 52, 56, 59 american bible society, 239 american mind, 25, 197-8, 207 et seq. "amy foster," 36 anglo-saxon point of view, 20-3 animal behaviour, theory of, 135 "anthony comstock, fighter," 254 _n_, 255 et seq. anti-saloon league, 244 et seq., 249-50 art students' league raid, 269 balzac, h. de, 15, 73, 76, 113, 155, 202, 260 "banks of the wabash, the," 106 beauty, dreiser on, 126 benedict, judge chas. l., and comstockery, 267 _n_. bennett, arnold, 19, 26, 32, 48, 62, 78, 104, 137, 142, 143 bible, declared obscene, 261-2 bierce, ambrose, 146, 202, 216, 224 "blue sphere, the," 126 _bohemian magazine_, 104 bourne, randolph, 147 _n_, 158, 237 _n_. boynton, h. w., 134, 158 british mind, 25 brooks, van wyck, 134 _butler, edward malia_, 116 et seq., 119 calvinism, 14, 139, 164, 197 et seq. catholicism, dreiser's, 75 censorship, theatre, 241; moving picture, 242, 274 _century magazine_, 143, 221 "chance," 37, 48, 56, 60 chicago vice commission, report of, 269 "children of the sea," _see_ "nigger of the narcissus, the" "chopin: the man and his music," 166, 169 et seq. clemens, s. l., _see_ twain, mark clifford, hugh, 52, 54, 59 comstock, anthony, 253 et seq. comstock postal acts of 1873, 241, 257 et seq. comstocks, attack on dreiser, 101-2, 140 et seq. conrad, joseph, birth and parentage, 20; first book, 51; early success, 53; pensioned, 54; his books as bibelots, 56; style, 36 et seq.; materials, 40 et seq.; irony, 13, 18; ethical agnosticism, 17, 29-32; on women, 33-5; statement of his task, 29; contrasted with other authors, 30, 45, 48-9, 88 et seq., 96 _cowperwood, frank_, 79, 114 et seq., 135, 201 criticism in america, 153 et seq., 191-2 curle, richard, 60 _delineator_, 104 de pachmann, vladimir, 171, 178 dewey, john, 152-3 dime novels, dreiser as editor of, 103 doubleday, page & co., 70, 100-1, 102 drama league of america, 180, 182 dreiser, theodore, birth and parentage, 76-7, 106; early influences, 68 et seq.; career in journalism, 98-105; first book, 70, 98 et seq.; dates of books, 100, 105; plays, 105, 125-6; travel books, 105, 127-131; style, 79 et seq., 113; mysticism, 12; agnosticism, 88 et seq., 147; his novels criticized, 106 et seq.; academic attitude toward, 131 et seq.; attacked by comstocks, 139 et seq.; contrasted with conrad, 34, 88 et seq. dresser, paul, 106, 130 "egoists," 179, 181 "end of the tether, the," 47 "falk," 16, 36, 39, 47, 59, 64 fiction, english, 18, 19 "financier, the," 81, 86, 101, 105, 107, 114, 122, 138 flaubert, gustave, 73, 84, 136, 181 follett, wilson, 11, 13, 17, 60 garnett, edward, 52 "'genius,' the," 80-1, 83, 86, 87, 93, 105, 107, 115, 122, 125, 139, 226, 270, 273, 282 _gerhardt, jennie_, 109-10, 119, 137 _gerhardt, jennie's_ father, 96, 117 german mind, 25 "girl in the coffin, the," 125 good templars, 228-30 _goorall, yanko_, 12 great awakening of 1734, 227 greenwich village, 124, 145, 224 "hand of the potter, the," 105 _hanson, minnie_, 85 hardy, thomas, 16, 62, 69, 71, 72, 76, 260 harper & bros., 100-2, 105 harvard, 163, 169, 177 "heart of darkness," 35, 36, 41, 64 _herrenmoral_, 236 _heyst_, 12, 34, 59 "hoosier holiday, a," 76, 86, 88, 92, 105, 106, 125, 127 et seq. hope, dreiser on, 126 howells, w. d., 28, 58, 74, 76, 97, 156, 159, 188, 205, 217, 218, 275, 282 hueffer, ford madox, 53, 54 huneker, james, birth and parentage, 164; in journalism, 167, 183; as music student, 166-7; as a critic, 159 et seq., 190-4; books on music, 168-175; stories, 188-90; on conrad, 59; his aims, 193; style, 180 et seq. _hurstwood_, 99, 108-9 ibsen, henrik, 15, 23, 24, 40, 83, 124, 156, 160-1, 162, 182, 200 "iconoclasts," 169, 170, 179, 181 "inheritors, the," 42, 53, 56 "in the dark," 126 "ivory, apes and peacocks," 59 james, henry, 58, 62, 113, 217, 218, 283 "jennie gerhardt," 16, 71, 76-7, 82, 84, 96, 101, 105-9, 111-2, 117, 124, 276 jesup, morris k., 257 et seq. _jim, lord_, 12, 16, 38, 39, 42, 59 _jones, althea_, 80-1, 85 joseffy, rafael, 167, 178 kellner, leon, 197 et seq. _kultur-novellen_, huneker's, 188 et seq. _kurtz_, 12, 16, 34, 38, 39, 59 libraries, dreiser's books in american, 143-5 _n_. "life, art and america," 86, 88, 92, 105 "lord jim," 36, 47, 56, 60 lord's day alliance, 242 love, dreiser on, 126 _macwhirr, capt._, 12, 37, 42 mann act, 241, 251-2, 258 _marlow_, 36, 37 _meeber, carrie_, 40, 85, 99, 109 et seq., 126, 137 "melomaniacs," 188 et seq. men and religions forward movement, 239 methodism, 139, 197, 277 "mezzotints in modern music," 168 "mirror of the sea, the," 50, 56 "morals, not art or literature," 253 naturalism, german, 77 "new cosmopolis," 165, 183 et seq. nietzsche, f. w., 15, 29, 90, 93, 136, 158, 162, 173, 180, 181, 183, 192, 193 "nigger of the narcissus, the," 50, 52, 56 norris, frank, 15, 70, 71, 100, 108, 122, 163, 191, 224 "nostromo," 12, 38, 42, 45, 46-7, 48, 56 "old fogy," 170 et seq., 179, 181 "old ragpicker," 125 "outcast of the islands, an," 37 page, walter h., 102 "pathos of distance, the," 164 "personal record, a," 37, 51, 88 pilsner, 165, 184-5 "plays of the natural and the supernatural," 105, 125 poe, edgar allan, 73, 151, 152, 154, 180-1, 189, 214, 221 "point of honor, the," 42, 47 prague, 165, 185-6 prohibition, 228-9, 244 et seq. prudery, american, 228 _razumov_, 12, 34, 49 resignationism, 14 "return, the," 42 "romance," 56 _ruiz, gaspar_, 12 russia, conrad's picture of, 49-50 sea, conrad's pictures of, 50-1 "secret agent, the," 42, 48, 59, 60 "set of six, a.," 56 "shadow line, the," 12, 13, 47 shakespeare, wm., 14-5, 61, 155, 121, 199, 204 shaw, g. b., 15, 16, 19, 26, 121-2, 161, 182, 269 "sister carrie," 58, 70, 71, 73, 81, 84, 95, 97, 98 et seq., 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 112-3, 117, 119, 126, 143, 201 _sklavenmoral_, 22, 235 slav, qualities of, 14 "some reminiscences," 37, 56. (_see also_ "personal record, a.") sons of temperance, 228 street & smith, 103-4 symons, arthur, 19, 28-9, 39 "tales of unrest," 52, 56 "titan, the," 60, 77, 82, 86, 101, 105, 106, 111, 114, 117 et seq., 129, 138, 201, 275 train, george francis, 261-2 "traveler at forty, a.," 76, 82, 105, 125, 127 truth, dreiser on, 126 twain, mark, 15, 17, 30, 90, 131-2, 133, 143, 151, 202, 203-4, 217, 222 "typhoon," 12, 47, 50, 53 "under western eyes," 36, 42, 47, 48, 49, 56, 59 "victory," 13, 33, 42, 48, 55, 56 "visionaries," 188 et seq. webb law, 230, 241, 258 wells, h. g., 19, 32, 38, 48, 53, 62, 135, 142, 144, 281 _wille zur macht_, the puritan, 237, 246 _witla, eugene_, 122 et seq., 137, 140 et seq. young men's christian association, 230, 238, 240, 256 "youth," 12, 13, 37, 41, 48, 53, 54, 56, 64 zola, emile, 15-6, 63, 71-2, 76, 78, 113, 124, 136, 202, 216, 260 transcribed from the 1921 j. m. dent edition by david price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk notes on life & letters contents: author's note part i--letters books--1905. henry james--an appreciation--1905 alphonse daudet--1898 guy de maupassant--1904 anatole france--1904 turgenev--1917 stephen crane--a note without dates--1919 tales of the sea--1898 an observer in malaya--1898 a happy wanderer--1910 the life beyond--1910 the ascending effort--1910 the censor of plays--an appreciation--1907 part ii--life autocracy and war--1905 the crime of partition--1919 a note on the polish problem--1916 poland revisited--1915 first news--1918 well done--1918 tradition--1918 confidence--1919 flight--1917 some reflections on the loss of the _titanic_--1912 certain aspects of the admirable inquiry into the loss of the _titanic_--1912 protection of ocean liners--1914 a friendly place author's note i don't know whether i ought to offer an apology for this collection which has more to do with life than with letters. its appeal is made to orderly minds. this, to be frank about it, is a process of tidying up, which, from the nature of things, cannot be regarded as premature. the fact is that i wanted to do it myself because of a feeling that had nothing to do with the considerations of worthiness or unworthiness of the small (but unbroken) pieces collected within the covers of this volume. of course it may be said that i might have taken up a broom and used it without saying anything about it. that, certainly, is one way of tidying up. but it would have been too much to have expected me to treat all this matter as removable rubbish. all those things had a place in my life. whether any of them deserve to have been picked up and ranged on the shelf--this shelf--i cannot say, and, frankly, i have not allowed my mind to dwell on the question. i was afraid of thinking myself into a mood that would hurt my feelings; for those pieces of writing, whatever may be the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man. and so here they are, dusted, which was but a decent thing to do, but in no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year '20, a thin array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: conrad literary, conrad political, conrad reminiscent, conrad controversial. well, yes! a one-man show--or is it merely the show of one man? the only thing that will not be found amongst those figures and things that have passed away, will be conrad _en pantoufles_. it is a constitutional inability. _schlafrock und pantoffeln_! not that! never! . . . i don't know whether i dare boast like a certain south american general who used to say that no emergency of war or peace had ever found him "with his boots off"; but i may say that whenever the various periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the trumpet of personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of the past, i always tried to pull on my boots first. i didn't want to do it, god knows! their editors, to whom i beg to offer my thanks here, made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. well, yes! bribery? what can you expect? i never pretended to be better than the people in the next street, or even in the same street. this volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is as near as i shall ever come to _deshabille_ in public; and perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that cannot be helped: because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock ticks with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have observed in the ticking of the hall clock at home. for reasons like that. yes! it recedes. and this was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to my own eyes. the section within this volume called letters explains itself, though i do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence. it claims nothing in its defence except the right of speech which i believe belongs to everybody outside a trappist monastery. the part i have ventured, for shortness' sake, to call life, may perhaps justify itself by the emotional sincerity of the feelings to which the various papers included under that head owe their origin. and as they relate to events of which everyone has a date, they are in the nature of sign-posts pointing out the direction my thoughts were compelled to take at the various crossroads. if anybody detects any sort of consistency in the choice, this will be only proof positive that wisdom had nothing to do with it. whether right or wrong, instinct alone is invariable; a fact which only adds a deeper shade to its inherent mystery. the appearance of intellectuality these pieces may present at first sight is merely the result of the arrangement of words. the logic that may be found there is only the logic of the language. but i need not labour the point. there will be plenty of people sagacious enough to perceive the absence of all wisdom from these pages. but i believe sufficiently in human sympathies to imagine that very few will question their sincerity. whatever delusions i may have suffered from i have had no delusions as to the nature of the facts commented on here. i may have misjudged their import: but that is the sort of error for which one may expect a certain amount of toleration. the only paper of this collection which has never been published before is the note on the polish problem. it was written at the request of a friend to be shown privately, and its "protectorate" idea, sprung from a strong sense of the critical nature of the situation, was shaped by the actual circumstances of the time. the time was about a month before the entrance of roumania into the war, and though, honestly, i had seen already the shadow of coming events i could not permit my misgivings to enter into and destroy the structure of my plan. i still believe that there was some sense in it. it may certainly be charged with the appearance of lack of faith and it lays itself open to the throwing of many stones; but my object was practical and i had to consider warily the preconceived notions of the people to whom it was implicitly addressed, and also their unjustifiable hopes. they were unjustifiable, but who was to tell them that? i mean who was wise enough and convincing enough to show them the inanity of their mental attitude? the whole atmosphere was poisoned with visions that were not so much false as simply impossible. they were also the result of vague and unconfessed fears, and that made their strength. for myself, with a very definite dread in my heart, i was careful not to allude to their character because i did not want the note to be thrown away unread. and then i had to remember that the impossible has sometimes the trick of coming to pass to the confusion of minds and often to the crushing of hearts. of the other papers i have nothing special to say. they are what they are, and i am by now too hardened a sinner to feel ashamed of insignificant indiscretions. and as to their appearance in this form i claim that indulgence to which all sinners against themselves are entitled. j. c. 1920. part i--letters books--1905. i. "i have not read this author's books, and if i have read them i have forgotten what they were about." these words are reported as having been uttered in our midst not a hundred years ago, publicly, from the seat of justice, by a civic magistrate. the words of our municipal rulers have a solemnity and importance far above the words of other mortals, because our municipal rulers more than any other variety of our governors and masters represent the average wisdom, temperament, sense and virtue of the community. this generalisation, it ought to be promptly said in the interests of eternal justice (and recent friendship), does not apply to the united states of america. there, if one may believe the long and helpless indignations of their daily and weekly press, the majority of municipal rulers appear to be thieves of a particularly irrepressible sort. but this by the way. my concern is with a statement issuing from the average temperament and the average wisdom of a great and wealthy community, and uttered by a civic magistrate obviously without fear and without reproach. i confess i am pleased with his temper, which is that of prudence. "i have not read the books," he says, and immediately he adds, "and if i have read them i have forgotten." this is excellent caution. and i like his style: it is unartificial and bears the stamp of manly sincerity. as a reported piece of prose this declaration is easy to read and not difficult to believe. many books have not been read; still more have been forgotten. as a piece of civic oratory this declaration is strikingly effective. calculated to fall in with the bent of the popular mind, so familiar with all forms of forgetfulness, it has also the power to stir up a subtle emotion while it starts a train of thought--and what greater force can be expected from human speech? but it is in naturalness that this declaration is perfectly delightful, for there is nothing more natural than for a grave city father to forget what the books he has read once--long ago--in his giddy youth maybe--were about. and the books in question are novels, or, at any rate, were written as novels. i proceed thus cautiously (following my illustrious example) because being without fear and desiring to remain as far as possible without reproach, i confess at once that i have not read them. i have not; and of the million persons or more who are said to have read them, i never met one yet with the talent of lucid exposition sufficiently developed to give me a connected account of what they are about. but they are books, part and parcel of humanity, and as such, in their ever increasing, jostling multitude, they are worthy of regard, admiration, and compassion. especially of compassion. it has been said a long time ago that books have their fate. they have, and it is very much like the destiny of man. they share with us the great incertitude of ignominy or glory--of severe justice and senseless persecution--of calumny and misunderstanding--the shame of undeserved success. of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thought, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. but most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life. a bridge constructed according to the rules of the art of bridge-building is certain of a long, honourable and useful career. but a book as good in its way as the bridge may perish obscurely on the very day of its birth. the art of their creators is not sufficient to give them more than a moment of life. of the books born from the restlessness, the inspiration, and the vanity of human minds, those that the muses would love best lie more than all others under the menace of an early death. sometimes their defects will save them. sometimes a book fair to see may--to use a lofty expression--have no individual soul. obviously a book of that sort cannot die. it can only crumble into dust. but the best of books drawing sustenance from the sympathy and memory of men have lived on the brink of destruction, for men's memories are short, and their sympathy is, we must admit, a very fluctuating, unprincipled emotion. no secret of eternal life for our books can be found amongst the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs. this is not because some books are not worthy of enduring life, but because the formulas of art are dependent on things variable, unstable and untrustworthy; on human sympathies, on prejudices, on likes and dislikes, on the sense of virtue and the sense of propriety, on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form--often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation. ii. of all books, novels, which the muses should love, make a serious claim on our compassion. the art of the novelist is simple. at the same time it is the most elusive of all creative arts, the most liable to be obscured by the scruples of its servants and votaries, the one pre-eminently destined to bring trouble to the mind and the heart of the artist. after all, the creation of a world is not a small undertaking except perhaps to the divinely gifted. in truth every novelist must begin by creating for himself a world, great or little, in which he can honestly believe. this world cannot be made otherwise than in his own image: it is fated to remain individual and a little mysterious, and yet it must resemble something already familiar to the experience, the thoughts and the sensations of his readers. at the heart of fiction, even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of dumas the father. but the fair truth of human delicacy can be found in mr. henry james's novels; and the comical, appalling truth of human rapacity let loose amongst the spoils of existence lives in the monstrous world created by balzac. the pursuit of happiness by means lawful and unlawful, through resignation or revolt, by the clever manipulation of conventions or by solemn hanging on to the skirts of the latest scientific theory, is the only theme that can be legitimately developed by the novelist who is the chronicler of the adventures of mankind amongst the dangers of the kingdom of the earth. and the kingdom of this earth itself, the ground upon which his individualities stand, stumble, or die, must enter into his scheme of faithful record. to encompass all this in one harmonious conception is a great feat; and even to attempt it deliberately with serious intention, not from the senseless prompting of an ignorant heart, is an honourable ambition. for it requires some courage to step in calmly where fools may be eager to rush. as a distinguished and successful french novelist once observed of fiction, "c'est un art _trop_ difficile." it is natural that the novelist should doubt his ability to cope with his task. he imagines it more gigantic than it is. and yet literary creation being only one of the legitimate forms of human activity has no value but on the condition of not excluding the fullest recognition of all the more distinct forms of action. this condition is sometimes forgotten by the man of letters, who often, especially in his youth, is inclined to lay a claim of exclusive superiority for his own amongst all the other tasks of the human mind. the mass of verse and prose may glimmer here and there with the glow of a divine spark, but in the sum of human effort it has no special importance. there is no justificative formula for its existence any more than for any other artistic achievement. with the rest of them it is destined to be forgotten, without, perhaps, leaving the faintest trace. where a novelist has an advantage over the workers in other fields of thought is in his privilege of freedom--the freedom of expression and the freedom of confessing his innermost beliefs--which should console him for the hard slavery of the pen. iii. liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. to try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of some romantic, realistic, or naturalistic creed in the free work of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of human perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors. it is a weakness of inferior minds when it is not the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school. such, for instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed stendhal for a prophet of naturalism. but stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of his freedom. stendhal's mind was of the first order. his spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly stendhalesque scorn and indignation. for the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas. and stendhal was pre-eminently courageous. he wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty. it must not be supposed that i claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral nihilism. i would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation. it is the god-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. we are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. what one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. it seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. that frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. it gives an author--goodness only knows why--an elated sense of his own superiority. and there is nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation. to be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. it is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so. if the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling. to have the gift of words is no such great matter. a man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either one or the other. of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art i would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues. i would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors. i would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous or terrible. i would wish him to look with a large forgiveness at men's ideas and prejudices, which are by no means the outcome of malevolence, but depend on their education, their social status, even their professions. the good artist should expect no recognition of his toil and no admiration of his genius, because his toil can with difficulty be appraised and his genius cannot possibly mean anything to the illiterate who, even from the dreadful wisdom of their evoked dead, have, so far, culled nothing but inanities and platitudes. i would wish him to enlarge his sympathies by patient and loving observation while he grows in mental power. it is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception. let him mature the strength of his imagination amongst the things of this earth, which it is his business to cherish and know, and refrain from calling down his inspiration ready-made from some heaven of perfections of which he knows nothing. and i would not grudge him the proud illusion that will come sometimes to a writer: the illusion that his achievement has almost equalled the greatness of his dream. for what else could give him the serenity and the force to hug to his breast as a thing delightful and human, the virtue, the rectitude and sagacity of his own city, declaring with simple eloquence through the mouth of a conscript father: "i have not read this author's books, and if i have read them i have forgotten . . ." henry james--an appreciation--1905 the critical faculty hesitates before the magnitude of mr. henry james's work. his books stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion. but not all his books. there is no collected edition to date, such as some of "our masters" have been provided with; no neat rows of volumes in buckram or half calf, putting forth a hasty claim to completeness, and conveying to my mind a hint of finality, of a surrender to fate of that field in which all these victories have been won. nothing of the sort has been done for mr. henry james's victories in england. in a world such as ours, so painful with all sorts of wonders, one would not exhaust oneself in barren marvelling over mere bindings, had not the fact, or rather the absence of the material fact, prominent in the case of other men whose writing counts, (for good or evil)--had it not been, i say, expressive of a direct truth spiritual and intellectual; an accident of--i suppose--the publishing business acquiring a symbolic meaning from its negative nature. because, emphatically, in the body of mr. henry james's work there is no suggestion of finality, nowhere a hint of surrender, or even of probability of surrender, to his own victorious achievement in that field where he is a master. happily, he will never be able to claim completeness; and, were he to confess to it in a moment of self-ignorance, he would not be believed by the very minds for whom such a confession naturally would be meant. it is impossible to think of mr. henry james becoming "complete" otherwise than by the brutality of our common fate whose finality is meaningless--in the sense of its logic being of a material order, the logic of a falling stone. i do not know into what brand of ink mr. henry james dips his pen; indeed, i heard that of late he had been dictating; but i know that his mind is steeped in the waters flowing from the fountain of intellectual youth. the thing--a privilege--a miracle--what you will--is not quite hidden from the meanest of us who run as we read. to those who have the grace to stay their feet it is manifest. after some twenty years of attentive acquaintance with mr. henry james's work, it grows into absolute conviction which, all personal feeling apart, brings a sense of happiness into one's artistic existence. if gratitude, as someone defined it, is a lively sense of favours to come, it becomes very easy to be grateful to the author of the ambassadors--to name the latest of his works. the favours are sure to come; the spring of that benevolence will never run dry. the stream of inspiration flows brimful in a predetermined direction, unaffected by the periods of drought, untroubled in its clearness by the storms of the land of letters, without languor or violence in its force, never running back upon itself, opening new visions at every turn of its course through that richly inhabited country its fertility has created for our delectation, for our judgment, for our exploring. it is, in fact, a magic spring. with this phrase the metaphor of the perennial spring, of the inextinguishable youth, of running waters, as applied to mr. henry james's inspiration, may be dropped. in its volume and force the body of his work may be compared rather to a majestic river. all creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality. action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. it is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values--the permanence of memory. and the multitude feels it obscurely too; since the demand of the individual to the artist is, in effect, the cry, "take me out of myself!" meaning really, out of my perishable activity into the light of imperishable consciousness. but everything is relative, and the light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our industrious hands. when the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth, man, indomitable by his training in resistance to misery and pain, shall set this undiminished light of his eyes against the feeble glow of the sun. the artistic faculty, of which each of us has a minute grain, may find its voice in some individual of that last group, gifted with a power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art. i do not mean to say that he would attempt to beguile the last moments of humanity by an ingenious tale. it would be too much to expect--from humanity. i doubt the heroism of the hearers. as to the heroism of the artist, no doubt is necessary. there would be on his part no heroism. the artist in his calling of interpreter creates (the clearest form of demonstration) because he must. he is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. it is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrow--whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess? for my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, i am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. for mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity. it will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. it will not know when it is beaten. and perhaps it is right in that quality. the victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. mr. henry james seems to hold that belief. nobody has rendered better, perhaps, the tenacity of temper, or known how to drape the robe of spiritual honour about the drooping form of a victor in a barren strife. and the honour is always well won; for the struggles mr. henry james chronicles with such subtle and direct insight are, though only personal contests, desperate in their silence, none the less heroic (in the modern sense) for the absence of shouted watchwords, clash of arms and sound of trumpets. those are adventures in which only choice souls are ever involved. and mr. henry james records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the _peripeties_ of the contest, and the feelings of the combatants. the fiercest excitements of a romance _de cape et d'epee_, the romance of yard-arm and boarding pike so dear to youth, whose knowledge of action (as of other things) is imperfect and limited, are matched, for the quickening of our maturer years, by the tasks set, by the difficulties presented, to the sense of truth, of necessity--before all, of conduct--of mr. henry james's men and women. his mankind is delightful. it is delightful in its tenacity; it refuses to own itself beaten; it will sleep on the battlefield. these warlike images come by themselves under the pen; since from the duality of man's nature and the competition of individuals, the life-history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really very relentless warfare. neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone. in virtue of these allies and enemies, he holds his precarious dominion, he possesses his fleeting significance; and it is this relation in all its manifestations, great and little, superficial or profound, and this relation alone, that is commented upon, interpreted, demonstrated by the art of the novelist in the only possible way in which the task can be performed: by the independent creation of circumstance and character, achieved against all the difficulties of expression, in an imaginative effort finding its inspiration from the reality of forms and sensations. that a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. there is no other secret behind the curtain. all adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation. it is the uttermost limit of our power; it is the most potent and effective force at our disposal on which rest the labours of a solitary man in his study, the rock on which have been built commonwealths whose might casts a dwarfing shadow upon two oceans. like a natural force which is obscured as much as illuminated by the multiplicity of phenomena, the power of renunciation is obscured by the mass of weaknesses, vacillations, secondary motives and false steps and compromises which make up the sum of our activity. but no man or woman worthy of the name can pretend to anything more, to anything greater. and mr. henry james's men and women are worthy of the name, within the limits his art, so clear, so sure of itself, has drawn round their activities. he would be the last to claim for them titanic proportions. the earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. but in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one--not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions to his gods. that is the problem, great enough, in all truth, if approached in the spirit of sincerity and knowledge. in one of his critical studies, published some fifteen years ago, mr. henry james claims for the novelist the standing of the historian as the only adequate one, as for himself and before his audience. i think that the claim cannot be contested, and that the position is unassailable. fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. but it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. thus fiction is nearer truth. but let that pass. a historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience. as is meet for a man of his descent and tradition, mr. henry james is the historian of fine consciences. of course, this is a general statement; but i don't think its truth will be, or can be questioned. its fault is that it leaves so much out; and, besides, mr. henry james is much too considerable to be put into the nutshell of a phrase. the fact remains that he has made his choice, and that his choice is justified up to the hilt by the success of his art. he has taken for himself the greater part. the range of a fine conscience covers more good and evil than the range of conscience which may be called, roughly, not fine; a conscience, less troubled by the nice discrimination of shades of conduct. a fine conscience is more concerned with essentials; its triumphs are more perfect, if less profitable, in a worldly sense. there is, in short, more truth in its working for a historian to detect and to show. it is a thing of infinite complication and suggestion. none of these escapes the art of mr. henry james. he has mastered the country, his domain, not wild indeed, but full of romantic glimpses, of deep shadows and sunny places. there are no secrets left within his range. he has disclosed them as they should be disclosed--that is, beautifully. and, indeed, ugliness has but little place in this world of his creation. yet, it is always felt in the truthfulness of his art; it is there, it surrounds the scene, it presses close upon it. it is made visible, tangible, in the struggles, in the contacts of the fine consciences, in their perplexities, in the sophism of their mistakes. for a fine conscience is naturally a virtuous one. what is natural about it is just its fineness, an abiding sense of the intangible, ever-present, right. it is most visible in their ultimate triumph, in their emergence from miracle, through an energetic act of renunciation. energetic, not violent: the distinction is wide, enormous, like that between substance and shadow. through it all mr. henry james keeps a firm hold of the substance, of what is worth having, of what is worth holding. the contrary opinion has been, if not absolutely affirmed, then at least implied, with some frequency. to most of us, living willingly in a sort of intellectual moonlight, in the faintly reflected light of truth, the shadows so firmly renounced by mr. henry james's men and women, stand out endowed with extraordinary value, with a value so extraordinary that their rejection offends, by its uncalled-for scrupulousness, those business-like instincts which a careful providence has implanted in our breasts. and, apart from that just cause of discontent, it is obvious that a solution by rejection must always present a certain lack of finality, especially startling when contrasted with the usual methods of solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or a sudden death. why the reading public which, as a body, has never laid upon a story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine omnipotence, is utterly incomprehensible. but so it is; and these solutions are legitimate inasmuch as they satisfy the desire for finality, for which our hearts yearn with a longing greater than the longing for the loaves and fishes of this earth. perhaps the only true desire of mankind, coming thus to light in its hours of leisure, is to be set at rest. one is never set at rest by mr. henry james's novels. his books end as an episode in life ends. you remain with the sense of the life still going on; and even the subtle presence of the dead is felt in that silence that comes upon the artist-creation when the last word has been read. it is eminently satisfying, but it is not final. mr. henry james, great artist and faithful historian, never attempts the impossible. alphonse daudet--1898 it is sweet to talk decorously of the dead who are part of our past, our indisputable possession. one must admit regretfully that to-day is but a scramble, that to-morrow may never come; it is only the precious yesterday that cannot be taken away from us. a gift from the dead, great and little, it makes life supportable, it almost makes one believe in a benevolent scheme of creation. and some kind of belief is very necessary. but the real knowledge of matters infinitely more profound than any conceivable scheme of creation is with the dead alone. that is why our talk about them should be as decorous as their silence. their generosity and their discretion deserve nothing less at our hands; and they, who belong already to the unchangeable, would probably disdain to claim more than this from a mankind that changes its loves and its hates about every twenty-five years--at the coming of every new and wiser generation. one of the most generous of the dead is daudet, who, with a prodigality approaching magnificence, gave himself up to us without reserve in his work, with all his qualities and all his faults. neither his qualities nor his faults were great, though they were by no means imperceptible. it is only his generosity that is out of the common. what strikes one most in his work is the disinterestedness of the toiler. with more talent than many bigger men, he did not preach about himself, he did not attempt to persuade mankind into a belief of his own greatness. he never posed as a scientist or as a seer, not even as a prophet; and he neglected his interests to the point of never propounding a theory for the purpose of giving a tremendous significance to his art, alone of all things, in a world that, by some strange oversight, has not been supplied with an obvious meaning. neither did he affect a passive attitude before the spectacle of life, an attitude which in gods--and in a rare mortal here and there--may appear godlike, but assumed by some men, causes one, very unwillingly, to think of the melancholy quietude of an ape. he was not the wearisome expounder of this or that theory, here to-day and spurned to-morrow. he was not a great artist, he was not an artist at all, if you like--but he was alphonse daudet, a man as naively clear, honest, and vibrating as the sunshine of his native land; that regrettably undiscriminating sunshine which matures grapes and pumpkins alike, and cannot, of course, obtain the commendation of the very select who look at life from under a parasol. naturally, being a man from the south, he had a rather outspoken belief in himself, but his small distinction, worth many a greater, was in not being in bondage to some vanishing creed. he was a worker who could not compel the admiration of the few, but who deserved the affection of the many; and he may be spoken of with tenderness and regret, for he is not immortal--he is only dead. during his life the simple man whose business it ought to have been to climb, in the name of art, some elevation or other, was content to remain below, on the plain, amongst his creations, and take an eager part in those disasters, weaknesses, and joys which are tragic enough in their droll way, but are by no means so momentous and profound as some writers--probably for the sake of art--would like to make us believe. there is, when one thinks of it, a considerable want of candour in the august view of life. without doubt a cautious reticence on the subject, or even a delicately false suggestion thrown out in that direction is, in a way, praiseworthy, since it helps to uphold the dignity of man--a matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot help feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly blamable. to state, then, with studied moderation a belief that in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most of us--the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it. it may be consoling--for human folly is very _bizarre_--but it is scarcely honest to shout at those who struggle drowning in an insignificant pool: you are indeed admirable and great to be the victims of such a profound, of such a terrible ocean! and daudet was honest; perhaps because he knew no better--but he was very honest. if he saw only the surface of things it is for the reason that most things have nothing but a surface. he did not pretend--perhaps because he did not know how--he did not pretend to see any depths in a life that is only a film of unsteady appearances stretched over regions deep indeed, but which have nothing to do with the half-truths, half-thoughts, and whole illusions of existence. the road to these distant regions does not lie through the domain of art or the domain of science where well-known voices quarrel noisily in a misty emptiness; it is a path of toilsome silence upon which travel men simple and unknown, with closed lips, or, maybe, whispering their pain softly--only to themselves. but daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a clear felicity of tone--as a bird sings. he saw life around him with extreme clearness, and he felt it as it is--thinner than air and more elusive than a flash of lightning. he hastened to offer it his compassion, his indignation, his wonder, his sympathy, without giving a moment of thought to the momentous issues that are supposed to lurk in the logic of such sentiments. he tolerated the little foibles, the small ruffianisms, the grave mistakes; the only thing he distinctly would not forgive was hardness of heart. this unpractical attitude would have been fatal to a better man, but his readers have forgiven him. withal he is chivalrous to exiled queens and deformed sempstresses, he is pityingly tender to broken-down actors, to ruined gentlemen, to stupid academicians; he is glad of the joys of the commonplace people in a commonplace way--and he never makes a secret of all this. no, the man was not an artist. what if his creations are illumined by the sunshine of his temperament so vividly that they stand before us infinitely more real than the dingy illusions surrounding our everyday existence? the misguided man is for ever pottering amongst them, lifting up his voice, dotting his i's in the wrong places. he takes tartarin by the arm, he does not conceal his interest in the nabob's cheques, his sympathy for an honest academician _plus bete que nature_, his hate for an architect _plus mauvais que la gale_; he is in the thick of it all. he feels with the duc de mora and with felicia ruys--and he lets you see it. he does not sit on a pedestal in the hieratic and imbecile pose of some cheap god whose greatness consists in being too stupid to care. he cares immensely for his nabobs, his kings, his book-keepers, his colettes, and his saphos. he vibrates together with his universe, and with lamentable simplicity follows m. de montpavon on that last walk along the boulevards. "monsieur de montpavon marche a la mort," and the creator of that unlucky _gentilhomme_ follows with stealthy footsteps, with wide eyes, with an impressively pointing finger. and who wouldn't look? but it is hard; it is sometimes very hard to forgive him the dotted i's, the pointing finger, this making plain of obvious mysteries. "monsieur de montpavon marche a la mort," and presently, on the crowded pavement, takes off his hat with punctilious courtesy to the doctor's wife, who, elegant and unhappy, is bound on the same pilgrimage. this is too much! we feel we cannot forgive him such meetings, the constant whisper of his presence. we feel we cannot, till suddenly the very _naivete_ of it all touches us with the revealed suggestion of a truth. then we see that the man is not false; all this is done in transparent good faith. the man is not melodramatic; he is only picturesque. he may not be an artist, but he comes as near the truth as some of the greatest. his creations are seen; you can look into their very eyes, and these are as thoughtless as the eyes of any wise generation that has in its hands the fame of writers. yes, they are _seen_, and the man who is not an artist is seen also commiserating, indignant, joyous, human and alive in their very midst. inevitably they _marchent a la mort_--and they are very near the truth of our common destiny: their fate is poignant, it is intensely interesting, and of not the slightest consequence. guy de maupassant--1904 {1} to introduce maupassant to english readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite and the tendency of his work immoral would be a gratuitous impertinence. maupassant's conception of his art is such as one would expect from a practical and resolute mind; but in the consummate simplicity of his technique it ceases to be perceptible. this is one of its greatest qualities, and like all the great virtues it is based primarily on selfdenial. to pronounce a judgment upon the general tendency of an author is a difficult task. one could not depend upon reason alone, nor yet trust solely to one's emotions. used together, they would in many cases traverse each other, because emotions have their own unanswerable logic. our capacity for emotion is limited, and the field of our intelligence is restricted. responsiveness to every feeling, combined with the penetration of every intellectual subterfuge, would end, not in judgment, but in universal absolution. _tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner_. and in this benevolent neutrality towards the warring errors of human nature all light would go out from art and from life. we are at liberty then to quarrel with maupassant's attitude towards our world in which, like the rest of us, he has that share which his senses are able to give him. but we need not quarrel with him violently. if our feelings (which are tender) happen to be hurt because his talent is not exercised for the praise and consolation of mankind, our intelligence (which is great) should let us see that he is a very splendid sinner, like all those who in this valley of compromises err by over-devotion to the truth that is in them. his determinism, barren of praise, blame and consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art. the worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held. except for his philosophy, which in the case of so consummate an artist does not matter (unless to the solemn and naive mind), maupassant of all writers of fiction demands least forgiveness from his readers. he does not require forgiveness because he is never dull. the interest of a reader in a work of imagination is either ethical or that of simple curiosity. both are perfectly legitimate, since there is both a moral and an excitement to be found in a faithful rendering of life. and in maupassant's work there is the interest of curiosity and the moral of a point of view consistently preserved and never obtruded for the end of personal gratification. the spectacle of this immense talent served by exceptional faculties and triumphing over the most thankless subjects by an unswerving singleness of purpose is in itself an admirable lesson in the power of artistic honesty, one may say of artistic virtue. the inherent greatness of the man consists in this, that he will let none of the fascinations that beset a writer working in loneliness turn him away from the straight path, from the vouchsafed vision of excellence. he will not be led into perdition by the seductions of sentiment, of eloquence, of humour, of pathos; of all that splendid pageant of faults that pass between the writer and his probity on the blank sheet of paper, like the glittering cortege of deadly sins before the austere anchorite in the desert air of thebaide. this is not to say that maupassant's austerity has never faltered; but the fact remains that no tempting demon has ever succeeded in hurling him down from his high, if narrow, pedestal. it is the austerity of his talent, of course, that is in question. let the discriminating reader, who at times may well spare a moment or two to the consideration and enjoyment of artistic excellence, be asked to reflect a little upon the texture of two stories included in this volume: "a piece of string," and "a sale." how many openings the last offers for the gratuitous display of the author's wit or clever buffoonery, the first for an unmeasured display of sentiment! and both sentiment and buffoonery could have been made very good too, in a way accessible to the meanest intelligence, at the cost of truth and honesty. here it is where maupassant's austerity comes in. he refrains from setting his cleverness against the eloquence of the facts. there is humour and pathos in these stories; but such is the greatness of his talent, the refinement of his artistic conscience, that all his high qualities appear inherent in the very things of which he speaks, as if they had been altogether independent of his presentation. facts, and again facts are his unique concern. that is why he is not always properly understood. his facts are so perfectly rendered that, like the actualities of life itself, they demand from the reader the faculty of observation which is rare, the power of appreciation which is generally wanting in most of us who are guided mainly by empty phrases requiring no effort, demanding from us no qualities except a vague susceptibility to emotion. nobody has ever gained the vast applause of a crowd by the simple and clear exposition of vital facts. words alone strung upon a convention have fascinated us as worthless glass beads strung on a thread have charmed at all times our brothers the unsophisticated savages of the islands. now, maupassant, of whom it has been said that he is the master of the _mot juste_, has never been a dealer in words. his wares have been, not glass beads, but polished gems; not the most rare and precious, perhaps, but of the very first water of their kind. that he took trouble with his gems, taking them up in the rough and polishing each facet patiently, the publication of the two posthumous volumes of short stories proves abundantly. i think it proves also the assertion made here that he was by no means a dealer in words. on looking at the first feeble drafts from which so many perfect stories have been fashioned, one discovers that what has been matured, improved, brought to perfection by unwearied endeavour is not the diction of the tale, but the vision of its true shape and detail. those first attempts are not faltering or uncertain in expression. it is the conception which is at fault. the subjects have not yet been adequately seen. his proceeding was not to group expressive words, that mean nothing, around misty and mysterious shapes dear to muddled intellects and belonging neither to earth nor to heaven. his vision by a more scrupulous, prolonged and devoted attention to the aspects of the visible world discovered at last the right words as if miraculously impressed for him upon the face of things and events. this was the particular shape taken by his inspiration; it came to him directly, honestly in the light of his day, not on the tortuous, dark roads of meditation. his realities came to him from a genuine source, from this universe of vain appearances wherein we men have found everything to make us proud, sorry, exalted, and humble. maupassant's renown is universal, but his popularity is restricted. it is not difficult to perceive why. maupassant is an intensely national writer. he is so intensely national in his logic, in his clearness, in his aesthetic and moral conceptions, that he has been accepted by his countrymen without having had to pay the tribute of flattery either to the nation as a whole, or to any class, sphere or division of the nation. the truth of his art tells with an irresistible force; and he stands excused from the duty of patriotic posturing. he is a frenchman of frenchmen beyond question or cavil, and with that he is simple enough to be universally comprehensible. what is wanting to his universal success is the mediocrity of an obvious and appealing tenderness. he neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness; he forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs. the disregard of these common decencies lays him open to the charges of cruelty, cynicism, hardness. and yet it can be safely affirmed that this man wrote from the fulness of a compassionate heart. he is merciless and yet gentle with his mankind; he does not rail at their prudent fears and their small artifices; he does not despise their labours. it seems to me that he looks with an eye of profound pity upon their troubles, deceptions and misery. but he looks at them all. he sees--and does not turn away his head. as a matter of fact he is courageous. courage and justice are not popular virtues. the practice of strict justice is shocking to the multitude who always (perhaps from an obscure sense of guilt) attach to it the meaning of mercy. in the majority of us, who want to be left alone with our illusions, courage inspires a vague alarm. this is what is felt about maupassant. his qualities, to use the charming and popular phrase, are not lovable. courage being a force will not masquerade in the robes of affected delicacy and restraint. but if his courage is not of a chivalrous stamp, it cannot be denied that it is never brutal for the sake of effect. the writer of these few reflections, inspired by a long and intimate acquaintance with the work of the man, has been struck by the appreciation of maupassant manifested by many women gifted with tenderness and intelligence. their more delicate and audacious souls are good judges of courage. their finer penetration has discovered his genuine masculinity without display, his virility without a pose. they have discerned in his faithful dealings with the world that enterprising and fearless temperament, poor in ideas but rich in power, which appeals most to the feminine mind. it cannot be denied that he thinks very little. in him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of force and desire. his view of intellectual problems is perhaps more simple than their nature warrants; still a man who has written _yvette_ cannot be accused of want of subtlety. but one cannot insist enough upon this, that his subtlety, his humour, his grimness, though no doubt they are his own, are never presented otherwise but as belonging to our life, as found in nature, whose beauties and cruelties alike breathe the spirit of serene unconsciousness. maupassant's philosophy of life is more temperamental than rational. he expects nothing from gods or men. he trusts his senses for information and his instinct for deductions. it may seem that he has made but little use of his mind. but let me be clearly understood. his sensibility is really very great; and it is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible premises to an unsophisticated conclusion. this is literary honesty. it may be remarked that it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those who express their fundamental sentiment in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their hands. the work of maupassant's hands is honest. he thinks sufficiently to concrete his fearless conclusions in illuminative instances. he renders them with that exact knowledge of the means and that absolute devotion to the aim of creating a true effect--which is art. he is the most accomplished of narrators. it is evident that maupassant looked upon his mankind in another spirit than those writers who make haste to submerge the difficulties of our holding-place in the universe under a flood of false and sentimental assumptions. maupassant was a true and dutiful lover of our earth. he says himself in one of his descriptive passages: "nous autres que seduit la terre . . ." it was true. the earth had for him a compelling charm. he looks upon her august and furrowed face with the fierce insight of real passion. his is the power of detecting the one immutable quality that matters in the changing aspects of nature and under the ever-shifting surface of life. to say that he could not embrace in his glance all its magnificence and all its misery is only to say that he was human. he lays claim to nothing that his matchless vision has not made his own. this creative artist has the true imagination; he never condescends to invent anything; he sets up no empty pretences. and he stoops to no littleness in his art--least of all to the miserable vanity of a catching phrase. anatole france--1904 i.--"crainquebille" the latest volume of m. anatole france purports, by the declaration of its title-page, to contain several profitable narratives. the story of crainquebille's encounter with human justice stands at the head of them; a tale of a well-bestowed charity closes the book with the touch of playful irony characteristic of the writer on whom the most distinguished amongst his literary countrymen have conferred the rank of prince of prose. never has a dignity been better borne. m. anatole france is a good prince. he knows nothing of tyranny but much of compassion. the detachment of his mind from common errors and current superstitions befits the exalted rank he holds in the commonwealth of literature. it is just to suppose that the clamour of the tribes in the forum had little to do with his elevation. their elect are of another stamp. they are such as their need of precipitate action requires. he is the elect of the senate--the senate of letters--whose conscript fathers have recognised him as _primus inter pares_; a post of pure honour and of no privilege. it is a good choice. first, because it is just, and next, because it is safe. the dignity will suffer no diminution in m. anatole france's hands. he is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a good prince should be in his public action. it is a republican dignity. and m. anatole france, with his sceptical insight into an forms of government, is a good republican. he is indulgent to the weaknesses of the people, and perceives that political institutions, whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the happiness of mankind. he perceives this truth in the serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind. he expresses his convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed princely qualities. he is a great analyst of illusions. he searches and probes their innermost recesses as if they were realities made of an eternal substance. and therein consists his humanity; this is the expression of his profound and unalterable compassion. he will flatter no tribe no section in the forum or in the market-place. his lucid thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of affection. he feels that men born in ignorance as in the house of an enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever deferred. he knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremediable littleness. he knows this well because he is an artist and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort there is a refuge from despair for minds less clear-seeing and philosophic than his own. therefore he wishes us to believe and to hope, preserving in our activity the consoling illusion of power and intelligent purpose. he is a good and politic prince. "the majesty of justice is contained entire in each sentence pronounced by the judge in the name of the sovereign people. jerome crainquebille, hawker of vegetables, became aware of the august aspect of the law as he stood indicted before the tribunal of the higher police court on a charge of insulting a constable of the force." with this exposition begins the first tale of m. anatole france's latest volume. the bust of the republic and the image of the crucified christ appear side by side above the bench occupied by the president bourriche and his two assessors; all the laws divine and human are suspended over the head of crainquebille. from the first visual impression of the accused and of the court the author passes by a characteristic and natural turn to the historical and moral significance of those two emblems of state and religion whose accord is only possible to the confused reasoning of an average man. but the reasoning of m. anatole france is never confused. his reasoning is clear and informed by a profound erudition. such is not the case of crainquebille, a street hawker, charged with insulting the constituted power of society in the person of a policeman. the charge is not true, nothing was further from his thoughts; but, amazed by the novelty of his position, he does not reflect that the cross on the wall perpetuates the memory of a sentence which for nineteen hundred years all the christian peoples have looked upon as a grave miscarriage of justice. he might well have challenged the president to pronounce any sort of sentence, if it were merely to forty-eight hours of simple imprisonment, in the name of the crucified redeemer. he might have done so. but crainquebille, who has lived pushing every day for half a century his hand-barrow loaded with vegetables through the streets of paris, has not a philosophic mind. truth to say he has nothing. he is one of the disinherited. properly speaking, he has no existence at all, or, to be strictly truthful, he had no existence till m. anatole france's philosophic mind and human sympathy have called him up from his nothingness for our pleasure, and, as the title-page of the book has it, no doubt for our profit also. therefore we behold him in the dock, a stranger to all historical, political or social considerations which can be brought to bear upon his case. he remains lost in astonishment. penetrated with respect, overwhelmed with awe, he is ready to trust the judge upon the question of his transgression. in his conscience he does not think himself culpable; but m. anatole france's philosophical mind discovers for us that he feels all the insignificance of such a thing as the conscience of a mere streethawker in the face of the symbols of the law and before the ministers of social repression. crainquebille is innocent; but already the young advocate, his defender, has half persuaded him of his guilt. on this phrase practically ends the introductory chapter of the story which, as the author's dedication states, has inspired an admirable draughtsman and a skilful dramatist, each in his art, to a vision of tragic grandeur. and this opening chapter without a name--consisting of two and a half pages, some four hundred words at most--is a masterpiece of insight and simplicity, resumed in m. anatole france's distinction of thought and in his princely command of words. it is followed by six more short chapters, concise and full, delicate and complete like the petals of a flower, presenting to us the adventure of crainquebille--crainquebille before the justice--an apology for the president of the tribunal--of the submission of crainquebille to the laws of the republic--of his attitude before the public opinion, and so on to the chapter of the last consequences. we see, created for us in his outward form and innermost perplexity, the old man degraded from his high estate of a law-abiding street-hawker and driven to insult, really this time, the majesty of the social order in the person of another policeconstable. it is not an act of revolt, and still less of revenge. crainquebille is too old, too resigned, too weary, too guileless to raise the black standard of insurrection. he is cold and homeless and starving. he remembers the warmth and the food of the prison. he perceives the means to get back there. since he has been locked up, he argues with himself, for uttering words which, as a matter of fact he did not say, he will go forth now, and to the first policeman he meets will say those very words in order to be imprisoned again. thus reasons crainquebille with simplicity and confidence. he accepts facts. nothing surprises him. but all the phenomena of social organisation and of his own life remain for him mysterious to the end. the description of the policeman in his short cape and hood, who stands quite still, under the light of a street lamp at the edge of the pavement shining with the wet of a rainy autumn evening along the whole extent of a long and deserted thoroughfare, is a perfect piece of imaginative precision. from under the edge of the hood his eyes look upon crainquebille, who has just uttered in an uncertain voice the sacramental, insulting phrase of the popular slang--_mort aux vaches_! they look upon him shining in the deep shadow of the hood with an expression of sadness, vigilance, and contempt. he does not move. crainquebille, in a feeble and hesitating voice, repeats once more the insulting words. but this policeman is full of philosophic superiority, disdain, and indulgence. he refuses to take in charge the old and miserable vagabond who stands before him shivering and ragged in the drizzle. and the ruined crainquebille, victim of a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, appalled at this magnanimity, passes on hopelessly down the street full of shadows where the lamps gleam each in a ruddy halo of falling mist. m. anatole france can speak for the people. this prince of the senate is invested with the tribunitian power. m. anatole france is something of a socialist; and in that respect he seems to depart from his sceptical philosophy. but as an illustrious statesman, now no more, a great prince too, with an ironic mind and a literary gift, has sarcastically remarked in one of his public speeches: "we are all socialists now." and in the sense in which it may be said that we all in europe are christians that is true enough. to many of us socialism is merely an emotion. an emotion is much and is also less than nothing. it is the initial impulse. the real socialism of to-day is a religion. it has its dogmas. the value of the dogma does not consist in its truthfulness, and m. anatole france, who loves truth, does not love dogma. only, unlike religion, the cohesive strength of socialism lies not in its dogmas but in its ideal. it is perhaps a too materialistic ideal, and the mind of m. anatole france may not find in it either comfort or consolation. it is not to be doubted that he suspects this himself; but there is something reposeful in the finality of popular conceptions. m. anatole france, a good prince and a good republican, will succeed no doubt in being a good socialist. he will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. his art will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress. m. anatole france is humane. he is also human. he may be able to discard his philosophy; to forget that the evils are many and the remedies are few, that there is no universal panacea, that fatality is invincible, that there is an implacable menace of death in the triumph of the humanitarian idea. he may forget all that because love is stronger than truth. besides "crainquebille" this volume contains sixteen other stories and sketches. to define them it is enough to say that they are written in m. anatole france's prose. one sketch entitled "riquet" may be found incorporated in the volume of _monsieur bergeret a paris_. "putois" is a remarkable little tale, significant, humorous, amusing, and symbolic. it concerns the career of a man born in the utterance of a hasty and untruthful excuse made by a lady at a loss how to decline without offence a very pressing invitation to dinner from a very tyrannical aunt. this happens in a provincial town, and the lady says in effect: "impossible, my dear aunt. to-morrow i am expecting the gardener." and the garden she glances at is a poor garden; it is a wild garden; its extent is insignificant and its neglect seems beyond remedy. "a gardener! what for?" asks the aunt. "to work in the garden." and the poor lady is abashed at the transparence of her evasion. but the lie is told, it is believed, and she sticks to it. when the masterful old aunt inquires, "what is the man's name, my dear?" she answers brazenly, "his name is putois." "where does he live?" "oh, i don't know; anywhere. he won't give his address. one leaves a message for him here and there." "oh! i see," says the other; "he is a sort of ne'er do well, an idler, a vagabond. i advise you, my dear, to be careful how you let such a creature into your grounds; but i have a large garden, and when you do not want his services i shall find him some work to do, and see he does it too. tell your putois to come and see me." and thereupon putois is born; he stalks abroad, invisible, upon his career of vagabondage and crime, stealing melons from gardens and tea-spoons from pantries, indulging his licentious proclivities; becoming the talk of the town and of the countryside; seen simultaneously in far-distant places; pursued by gendarmes, whose brigadier assures the uneasy householders that he "knows that scamp very well, and won't be long in laying his hands upon him." a detailed description of his person collected from the information furnished by various people appears in the columns of a local newspaper. putois lives in his strength and malevolence. he lives after the manner of legendary heroes, of the gods of olympus. he is the creation of the popular mind. there comes a time when even the innocent originator of that mysterious and potent evil-doer is induced to believe for a moment that he may have a real and tangible presence. all this is told with the wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to m. anatole france's readers and admirers. for it is difficult to read m. anatole france without admiring him. he has the princely gift of arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our reason has its place by the side of our enthusiasm. he is an artist. as an artist he awakens emotion. the quality of his art remains, as an inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his thought compel our intellectual admiration. in this volume the trifle called "the military manoeuvres at montil," apart from its far-reaching irony, embodies incidentally the very spirit of automobilism. somehow or other, how you cannot tell, the flight over the country in a motor-car, its sensations, its fatigue, its vast topographical range, its incidents down to the bursting of a tyre, are brought home to you with all the force of high imaginative perception. it would be out of place to analyse here the means by which the true impression is conveyed so that the absurd rushing about of general decuir, in a 30-horse-power car, in search of his cavalry brigade, becomes to you a more real experience than any day-and-night run you may ever have taken yourself. suffice it to say that m. anatole france had thought the thing worth doing and that it becomes, in virtue of his art, a distinct achievement. and there are other sketches in this book, more or less slight, but all worthy of regard--the childhood's recollections of professor bergeret and his sister zoe; the dialogue of the two upright judges and the conversation of their horses; the dream of m. jean marteau, aimless, extravagant, apocalyptic, and of all the dreams one ever dreamt, the most essentially dreamlike. the vision of m. anatole france, the prince of prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. contemplating the exactness of his images and the justice of his judgment, the freedom of his fancy and the fidelity of his purpose, one becomes aware of the futility of literary watchwords and the vanity of all the schools of fiction. not that m. anatole france is a wild and untrammelled genius. he is not that. issued legitimately from the past, he is mindful of his high descent. he has a critical temperament joined to creative power. he surveys his vast domain in a spirit of princely moderation that knows nothing of excesses but much of restraint. ii.--"l'ile des pingouins" m. anatole france, historian and adventurer, has given us many profitable histories of saints and sinners, of roman procurators and of officials of the third republic, of _grandes dames_ and of dames not so very grand, of ornate latinists and of inarticulate street hawkers, of priests and generals--in fact, the history of all humanity as it appears to his penetrating eye, serving a mind marvellously incisive in its scepticism, and a heart that, of all contemporary hearts gifted with a voice, contains the greatest treasure of charitable irony. as to m. anatole france's adventures, these are well-known. they lie open to this prodigal world in the four volumes of the _vie litteraire_, describing the adventures of a choice soul amongst masterpieces. for such is the romantic view m. anatole france takes of the life of a literary critic. history and adventure, then, seem to be the chosen fields for the magnificent evolutions of m. anatole france's prose; but no material limits can stand in the way of a genius. the latest book from his pen--which may be called golden, as the lips of an eloquent saint once upon a time were acclaimed golden by the faithful--this latest book is, up to a certain point, a book of travel. i would not mislead a public whose confidence i court. the book is not a record of globe-trotting. i regret it. it would have been a joy to watch m. anatole france pouring the clear elixir compounded of his pyrrhonic philosophy, his benedictine erudition, his gentle wit and most humane irony into such an unpromising and opaque vessel. he would have attempted it in a spirit of benevolence towards his fellow men and of compassion for that life of the earth which is but a vain and transitory illusion. m. anatole france is a great magician, yet there seem to be tasks which he dare not face. for he is also a sage. it is a book of ocean travel--not, however, as understood by herr ballin of hamburg, the machiavel of the atlantic. it is a book of exploration and discovery--not, however, as conceived by an enterprising journal and a shrewdly philanthropic king of the nineteenth century. it is nothing so recent as that. it dates much further back; long, long before the dark age when krupp of essen wrought at his steel plates and a german emperor condescendingly suggested the last improvements in ships' diningtables. the best idea of the inconceivable antiquity of that enterprise i can give you is by stating the nature of the explorer's ship. it was a trough of stone, a vessel of hollowed granite. the explorer was st. mael, a saint of armorica. i had never heard of him before, but i believe now in his arduous existence with a faith which is a tribute to m. anatole france's pious earnestness and delicate irony. st. mael existed. it is distinctly stated of him that his life was a progress in virtue. thus it seems that there may be saints that are not progressively virtuous. st. mael was not of that kind. he was industrious. he evangelised the heathen. he erected two hundred and eighteen chapels and seventy-four abbeys. indefatigable navigator of the faith, he drifted casually in the miraculous trough of stone from coast to coast and from island to island along the northern seas. at the age of eighty-four his high stature was bowed by his long labours, but his sinewy arms preserved their vigour and his rude eloquence had lost nothing of its force. a nautical devil tempting him by the worldly suggestion of fitting out his desultory, miraculous trough with mast, sail, and rudder for swifter progression (the idea of haste has sprung from the pride of satan), the simple old saint lent his ear to the subtle arguments of the progressive enemy of mankind. the venerable st. mael fell away from grace by not perceiving at once that a gift of heaven cannot be improved by the contrivances of human ingenuity. his punishment was adequate. a terrific tempest snatched the rigged ship of stone in its whirlwinds, and, to be brief, the dazed st. mael was stranded violently on the island of penguins. the saint wandered away from the shore. it was a flat, round island whence rose in the centre a conical mountain capped with clouds. the rain was falling incessantly--a gentle, soft rain which caused the simple saint to exclaim in great delight: "this is the island of tears, the island of contrition!" meantime the inhabitants had flocked in their tens of thousands to an amphitheatre of rocks; they were penguins; but the holy man, rendered deaf and purblind by his years, mistook excusably the multitude of silly, erect, and self-important birds for a human crowd. at once he began to preach to them the doctrine of salvation. having finished his discourse he lost no time in administering to his interesting congregation the sacrament of baptism. if you are at all a theologian you will see that it was no mean adventure to happen to a well-meaning and zealous saint. pray reflect on the magnitude of the issues! it is easy to believe what m. anatole france says, that, when the baptism of the penguins became known in paradise, it caused there neither joy nor sorrow, but a profound sensation. m. anatole france is no mean theologian himself. he reports with great casuistical erudition the debates in the saintly council assembled in heaven for the consideration of an event so disturbing to the economy of religious mysteries. ultimately the baptised penguins had to be turned into human beings; and together with the privilege of sublime hopes these innocent birds received the curse of original sin, with the labours, the miseries, the passions, and the weaknesses attached to the fallen condition of humanity. at this point m. anatole france is again an historian. from being the hakluyt of a saintly adventurer he turns (but more concisely) into the gibbon of imperial penguins. tracing the development of their civilisation, the absurdity of their desires, the pathos of their folly and the ridiculous littleness of their quarrels, his golden pen lightens by relevant but unpuritanical anecdotes the austerity of a work devoted to a subject so grave as the polity of penguins. it is a very admirable treatment, and i hasten to congratulate all men of receptive mind on the feast of wisdom which is theirs for the mere plucking of a book from a shelf. turgenev {2}--1917 dear edward, i am glad to hear that you are about to publish a study of turgenev, that fortunate artist who has found so much in life for us and no doubt for himself, with the exception of bare justice. perhaps that will come to him, too, in time. your study may help the consummation. for his luck persists after his death. what greater luck an artist like turgenev could wish for than to find in the english-speaking world a translator who has missed none of the most delicate, most simple beauties of his work, and a critic who has known how to analyse and point out its high qualities with perfect sympathy and insight. after twenty odd years of friendship (and my first literary friendship too) i may well permit myself to make that statement, while thinking of your wonderful prefaces as they appeared from time to time in the volumes of turgenev's complete edition, the last of which came into the light of public indifference in the ninety-ninth year of the nineteenth century. with that year one may say, with some justice, that the age of turgenev had come to an end too; yet work so simple and human, so independent of the transitory formulas and theories of art, belongs as you point out in the preface to _smoke_ "to all time." turgenev's creative activity covers about thirty years. since it came to an end the social and political events in russia have moved at an accelerated pace, but the deep origins of them, in the moral and intellectual unrest of the souls, are recorded in the whole body of his work with the unerring lucidity of a great national writer. the first stirrings, the first gleams of the great forces can be seen almost in every page of the novels, of the short stories and of _a sportsman's sketches_--those marvellous landscapes peopled by unforgettable figures. those will never grow old. fashions in monsters do change, but the truth of humanity goes on for ever, unchangeable and inexhaustible in the variety of its disclosures. whether turgenev's art, which has captured it with such mastery and such gentleness, is for "all time" it is hard to say. since, as you say yourself, he brings all his problems and characters to the test of love, we may hope that it will endure at least till the infinite emotions of love are replaced by the exact simplicity of perfected eugenics. but even by then, i think, women would not have changed much; and the women of turgenev who understood them so tenderly, so reverently and so passionately--they, at least, are certainly for all time. women are, one may say, the foundation of his art. they are russian of course. never was a writer so profoundly, so whole-souledly national. but for non-russian readers, turgenev's russia is but a canvas on which the incomparable artist of humanity lays his colours and his forms in the great light and the free air of the world. had he invented them all and also every stick and stone, brook and hill and field in which they move, his personages would have been just as true and as poignant in their perplexed lives. they are his own and also universal. any one can accept them with no more question than one accepts the italians of shakespeare. in the larger, non-russian view, what should make turgenev sympathetic and welcome to the english-speaking world, is his essential humanity. all his creations, fortunate and unfortunate, oppressed and oppressors, are human beings, not strange beasts in a menagerie or damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions. they are human beings, fit to live, fit to suffer, fit to struggle, fit to win, fit to lose, in the endless and inspiring game of pursuing from day to day the ever-receding future. i began by calling him lucky, and he was, in a sense. but one ends by having some doubts. to be so great without the slightest parade and so fine without any tricks of "cleverness" must be fatal to any man's influence with his contemporaries. frankly, i don't want to appear as qualified to judge of things russian. it wouldn't be true. i know nothing of them. but i am aware of a few general truths, such as, for instance, that no man, whatever may be the loftiness of his character, the purity of his motives and the peace of his conscience--no man, i say, likes to be beaten with sticks during the greater part of his existence. from what one knows of his history it appears clearly that in russia almost any stick was good enough to beat turgenev with in his latter years. when he died the characteristically chicken-hearted autocracy hastened to stuff his mortal envelope into the tomb it refused to honour, while the sensitive revolutionists went on for a time flinging after his shade those jeers and curses from which that impartial lover of _all_ his countrymen had suffered so much in his lifetime. for he, too, was sensitive. every page of his writing bears its testimony to the fatal absence of callousness in the man. and now he suffers a little from other things. in truth it is not the convulsed terror-haunted dostoievski but the serene turgenev who is under a curse. for only think! every gift has been heaped on his cradle: absolute sanity and the deepest sensibility, the clearest vision and the quickest responsiveness, penetrating insight and unfailing generosity of judgment, an exquisite perception of the visible world and an unerring instinct for the significant, for the essential in the life of men and women, the clearest mind, the warmest heart, the largest sympathy--and all that in perfect measure. there's enough there to ruin the prospects of any writer. for you know very well, my dear edward, that if you had antinous himself in a booth of the world's fair, and killed yourself in protesting that his soul was as perfect as his body, you wouldn't get one per cent. of the crowd struggling next door for a sight of the doubleheaded nightingale or of some weak-kneed giant grinning through a horse collar. j. c. stephen crane--a note without dates--1919 my acquaintance with stephen crane was brought about by mr. pawling, partner in the publishing firm of mr. william heinemann. one day mr. pawling said to me: "stephen crane has arrived in england. i asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names. one of them was yours." i had then just been reading, like the rest of the world, crane's _red badge of courage_. the subject of that story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier's emotions. that individual (he remains nameless throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition i had been even more interested in the personality of the writer. the picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of admiration. apparently stephen crane had received a favourable impression from the reading of the _nigger of the narcissus_, a book of mine which had also been published lately. i was truly pleased to hear this. on my next visit to town we met at a lunch. i saw a young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some purpose. he had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within life's appearances and forms, the very spirit of life's truth. his ignorance of the world at large--he had seen very little of it--did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men. his manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly americans, had, i believe, a jarring effect. but not on me. whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging. he knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand. then his gift came out--and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language. his impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface. in his writing he was very sure of his effects. i don't think he was ever in doubt about what he could do. yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement. this achievement was curtailed by his early death. it was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature. i think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write. let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation. as to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision? perhaps he did not lose a great deal. the recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly. the worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from mr. w. henley in the _new review_ and later, towards the end of his life, from the late mr. william blackwood in his magazine. for the rest i must say that during his sojourn in england he had the misfortune to be, as the french say, _mal entoure_. he was beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature. some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now. i don't think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever i stayed with him in either of his english homes. my wife and i like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the park at brede. born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman. he never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse. he had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog. i saw stephen crane a few days after his arrival in london. i saw him for the last time on his last day in england. it was in dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea. he had been very ill and mrs. crane was taking him to some place in germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes. the last words he breathed out to me were: "i am tired. give my love to your wife and child." when i stopped at the door for another look i saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky. those who have read his little tale, "horses," and the story, "the open boat," in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea. and his passage on this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without sunshine. tales of the sea--1898 it is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that marryat is largely human. he is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own temperament. to his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage. his novels are not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that make up his record of naval service. to the artist his work is interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic nature. it is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young. there is an air of fable about it. its loss would be irreparable, like the curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical document. it is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition. to this writer of the sea the sea was not an element. it was a stage, where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as the world had never seen before. the greatness of that achievement cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal. history preserves the skeleton of facts and, here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in marryat's novels that we find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining monument of memories. marryat is really a writer of the service. what sets him apart is his fidelity. his pen serves his country as well as did his professional skill and his renowned courage. his figures move about between water and sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the service. his novels, like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably. the loves and the hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices. his women, from the beautiful agnes to the witch-like mother of lieutenant vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors' wives, like the shadows of what has never been. his silvas, his ribieras, his shriftens, his delmars remind us of people we have heard of somewhere, many times, without ever believing in their existence. his morality is honourable and conventional. there is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in the midst of carnage. his naiveties are perpetrated in a lurid light. there is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with memorable eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in the drawing. they do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to the service. and yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give. his adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. his greatness is undeniable. it is undeniable. to a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is marryat's navy still. he has created a priceless legend. if he be not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that service on which the life of his country depends. the tradition of the great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the future. he loved his country first, the service next, the sea perhaps not at all. but the sea loved him without reserve. it gave him his professional distinction and his author's fame--a fame such as not often falls to the lot of a true artist. at the same time, on the other side of the atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct. he is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. for james fenimore cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential part of existence. he could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception alone. his fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea. but he loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding. in his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes. his descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. they embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea. he knows the men and he knows the sea. his method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine. the truth is within him. the road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that--only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. he has the knowledge of simple hearts. long tom coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type. it is hard to believe that manual and borroughcliffe, mr. marble of marble-head, captain tuck of the packet-ship _montauk_, or daggett, the tenacious commander of the _sea lion_ of martha's vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly forgotten. his sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine--and as perfectly unaffected--as is his art. in certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision. he wrote before the great american language was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time. if he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely england has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense. the interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment. perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career. through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation. life is life, and art is art--and truth is hard to find in either. yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other--to which he had surrendered--have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of laborious years. he has never regretted his surrender. an observer in malaya {3}--1898 in his new volume, mr. hugh clifford, at the beginning of the sketch entitled "at the heels of the white man," expresses his anxiety as to the state of england's account in the day-book of the recording angel "for the good and the bad we have done--both with the most excellent intentions." the intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though, of course, every nation's conquests are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the recording angel, looking compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to enter into the eternal book the facts of a struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth--in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation. and, also, love will count for much. if the opinion of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, mr. hugh clifford's anxiety about his country's record is needless. to the malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of his race. and of all the nations conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, england alone sends out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as mr. hugh clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as "the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent"--and where (i would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes. all these studies are on a high level of interest, though not all on the same level. the descriptive chapters, results of personal observation, seem to me the most interesting. and, indeed, in a book of this kind it is the author's personality which awakens the greatest interest; it shapes itself before one in the ring of sentences, it is seen between the lines--like the progress of a traveller in the jungle that may be traced by the sound of the _parang_ chopping the swaying creepers, while the man himself is glimpsed, now and then, indistinct and passing between the trees. thus in his very vagueness of appearance, the writer seen through the leaves of his book becomes a fascinating companion in a land of fascination. it is when dealing with the aspects of nature that mr. hugh clifford is most convincing. he looks upon them lovingly, for the land is "very dear to him," and he records his cherished impressions so that the forest, the great flood, the jungle, the rapid river, and the menacing rock dwell in the memory of the reader long after the book is closed. he does not say anything, in so many words, of his affection for those who live amid the scenes he describes so well, but his humanity is large enough to pardon us if we suspect him of such a rare weakness. in his preface he expresses the regret at not having the gifts (whatever they may be) of the kailyard school, or--looking up to a very different plane--the genius of mr. barrie. he has, however, gifts of his own, and his genius has served his country and his fortunes in another direction. yet it is when attempting what he professes himself unable to do, in telling us the simple story of umat, the punkah-puller, with unaffected simplicity and half-concealed tenderness, that he comes nearest to artistic achievement. each study in this volume presents some idea, illustrated by a fact told without artifice, but with an elective sureness of knowledge. the story of tukang burok's love, related in the old man's own words, conveys the very breath of malay thought and speech. in "his little bill," the coolie, lim teng wah, facing his debtor, stands very distinct before us, an insignificant and tragic victim of fate with whom he had quarrelled to the death over a matter of seven dollars and sixty-eight cents. the story of "the schooner with a past" may be heard, from the straits eastward, with many variations. out in the pacific the schooner becomes a cutter, and the pearl-divers are replaced by the black-birds of the labour trade. but mr. hugh clifford's variation is very good. there is a passage in it--a trifle--just the diver as seen coming up from the depths, that in its dozen lines or so attains to distinct artistic value. and, scattered through the book, there are many other passages of almost equal descriptive excellence. nevertheless, to apply artistic standards to this book would be a fundamental error in appreciation. like faith, enthusiasm, or heroism, art veils part of the truth of life to make the rest appear more splendid, inspiring, or sinister. and this book is only truth, interesting and futile, truth unadorned, simple and straightforward. the resident of pahang has the devoted friendship of umat, the punkah-puller, he has an individual faculty of vision, a large sympathy, and the scrupulous consciousness of the good and evil in his hands. he may as well rest content with such gifts. one cannot expect to be, at the same time, a ruler of men and an irreproachable player on the flute. a happy wanderer--1910 converts are interesting people. most of us, if you will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road. and what did we do in our pride and our cowardice? casting fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave. the convert, the man capable of grace (i am speaking here in a secular sense), is not discreet. his pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly off the track--the touch of grace is mostly sudden--and facing about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on death itself. some converts have, indeed, earned immortality by their exquisite indiscretion. the most illustrious example of a convert, that flower of chivalry, don quixote de la mancha, remains for all the world the only genuine immortal hidalgo. the delectable knight of spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission. forthwith he was beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the barber and the priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social order. i do not know if it has occurred to anybody yet to shut up mr. luffmann in a wooden cage. {4} i do not raise the point because i wish him any harm. quite the contrary. i am a humane person. let him take it as the highest praise--but i must say that he richly deserves that sort of attention. on the other hand i would not have him unduly puffed up with the pride of the exalted association. the grave wisdom, the admirable amenity, the serene grace of the secular patron-saint of all mortals converted to noble visions are not his. mr. luffmann has no mission. he is no knight sublimely errant. but he is an excellent vagabond. he is full of merit. that peripatetic guide, philosopher and friend of all nations, mr. roosevelt, would promptly excommunicate him with a big stick. the truth is that the ex-autocrat of all the states does not like rebels against the sullen order of our universe. make the best of it or perish--he cries. a sane lineal successor of the barber and the priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incomparable sancho panza (another great governor), that distinguished litterateur has no mercy for dreamers. and our author happens to be a man of (you may trace them in his books) some rather fine reveries. every convert begins by being a rebel, and i do not see myself how any mercy can possibly be extended to mr. luffmann. he is a convert from the creed of strenuous life. for this renegade the body is of little account; to him work appears criminal when it suppresses the demands of the inner life; while he was young he did grind virtuously at the sacred handle, and now, he says, he has fallen into disgrace with some people because he believes no longer in toil without end. certain respectable folk hate him--so he says--because he dares to think that "poetry, beauty, and the broad face of the world are the best things to be in love with." he confesses to loving spain on the ground that she is "the land of to-morrow, and holds the gospel of never-mind." the universal striving to push ahead he considers mere vulgar folly. didn't i tell you he was a fit subject for the cage? it is a relief (we are all humane, are we not?) to discover that this desperate character is not altogether an outcast. little girls seem to like him. one of them, after listening to some of his tales, remarked to her mother, "wouldn't it be lovely if what he says were true!" here you have woman! the charming creatures will neither strain at a camel nor swallow a gnat. not publicly. these operations, without which the world they have such a large share in could not go on for ten minutes, are left to us--men. and then we are chided for being coarse. this is a refined objection but does not seem fair. another little girl--or perhaps the same little girl--wrote to him in cordova, "i hope poste-restante is a nice place, and that you are very comfortable." woman again! i have in my time told some stories which are (i hate false modesty) both true and lovely. yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms. and why? simply because i am not enough of a vagabond. the dear despots of the fireside have a weakness for lawless characters. this is amiable, but does not seem rational. being quixotic, mr. luffmann is no impressionist. he is far too earnest in his heart, and not half sufficiently precise in his style to be that. but he is an excellent narrator. more than any vagabond i have ever met, he knows what he is about. there is not one of his quiet days which is dull. you will find in them a love-story not made up, the _coup-de-foudre_, the lightning-stroke of spanish love; and you will marvel how a spell so sudden and vehement can be at the same time so tragically delicate. you will find there landladies devoured with jealousy, astute housekeepers, delightful boys, wise peasants, touchy shopkeepers, all the _cosas de espana_--and, in addition, the pale girl rosario. i recommend that pathetic and silent victim of fate to your benevolent compassion. you will find in his pages the humours of starving workers of the soil, the vision among the mountains of an exulting mad spirit in a mighty body, and many other visions worthy of attention. and they are exact visions, for this idealist is no visionary. he is in sympathy with suffering mankind, and has a grasp on real human affairs. i mean the great and pitiful affairs concerned with bread, love, and the obscure, unexpressed needs which drive great crowds to prayer in the holy places of the earth. but i like his conception of what a "quiet" life is like! his quiet days require no fewer than forty-two of the forty-nine provinces of spain to take their ease in. for his unquiet days, i presume, the seven--or is it nine?--crystal spheres of alexandrian cosmogony would afford, but a wretchedly straitened space. a most unconventional thing is his notion of quietness. one would take it as a joke; only that, perchance, to the author of _quiet days in spain_ all days may seem quiet, because, a courageous convert, he is now at peace with himself. how better can we take leave of this interesting vagabond than with the road salutation of passing wayfarers: "and on you be peace! . . . you have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. there's nothing like giving up one's life to an unselfish passion. let the rich and the powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable progress. the part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its illusions. no great passion can be barren. may a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty solitude of your renunciation!" the life beyond--1910 you have no doubt noticed that certain books produce a sort of physical effect on one--mostly an audible effect. i am not alluding here to blue books or to books of statistics. the effect of these is simply exasperating and no more. no! the books i have in mind are just the common books of commerce you and i read when we have five minutes to spare, the usual hired books published by ordinary publishers, printed by ordinary printers, and censored (when they happen to be novels) by the usual circulating libraries, the guardians of our firesides, whose names are household words within the four seas. to see the fair and the brave of this free country surrendering themselves with unbounded trust to the direction of the circulating libraries is very touching. it is even, in a sense, a beautiful spectacle, because, as you know, humility is a rare and fragrant virtue; and what can be more humble than to surrender your morals and your intellect to the judgment of one of your tradesmen? i suppose that there are some very perfect people who allow the army and navy stores to censor their diet. so much merit, however, i imagine, is not frequently met with here below. the flesh, alas! is weak, and--from a certain point of view--so important! a superficial person might be rendered miserable by the simple question: what would become of us if the circulating libraries ceased to exist? it is a horrid and almost indelicate supposition, but let us be brave and face the truth. on this earth of ours nothing lasts. _tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse_. imagine the utter wreck overtaking the morals of our beautiful country-houses should the circulating libraries suddenly die! but pray do not shudder. there is no occasion. their spirit shall survive. i declare this from inward conviction, and also from scientific information received lately. for observe: the circulating libraries are human institutions. i beg you to follow me closely. they are human institutions, and being human, they are not animal, and, therefore, they are spiritual. thus, any man with enough money to take a shop, stock his shelves, and pay for advertisements shall be able to evoke the pure and censorious spectre of the circulating libraries whenever his own commercial spirit moves him. for, and this is the information alluded to above, science, having in its infinite wanderings run up against various wonders and mysteries, is apparently willing now to allow a spiritual quality to man and, i conclude, to all his works as well. i do not know exactly what this "science" may be; and i do not think that anybody else knows; but that is the information stated shortly. it is contained in a book reposing under my thoughtful eyes. {5} i know it is not a censored book, because i can see for myself that it is not a novel. the author, on his side, warns me that it is not philosophy, that it is not metaphysics, that it is not natural science. after this comprehensive warning, the definition of the book becomes, you will admit, a pretty hard nut to crack. but meantime let us return for a moment to my opening remark about the physical effect of some common, hired books. a few of them (not necessarily books of verse) are melodious; the music some others make for you as you read has the disagreeable emphasis of a barrel-organ; the tinkling-cymbals book (it was not written by a humorist) i only met once. but there is infinite variety in the noises books do make. i have now on my shelves a book apparently of the most valuable kind which, before i have read half-a-dozen lines, begins to make a noise like a buzz-saw. i am inconsolable; i shall never, i fear, discover what it is all about, for the buzzing covers the words, and at every try i am absolutely forced to give it up ere the end of the page is reached. the book, however, which i have found so difficult to define, is by no means noisy. as a mere piece of writing it may be described as being breathless itself and taking the reader's breath away, not by the magnitude of its message but by a sort of anxious volubility in the delivery. the constantly elusive argument and the illustrative quotations go on without a single reflective pause. for this reason alone the reading of that work is a fatiguing process. the author himself (i use his own words) "suspects" that what he has written "may be theology after all." it may be. it is not my place either to allay or to confirm the author's suspicion of his own work. but i will state its main thesis: "that science regarded in the gross dictates the spirituality of man and strongly implies a spiritual destiny for individual human beings." this means: existence after death--that is, immortality. to find out its value you must go to the book. but i will observe here that an immortality liable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible incantations of mr. stead or professor crookes is scarcely worth having. can you imagine anything more squalid than an immortality at the beck and call of eusapia palladino? that woman lives on the top floor of a neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer, and die--she gets them to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a curtain. this is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one's faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one would long to do. and to believe that these manifestations, which the author evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith; to believe that the new psychology has, only the other day, discovered man to be a "spiritual mystery," is really carrying humility towards that universal provider, science, too far. * * * * * we moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself. it is not for nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the altar, murmurs, "why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?" since the day of creation two veiled figures, doubt and melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world. what humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy on the day of judgment. and, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may well be content to repeat the invocation of sar peladan. sar peladan was an occultist, a seer, a modern magician. he believed in astrology, in the spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously and deliciously absurd. incidentally he wrote some incomprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, "a magician is nothing else but a great harmonist." here are some eight lines of the magnificent invocation. let me, however, warn you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation is execrable. i am sorry to say i am no magician. "o nature, indulgent mother, forgive! open your arms to the son, prodigal and weary. "i have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and i have been wounded by the mystery. . . . oedipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, i come back to you repentant, reconciled, o gentle deceiver!" the ascending effort--1910 much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry. meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have gone on singing in a sweet strain. how they dare do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation. not yet. we are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan. as somebody--perhaps a publisher--said lately: "poetry is of no account nowa-days." but it is not totally neglected. those persons with gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind. except that tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that erasmus darwin wrote _the loves of the plants_ and a scoffer _the loves of the triangles_, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science. what tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity? all i can remember on the spur of the moment is mr. arthur symons' line about arc lamps: "hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit." commerce and manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of science. poetry does not play its part. behold john keats, skilful with the surgeon's knife; but when he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table. here i am reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose. mr. h. g. wells, who, as far as i know, has never written a line of verse, was inspired a few years ago to write a short story, _under the knife_. out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the judgment day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: "there shall be no more pain!" i advise you to look up that story, so human and so intimate, because mr. wells, the writer of prose whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are. his poetic imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, i am not afraid to say. but, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet--were he born without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper. * * * * * the book {6} which in the course of the last few days i have opened and shut several times is not imaginative. but, on the other hand, it is not a dumb book, as some are. it has even a sort of sober and serious eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter. mr. bourne begins his _ascending effort_ with a remark by sir francis galton upon eugenics that "if the principles he was advocating were to become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion." "introduced" suggests compulsory vaccination. mr. bourne, who is not a theologian, wishes to league together not science and religion, but science and the arts. "the intoxicating power of art," he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the doctrines of science. in uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing once upon a time a part in "popularising the christian tenets." with painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science. until that day dawns, science will continue to be lame and poetry blind. he himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that "a really prudent people would be greedy of beauty," and their public authorities "as careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation." as the writer of those remarkable rustic note-books, _the bettesworth book_ and _memoirs of a surrey labourer_, the author has a claim upon our attention. but his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more. he is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by it, until he has been bewildered into awe. he knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic vitality, and is a movement of life-cells with their matchless unintellectual knowledge. but the fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love with science has never made him doubt whether it may not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage ceremony performed amid public rejoicings. many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall. this is the copernican system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name. but while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system of ptolemy. he holds it without knowing it. in the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do after reading mr. bourne's book; he writes, therefore, as if neither truths nor book existed. life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science. some day, without a doubt,--and it may be a consolation to mr. bourne to know it--fully informed critics will point out that mr. davies's poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that mr. yeats's "had i the heaven's embroidered cloths" came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days. there are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining--and this is one of them. "many a man prides himself" says mr. bourne, "on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living selection of his hereditary taste." this extract is a fair sample of the book's thought and of its style. but mr. bourne seems to forget that "persuasion" is a vain thing. the appreciation of great art comes from within. it is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of mr. bourne's purpose is undeniable. but the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes, this one seems of little dynamic value--besides being impracticable. yes, indeed. art has served religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in christianity; but the light of transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows. the censor of plays--an appreciation--1907 a couple of years ago i was moved to write a one-act play--and i lived long enough to accomplish the task. we live and learn. when the play was finished i was informed that it had to be licensed for performance. thus i learned of the existence of the censor of plays. i may say without vanity that i am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, and i was aware of being in england--in the twentieth-century england. the fact did not fit the date and the place. that was my first thought. it was, in short, an improper fact. i beg you to believe that i am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously. therefore i don't say inappropriate. i say improper--that is: something to be ashamed of. and at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact had its being. the censor of plays! his name was not in the mouths of all men. far from it. he seemed stealthy and remote. there was about that figure the scent of the far east, like the peculiar atmosphere of a mandarin's back yard, and the mustiness of the middle ages, that epoch when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience. it was a disagreeable impression. but i reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one's old possessions apart from any intrinsic value; one more object of exotic _virtu_, an oriental _potiche_, a _magot chinois_ conceived by a childish and extravagant imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf. thus i quieted my uneasy mind. its uneasiness had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play. the play was duly produced, and an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards. it ceased to exist. it was a fair and open execution. but having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium i continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong. i was not pleased, but i was content. i was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and conscientious servant--the artist. only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved--not to speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the man. i shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public. to the selfrespect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being made and i join in it with all my heart. for i have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the _magot chinois_ whom i believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers' mental aberration, that grotesque _potiche_, works! the absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions. it heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a bravo of old venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper shelf. less picturesque than the venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no countenance from the powers of the republic, it stands more malevolent, inasmuch that the bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation. this chinese monstrosity, disguised in the trousers of the western barbarian and provided by the state with the immortal mr. stiggins's plug hat and umbrella, is with us. it is an office. an office of trust. and from time to time there is found an official to fill it. he is a public man. the least prominent of public men, the most unobtrusive, the most obscure if not the most modest. but however obscure, a public man may be told the truth if only once in his life. his office flourishes in the shade; not in the rustic shade beloved of the violet but in the muddled twilight of mind, where tyranny of every sort flourishes. its holder need not have either brain or heart, no sight, no taste, no imagination, not even bowels of compassion. he needs not these things. he has power. he can kill thought, and incidentally truth, and incidentally beauty, providing they seek to live in a dramatic form. he can do it, without seeing, without understanding, without feeling anything; out of mere stupid suspicion, as an irresponsible roman caesar could kill a senator. he can do that and there is no one to say him nay. he may call his cook (moliere used to do that) from below and give her five acts to judge every morning as a matter of constant practice and still remain the unquestioned destroyer of men's honest work. he may have a glass too much. this accident has happened to persons of unimpeachable morality--to gentlemen. he may suffer from spells of imbecility like clodius. he may . . . what might he not do! i tell you he is the caesar of the dramatic world. there has been since the roman principate nothing in the way of irresponsible power to compare with the office of the censor of plays. looked at in this way it has some grandeur, something colossal in the odious and the absurd. this figure in whose power it is to suppress an intellectual conception--to kill thought (a dream for a mad brain, my masters!)--seems designed in a spirit of bitter comedy to bring out the greatness of a philistine's conceit and his moral cowardice. but this is england in the twentieth century, and one wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. it is a matter for meditation. having given it a few minutes i come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being. he must be unconscious. it is one of the qualifications for his magistracy. other qualifications are equally easy. he must have done nothing, expressed nothing, imagined nothing. he must be obscure, insignificant and mediocre--in thought, act, speech and sympathy. he must know nothing of art, of life--and of himself. for if he did he would not dare to be what he is. like that much questioned and mysterious bird, the phoenix, he sits amongst the cold ashes of his predecessor upon the altar of morality, alone of his kind in the sight of wondering generations. and i will end with a quotation reproducing not perhaps the exact words but the true spirit of a lofty conscience. "often when sitting down to write the notice of a play, especially when i felt it antagonistic to my canons of art, to my tastes or my convictions, i hesitated in the fear lest my conscientious blame might check the development of a great talent, my sincere judgment condemn a worthy mind. with the pen poised in my hand i hesitated, whispering to myself 'what if i were perchance doing my part in killing a masterpiece.'" such were the lofty scruples of m. jules lemaitre--dramatist and dramatic critic, a great citizen and a high magistrate in the republic of letters; a censor of plays exercising his august office openly in the light of day, with the authority of a european reputation. but then m. jules lemaitre is a man possessed of wisdom, of great fame, of a fine conscience--not an obscure hollow chinese monstrosity ornamented with mr. stiggins's plug hat and cotton umbrella by its anxious grandmother--the state. frankly, is it not time to knock the improper object off its shelf? it has stood too long there. hatched in pekin (i should say) by some board of respectable rites, the little caravan monster has come to us by way of moscow--i suppose. it is outlandish. it is not venerable. it does not belong here. is it not time to knock it off its dark shelf with some implement appropriate to its worth and status? with an old broom handle for instance. part ii--life autocracy and war--1905 from the firing of the first shot on the banks of the sha-ho, the fate of the great battle of the russo-japanese war hung in the balance for more than a fortnight. the famous three-day battles, for which history has reserved the recognition of special pages, sink into insignificance before the struggles in manchuria engaging half a million men on fronts of sixty miles, struggles lasting for weeks, flaming up fiercely and dying away from sheer exhaustion, to flame up again in desperate persistence, and end--as we have seen them end more than once--not from the victor obtaining a crushing advantage, but through the mortal weariness of the combatants. we have seen these things, though we have seen them only in the cold, silent, colourless print of books and newspapers. in stigmatising the printed word as cold, silent and colourless, i have no intention of putting a slight upon the fidelity and the talents of men who have provided us with words to read about the battles in manchuria. i only wished to suggest that in the nature of things, the war in the far east has been made known to us, so far, in a grey reflection of its terrible and monotonous phases of pain, death, sickness; a reflection seen in the perspective of thousands of miles, in the dim atmosphere of official reticence, through the veil of inadequate words. inadequate, i say, because what had to be reproduced is beyond the common experience of war, and our imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a slumbering faculty, notwithstanding the din of humanitarian talk and the real progress of humanitarian ideas. direct vision of the fact, or the stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep; and even there, as against the testimony of the senses and the stirring up of emotion, that saving callousness which reconciles us to the conditions of our existence, will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal necessity, or in the enthusiasm of a purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering. in this age of knowledge our sympathetic imagination, to which alone we can look for the ultimate triumph of concord and justice, remains strangely impervious to information, however correctly and even picturesquely conveyed. as to the vaunted eloquence of a serried array of figures, it has all the futility of precision without force. it is the exploded superstition of enthusiastic statisticians. an over-worked horse falling in front of our windows, a man writhing under a cart-wheel in the streets awaken more genuine emotion, more horror, pity, and indignation than the stream of reports, appalling in their monotony, of tens of thousands of decaying bodies tainting the air of the manchurian plains, of other tens of thousands of maimed bodies groaning in ditches, crawling on the frozen ground, filling the field hospitals; of the hundreds of thousands of survivors no less pathetic and even more tragic in being left alive by fate to the wretched exhaustion of their pitiful toil. an early victorian, or perhaps a pre-victorian, sentimentalist, looking out of an upstairs window, i believe, at a street--perhaps fleet street itself--full of people, is reported, by an admiring friend, to have wept for joy at seeing so much life. these arcadian tears, this facile emotion worthy of the golden age, comes to us from the past, with solemn approval, after the close of the napoleonic wars and before the series of sanguinary surprises held in reserve by the nineteenth century for our hopeful grandfathers. we may well envy them their optimism of which this anecdote of an amiable wit and sentimentalist presents an extreme instance, but still, a true instance, and worthy of regard in the spontaneous testimony to that trust in the life of the earth, triumphant at last in the felicity of her children. moreover, the psychology of individuals, even in the most extreme instances, reflects the general effect of the fears and hopes of its time. wept for joy! i should think that now, after eighty years, the emotion would be of a sterner sort. one could not imagine anybody shedding tears of joy at the sight of much life in a street, unless, perhaps, he were an enthusiastic officer of a general staff or a popular politician, with a career yet to make. and hardly even that. in the case of the first tears would be unprofessional, and a stern repression of all signs of joy at the provision of so much food for powder more in accord with the rules of prudence; the joy of the second would be checked before it found issue in weeping by anxious doubts as to the soundness of these electors' views upon the question of the hour, and the fear of missing the consensus of their votes. no! it seems that such a tender joy would be misplaced now as much as ever during the last hundred years, to go no further back. the end of the eighteenth century was, too, a time of optimism and of dismal mediocrity in which the french revolution exploded like a bombshell. in its lurid blaze the insufficiency of europe, the inferiority of minds, of military and administrative systems, stood exposed with pitiless vividness. and there is but little courage in saying at this time of the day that the glorified french revolution itself, except for its destructive force, was in essentials a mediocre phenomenon. the parentage of that great social and political upheaval was intellectual, the idea was elevated; but it is the bitter fate of any idea to lose its royal form and power, to lose its "virtue" the moment it descends from its solitary throne to work its will among the people. it is a king whose destiny is never to know the obedience of his subjects except at the cost of degradation. the degradation of the ideas of freedom and justice at the root of the french revolution is made manifest in the person of its heir; a personality without law or faith, whom it has been the fashion to represent as an eagle, but who was, in truth, more like a sort of vulture preying upon the body of a europe which did, indeed, for some dozen of years, very much resemble a corpse. the subtle and manifold influence for evil of the napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice, cannot well be exaggerated. the nineteenth century began with wars which were the issue of a corrupted revolution. it may be said that the twentieth begins with a war which is like the explosive ferment of a moral grave, whence may yet emerge a new political organism to take the place of a gigantic and dreaded phantom. for a hundred years the ghost of russian might, overshadowing with its fantastic bulk the councils of central and western europe, sat upon the gravestone of autocracy, cutting off from air, from light, from all knowledge of themselves and of the world, the buried millions of russian people. not the most determined cockney sentimentalist could have had the heart to weep for joy at the thought of its teeming numbers! and yet they were living, they are alive yet, since, through the mist of print, we have seen their blood freezing crimson upon the snow of the squares and streets of st. petersburg; since their generations born in the grave are yet alive enough to fill the ditches and cover the fields of manchuria with their torn limbs; to send up from the frozen ground of battlefields a chorus of groans calling for vengeance from heaven; to kill and retreat, or kill and advance, without intermission or rest for twenty hours, for fifty hours, for whole weeks of fatigue, hunger, cold, and murder--till their ghastly labour, worthy of a place amongst the punishments of dante's inferno, passing through the stages of courage, of fury, of hopelessness, sinks into the night of crazy despair. it seems that in both armies many men are driven beyond the bounds of sanity by the stress of moral and physical misery. great numbers of soldiers and regimental officers go mad as if by way of protest against the peculiar sanity of a state of war: mostly among the russians, of course. the japanese have in their favour the tonic effect of success; and the innate gentleness of their character stands them in good stead. but the japanese grand army has yet another advantage in this nerve-destroying contest, which for endless, arduous toil of killing surpasses all the wars of history. it has a base for its operations; a base of a nature beyond the concern of the many books written upon the socalled art of war, which, considered by itself, purely as an exercise of human ingenuity, is at best only a thing of well-worn, simple artifices. the japanese army has for its base a reasoned conviction; it has behind it the profound belief in the right of a logical necessity to be appeased at the cost of so much blood and treasure. and in that belief, whether well or ill founded, that army stands on the high ground of conscious assent, shouldering deliberately the burden of a long-tried faithfulness. the other people (since each people is an army nowadays), torn out from a miserable quietude resembling death itself, hurled across space, amazed, without starting-point of its own or knowledge of the aim, can feel nothing but a horror-stricken consciousness of having mysteriously become the plaything of a black and merciless fate. the profound, the instructive nature of this war is resumed by the memorable difference in the spiritual state of the two armies; the one forlorn and dazed on being driven out from an abyss of mental darkness into the red light of a conflagration, the other with a full knowledge of its past and its future, "finding itself" as it were at every step of the trying war before the eyes of an astonished world. the greatness of the lesson has been dwarfed for most of us by an often half-conscious prejudice of race-difference. the west having managed to lodge its hasty foot on the neck of the east, is prone to forget that it is from the east that the wonders of patience and wisdom have come to a world of men who set the value of life in the power to act rather than in the faculty of meditation. it has been dwarfed by this, and it has been obscured by a cloud of considerations with whose shaping wisdom and meditation had little or nothing to do; by the weary platitudes on the military situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of hannibal and scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical record--since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. all this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as this--the time of a great war. more legitimate in view of the situation created in europe are the speculations as to the course of events after the war. more legitimate, but hardly more wise than the irresponsible talk of strategy that never changes, and of terms of peace that do not matter. and above it all--unaccountably persistent--the decrepit, old, hundred years old, spectre of russia's might still faces europe from across the teeming graves of russian people. this dreaded and strange apparition, bristling with bayonets, armed with chains, hung over with holy images; that something not of this world, partaking of a ravenous ghoul, of a blind djinn grown up from a cloud, and of the old man of the sea, still faces us with its old stupidity, with its strange mystical arrogance, stamping its shadowy feet upon the gravestone of autocracy already cracked beyond repair by the torpedoes of togo and the guns of oyama, already heaving in the blood-soaked ground with the first stirrings of a resurrection. never before had the western world the opportunity to look so deep into the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even believing itself to be, the arbiter of europe, from the benighted, starved souls of its people. this is the real object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. and this war's true mission, disengaged from the economic origins of that contest, from doors open or shut, from the fields of korea for russian wheat or japanese rice, from the ownership of ice-free ports and the command of the waters of the east--its true mission was to lay a ghost. it has accomplished it. whether kuropatkin was incapable or unlucky, whether or not russia issuing next year, or the year after next, from behind a rampart of piled-up corpses will win or lose a fresh campaign, are minor considerations. the task of japan is done, the mission accomplished; the ghost of russia's might is laid. only europe, accustomed so long to the presence of that portent, seems unable to comprehend that, as in the fables of our childhood, the twelve strokes of the hour have rung, the cock has crowed, the apparition has vanished--never to haunt again this world which has been used to gaze at it with vague dread and many misgivings. it was a fascination. and the hallucination still lasts as inexplicable in its persistence as in its duration. it seems so unaccountable, that the doubt arises as to the sincerity of all that talk as to what russia will or will not do, whether it will raise or not another army, whether it will bury the japanese in manchuria under seventy millions of sacrificed peasants' caps (as her press boasted a little more than a year ago) or give up to japan that jewel of her crown, saghalien, together with some other things; whether, perchance, as an interesting alternative, it will make peace on the amur in order to make war beyond the oxus. all these speculations (with many others) have appeared gravely in print; and if they have been gravely considered by only one reader out of each hundred, there must be something subtly noxious to the human brain in the composition of newspaper ink; or else it is that the large page, the columns of words, the leaded headings, exalt the mind into a state of feverish credulity. the printed page of the press makes a sort of still uproar, taking from men both the power to reflect and the faculty of genuine feeling; leaving them only the artificially created need of having something exciting to talk about. the truth is that the russia of our fathers, of our childhood, of our middle-age; the testamentary russia of peter the great--who imagined that all the nations were delivered into the hand of tsardom--can do nothing. it can do nothing because it does not exist. it has vanished for ever at last, and as yet there is no new russia to take the place of that illomened creation, which, being a fantasy of a madman's brain, could in reality be nothing else than a figure out of a nightmare seated upon a monument of fear and oppression. the true greatness of a state does not spring from such a contemptible source. it is a matter of logical growth, of faith and courage. its inspiration springs from the constructive instinct of the people, governed by the strong hand of a collective conscience and voiced in the wisdom and counsel of men who seldom reap the reward of gratitude. many states have been powerful, but, perhaps, none have been truly great--as yet. that the position of a state in reference to the moral methods of its development can be seen only historically, is true. perhaps mankind has not lived long enough for a comprehensive view of any particular case. perhaps no one will ever live long enough; and perhaps this earth shared out amongst our clashing ambitions by the anxious arrangements of statesmen will come to an end before we attain the felicity of greeting with unanimous applause the perfect fruition of a great state. it is even possible that we are destined for another sort of bliss altogether: that sort which consists in being perpetually duped by false appearances. but whatever political illusion the future may hold out to our fear or our admiration, there will be none, it is safe to say, which in the magnitude of anti-humanitarian effect will equal that phantom now driven out of the world by the thunder of thousands of guns; none that in its retreat will cling with an equally shameless sincerity to more unworthy supports: to the moral corruption and mental darkness of slavery, to the mere brute force of numbers. this very ignominy of infatuation should make clear to men's feelings and reason that the downfall of russia's might is unavoidable. spectral it lived and spectral it disappears without leaving a memory of a single generous deed, of a single service rendered--even involuntarily--to the polity of nations. other despotisms there have been, but none whose origin was so grimly fantastic in its baseness, and the beginning of whose end was so gruesomely ignoble. what is amazing is the myth of its irresistible strength which is dying so hard. * * * * * considered historically, russia's influence in europe seems the most baseless thing in the world; a sort of convention invented by diplomatists for some dark purpose of their own, one would suspect, if the lack of grasp upon the realities of any given situation were not the main characteristic of the management of international relations. a glance back at the last hundred years shows the invariable, one may say the logical, powerlessness of russia. as a military power it has never achieved by itself a single great thing. it has been indeed able to repel an ill-considered invasion, but only by having recourse to the extreme methods of desperation. in its attacks upon its specially selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. all the campaigns against turkey prove this, from potemkin's time to the last eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. even the halfarmed were always too much for the might of russia, or, rather, of the tsardom. it was victorious only against the practically disarmed, as, in regard to its ideal of territorial expansion, a glance at a map will prove sufficiently. as an ally, russia has been always unprofitable, taking her share in the defeats rather than in the victories of her friends, but always pushing her own claims with the arrogance of an arbiter of military success. she has been unable to help to any purpose a single principle to hold its own, not even the principle of authority and legitimism which nicholas the first had declared so haughtily to rest under his special protection; just as nicholas the second has tried to make the maintenance of peace on earth his own exclusive affair. and the first nicholas was a good russian; he held the belief in the sacredness of his realm with such an intensity of faith that he could not survive the first shock of doubt. rightly envisaged, the crimean war was the end of what remained of absolutism and legitimism in europe. it threw the way open for the liberation of italy. the war in manchuria makes an end of absolutism in russia, whoever has got to perish from the shock behind a rampart of dead ukases, manifestoes, and rescripts. in the space of fifty years the self-appointed apostle of absolutism and the self-appointed apostle of peace, the augustus and the augustulus of the _regime_ that was wont to speak contemptuously to european foreign offices in the beautiful french phrases of prince gorchakov, have fallen victims, each after his kind, to their shadowy and dreadful familiar, to the phantom, part ghoul, part djinn, part old man of the sea, with beak and claws and a double head, looking greedily both east and west on the confines of two continents. that nobody through all that time penetrated the true nature of the monster it is impossible to believe. but of the many who must have seen, all were either too modest, too cautious, perhaps too discreet, to speak; or else were too insignificant to be heard or believed. yet not all. in the very early sixties, prince bismarck, then about to leave his post of prussian minister in st. petersburg, called--so the story goes--upon another distinguished diplomatist. after some talk upon the general situation, the future chancellor of the german empire remarked that it was his practice to resume the impressions he had carried out of every country where he had made a long stay, in a short sentence, which he caused to be engraved upon some trinket. "i am leaving this country now, and this is what i bring away from it," he continued, taking off his finger a new ring to show to his colleague the inscription inside: "la russie, c'est le neant." prince bismarck had the truth of the matter and was neither too modest nor too discreet to speak out. certainly he was not afraid of not being believed. yet he did not shout his knowledge from the house-tops. he meant to have the phantom as his accomplice in an enterprise which has set the clock of peace back for many a year. he had his way. the german empire has been an accomplished fact for more than a third of a century--a great and dreadful legacy left to the world by the ill-omened phantom of russia's might. it is that phantom which is disappearing now--unexpectedly, astonishingly, as if by a touch of that wonderful magic for which the east has always been famous. the pretence of belief in its existence will no longer answer anybody's purposes (now prince bismarck is dead) unless the purposes of the writers of sensational paragraphs as to this _neant_ making an armed descent upon the plains of india. that sort of folly would be beneath notice if it did not distract attention from the real problem created for europe by a war in the far east. for good or evil in the working out of her destiny, russia is bound to remain a _neant_ for many long years, in a more even than a bismarckian sense. the very fear of this spectre being gone, it behoves us to consider its legacy--the fact (no phantom that) accomplished in central europe by its help and connivance. the german empire may feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. there is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint which the presence of a powerful neighbour, however implicated with you in a sense of common guilt, is bound to inspire. the common guilt of the two empires is defined precisely by their frontier line running through the polish provinces. without indulging in excessive feelings of indignation at that country's partition, or going so far as to believe--with a late french politician--in the "immanente justice des choses," it is clear that a material situation, based upon an essentially immoral transaction, contains the germ of fatal differences in the temperament of the two partners in iniquity--whatever the iniquity is. germany has been the evil counsellor of russia on all the questions of her polish problem. always urging the adoption of the most repressive measures with a perfectly logical duplicity, prince bismarck's empire has taken care to couple the neighbourly offers of military assistance with merciless advice. the thought of the polish provinces accepting a frank reconciliation with a humanised russia and bringing the weight of homogeneous loyalty within a few miles of berlin, has been always intensely distasteful to the arrogant germanising tendencies of the other partner in iniquity. and, besides, the way to the baltic provinces leads over the niemen and over the vistula. and now, when there is a possibility of serious internal disturbances destroying the sort of order autocracy has kept in russia, the road over these rivers is seen wearing a more inviting aspect. at any moment the pretext of armed intervention may be found in a revolutionary outbreak provoked by socialists, perhaps--but at any rate by the political immaturity of the enlightened classes and by the political barbarism of the russian people. the throes of russian resurrection will be long and painful. this is not the place to speculate upon the nature of these convulsions, but there must be some violent break-up of the lamentable tradition, a shattering of the social, of the administrative--certainly of the territorial--unity. voices have been heard saying that the time for reforms in russia is already past. this is the superficial view of the more profound truth that for russia there has never been such a time within the memory of mankind. it is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; and in russia there has never been anything else to which the faintest tradition could, after ages of error, go back as to a parting of ways. in europe the old monarchical principle stands justified in its historical struggle with the growth of political liberty by the evolution of the idea of nationality as we see it concreted at the present time; by the inception of that wider solidarity grouping together around the standard of monarchical power these larger, agglomerations of mankind. this service of unification, creating close-knit communities possessing the ability, the will, and the power to pursue a common ideal, has prepared the ground for the advent of a still larger understanding: for the solidarity of europeanism, which must be the next step towards the advent of concord and justice; an advent that, however delayed by the fatal worship of force and the errors of national selfishness, has been, and remains, the only possible goal of our progress. the conceptions of legality, of larger patriotism, of national duties and aspirations have grown under the shadow of the old monarchies of europe, which were the creations of historical necessity. there were seeds of wisdom in their very mistakes and abuses. they had a past and a future; they were human. but under the shadow of russian autocracy nothing could grow. russian autocracy succeeded to nothing; it had no historical past, and it cannot hope for a historical future. it can only end. by no industry of investigation, by no fantastic stretch of benevolence, can it be presented as a phase of development through which a society, a state, must pass on the way to the full consciousness of its destiny. it lies outside the stream of progress. this despotism has been utterly un-european. neither has it been asiatic in its nature. oriental despotisms belong to the history of mankind; they have left their trace on our minds and our imagination by their splendour, by their culture, by their art, by the exploits of great conquerors. the record of their rise and decay has an intellectual value; they are in their origins and their course the manifestations of human needs, the instruments of racial temperament, of catastrophic force, of faith and fanaticism. the russian autocracy as we see it now is a thing apart. it is impossible to assign to it any rational origin in the vices, the misfortunes, the necessities, or the aspirations of mankind. that despotism has neither an european nor an oriental parentage; more, it seems to have no root either in the institutions or the follies of this earth. what strikes one with a sort of awe is just this something inhuman in its character. it is like a visitation, like a curse from heaven falling in the darkness of ages upon the immense plains of forest and steppe lying dumbly on the confines of two continents: a true desert harbouring no spirit either of the east or of the west. this pitiful fate of a country held by an evil spell, suffering from an awful visitation for which the responsibility cannot be traced either to her sins or her follies, has made russia as a nation so difficult to understand by europe. from the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a state she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism; she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation. hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in western thought. western thought, when it crosses her frontier, falls under the spell of her autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself. hence the contradictions, the riddles of her national life, which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world. the curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. it seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness. the government of holy russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a god-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. the worst crime against humanity of that system we behold now crouching at bay behind vast heaps of mangled corpses is the ruthless destruction of innumerable minds. the greatest horror of the world--madness--walked faithfully in its train. some of the best intellects of russia, after struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss. an attentive survey of russia's literature, of her church, of her administration and the cross-currents of her thought, must end in the verdict that the russia of to-day has not the right to give her voice on a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence. the great governmental secret of that imperium which prince bismarck had the insight and the courage to call _le neant_, has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. to pronounce in the face of such a past the word evolution, which is precisely the expression of the highest intellectual hope, is a gruesome pleasantry. there can be no evolution out of a grave. another word of less scientific sound has been very much pronounced of late in connection with russia's future, a word of more vague import, a word of dread as much as of hope--revolution. in the face of the events of the last four months, this word has sprung instinctively, as it were, on grave lips, and has been heard with solemn forebodings. more or less consciously, europe is preparing herself for a spectacle of much violence and perhaps of an inspiring nobility of greatness. and there will be nothing of what she expects. she will see neither the anticipated character of the violence, nor yet any signs of generous greatness. her expectations, more or less vaguely expressed, give the measure of her ignorance of that _neant_ which for so many years had remained hidden behind this phantom of invincible armies. _neant_! in a way, yes! and yet perhaps prince bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form. the form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved within a ring. if he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. the saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did not want to destroy utterly by a more severe definition the prestige of the sham that could not deceive his genius. prince bismarck has been really complimentary to the useful phantom of the autocratic might. there is an awe-inspiring idea of infinity conveyed in the word _neant_--and in russia there is no idea. she is not a _neant_, she is and has been simply the negation of everything worth living for. she is not an empty void, she is a yawning chasm open between east and west; a bottomless abyss that has swallowed up every hope of mercy, every aspiration towards personal dignity, towards freedom, towards knowledge, every ennobling desire of the heart, every redeeming whisper of conscience. those that have peered into that abyss, where the dreams of panslavism, of universal conquest, mingled with the hate and contempt for western ideas, drift impotently like shapes of mist, know well that it is bottomless; that there is in it no ground for anything that could in the remotest degree serve even the lowest interests of mankind--and certainly no ground ready for a revolution. the sin of the old european monarchies was not the absolutism inherent in every form of government; it was the inability to alter the forms of their legality, grown narrow and oppressive with the march of time. every form of legality is bound to degenerate into oppression, and the legality in the forms of monarchical institutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. it has not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within. with the mission of uniting and consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in favour of a larger conception of a state, of giving self-consciousness, force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action, they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve. yet, for all that, the thrones still remain, and what is more significant, perhaps, some of the dynasties, too, have survived. the revolutions of european states have never been in the nature of absolute protests _en masse_ against the monarchical principle; they were the uprising of the people against the oppressive degeneration of legality. but there never has been any legality in russia; she is a negation of that as of everything else that has its root in reason or conscience. the ground of every revolution had to be intellectually prepared. a revolution is a short cut in the rational development of national needs in response to the growth of world-wide ideals. it is conceivably possible for a monarch of genius to put himself at the head of a revolution without ceasing to be the king of his people. for the autocracy of holy russia the only conceivable self-reform is--suicide. the same relentless fate holds in its grip the all-powerful ruler and his helpless people. wielders of a power purchased by an unspeakable baseness of subjection to the khans of the tartar horde, the princes of russia who, in their heart of hearts had come in time to regard themselves as superior to every monarch of europe, have never risen to be the chiefs of a nation. their authority has never been sanctioned by popular tradition, by ideas of intelligent loyalty, of devotion, of political necessity, of simple expediency, or even by the power of the sword. in whatever form of upheaval autocratic russia is to find her end, it can never be a revolution fruitful of moral consequences to mankind. it cannot be anything else but a rising of slaves. it is a tragic circumstance that the only thing one can wish to that people who had never seen face to face either law, order, justice, right, truth about itself or the rest of the world; who had known nothing outside the capricious will of its irresponsible masters, is that it should find in the approaching hour of need, not an organiser or a law-giver, with the wisdom of a lycurgus or a solon for their service, but at least the force of energy and desperation in some as yet unknown spartacus. a brand of hopeless mental and moral inferiority is set upon russian achievements; and the coming events of her internal changes, however appalling they may be in their magnitude, will be nothing more impressive than the convulsions of a colossal body. as her boasted military force that, corrupt in its origin, has ever struck no other but faltering blows, so her soul, kept benumbed by her temporal and spiritual master with the poison of tyranny and superstition, will find itself on awakening possessed of no language, a monstrous full-grown child having first to learn the ways of living thought and articulate speech. it is safe to say tyranny, assuming a thousand protean shapes, will remain clinging to her struggles for a long time before her blind multitudes succeed at last in trampling her out of existence under their millions of bare feet. that would be the beginning. what is to come after? the conquest of freedom to call your soul your own is only the first step on the road to excellence. we, in europe, have gone a step or two further, have had the time to forget how little that freedom means. to russia it must seem everything. a prisoner shut up in a noisome dungeon concentrates all his hope and desire on the moment of stepping out beyond the gates. it appears to him pregnant with an immense and final importance; whereas what is important is the spirit in which he will draw the first breath of freedom, the counsels he will hear, the hands he may find extended, the endless days of toil that must follow, wherein he will have to build his future with no other material but what he can find within himself. it would be vain for russia to hope for the support and counsel of collective wisdom. since 1870 (as a distinguished statesman of the old tradition disconsolately exclaimed) "il n'y a plus d'europe!" there is, indeed, no europe. the idea of a europe united in the solidarity of her dynasties, which for a moment seemed to dawn on the horizon of the vienna congress through the subsiding dust of napoleonic alarums and excursions, has been extinguished by the larger glamour of less restraining ideals. instead of the doctrines of solidarity it was the doctrine of nationalities much more favourable to spoliations that came to the front, and since its greatest triumphs at sadowa and sedan there is no europe. meanwhile till the time comes when there will be no frontiers, there are alliances so shamelessly based upon the exigencies of suspicion and mistrust that their cohesive force waxes and wanes with every year, almost with the event of every passing month. this is the atmosphere russia will find when the last rampart of tyranny has been beaten down. but what hands, what voices will she find on coming out into the light of day? an ally she has yet who more than any other of russia's allies has found that it had parted with lots of solid substance in exchange for a shadow. it is true that the shadow was indeed the mightiest, the darkest that the modern world had ever known--and the most overbearing. but it is fading now, and the tone of truest anxiety as to what is to take its place will come, no doubt, from that and no other direction, and no doubt, also, it will have that note of generosity which even in the moments of greatest aberration is seldom wanting in the voice of the french people. two neighbours russia will find at her door. austria, traditionally unaggressive whenever her hand is not forced, ruled by a dynasty of uncertain future, weakened by her duality, can only speak to her in an uncertain, bilingual phrase. prussia, grown in something like forty years from an almost pitiful dependant into a bullying friend and evil counsellor of russia's masters, may, indeed, hasten to extend a strong hand to the weakness of her exhausted body, but if so it will be only with the intention of tearing away the long-coveted part of her substance. pan-germanism is by no means a shape of mists, and germany is anything but a _neant_ where thought and effort are likely to lose themselves without sound or trace. it is a powerful and voracious organisation, full of unscrupulous self-confidence, whose appetite for aggrandisement will only be limited by the power of helping itself to the severed members of its friends and neighbours. the era of wars so eloquently denounced by the old republicans as the peculiar blood guilt of dynastic ambitions is by no means over yet. they will be fought out differently, with lesser frequency, with an increased bitterness and the savage toothand-claw obstinacy of a struggle for existence. they will make us regret the time of dynastic ambitions, with their human absurdity moderated by prudence and even by shame, by the fear of personal responsibility and the regard paid to certain forms of conventional decency. for, if the monarchs of europe have been derided for addressing each other as "brother" in autograph communications, that relationship was at least as effective as any form of brotherhood likely to be established between the rival nations of this continent, which, we are assured on all hands, is the heritage of democracy. in the ceremonial brotherhood of monarchs the reality of blood-ties, for what little it is worth, acted often as a drag on unscrupulous desires of glory or greed. besides, there was always the common danger of exasperated peoples, and some respect for each other's divine right. no leader of a democracy, without other ancestry but the sudden shout of a multitude, and debarred by the very condition of his power from even thinking of a direct heir, will have any interest in calling brother the leader of another democracy--a chief as fatherless and heirless as himself. the war of 1870, brought about by the third napoleon's half-generous, half-selfish adoption of the principle of nationalities, was the first war characterised by a special intensity of hate, by a new note in the tune of an old song for which we may thank the teutonic thoroughness. was it not that excellent bourgeoise, princess bismarck (to keep only to great examples), who was so righteously anxious to see men, women and children--emphatically the children, too--of the abominable french nation massacred off the face of the earth? this illustration of the new wartemper is artlessly revealed in the prattle of the amiable busch, the chancellor's pet "reptile" of the press. and this was supposed to be a war for an idea! too much, however, should not be made of that good wife's and mother's sentiments any more than of the good first emperor william's tears, shed so abundantly after every battle, by letter, telegram, and otherwise, during the course of the same war, before a dumb and shamefaced continent. these were merely the expressions of the simplicity of a nation which more than any other has a tendency to run into the grotesque. there is worse to come. to-day, in the fierce grapple of two nations of different race, the short era of national wars seems about to close. no war will be waged for an idea. the "noxious idle aristocracies" of yesterday fought without malice for an occupation, for the honour, for the fun of the thing. the virtuous, industrious democratic states of to-morrow may yet be reduced to fighting for a crust of dry bread, with all the hate, ferocity, and fury that must attach to the vital importance of such an issue. the dreams sanguine humanitarians raised almost to ecstasy about the year fifty of the last century by the moving sight of the crystal palace--crammed full with that variegated rubbish which it seems to be the bizarre fate of humanity to produce for the benefit of a few employers of labour--have vanished as quickly as they had arisen. the golden hopes of peace have in a single night turned to dead leaves in every drawer of every benevolent theorist's writing table. a swift disenchantment overtook the incredible infatuation which could put its trust in the peaceful nature of industrial and commercial competition. industrialism and commercialism--wearing high-sounding names in many languages (_welt-politik_ may serve for one instance) picking up coins behind the severe and disdainful figure of science whose giant strides have widened for us the horizon of the universe by some few inches--stand ready, almost eager, to appeal to the sword as soon as the globe of the earth has shrunk beneath our growing numbers by another ell or so. and democracy, which has elected to pin its faith to the supremacy of material interests, will have to fight their battles to the bitter end, on a mere pittance--unless, indeed, some statesman of exceptional ability and overwhelming prestige succeeds in carrying through an international understanding for the delimitation of spheres of trade all over the earth, on the model of the territorial spheres of influence marked in africa to keep the competitors for the privilege of improving the nigger (as a buying machine) from flying prematurely at each other's throats. this seems the only expedient at hand for the temporary maintenance of european peace, with its alliances based on mutual distrust, preparedness for war as its ideal, and the fear of wounds, luckily stronger, so far, than the pinch of hunger, its only guarantee. the true peace of the world will be a place of refuge much less like a beleaguered fortress and more, let us hope, in the nature of an inviolable temple. it will be built on less perishable foundations than those of material interests. but it must be confessed that the architectural aspect of the universal city remains as yet inconceivable--that the very ground for its erection has not been cleared of the jungle. never before in history has the right of war been more fully admitted in the rounded periods of public speeches, in books, in public prints, in all the public works of peace, culminating in the establishment of the hague tribunal--that solemnly official recognition of the earth as a house of strife. to him whose indignation is qualified by a measure of hope and affection, the efforts of mankind to work its own salvation present a sight of alarming comicality. after clinging for ages to the steps of the heavenly throne, they are now, without much modifying their attitude, trying with touching ingenuity to steal one by one the thunderbolts of their jupiter. they have removed war from the list of heaven-sent visitations that could only be prayed against; they have erased its name from the supplication against the wrath of war, pestilence, and famine, as it is found in the litanies of the roman catholic church; they have dragged the scourge down from the skies and have made it into a calm and regulated institution. at first sight the change does not seem for the better. jove's thunderbolt looks a most dangerous plaything in the hands of the people. but a solemnly established institution begins to grow old at once in the discussion, abuse, worship, and execration of men. it grows obsolete, odious, and intolerable; it stands fatally condemned to an unhonoured old age. therein lies the best hope of advanced thought, and the best way to help its prospects is to provide in the fullest, frankest way for the conditions of the present day. war is one of its conditions; it is its principal condition. it lies at the heart of every question agitating the fears and hopes of a humanity divided against itself. the succeeding ages have changed nothing except the watchwords of the armies. the intellectual stage of mankind being as yet in its infancy, and states, like most individuals, having but a feeble and imperfect consciousness of the worth and force of the inner life, the need of making their existence manifest to themselves is determined in the direction of physical activity. the idea of ceasing to grow in territory, in strength, in wealth, in influence--in anything but wisdom and self-knowledge--is odious to them as the omen of the end. action, in which is to be found the illusion of a mastered destiny, can alone satisfy our uneasy vanity and lay to rest the haunting fear of the future--a sentiment concealed, indeed, but proving its existence by the force it has, when invoked, to stir the passions of a nation. it will be long before we have learned that in the great darkness before us there is nothing that we need fear. let us act lest we perish--is the cry. and the only form of action open to a state can be of no other than aggressive nature. there are many kinds of aggressions, though the sanction of them is one and the same--the magazine rifle of the latest pattern. in preparation for or against that form of action the states of europe are spending now such moments of uneasy leisure as they can snatch from the labours of factory and counting-house. never before has war received so much homage at the lips of men, and reigned with less disputed sway in their minds. it has harnessed science to its gun-carriages, it has enriched a few respectable manufacturers, scattered doles of food and raiment amongst a few thousand skilled workmen, devoured the first youth of whole generations, and reaped its harvest of countless corpses. it has perverted the intelligence of men, women, and children, and has made the speeches of emperors, kings, presidents, and ministers monotonous with ardent protestations of fidelity to peace. indeed, war has made peace altogether its own, it has modelled it on its own image: a martial, overbearing, war-lord sort of peace, with a mailed fist, and turned-up moustaches, ringing with the din of grand manoeuvres, eloquent with allusions to glorious feats of arms; it has made peace so magnificent as to be almost as expensive to keep up as itself. it has sent out apostles of its own, who at one time went about (mostly in newspapers) preaching the gospel of the mystic sanctity of its sacrifices, and the regenerating power of spilt blood, to the poor in mind--whose name is legion. it has been observed that in the course of earthly greatness a day of culminating triumph is often paid for by a morrow of sudden extinction. let us hope it is so. yet the dawn of that day of retribution may be a long time breaking above a dark horizon. war is with us now; and, whether this one ends soon or late, war will be with us again. and it is the way of true wisdom for men and states to take account of things as they are. civilisation has done its little best by our sensibilities for whose growth it is responsible. it has managed to remove the sights and sounds of battlefields away from our doorsteps. but it cannot be expected to achieve the feat always and under every variety of circumstance. some day it must fail, and we shall have then a wealth of appallingly unpleasant sensations brought home to us with painful intimacy. it is not absurd to suppose that whatever war comes to us next it will _not_ be a distant war waged by russia either beyond the amur or beyond the oxus. the japanese armies have laid that ghost for ever, because the russia of the future will not, for the reasons explained above, be the russia of today. it will not have the same thoughts, resentments and aims. it is even a question whether it will preserve its gigantic frame unaltered and unbroken. all speculation loses itself in the magnitude of the events made possible by the defeat of an autocracy whose only shadow of a title to existence was the invincible power of military conquest. that autocratic russia will have a miserable end in harmony with its base origin and inglorious life does not seem open to doubt. the problem of the immediate future is posed not by the eventual manner but by the approaching fact of its disappearance. the japanese armies, in laying the oppressive ghost, have not only accomplished what will be recognised historically as an important mission in the world's struggle against all forms of evil, but have also created a situation. they have created a situation in the east which they are competent to manage by themselves; and in doing this they have brought about a change in the condition of the west with which europe is not well prepared to deal. the common ground of concord, good faith and justice is not sufficient to establish an action upon; since the conscience of but very few men amongst us, and of no single western nation as yet, will brook the restraint of abstract ideas as against the fascination of a material advantage. and eagle-eyed wisdom alone cannot take the lead of human action, which in its nature must for ever remain short-sighted. the trouble of the civilised world is the want of a common conservative principle abstract enough to give the impulse, practical enough to form the rallying point of international action tending towards the restraint of particular ambitions. peace tribunals instituted for the greater glory of war will not replace it. whether such a principle exists--who can say? if it does not, then it ought to be invented. a sage with a sense of humour and a heart of compassion should set about it without loss of time, and a solemn prophet full of words and fire ought to be given the task of preparing the minds. so far there is no trace of such a principle anywhere in sight; even its plausible imitations (never very effective) have disappeared long ago before the doctrine of national aspirations. _il n'y a plus d'europe_--there is only an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. there are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great powers of the continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean--not yet--and whose head is very high up--in pomerania, the breeding place of such precious grenadiers that prince bismarck (whom it is a pleasure to quote) would not have given the bones of one of them for the settlement of the old eastern question. but times have changed, since, by way of keeping up, i suppose, some old barbaric german rite, the faithful servant of the hohenzollerns was buried alive to celebrate the accession of a new emperor. already the voice of surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a possible re-grouping of european powers. the alliance of the three empires is supposed possible. and it may be possible. the myth of russia's power is dying very hard--hard enough for that combination to take place--such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers will still exercise upon the imagination of a people trained to the worship of force. germany may be willing to lend its support to a tottering autocracy for the sake of an undisputed first place, and of a preponderating voice in the settlement of every question in that southeast of europe which merges into asia. no principle being involved in such an alliance of mere expediency, it would never be allowed to stand in the way of germany's other ambitions. the fall of autocracy would bring its restraint automatically to an end. thus it may be believed that the support russian despotism may get from its once humble friend and client will not be stamped by that thoroughness which is supposed to be the mark of german superiority. russia weakened down to the second place, or russia eclipsed altogether during the throes of her regeneration, will answer equally well the plans of german policy--which are many and various and often incredible, though the aim of them all is the same: aggrandisement of territory and influence, with no regard to right and justice, either in the east or in the west. for that and no other is the true note of your _welt-politik_ which desires to live. the german eagle with a prussian head looks all round the horizon, not so much for something to do that would count for good in the records of the earth, as simply for something good to get. he gazes upon the land and upon the sea with the same covetous steadiness, for he has become of late a maritime eagle, and has learned to box the compass. he gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the mediterranean when they are blue. the disappearance of the russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the _weltpolitik_. according to the national tendency this assumption of imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the _pickelhaubes_ peeping out grimly from behind. germany's attitude proves that no peace for the earth can be found in the expansion of material interests which she seems to have adopted exclusively as her only aim, ideal, and watchword. for the use of those who gaze half-unbelieving at the passing away of the russian phantom, part ghoul, part djinn, part old man of the sea, and wait half-doubting for the birth of a nation's soul in this age which knows no miracles, the once-famous saying of poor gambetta, tribune of the people (who was simple and believed in the "immanent justice of things"), may be adapted in the shape of a warning that, so far as a future of liberty, concord, and justice is concerned: "le prussianisme--voila l'ennemi!" the crime of partition--1919 at the end of the eighteenth century, when the partition of poland had become an accomplished fact, the world qualified it at once as a crime. this strong condemnation proceeded, of course, from the west of europe; the powers of the centre, prussia and austria, were not likely to admit that this spoliation fell into the category of acts morally reprehensible and carrying the taint of anti-social guilt. as to russia, the third party to the crime, and the originator of the scheme, she had no national conscience at the time. the will of its rulers was always accepted by the people as the expression of an omnipotence derived directly from god. as an act of mere conquest the best excuse for the partition lay simply in the fact that it happened to be possible; there was the plunder and there was the opportunity to get hold of it. catherine the great looked upon this extension of her dominions with a cynical satisfaction. her political argument that the destruction of poland meant the repression of revolutionary ideas and the checking of the spread of jacobinism in europe was a characteristically impudent pretence. there may have been minds here and there amongst the russians that perceived, or perhaps only felt, that by the annexation of the greater part of the polish republic, russia approached nearer to the comity of civilised nations and ceased, at least territorially, to be an asiatic power. it was only after the partition of poland that russia began to play a great part in europe. to such statesmen as she had then that act of brigandage must have appeared inspired by great political wisdom. the king of prussia, faithful to the ruling principle of his life, wished simply to aggrandise his dominions at a much smaller cost and at much less risk than he could have done in any other direction; for at that time poland was perfectly defenceless from a material point of view, and more than ever, perhaps, inclined to put its faith in humanitarian illusions. morally, the republic was in a state of ferment and consequent weakness, which so often accompanies the period of social reform. the strength arrayed against her was just then overwhelming; i mean the comparatively honest (because open) strength of armed forces. but, probably from innate inclination towards treachery, frederick of prussia selected for himself the part of falsehood and deception. appearing on the scene in the character of a friend he entered deliberately into a treaty of alliance with the republic, and then, before the ink was dry, tore it up in brazen defiance of the commonest decency, which must have been extremely gratifying to his natural tastes. as to austria, it shed diplomatic tears over the transaction. they cannot be called crocodile tears, insomuch that they were in a measure sincere. they arose from a vivid perception that austria's allotted share of the spoil could never compensate her for the accession of strength and territory to the other two powers. austria did not really want an extension of territory at the cost of poland. she could not hope to improve her frontier in that way, and economically she had no need of galicia, a province whose natural resources were undeveloped and whose salt mines did not arouse her cupidity because she had salt mines of her own. no doubt the democratic complexion of polish institutions was very distasteful to the conservative monarchy; austrian statesmen did see at the time that the real danger to the principle of autocracy was in the west, in france, and that all the forces of central europe would be needed for its suppression. but the movement towards a _partage_ on the part of russia and prussia was too definite to be resisted, and austria had to follow their lead in the destruction of a state which she would have preferred to preserve as a possible ally against prussian and russian ambitions. it may be truly said that the destruction of poland secured the safety of the french revolution. for when in 1795 the crime was consummated, the revolution had turned the corner and was in a state to defend itself against the forces of reaction. in the second half of the eighteenth century there were two centres of liberal ideas on the continent of europe: france and poland. on an impartial survey one may say without exaggeration that then france was relatively every bit as weak as poland; even, perhaps, more so. but france's geographical position made her much less vulnerable. she had no powerful neighbours on her frontier; a decayed spain in the south and a conglomeration of small german principalities on the east were her happy lot. the only states which dreaded the contamination of the new principles and had enough power to combat it were prussia, austria, and russia, and they had another centre of forbidden ideas to deal with in defenceless poland, unprotected by nature, and offering an immediate satisfaction to their cupidity. they made their choice, and the untold sufferings of a nation which would not die was the price exacted by fate for the triumph of revolutionary ideals. thus even a crime may become a moral agent by the lapse of time and the course of history. progress leaves its dead by the way, for progress is only a great adventure as its leaders and chiefs know very well in their hearts. it is a march into an undiscovered country; and in such an enterprise the victims do not count. as an emotional outlet for the oratory of freedom it was convenient enough to remember the crime now and then: the crime being the murder of a state and the carving of its body into three pieces. there was really nothing to do but to drop a few tears and a few flowers of rhetoric upon the grave. but the spirit of the nation refused to rest therein. it haunted the territories of the old republic in the manner of a ghost haunting its ancestral mansion where strangers are making themselves at home; a calumniated, ridiculed, and pooh-pooh'd ghost, and yet never ceasing to inspire a sort of awe, a strange uneasiness, in the hearts of the unlawful possessors. poland deprived of its independence, of its historical continuity, with its religion and language persecuted and repressed, became a mere geographical expression. and even that, itself, seemed strangely vague, had lost its definite character, was rendered doubtful by the theories and the claims of the spoliators who, by a strange effect of uneasy conscience, while strenuously denying the moral guilt of the transaction, were always trying to throw a veil of high rectitude over the crime. what was most annoying to their righteousness was the fact that the nation, stabbed to the heart, refused to grow insensible and cold. that persistent and almost uncanny vitality was sometimes very inconvenient to the rest of europe also. it would intrude its irresistible claim into every problem of european politics, into the theory of european equilibrium, into the question of the near east, the italian question, the question of schleswig-holstein, and into the doctrine of nationalities. that ghost, not content with making its ancestral halls uncomfortable for the thieves, haunted also the cabinets of europe, waved indecently its bloodstained robes in the solemn atmosphere of councilrooms, where congresses and conferences sit with closed windows. it would not be exorcised by the brutal jeers of bismarck and the fine railleries of gorchakov. as a polish friend observed to me some years ago: "till the year '48 the polish problem has been to a certain extent a convenient rallying-point for all manifestations of liberalism. since that time we have come to be regarded simply as a nuisance. it's very disagreeable." i agreed that it was, and he continued: "what are we to do? we did not create the situation by any outside action of ours. through all the centuries of its existence poland has never been a menace to anybody, not even to the turks, to whom it has been merely an obstacle." nothing could be more true. the spirit of aggressiveness was absolutely foreign to the polish temperament, to which the preservation of its institutions and its liberties was much more precious than any ideas of conquest. polish wars were defensive, and they were mostly fought within poland's own borders. and that those territories were often invaded was but a misfortune arising from its geographical position. territorial expansion was never the master-thought of polish statesmen. the consolidation of the territories of the _serenissime_ republic, which made of it a power of the first rank for a time, was not accomplished by force. it was not the consequence of successful aggression, but of a long and successful defence against the raiding neighbours from the east. the lands of lithuanian and ruthenian speech were never conquered by poland. these peoples were not compelled by a series of exhausting wars to seek safety in annexation. it was not the will of a prince or a political intrigue that brought about the union. neither was it fear. the slowly-matured view of the economical and social necessities and, before all, the ripening moral sense of the masses were the motives that induced the forty three representatives of lithuanian and ruthenian provinces, led by their paramount prince, to enter into a political combination unique in the history of the world, a spontaneous and complete union of sovereign states choosing deliberately the way of peace. never was strict truth better expressed in a political instrument than in the preamble of the first union treaty (1413). it begins with the words: "this union, being the outcome not of hatred, but of love"--words that poles have not heard addressed to them politically by any nation for the last hundred and fifty years. this union being an organic, living thing capable of growth and development was, later, modified and confirmed by two other treaties, which guaranteed to all the parties in a just and eternal union all their rights, liberties, and respective institutions. the polish state offers a singular instance of an extremely liberal administrative federalism which, in its parliamentary life as well as its international politics, presented a complete unity of feeling and purpose. as an eminent french diplomatist remarked many years ago: "it is a very remarkable fact in the history of the polish state, this invariable and unanimous consent of the populations; the more so that, the king being looked upon simply as the chief of the republic, there was no monarchical bond, no dynastic fidelity to control and guide the sentiment of the nations, and their union remained as a pure affirmation of the national will." the grand duchy of lithuania and its ruthenian provinces retained their statutes, their own administration, and their own political institutions. that those institutions in the course of time tended to assimilation with the polish form was not the result of any pressure, but simply of the superior character of polish civilisation. even after poland lost its independence this alliance and this union remained firm in spirit and fidelity. all the national movements towards liberation were initiated in the name of the whole mass of people inhabiting the limits of the old republic, and all the provinces took part in them with complete devotion. it is only in the last generation that efforts have been made to create a tendency towards separation, which would indeed serve no one but poland's common enemies. and, strangely enough, it is the internationalists, men who professedly care nothing for race or country, who have set themselves this task of disruption, one can easily see for what sinister purpose. the ways of the internationalists may be dark, but they are not inscrutable. from the same source no doubt there will flow in the future a poisoned stream of hints of a reconstituted poland being a danger to the races once so closely associated within the territories of the old republic. the old partners in "the crime" are not likely to forgive their victim its inconvenient and almost shocking obstinacy in keeping alive. they had tried moral assassination before and with some small measure of success, for, indeed, the polish question, like all living reproaches, had become a nuisance. given the wrong, and the apparent impossibility of righting it without running risks of a serious nature, some moral alleviation may be found in the belief that the victim had brought its misfortunes on its own head by its own sins. that theory, too, had been advanced about poland (as if other nations had known nothing of sin and folly), and it made some way in the world at different times, simply because good care was taken by the interested parties to stop the mouth of the accused. but it has never carried much conviction to honest minds. somehow, in defiance of the cynical point of view as to the force of lies and against all the power of falsified evidence, truth often turns out to be stronger than calumny. with the course of years, however, another danger sprang up, a danger arising naturally from the new political alliances dividing europe into two armed camps. it was the danger of silence. almost without exception the press of western europe in the twentieth century refused to touch the polish question in any shape or form whatever. never was the fact of polish vitality more embarrassing to european diplomacy than on the eve of poland's resurrection. when the war broke out there was something gruesomely comic in the proclamations of emperors and archdukes appealing to that invincible soul of a nation whose existence or moral worth they had been so arrogantly denying for more than a century. perhaps in the whole record of human transactions there have never been performances so brazen and so vile as the manifestoes of the german emperor and the grand duke nicholas of russia; and, i imagine, no more bitter insult has been offered to human heart and intelligence than the way in which those proclamations were flung into the face of historical truth. it was like a scene in a cynical and sinister farce, the absurdity of which became in some sort unfathomable by the reflection that nobody in the world could possibly be so abjectly stupid as to be deceived for a single moment. at that time, and for the first two months of the war, i happened to be in poland, and i remember perfectly well that, when those precious documents came out, the confidence in the moral turpitude of mankind they implied did not even raise a scornful smile on the lips of men whose most sacred feelings and dignity they outraged. they did not deign to waste their contempt on them. in fact, the situation was too poignant and too involved for either hot scorn or a coldly rational discussion. for the poles it was like being in a burning house of which all the issues were locked. there was nothing but sheer anguish under the strange, as if stony, calmness which in the utter absence of all hope falls on minds that are not constitutionally prone to despair. yet in this time of dismay the irrepressible vitality of the nation would not accept a neutral attitude. i was told that even if there were no issue it was absolutely necessary for the poles to affirm their national existence. passivity, which could be regarded as a craven acceptance of all the material and moral horrors ready to fall upon the nation, was not to be thought of for a moment. therefore, it was explained to me, the poles _must_ act. whether this was a counsel of wisdom or not it is very difficult to say, but there are crises of the soul which are beyond the reach of wisdom. when there is apparently no issue visible to the eyes of reason, sentiment may yet find a way out, either towards salvation or to utter perdition, no one can tell--and the sentiment does not even ask the question. being there as a stranger in that tense atmosphere, which was yet not unfamiliar to me, i was not very anxious to parade my wisdom, especially after it had been pointed out in answer to my cautious arguments that, if life has its values worth fighting for, death, too, has that in it which can make it worthy or unworthy. out of the mental and moral trouble into which the grouping of the powers at the beginning of war had thrown the counsels of poland there emerged at last the decision that the polish legions, a peace organisation in galicia directed by pilsudski (afterwards given the rank of general, and now apparently the chief of the government in warsaw), should take the field against the russians. in reality it did not matter against which partner in the "crime" polish resentment should be directed. there was little to choose between the methods of russian barbarism, which were both crude and rotten, and the cultivated brutality tinged with contempt of germany's superficial, grinding civilisation. there was nothing to choose between them. both were hateful, and the direction of the polish effort was naturally governed by austria's tolerant attitude, which had connived for years at the semi-secret organisation of the polish legions. besides, the material possibility pointed out the way. that poland should have turned at first against the ally of western powers, to whose moral support she had been looking for so many years, is not a greater monstrosity than that alliance with russia which had been entered into by england and france with rather less excuse and with a view to eventualities which could perhaps have been avoided by a firmer policy and by a greater resolution in the face of what plainly appeared unavoidable. for let the truth be spoken. the action of germany, however cruel, sanguinary, and faithless, was nothing in the nature of a stab in the dark. the germanic tribes had told the whole world in all possible tones carrying conviction, the gently persuasive, the coldly logical; in tones hegelian, nietzschean, warlike, pious, cynical, inspired, what they were going to do to the inferior races of the earth, so full of sin and all unworthiness. but with a strange similarity to the prophets of old (who were also great moralists and invokers of might) they seemed to be crying in a desert. whatever might have been the secret searching of hearts, the worthless ones would not take heed. it must also be admitted that the conduct of the menaced governments carried with it no suggestion of resistance. it was no doubt, the effect of neither courage nor fear, but of that prudence which causes the average man to stand very still in the presence of a savage dog. it was not a very politic attitude, and the more reprehensible in so far that it seemed to arise from the mistrust of their own people's fortitude. on simple matters of life and death a people is always better than its leaders, because a people cannot argue itself as a whole into a sophisticated state of mind out of deference for a mere doctrine or from an exaggerated sense of its own cleverness. i am speaking now of democracies whose chiefs resemble the tyrant of syracuse in this, that their power is unlimited (for who can limit the will of a voting people?) and who always see the domestic sword hanging by a hair above their heads. perhaps a different attitude would have checked german self-confidence, and her overgrown militarism would have died from the excess of its own strength. what would have been then the moral state of europe it is difficult to say. some other excess would probably have taken its place, excess of theory, or excess of sentiment, or an excess of the sense of security leading to some other form of catastrophe; but it is certain that in that case the polish question would not have taken a concrete form for ages. perhaps it would never have taken form! in this world, where everything is transient, even the most reproachful ghosts end by vanishing out of old mansions, out of men's consciences. progress of enlightenment, or decay of faith? in the years before the war the polish ghost was becoming so thin that it was impossible to get for it the slightest mention in the papers. a young pole coming to me from paris was extremely indignant, but i, indulging in that detachment which is the product of greater age, longer experience, and a habit of meditation, refused to share that sentiment. he had gone begging for a word on poland to many influential people, and they had one and all told him that they were going to do no such thing. they were all men of ideas and therefore might have been called idealists, but the notion most strongly anchored in their minds was the folly of touching a question which certainly had no merit of actuality and would have had the appalling effect of provoking the wrath of their old enemies and at the same time offending the sensibilities of their new friends. it was an unanswerable argument. i couldn't share my young friend's surprise and indignation. my practice of reflection had also convinced me that there is nothing on earth that turns quicker on its pivot than political idealism when touched by the breath of practical politics. it would be good to remember that polish independence as embodied in a polish state is not the gift of any kind of journalism, neither is it the outcome even of some particularly benevolent idea or of any clearly apprehended sense of guilt. i am speaking of what i know when i say that the original and only formative idea in europe was the idea of delivering the fate of poland into the hands of russian tsarism. and, let us remember, it was assumed then to be a victorious tsarism at that. it was an idea talked of openly, entertained seriously, presented as a benevolence, with a curious blindness to its grotesque and ghastly character. it was the idea of delivering the victim with a kindly smile and the confident assurance that "it would be all right" to a perfectly unrepentant assassin, who, after sawing furiously at its throat for a hundred years or so, was expected to make friends suddenly and kiss it on both cheeks in the mystic russian fashion. it was a singularly nightmarish combination of international polity, and no whisper of any other would have been officially tolerated. indeed, i do not think in the whole extent of western europe there was anybody who had the slightest mind to whisper on that subject. those were the days of the dark future, when benckendorf put down his name on the committee for the relief of polish populations driven by the russian armies into the heart of russia, when the grand duke nicholas (the gentleman who advocated a st. bartholomew's night for the suppression of russian liberalism) was displaying his "divine" (i have read the very word in an english newspaper of standing) strategy in the great retreat, where mr. iswolsky carried himself haughtily on the banks of the seine; and it was beginning to dawn upon certain people there that he was a greater nuisance even than the polish question. but there is no use in talking about all that. some clever person has said that it is always the unexpected that happens, and on a calm and dispassionate survey the world does appear mainly to one as a scene of miracles. out of germany's strength, in whose purpose so many people refused to believe, came poland's opportunity, in which nobody could have been expected to believe. out of russia's collapse emerged that forbidden thing, the polish independence, not as a vengeful figure, the retributive shadow of the crime, but as something much more solid and more difficult to get rid of--a political necessity and a moral solution. directly it appeared its practical usefulness became undeniable, and also the fact that, for better or worse, it was impossible to get rid of it again except by the unthinkable way of another carving, of another partition, of another crime. therein lie the strength and the future of the thing so strictly forbidden no farther back than two years or so, of the polish independence expressed in a polish state. it comes into the world morally free, not in virtue of its sufferings, but in virtue of its miraculous rebirth and of its ancient claim for services rendered to europe. not a single one of the combatants of all the fronts of the world has died consciously for poland's freedom. that supreme opportunity was denied even to poland's own children. and it is just as well! providence in its inscrutable way had been merciful, for had it been otherwise the load of gratitude would have been too great, the sense of obligation too crushing, the joy of deliverance too fearful for mortals, common sinners with the rest of mankind before the eye of the most high. those who died east and west, leaving so much anguish and so much pride behind them, died neither for the creation of states, nor for empty words, nor yet for the salvation of general ideas. they died neither for democracy, nor leagues, nor systems, nor yet for abstract justice, which is an unfathomable mystery. they died for something too deep for words, too mighty for the common standards by which reason measures the advantages of life and death, too sacred for the vain discourses that come and go on the lips of dreamers, fanatics, humanitarians, and statesmen. they died . . . . poland's independence springs up from that great immolation, but poland's loyalty to europe will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiments to end in negation. polish loyalty will be rooted in something much more solid and enduring, in something that could never be called eternal, but which is, in fact, life-enduring. it will be rooted in the national temperament, which is about the only thing on earth that can be trusted. men may deteriorate, they may improve too, but they don't change. misfortune is a hard school which may either mature or spoil a national character, but it may be reasonably advanced that the long course of adversity of the most cruel kind has not injured the fundamental characteristics of the polish nation which has proved its vitality against the most demoralising odds. the various phases of the polish sense of self-preservation struggling amongst the menacing forces and the no less threatening chaos of the neighbouring powers should be judged impartially. i suggest impartiality and not indulgence simply because, when appraising the polish question, it is not necessary to invoke the softer emotions. a little calm reflection on the past and the present is all that is necessary on the part of the western world to judge the movements of a community whose ideals are the same, but whose situation is unique. this situation was brought vividly home to me in the course of an argument more than eighteen months ago. "don't forget," i was told, "that poland has got to live in contact with germany and russia to the end of time. do you understand the force of that expression: 'to the end of time'? facts must be taken into account, and especially appalling facts, such as this, to which there is no possible remedy on earth. for reasons which are, properly speaking, physiological, a prospect of friendship with germans or russians even in the most distant future is unthinkable. any alliance of heart and mind would be a monstrous thing, and monsters, as we all know, cannot live. you can't base your conduct on a monstrous conception. we are either worth or not worth preserving, but the horrible psychology of the situation is enough to drive the national mind to distraction. yet under a destructive pressure, of which western europe can have no notion, applied by forces that were not only crushing but corrupting, we have preserved our sanity. therefore there can be no fear of our losing our minds simply because the pressure is removed. we have neither lost our heads nor yet our moral sense. oppression, not merely political, but affecting social relations, family life, the deepest affections of human nature, and the very fount of natural emotions, has never made us vengeful. it is worthy of notice that with every incentive present in our emotional reactions we had no recourse to political assassination. arms in hand, hopeless or hopefully, and always against immeasurable odds, we did affirm ourselves and the justice of our cause; but wild justice has never been a part of our conception of national manliness. in all the history of polish oppression there was only one shot fired which was not in battle. only one! and the man who fired it in paris at the emperor alexander ii. was but an individual connected with no organisation, representing no shade of polish opinion. the only effect in poland was that of profound regret, not at the failure, but at the mere fact of the attempt. the history of our captivity is free from that stain; and whatever follies in the eyes of the world we may have perpetrated, we have neither murdered our enemies nor acted treacherously against them, nor yet have been reduced to the point of cursing each other." i could not gainsay the truth of that discourse, i saw as clearly as my interlocutor the impossibility of the faintest sympathetic bond between poland and her neighbours ever being formed in the future. the only course that remains to a reconstituted poland is the elaboration, establishment, and preservation of the most correct method of political relations with neighbours to whom poland's existence is bound to be a humiliation and an offence. calmly considered it is an appalling task, yet one may put one's trust in that national temperament which is so completely free from aggressiveness and revenge. therein lie the foundations of all hope. the success of renewed life for that nation whose fate is to remain in exile, ever isolated from the west, amongst hostile surroundings, depends on the sympathetic understanding of its problems by its distant friends, the western powers, which in their democratic development must recognise the moral and intellectual kinship of that distant outpost of their own type of civilisation, which was the only basis of polish culture. whatever may be the future of russia and the final organisation of germany, the old hostility must remain unappeased, the fundamental antagonism must endure for years to come. the crime of the partition was committed by autocratic governments which were the governments of their time; but those governments were characterised in the past, as they will be in the future, by their people's national traits, which remain utterly incompatible with the polish mentality and polish sentiment. both the german submissiveness (idealistic as it may be) and the russian lawlessness (fed on the corruption of all the virtues) are utterly foreign to the polish nation, whose qualities and defects are altogether of another kind, tending to a certain exaggeration of individualism and, perhaps, to an extreme belief in the governing power of free assent: the one invariably vital principle in the internal government of the old republic. there was never a history more free from political bloodshed than the history of the polish state, which never knew either feudal institutions or feudal quarrels. at the time when heads were falling on the scaffolds all over europe there was only one political execution in poland--only one; and as to that there still exists a tradition that the great chancellor who democratised polish institutions, and had to order it in pursuance of his political purpose, could not settle that matter with his conscience till the day of his death. poland, too, had her civil wars, but this can hardly be made a matter of reproach to her by the rest of the world. conducted with humanity, they left behind them no animosities and no sense of repression, and certainly no legacy of hatred. they were but a recognised argument in political discussion and tended always towards conciliation. i cannot imagine, whatever form of democratic government poland elaborates for itself, that either the nation or its leaders would do anything but welcome the closest scrutiny of their renewed political existence. the difficulty of the problem of that existence will be so great that some errors will be unavoidable, and one may be sure that they will be taken advantage of by its neighbours to discredit that living witness to a great historical crime. if not the actual frontiers, then the moral integrity of the new state is sure to be assailed before the eyes of europe. economical enmity will also come into play when the world's work is resumed again and competition asserts its power. charges of aggression are certain to be made, especially as related to the small states formed of the territories of the old republic. and everybody knows the power of lies which go about clothed in coats of many colours, whereas, as is well known, truth has no such advantage, and for that reason is often suppressed as not altogether proper for everyday purposes. it is not often recognised, because it is not always fit to be seen. already there are innuendoes, threats, hints thrown out, and even awful instances fabricated out of inadequate materials, but it is historically unthinkable that the poland of the future, with its sacred tradition of freedom and its hereditary sense of respect for the rights of individuals and states, should seek its prosperity in aggressive action or in moral violence against that part of its once fellow-citizens who are ruthenians or lithuanians. the only influence that cannot be restrained is simply the influence of time, which disengages truth from all facts with a merciless logic and prevails over the passing opinions, the changing impulses of men. there can be no doubt that the moral impulses and the material interests of the new nationalities, which seem to play now the game of disintegration for the benefit of the world's enemies, will in the end bring them nearer to the poland of this war's creation, will unite them sooner or later by a spontaneous movement towards the state which had adopted and brought them up in the development of its own humane culture--the offspring of the west. a note on the polish problem--1916 we must start from the assumption that promises made by proclamation at the beginning of this war may be binding on the individuals who made them under the stress of coming events, but cannot be regarded as binding the governments after the end of the war. poland has been presented with three proclamations. two of them were in such contrast with the avowed principles and the historic action for the last hundred years (since the congress of vienna) of the powers concerned, that they were more like cynical insults to the nation's deepest feelings, its memory and its intelligence, than state papers of a conciliatory nature. the german promises awoke nothing but indignant contempt; the russian a bitter incredulity of the most complete kind. the austrian proclamation, which made no promises and contented itself with pointing out the austropolish relations for the last forty-five years, was received in silence. for it is a fact that in austrian poland alone polish nationality was recognised as an element of the empire, and individuals could breathe the air of freedom, of civil life, if not of political independence. but for poles to be germanophile is unthinkable. to be russophile or austrophile is at best a counsel of despair in view of a european situation which, because of the grouping of the powers, seems to shut from them every hope, expressed or unexpressed, of a national future nursed through more than a hundred years of suffering and oppression. through most of these years, and especially since 1830, poland (i use this expression since poland exists as a spiritual entity to-day as definitely as it ever existed in her past) has put her faith in the western powers. politically it may have been nothing more than a consoling illusion, and the nation had a half-consciousness of this. but what poland was looking for from the western powers without discouragement and with unbroken confidence was moral support. this is a fact of the sentimental order. but such facts have their positive value, for their idealism derives from perhaps the highest kind of reality. a sentiment asserts its claim by its force, persistence and universality. in poland that sentimental attitude towards the western powers is universal. it extends to all classes. the very children are affected by it as soon as they begin to think. the political value of such a sentiment consists in this, that it is based on profound resemblances. therefore one can build on it as if it were a material fact. for the same reason it would be unsafe to disregard it if one proposed to build solidly. the poles, whom superficial or ill-informed theorists are trying to force into the social and psychological formula of slavonism, are in truth not slavonic at all. in temperament, in feeling, in mind, and even in unreason, they are western, with an absolute comprehension of all western modes of thought, even of those which are remote from their historical experience. that element of racial unity which may be called polonism, remained compressed between prussian germanism on one side and the russian slavonism on the other. for germanism it feels nothing but hatred. but between polonism and slavonism there is not so much hatred as a complete and ineradicable incompatibility. no political work of reconstructing poland either as a matter of justice or expediency could be sound which would leave the new creation in dependence to germanism or to slavonism. the first need not be considered. the second must be--unless the powers elect to drop the polish question either under the cover of vague assurances or without any disguise whatever. but if it is considered it will be seen at once that the slavonic solution of the polish question can offer no guarantees of duration or hold the promise of security for the peace of europe. the only basis for it would be the grand duke's manifesto. but that manifesto, signed by a personage now removed from europe to asia, and by a man, moreover, who if true to himself, to his conception of patriotism and to his family tradition could not have put his hand to it with any sincerity of purpose, is now divested of all authority. the forcible vagueness of its promises, its startling inconsistency with the hundred years of ruthlessly denationalising oppression permit one to doubt whether it was ever meant to have any authority. but in any case it could have had no effect. the very nature of things would have brought to nought its professed intentions. it is impossible to suppose that a state of russia's power and antecedents would tolerate a privileged community (of, to russia, unnational complexion) within the body of the empire. all history shows that such an arrangement, however hedged in by the most solemn treaties and declarations, cannot last. in this case it would lead to a tragic issue. the absorption of polonism is unthinkable. the last hundred years of european history proves it undeniably. there remains then extirpation, a process of blood and iron; and the last act of the polish drama would be played then before a europe too weary to interfere, and to the applause of germany. it would not be just to say that the disappearance of polonism would add any strength to the slavonic power of expansion. it would add no strength, but it would remove a possibly effective barrier against the surprises the future of europe may hold in store for the western powers. thus the question whether polonism is worth saving presents itself as a problem of politics with a practical bearing on the stability of european peace--as a barrier or perhaps better (in view of its detached position) as an outpost of the western powers placed between the great might of slavonism which has not yet made up its mind to anything, and the organised germanism which has spoken its mind with no uncertain voice, before the world. looked at in that light alone polonism seems worth saving. that it has lived so long on its trust in the moral support of the western powers may give it another and even stronger claim, based on a truth of a more profound kind. polonism had resisted the utmost efforts of germanism and slavonism for more than a hundred years. why? because of the strength of its ideals conscious of their kinship with the west. such a power of resistance creates a moral obligation which it would be unsafe to neglect. there is always a risk in throwing away a tool of proved temper. in this profound conviction of the practical and ideal worth of polonism one approaches the problem of its preservation with a very vivid sense of the practical difficulties derived from the grouping of the powers. the uncertainty of the extent and of the actual form of victory for the allies will increase the difficulty of formulating a plan of polish regeneration at the present moment. poland, to strike its roots again into the soil of political europe, will require a guarantee of security for the healthy development and for the untrammelled play of such institutions as she may be enabled to give to herself. those institutions will be animated by the spirit of polonism, which, having been a factor in the history of europe and having proved its vitality under oppression, has established its right to live. that spirit, despised and hated by germany and incompatible with slavonism because of moral differences, cannot avoid being (in its renewed assertion) an object of dislike and mistrust. as an unavoidable consequence of the past poland will have to begin its existence in an atmosphere of enmities and suspicions. that advanced outpost of western civilisation will have to hold its ground in the midst of hostile camps: always its historical fate. against the menace of such a specially dangerous situation the paper and ink of public treaties cannot be an effective defence. nothing but the actual, living, active participation of the two western powers in the establishment of the new polish commonwealth, and in the first twenty years of its existence, will give the poles a sufficient guarantee of security in the work of restoring their national life. an anglo-french protectorate would be the ideal form of moral and material support. but russia, as an ally, must take her place in it on such a footing as will allay to the fullest extent her possible apprehensions and satisfy her national sentiment. that necessity will have to be formally recognised. in reality russia has ceased to care much for her polish possessions. public recognition of a mistake in political morality and a voluntary surrender of territory in the cause of european concord, cannot damage the prestige of a powerful state. the new spheres of expansion in regions more easily assimilable, will more than compensate russia for the loss of territory on the western frontier of the empire. the experience of dual controls and similar combinations has been so unfortunate in the past that the suggestion of a triple protectorate may well appear at first sight monstrous even to unprejudiced minds. but it must be remembered that this is a unique case and a problem altogether exceptional, justifying the employment of exceptional means for its solution. to those who would doubt the possibility of even bringing such a scheme into existence the answer may be made that there are psychological moments when any measure tending towards the ends of concord and justice may be brought into being. and it seems that the end of the war would be the moment for bringing into being the political scheme advocated in this note. its success must depend on the singleness of purpose in the contracting powers, and on the wisdom, the tact, the abilities, the good-will of men entrusted with its initiation and its further control. finally it may be pointed out that this plan is the only one offering serious guarantees to all the parties occupying their respective positions within the scheme. if her existence as a state is admitted as just, expedient and necessary, poland has the moral right to receive her constitution not from the hand of an old enemy, but from the western powers alone, though of course with the fullest concurrence of russia. this constitution, elaborated by a committee of poles nominated by the three governments, will (after due discussion and amendment by the high commissioners of the protecting powers) be presented to poland as the initial document, the charter of her new life, freely offered and unreservedly accepted. it should be as simple and short as a written constitution can be--establishing the polish commonwealth, settling the lines of representative institutions, the form of judicature, and leaving the greatest measure possible of self-government to the provinces forming part of the re-created poland. this constitution will be promulgated immediately after the three powers had settled the frontiers of the new state, including the town of danzic (free port) and a proportion of seaboard. the legislature will then be called together and a general treaty will regulate poland's international portion as a protected state, the status of the high commissioners and such-like matters. the legislature will ratify, thus making poland, as it were, a party in the establishment of the protectorate. a point of importance. other general treaties will define poland's position in the anglo-francorussian alliance, fix the numbers of the army, and settle the participation of the powers in its organisation and training. poland revisited--1915 i. i have never believed in political assassination as a means to an end, and least of all in assassination of the dynastic order. i don't know how far murder can ever approach the perfection of a fine art, but looked upon with the cold eye of reason it seems but a crude expedient of impatient hope or hurried despair. there are few men whose premature death could influence human affairs more than on the surface. the deeper stream of causes depends not on individuals who, like the mass of mankind, are carried on by a destiny which no murder has ever been able to placate, divert, or arrest. in july of last year i was a stranger in a strange city in the midlands and particularly out of touch with the world's politics. never a very diligent reader of newspapers, there were at that time reasons of a private order which caused me to be even less informed than usual on public affairs as presented from day to day in that necessarily atmosphereless, perspectiveless manner of the daily papers, which somehow, for a man possessed of some historic sense, robs them of all real interest. i don't think i had looked at a daily for a month past. but though a stranger in a strange city i was not lonely, thanks to a friend who had travelled there out of pure kindness to bear me company in a conjuncture which, in a most private sense, was somewhat trying. it was this friend who, one morning at breakfast, informed me of the murder of the archduke ferdinand. the impression was mediocre. i was barely aware that such a man existed. i remembered only that not long before he had visited london. the recollection was rather of a cloud of insignificant printed words his presence in this country provoked. various opinions had been expressed of him, but his importance was archducal, dynastic, purely accidental. can there be in the world of real men anything more shadowy than an archduke? and now he was no more; removed with an atrocity of circumstances which made one more sensible of his humanity than when he was in life. i connected that crime with balkanic plots and aspirations so little that i had actually to ask where it had happened. my friend told me it was in serajevo, and wondered what would be the consequences of that grave event. he asked me what i thought would happen next. it was with perfect sincerity that i answered "nothing," and having a great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, i dismissed the subject. it fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless. i had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy archdukes in the background, out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light of the european stage. and then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to the march of events as i did at that time. what for want of a more definite term i must call my mind was fixed upon my own affairs, not because they were in a bad posture, but because of their fascinating holiday-promising aspect. i had been obtaining my information as to europe at second hand, from friends good enough to come down now and then to see us. they arrived with their pockets full of crumpled newspapers, and answered my queries casually, with gentle smiles of scepticism as to the reality of my interest. and yet i was not indifferent; but the tension in the balkans had become chronic after the acute crisis, and one could not help being less conscious of it. it had wearied out one's attention. who could have guessed that on that wild stage we had just been looking at a miniature rehearsal of the great world-drama, the reduced model of the very passions and violences of what the future held in store for the powers of the old world? here and there, perhaps, rare minds had a suspicion of that possibility, while they watched old europe stage-managing fussily by means of notes and conferences, the prophetic reproduction of its awaiting fate. it was wonderfully exact in the spirit; same roar of guns, same protestations of superiority, same words in the air; race, liberation, justice--and the same mood of trivial demonstrations. one could not take to-day a ticket for petersburg. "you mean petrograd," would say the booking clerk. shortly after the fall of adrianople a friend of mine passing through sophia asked for some _cafe turc_ at the end of his lunch. "monsieur veut dire cafe balkanique," the patriotic waiter corrected him austerely. i will not say that i had not observed something of that instructive aspect of the war of the balkans both in its first and in its second phase. but those with whom i touched upon that vision were pleased to see in it the evidence of my alarmist cynicism. as to alarm, i pointed out that fear is natural to man, and even salutary. it has done as much as courage for the preservation of races and institutions. but from a charge of cynicism i have always shrunk instinctively. it is like a charge of being blind in one eye, a moral disablement, a sort of disgraceful calamity that must he carried off with a jaunty bearing--a sort of thing i am not capable of. rather than be thought a mere jaunty cripple i allowed myself to be blinded by the gross obviousness of the usual arguments. it was pointed out to me that these eastern nations were not far removed from a savage state. their economics were yet at the stage of scratching the earth and feeding the pigs. the highly-developed material civilisation of europe could not allow itself to be disturbed by a war. the industry and the finance could not allow themselves to be disorganised by the ambitions of an idle class, or even the aspirations, whatever they might be, of the masses. very plausible all this sounded. war does not pay. there had been a book written on that theme--an attempt to put pacificism on a material basis. nothing more solid in the way of argument could have been advanced on this trading and manufacturing globe. war was "bad business!" this was final. but, truth to say, on this july day i reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world. whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, i was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly. the most innocent of passions will take the edge off one's judgment. the desire which possessed me was simply the desire to travel. and that being so it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the continent. my sentiment and not my reason was engaged there. my eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace. in the preceding month of may we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of cracow, but within the russian frontier. the enterprise at first seemed to me considerable. since leaving the sea, to which i have been faithful for so many years, i have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made. i confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone. but the invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings. cracow is the town where i spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life. it was in that old royal and academical city that i ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that age. it was within those historical walls that i began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which i was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence. it was like the experience of another world. the wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and i feared at first that if i ventured bodily in there i would discover that i who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth. i feared. but fear in itself may become a fascination. men have gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight--just to see what would happen. and this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine. neither would it be pursued alone. the invitation was extended to us all. this journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe. my present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past. i was pleased with the idea of showing my companions what polish country life was like; to visit the town where i was at school before the boys by my side should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine. it is only in the short instants of early youth that we have the faculty of coming out of ourselves to see dimly the visions and share the emotions of another soul. for youth all is reality in this world, and with justice, since it apprehends so vividly its images behind which a longer life makes one doubt whether there is any substance. i trusted to the fresh receptivity of these young beings in whom, unless heredity is an empty word, there should have been a fibre which would answer to the sight, to the atmosphere, to the memories of that corner of the earth where my own boyhood had received its earliest independent impressions. the first days of the third week in july, while the telegraph wires hummed with the words of enormous import which were to fill blue books, yellow books, white books, and to arouse the wonder of mankind, passed for us in light-hearted preparations for the journey. what was it but just a rush through germany, to get across as quickly as possible? germany is the part of the earth's solid surface of which i know the least. in all my life i had been across it only twice. i may well say of it _vidi tantum_; and the very little i saw was through the window of a railway carriage at express speed. those journeys of mine had been more like pilgrimages when one hurries on towards the goal for the satisfaction of a deeper need than curiosity. in this last instance, too, i was so incurious that i would have liked to have fallen asleep on the shores of england and opened my eyes, if it were possible, only on the other side of the silesian frontier. yet, in truth, as many others have done, i had "sensed it"--that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of europeans amongst effete asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if i may express myself so, the "perfect man's burden." meantime, in a clearing of the teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a tree of cynical wisdom, a sort of upas tree, whose shade may be seen now lying over the prostrate body of belgium. it must be said that they laboured openly enough, watering it with the most authentic sources of all madness, and watching with their be-spectacled eyes the slow ripening of the glorious blood-red fruit. the sincerest words of peace, words of menace, and i verily believe words of abasement, even if there had been a voice vile enough to utter them, would have been wasted on their ecstasy. for when the fruit ripens on a branch it must fall. there is nothing on earth that can prevent it. ii. for reasons which at first seemed to me somewhat obscure, that one of my companions whose wishes are law decided that our travels should begin in an unusual way by the crossing of the north sea. we should proceed from harwich to hamburg. besides being thirty-six times longer than the dovercalais passage this rather unusual route had an air of adventure in better keeping with the romantic feeling of this polish journey which for so many years had been before us in a state of a project full of colour and promise, but always retreating, elusive like an enticing mirage. and, after all, it had turned out to be no mirage. no wonder they were excited. it's no mean experience to lay your hands on a mirage. the day of departure had come, the very hour had struck. the luggage was coming downstairs. it was most convincing. poland then, if erased from the map, yet existed in reality; it was not a mere _pays du reve_, where you can travel only in imagination. for no man, they argued, not even father, an habitual pursuer of dreams, would push the love of the novelist's art of make-believe to the point of burdening himself with real trunks for a voyage _au pays du reve_. as we left the door of our house, nestling in, perhaps, the most peaceful nook in kent, the sky, after weeks of perfectly brazen serenity, veiled its blue depths and started to weep fine tears for the refreshment of the parched fields. a pearly blur settled over them, and a light sifted of all glare, of everything unkindly and searching that dwells in the splendour of unveiled skies. all unconscious of going towards the very scenes of war, i carried off in my eye, this tiny fragment of great britain; a few fields, a wooded rise; a clump of trees or two, with a short stretch of road, and here and there a gleam of red wall and tiled roof above the darkening hedges wrapped up in soft mist and peace. and i felt that all this had a very strong hold on me as the embodiment of a beneficent and gentle spirit; that it was dear to me not as an inheritance, but as an acquisition, as a conquest in the sense in which a woman is conquered--by love, which is a sort of surrender. these were strange, as if disproportionate thoughts to the matter in hand, which was the simplest sort of a continental holiday. and i am certain that my companions, near as they are to me, felt no other trouble but the suppressed excitement of pleasurable anticipation. the forms and the spirit of the land before their eyes were their inheritance, not their conquest--which is a thing precarious, and, therefore, the most precious, possessing you if only by the fear of unworthiness rather than possessed by you. moreover, as we sat together in the same railway carriage, they were looking forward to a voyage in space, whereas i felt more and more plainly, that what i had started on was a journey in time, into the past; a fearful enough prospect for the most consistent, but to him who had not known how to preserve against his impulses the order and continuity of his life--so that at times it presented itself to his conscience as a series of betrayals--still more dreadful. i down here these thoughts so exclusively personal, to explain why there was no room in my consciousness for the apprehension of a european war. i don't mean to say that i ignored the possibility; i simply did not think of it. and it made no difference; for if i had thought of it, it could only have been in the lame and inconclusive way of the common uninitiated mortals; and i am sure that nothing short of intellectual certitude--obviously unattainable by the man in the street--could have stayed me on that journey which now that i had started on it seemed an irrevocable thing, a necessity of my self-respect. london, the london before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky--with its best venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway. everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the mansion house went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions streamed east and west in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles. in liverpool street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. it was the hour of the boat-trains to holland, to hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places. the station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. there was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that i should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence. for this was the station at which, thirty-seven years before, i arrived on my first visit to london. not the same building, but the same spot. at nineteen years of age, after a period of probation and training i had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a north sea coaster, i had come up from lowestoft--my first long railway journey in england--to "sign on" for an antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship. straight from a railway carriage i had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness. no explorer could have been more lonely. i did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets. i cannot say i was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one's feelings are simple. i was elated. i was pursuing a clear aim, i was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom i was to live; and in the second place, i had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge. both these aims were to be attained by the same effort. how simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early september in the year 1878, when i entered london for the first time. from that point of view--youth and a straightforward scheme of conduct--it was certainly a year of grace. all the help i had to get in touch with the world i was invading was a piece of paper not much bigger than the palm of my hand--in which i held it--torn out of a larger plan of london for the greater facility of reference. it had been the object of careful study for some days past. the fact that i could take a conveyance at the station never occurred to my mind, no, not even when i got out into the street, and stood, taking my anxious bearings, in the midst, so to speak, of twenty thousand hansoms. a strange absence of mind or unconscious conviction that one cannot approach an important moment of one's life by means of a hired carriage? yes, it would have been a preposterous proceeding. and indeed i was to make an australian voyage and encircle the globe before ever entering a london hansom. another document, a cutting from a newspaper, containing the address of an obscure shipping agent, was in my pocket. and i needed not to take it out. that address was as if graven deep in my brain. i muttered its words to myself as i walked on, navigating the sea of london by the chart concealed in the palm of my hand; for i had vowed to myself not to inquire my way from anyone. youth is the time of rash pledges. had i taken a wrong turning i would have been lost; and if faithful to my pledge i might have remained lost for days, for weeks, have left perhaps my bones to be discovered bleaching in some blind alley of the whitechapel district, as it had happened to lonely travellers lost in the bush. but i walked on to my destination without hesitation or mistake, showing there, for the first time, some of that faculty to absorb and make my own the imaged topography of a chart, which in later years was to help me in regions of intricate navigation to keep the ships entrusted to me off the ground. the place i was bound to was not easy to find. it was one of those courts hidden away from the charted and navigable streets, lost among the thick growth of houses like a dark pool in the depths of a forest, approached by an inconspicuous archway as if by secret path; a dickensian nook of london, that wonder city, the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre phantasy the great master knew so well how to bring out by the magic of his understanding love. and the office i entered was dickensian too. the dust of the waterloo year lay on the panes and frames of its windows; early georgian grime clung to its sombre wainscoting. it was one o'clock in the afternoon, but the day was gloomy. by the light of a single gas-jet depending from the smoked ceiling i saw an elderly man, in a long coat of black broadcloth. he had a grey beard, a big nose, thick lips, and heavy shoulders. his curly white hair and the general character of his head recalled vaguely a burly apostle in the _barocco_ style of italian art. standing up at a tall, shabby, slanting desk, his silver-rimmed spectacles pushed up high on his forehead, he was eating a mutton-chop, which had been just brought to him from some dickensian eating-house round the corner. without ceasing to eat he turned to me his florid, _barocco_ apostle's face with an expression of inquiry. i produced elaborately a series of vocal sounds which must have borne sufficient resemblance to the phonetics of english speech, for his face broke into a smile of comprehension almost at once.--"oh, it's you who wrote a letter to me the other day from lowestoft about getting a ship." i had written to him from lowestoft. i can't remember a single word of that letter now. it was my very first composition in the english language. and he had understood it, evidently, for he spoke to the point at once, explaining that his business, mainly, was to find good ships for young gentlemen who wanted to go to sea as premium apprentices with a view of being trained for officers. but he gathered that this was not my object. i did not desire to be apprenticed. was that the case? it was. he was good enough to say then, "of course i see that you are a gentleman. but your wish is to get a berth before the mast as an able seaman if possible. is that it?" it was certainly my wish; but he stated doubtfully that he feared he could not help me much in this. there was an act of parliament which made it penal to procure ships for sailors. "an act-of-parliament. a law," he took pains to impress it again and again on my foreign understanding, while i looked at him in consternation. i had not been half an hour in london before i had run my head against an act of parliament! what a hopeless adventure! however, the _barocco_ apostle was a resourceful person in his way, and we managed to get round the hard letter of it without damage to its fine spirit. yet, strictly speaking, it was not the conduct of a good citizen; and in retrospect there is an unfilial flavour about that early sin of mine. for this act of parliament, the merchant shipping act of the victorian era, had been in a manner of speaking a father and mother to me. for many years it had regulated and disciplined my life, prescribed my food and the amount of my breathing space, had looked after my health and tried as much as possible to secure my personal safety in a risky calling. it isn't such a bad thing to lead a life of hard toil and plain duty within the four corners of an honest act of parliament. and i am glad to say that its seventies have never been applied to me. in the year 1878, the year of "peace with honour," i had walked as lone as any human being in the streets of london, out of liverpool street station, to surrender myself to its care. and now, in the year of the war waged for honour and conscience more than for any other cause, i was there again, no longer alone, but a man of infinitely dear and close ties grown since that time, of work done, of words written, of friendships secured. it was like the closing of a thirty-six-year cycle. all unaware of the war angel already awaiting, with the trumpet at his lips, the stroke of the fatal hour, i sat there, thinking that this life of ours is neither long nor short, but that it can appear very wonderful, entertaining, and pathetic, with symbolic images and bizarre associations crowded into one half-hour of retrospective musing. i felt, too, that this journey, so suddenly entered upon, was bound to take me away from daily life's actualities at every step. i felt it more than ever when presently we steamed out into the north sea, on a dark night fitful with gusts of wind, and i lingered on deck, alone of all the tale of the ship's passengers. that sea was to me something unforgettable, something much more than a name. it had been for some time the schoolroom of my trade. on it, i may safely say, i had learned, too, my first words of english. a wild and stormy abode, sometimes, was that confined, shallow-water academy of seamanship from which i launched myself on the wide oceans. my teachers had been the sailors of the norfolk shore; coast men, with steady eyes, mighty limbs, and gentle voice; men of very few words, which at least were never bare of meaning. honest, strong, steady men, sobered by domestic ties, one and all, as far as i can remember. that is what years ago the north sea i could hear growling in the dark all round the ship had been for me. and i fancied that i must have been carrying its voice in my ear ever since, for nothing could be more familiar than those short, angry sounds i was listening to with a smile of affectionate recognition. i could not guess that before many days my old schoolroom would be desecrated by violence, littered with wrecks, with death walking its waves, hiding under its waters. perhaps while i am writing these words the children, or maybe the grandchildren, of my pacific teachers are out in trawlers, under the naval flag, dredging for german submarine mines. iii. i have said that the north sea was my finishing school of seamanship before i launched myself on the wider oceans. confined as it is in comparison with the vast stage of this water-girt globe, i did not know it in all its parts. my class-room was the region of the english east coast which, in the year of peace with honour, had long forgotten the war episodes belonging to its maritime history. it was a peaceful coast, agricultural, industrial, the home of fishermen. at night the lights of its many towns played on the clouds, or in clear weather lay still, here and there, in brilliant pools above the ink-black outline of the land. on many a night i have hauled at the braces under the shadow of that coast, envying, as sailors will, the people on shore sleeping quietly in their beds within sound of the sea. i imagine that not one head on those envied pillows was made uneasy by the slightest premonition of the realities of naval war the short lifetime of one generation was to bring so close to their homes. though far away from that region of kindly memories and traversing a part of the north sea much less known to me, i was deeply conscious of the familiarity of my surroundings. it was a cloudy, nasty day: and the aspects of nature don't change, unless in the course of thousands of years--or, perhaps, centuries. the phoenicians, its first discoverers, the romans, the first imperial rulers of that sea, had experienced days like this, so different in the wintry quality of the light, even on a july afternoon, from anything they had ever known in their native mediterranean. for myself, a very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, i accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training. the same old thing. a greygreen expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foamridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper. from time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever reforming sky-line. those flurries, and the steady rolling of the ship, accounted for the emptiness of the decks, favouring my reminiscent mood. it might have been a day of five and thirty years ago, when there were on this and every other sea more sails and less smoke-stacks to be seen. yet, thanks to the unchangeable sea i could have given myself up to the illusion of a revised past, had it not been for the periodical transit across my gaze of a german passenger. he was marching round and round the boat deck with characteristic determination. two sturdy boys gambolled round him in his progress like two disorderly satellites round their parent planet. he was bringing them home, from their school in england, for their holiday. what could have induced such a sound teuton to entrust his offspring to the unhealthy influences of that effete, corrupt, rotten and criminal country i cannot imagine. it could hardly have been from motives of economy. i did not speak to him. he trod the deck of that decadent british ship with a scornful foot while his breast (and to a large extent his stomach, too) appeared expanded by the consciousness of a superior destiny. later i could observe the same truculent bearing, touched with the racial grotesqueness, in the men of the _landwehr_ corps, that passed through cracow to reinforce the austrian army in eastern galicia. indeed, the haughty passenger might very well have been, most probably was, an officer of the _landwehr_; and perhaps those two fine active boys are orphans by now. thus things acquire significance by the lapse of time. a citizen, a father, a warrior, a mote in the dust-cloud of six million fighting particles, an unconsidered trifle for the jaws of war, his humanity was not consciously impressed on my mind at the time. mainly, for me, he was a sharp tapping of heels round the corner of the deck-house, a white yachting cap and a green overcoat getting periodically between my eyes and the shifting cloud-horizon of the ashy-grey north sea. he was but a shadowy intrusion and a disregarded one, for, far away there to the west, in the direction of the dogger bank, where fishermen go seeking their daily bread and sometimes find their graves, i could behold an experience of my own in the winter of '81, not of war, truly, but of a fairly lively contest with the elements which were very angry indeed. there had been a troublesome week of it, including one hateful night--or a night of hate (it isn't for nothing that the north sea is also called the german ocean)--when all the fury stored in its heart seemed concentrated on one ship which could do no better than float on her side in an unnatural, disagreeable, precarious, and altogether intolerable manner. there were on board, besides myself, seventeen men all good and true, including a round enormous dutchman who, in those hours between sunset and sunrise, managed to lose his blown-out appearance somehow, became as it were deflated, and thereafter for a good long time moved in our midst wrinkled and slack all over like a half-collapsed balloon. the whimpering of our deck-boy, a skinny, impressionable little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of german ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, i say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and the white cap of the german passenger circling the deck indefatigably, attended by his two gyrating children. "that's a very nice gentleman." this information, together with the fact that he was a widower and a regular passenger twice a year by the ship, was communicated to me suddenly by our captain. at intervals through the day he would pop out of the chart-room and offer me short snatches of conversation. he owned a simple soul and a not very entertaining mind, and he was without malice and, i believe, quite unconsciously, a warm germanophil. and no wonder! as he told me himself, he had been fifteen years on that run, and spent almost as much of his life in hamburg as in harwich. "wonderful people they are," he repeated from time to time, without entering into particulars, but with many nods of sagacious obstinacy. what he knew of them, i suppose, were a few commercial travellers and small merchants, most likely. but i had observed long before that german genius has a hypnotising power over half-baked souls and half-lighted minds. there is an immense force of suggestion in highly organised mediocrity. had it not hypnotised half europe? my man was very much under the spell of german excellence. on the other hand, his contempt for france was equally general and unbounded. i tried to advance some arguments against this position, but i only succeeded in making him hostile. "i believe you are a frenchman yourself," he snarled at last, giving me an intensely suspicious look; and forthwith broke off communications with a man of such unsound sympathies. hour by hour the blotting-paper sky and the great flat greenish smudge of the sea had been taking on a darker tone, without any change in their colouring and texture. evening was coming on over the north sea. black uninteresting hummocks of land appeared, dotting the duskiness of water and clouds in the eastern board: tops of islands fringing the german shore. while i was looking at their antics amongst the waves--and for all their solidity they were very elusive things in the failing light--another passenger came out on deck. this one wore a dark overcoat and a grey cap. the yellow leather strap of his binocular case crossed his chest. his elderly red cheeks nourished but a very thin crop of short white hairs, and the end of his nose was so perfectly round that it determined the whole character of his physiognomy. indeed nothing else in it had the slightest chance to assert itself. his disposition, unlike the widower's, appeared to be mild and humane. he offered me the loan of his glasses. he had a wife and some small children concealed in the depths of the ship, and he thought they were very well where they were. his eldest son was about the decks somewhere. "we are americans," he remarked weightily, but in a rather peculiar tone. he spoke english with the accent of our captain's "wonderful people," and proceeded to give me the history of the family's crossing the atlantic in a white star liner. they remained in england just the time necessary for a railway journey from liverpool to harwich. his people (those in the depths of the ship) were naturally a little tired. at that moment a young man of about twenty, his son, rushed up to us from the fore-deck in a state of intense elation. "hurrah," he cried under his breath. "the first german light! hurrah!" and those two american citizens shook hands on it with the greatest fervour, while i turned away and received full in the eyes the brilliant wink of the borkum lighthouse squatting low down in the darkness. the shade of the night had settled on the north sea. i do not think i have ever seen before a night so full of lights. the great change of sea life since my time was brought home to me. i had been conscious all day of an interminable procession of steamers. they went on and on as if in chase of each other, the baltic trade, the trade of scandinavia, of denmark, of germany, pitching heavily into a head sea and bound for the gateway of dover straits. singly, and in small companies of two and three, they emerged from the dull, colourless, sunless distances ahead as if the supply of rather roughly finished mechanical toys were inexhaustible in some mysterious cheap store away there, below the grey curve of the earth. cargo steam vessels have reached by this time a height of utilitarian ugliness which, when one reflects that it is the product of human ingenuity, strikes hopeless awe into one. these dismal creations look still uglier at sea than in port, and with an added touch of the ridiculous. their rolling waddle when seen at a certain angle, their abrupt clockwork nodding in a sea-way, so unlike the soaring lift and swing of a craft under sail, have in them something caricatural, a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull, mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace. when they switched on (each of these unlovely cargo tanks carried tame lightning within its slab-sided body), when they switched on their lamps they spangled the night with the cheap, electric, shop-glitter, here, there, and everywhere, as of some high street, broken up and washed out to sea. later, heligoland cut into the overhead darkness with its powerful beam, infinitely prolonged out of unfathomable night under the clouds. i remained on deck until we stopped and a steam pilot-boat, so overlighted amidships that one could not make out her complete shape, glided across our bows and sent a pilot on board. i fear that the oar, as a working implement, will become presently as obsolete as the sail. the pilot boarded us in a motor-dinghy. more and more is mankind reducing its physical activities to pulling levers and twirling little wheels. progress! yet the older methods of meeting natural forces demanded intelligence too; an equally fine readiness of wits. and readiness of wits working in combination with the strength of muscles made a more complete man. it was really a surprisingly small dinghy and it ran to and fro like a water-insect fussing noisily down there with immense self-importance. within hail of us the hull of the elbe lightship floated all dark and silent under its enormous round, service lantern; a faithful black shadow watching the broad estuary full of lights. such was my first view of the elbe approached under the wings of peace ready for flight away from the luckless shores of europe. our visual impressions remain with us so persistently that i find it extremely difficult to hold fast to the rational belief that now everything is dark over there, that the elbe lightship has been towed away from its post of duty, the triumphant beam of heligoland extinguished, and the pilot-boat laid up, or turned to warlike uses for lack of its proper work to do. and obviously it must be so. any trickle of oversea trade that passes yet that way must be creeping along cautiously with the unlighted, war-blighted black coast close on one hand, and sudden death on the other. for all the space we steamed through that sunday evening must now be one great minefield, sown thickly with the seeds of hate; while submarines steal out to sea, over the very spot perhaps where the insect-dinghy put a pilot on board of us with so much fussy importance. mines; submarines. the last word in sea-warfare! progress--impressively disclosed by this war. there have been other wars! wars not inferior in the greatness of the stake and in the fierce animosity of feelings. during that one which was finished a hundred years ago it happened that while the english fleet was keeping watch on brest, an american, perhaps fulton himself, offered to the maritime prefect of the port and to the french admiral, an invention which would sink all the unsuspecting english ships one after another--or, at any rate most of them. the offer was not even taken into consideration; and the prefect ends his report to the minister in paris with a fine phrase of indignation: "it is not the sort of death one would deal to brave men." and behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those self-denying words. mankind has been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances. its spirit is apparently so weak now, and its flesh has grown so strong, that it will face any deadly horror of destruction and cannot resist the temptation to use any stealthy, murderous contrivance. it has become the intoxicated slave of its own detestable ingenuity. it is true, too, that since the napoleonic time another sort of war-doctrine has been inculcated in a nation, and held out to the world. iv. on this journey of ours, which for me was essentially not a progress, but a retracing of footsteps on the road of life, i had no beacons to look for in germany. i had never lingered in that land which, on the whole, is so singularly barren of memorable manifestations of generous sympathies and magnanimous impulses. an ineradicable, invincible, provincialism of envy and vanity clings to the forms of its thought like a frowsy garment. even while yet very young i turned my eyes away from it instinctively as from a threatening phantom. i believe that children and dogs have, in their innocence, a special power of perception as far as spectral apparitions and coming misfortunes are concerned. i let myself be carried through germany as if it were pure space, without sights, without sounds. no whispers of the war reached my voluntary abstraction. and perhaps not so very voluntary after all! each of us is a fascinating spectacle to himself, and i had to watch my own personality returning from another world, as it were, to revisit the glimpses of old moons. considering the condition of humanity, i am, perhaps, not so much to blame for giving myself up to that occupation. we prize the sensation of our continuity, and we can only capture it in that way. by watching. we arrived in cracow late at night. after a scrambly supper, i said to my eldest boy, "i can't go to bed. i am going out for a look round. coming?" he was ready enough. for him, all this was part of the interesting adventure of the whole journey. we stepped out of the portal of the hotel into an empty street, very silent and bright with moonlight. i was, indeed, revisiting the glimpses of the moon. i felt so much like a ghost that the discovery that i could remember such material things as the right turn to take and the general direction of the street gave me a moment of wistful surprise. the street, straight and narrow, ran into the great market square of the town, the centre of its affairs and of the lighter side of its life. we could see at the far end of the street a promising widening of space. at the corner an unassuming (but armed) policeman, wearing ceremoniously at midnight a pair of white gloves which made his big hands extremely noticeable, turned his head to look at the grizzled foreigner holding forth in a strange tongue to a youth on whose arm he leaned. the square, immense in its solitude, was full to the brim of moonlight. the garland of lights at the foot of the houses seemed to burn at the bottom of a bluish pool. i noticed with infinite satisfaction that the unnecessary trees the municipality insisted upon sticking between the stones had been steadily refusing to grow. they were not a bit bigger than the poor victims i could remember. also, the paving operations seemed to be exactly at the same point at which i left them forty years before. there were the dull, torn-up patches on that bright expanse, the piles of paving material looking ominously black, like heads of rocks on a silvery sea. who was it that said that time works wonders? what an exploded superstition! as far as these trees and these paving stones were concerned, it had worked nothing. the suspicion of the unchangeableness of things already vaguely suggested to my senses by our rapid drive from the railway station was agreeably strengthened within me. "we are now on the line a.b.," i said to my companion, importantly. it was the name bestowed in my time on one of the sides of the square by the senior students of that town of classical learning and historical relics. the common citizens knew nothing of it, and, even if they had, would not have dreamed of taking it seriously. he who used it was of the initiated, belonged to the schools. we youngsters regarded that name as a fine jest, the invention of a most excellent fancy. even as i uttered it to my boy i experienced again that sense of my privileged initiation. and then, happening to look up at the wall, i saw in the light of the corner lamp, a white, cast-iron tablet fixed thereon, bearing an inscription in raised black letters, thus: "line a.b." heavens! the name had been adopted officially! any town urchin, any guttersnipe, any herb-selling woman of the market-place, any wandering boeotian, was free to talk of the line a.b., to walk on the line a.b., to appoint to meet his friends on the line a.b. it had become a mere name in a directory. i was stunned by the extreme mutability of things. time could work wonders, and no mistake. a municipality had stolen an invention of excellent fancy, and a fine jest had turned into a horrid piece of castiron. i proposed that we should walk to the other end of the line, using the profaned name, not only without gusto, but with positive distaste. and this, too, was one of the wonders of time, for a bare minute had worked that change. there was at the end of the line a certain street i wanted to look at, i explained to my companion. to our right the unequal massive towers of st. mary's church soared aloft into the ethereal radiance of the air, very black on their shaded sides, glowing with a soft phosphorescent sheen on the others. in the distance the florian gate, thick and squat under its pointed roof, barred the street with the square shoulders of the old city wall. in the narrow, brilliantly pale vista of bluish flagstones and silvery fronts of houses, its black archway stood out small and very distinct. there was not a soul in sight, and not even the echo of a footstep for our ears. into this coldly illuminated and dumb emptiness there issued out of my aroused memory, a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the florian gate. it was in the winter months of 1868. at eight o'clock of every morning that god made, sleet or shine, i walked up florian street. but of that, my first school, i remember very little. i believe that one of my co-sufferers there has become a much appreciated editor of historical documents. but i didn't suffer much from the various imperfections of my first school. i was rather indifferent to school troubles. i had a private gnawing worm of my own. this was the time of my father's last illness. every evening at seven, turning my back on the florian gate, i walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the great square. there, in a large drawing-room, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk, i sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. the table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. there were two of these noiseless nursing nuns. their voices were seldom heard. for, indeed, what could they have had to say? when they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral, clear whisper. our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbour on the second floor, a canon of the cathedral, lent for the emergency. she, too, spoke but seldom. she wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. and though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nuns, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. the air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence. i don't know what would have become of me if i had not been a reading boy. my prep. finished i would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart. i suppose that in a futile childish way i would have gone crazy. but i was a reading boy. there were many books about, lying on consoles, on tables, and even on the floor, for we had not had time to settle down. i read! what did i not read! sometimes the elder nun, gliding up and casting a mistrustful look on the open pages, would lay her hand lightly on my head and suggest in a doubtful whisper, "perhaps it is not very good for you to read these books." i would raise my eyes to her face mutely, and with a vague gesture of giving it up she would glide away. later in the evening, but not always, i would be permitted to tip-toe into the sick room to say good-night to the figure prone on the bed, which often could not acknowledge my presence but by a slow movement of the eyes, put my lips dutifully to the nerveless hand lying on the coverlet, and tip-toe out again. then i would go to bed, in a room at the end of the corridor, and often, not always, cry myself into a good sound sleep. i looked forward to what was coming with an incredulous terror. i turned my eyes from it sometimes with success, and yet all the time i had an awful sensation of the inevitable. i had also moments of revolt which stripped off me some of my simple trust in the government of the universe. but when the inevitable entered the sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, i don't think i found a single tear to shed. i have a suspicion that the canon's housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on earth. the day of the funeral came in due course and all the generous "youth of the schools," the grave senate of the university, the delegations of the trade-guilds, might have obtained (if they cared) _de visu_ evidence of the callousness of the little wretch. there was nothing in my aching head but a few words, some such stupid sentences as, "it's done," or, "it's accomplished" (in polish it is much shorter), or something of the sort, repeating itself endlessly. the long procession moved out of the narrow street, down a long street, past the gothic front of st. mary's under its unequal towers, towards the florian gate. in the moonlight-flooded silence of the old town of glorious tombs and tragic memories, i could see again the small boy of that day following a hearse; a space kept clear in which i walked alone, conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes. half the population had turned out on that fine may afternoon. they had not come to honour a great achievement, or even some splendid failure. the dead and they were victims alike of an unrelenting destiny which cut them off from every path of merit and glory. they had come only to render homage to the ardent fidelity of the man whose life had been a fearless confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart in that crowd could feel and understand. it seemed to me that if i remained longer there in that narrow street i should become the helpless prey of the shadows i had called up. they were crowding upon me, enigmatic and insistent in their clinging air of the grave that tasted of dust and of the bitter vanity of old hopes. "let's go back to the hotel, my boy," i said. "it's getting late." it will be easily understood that i neither thought nor dreamt that night of a possible war. for the next two days i went about amongst my fellow men, who welcomed me with the utmost consideration and friendliness, but unanimously derided my fears of a war. they would not believe in it. it was impossible. on the evening of the second day i was in the hotel's smoking room, an irrationally private apartment, a sanctuary for a few choice minds of the town, always pervaded by a dim religious light, and more hushed than any club reading-room i have ever been in. gathered into a small knot, we were discussing the situation in subdued tones suitable to the genius of the place. a gentleman with a fine head of white hair suddenly pointed an impatient finger in my direction and apostrophised me. "what i want to know is whether, should there be war, england would come in." the time to draw a breath, and i spoke out for the cabinet without faltering. "most assuredly. i should think all europe knows that by this time." he took hold of the lapel of my coat, and, giving it a slight jerk for greater emphasis, said forcibly: "then, if england will, as you say, and all the world knows it, there can be no war. germany won't be so mad as that." on the morrow by noon we read of the german ultimatum. the day after came the declaration of war, and the austrian mobilisation order. we were fairly caught. all that remained for me to do was to get my party out of the way of eventual shells. the best move which occurred to me was to snatch them up instantly into the mountains to a polish health resort of great repute--which i did (at the rate of one hundred miles in eleven hours) by the last civilian train permitted to leave cracow for the next three weeks. and there we remained amongst the poles from all parts of poland, not officially interned, but simply unable to obtain the permission to travel by train, or road. it was a wonderful, a poignant two months. this is not the time, and, perhaps, not the place, to enlarge upon the tragic character of the situation; a whole people seeing the culmination of its misfortunes in a final catastrophe, unable to trust anyone, to appeal to anyone, to look for help from any quarter; deprived of all hope and even of its last illusions, and unable, in the trouble of minds and the unrest of consciences, to take refuge in stoical acceptance. i have seen all this. and i am glad i have not so many years left me to remember that appalling feeling of inexorable fate, tangible, palpable, come after so many cruel years, a figure of dread, murmuring with iron lips the final words: ruin--and extinction. but enough of this. for our little band there was the awful anguish of incertitude as to the real nature of events in the west. it is difficult to give an idea how ugly and dangerous things looked to us over there. belgium knocked down and trampled out of existence, france giving in under repeated blows, a military collapse like that of 1870, and england involved in that disastrous alliance, her army sacrificed, her people in a panic! polish papers, of course, had no other but german sources of information. naturally, we did not believe all we read, but it was sometimes excessively difficult to react with sufficient firmness. we used to shut our door, and there, away from everybody, we sat weighing the news, hunting up discrepancies, scenting lies, finding reasons for hopefulness, and generally cheering each other up. but it was a beastly time. people used to come to me with very serious news and ask, "what do you think of it?" and my invariable answer was: "whatever has happened, or is going to happen, whoever wants to make peace, you may be certain that england will not make it, not for ten years, if necessary."' but enough of this, too. through the unremitting efforts of polish friends we obtained at last the permission to travel to vienna. once there, the wing of the american eagle was extended over our uneasy heads. we cannot be sufficiently grateful to the american ambassador (who, all along, interested himself in our fate) for his exertions on our behalf, his invaluable assistance and the real friendliness of his reception in vienna. owing to mr. penfield's action we obtained the permission to leave austria. and it was a near thing, for his excellency has informed my american publishers since that a week later orders were issued to have us detained till the end of the war. however, we effected our hair'sbreadth escape into italy; and, reaching genoa, took passage in a dutch mail steamer, homeward-bound from java with london as a port of call. on that sea-route i might have picked up a memory at every mile if the past had not been eclipsed by the tremendous actuality. we saw the signs of it in the emptiness of the mediterranean, the aspect of gibraltar, the misty glimpse in the bay of biscay of an outward-bound convoy of transports, in the presence of british submarines in the channel. innumerable drifters flying the naval flag dotted the narrow waters, and two naval officers coming on board off the south foreland, piloted the ship through the downs. the downs! there they were, thick with the memories of my sea-life. but what were to me now the futilities of an individual past? as our ship's head swung into the estuary of the thames, a deep, yet faint, concussion passed through the air, a shock rather than a sound, which missing my ear found its way straight into my heart. turning instinctively to look at my boys, i happened to meet my wife's eyes. she also had felt profoundly, coming from far away across the grey distances of the sea, the faint boom of the big guns at work on the coast of flanders--shaping the future. first news--1918 four years ago, on the first day of august, in the town of cracow, austrian poland, nobody would believe that the war was coming. my apprehensions were met by the words: "we have had these scares before." this incredulity was so universal amongst people of intelligence and information, that even i, who had accustomed myself to look at the inevitable for years past, felt my conviction shaken. at that time, it must be noted, the austrian army was already partly mobilised, and as we came through austrian silesia we had noticed all the bridges being guarded by soldiers. "austria will back down," was the opinion of all the well-informed men with whom i talked on the first of august. the session of the university was ended and the students were either all gone or going home to different parts of poland, but the professors had not all departed yet on their respective holidays, and amongst them the tone of scepticism prevailed generally. upon the whole there was very little inclination to talk about the possibility of a war. nationally, the poles felt that from their point of view there was nothing to hope from it. "whatever happens," said a very distinguished man to me, "we may be certain that it's our skins which will pay for it as usual." a well-known literary critic and writer on economical subjects said to me: "war seems a material impossibility, precisely because it would mean the complete ruin of all material interests." he was wrong, as we know; but those who said that austria as usual would back down were, as a matter of fact perfectly right. austria did back down. what these men did not foresee was the interference of germany. and one cannot blame them very well; for who could guess that, when the balance stood even, the german sword would be thrown into the scale with nothing in the open political situation to justify that act, or rather that crime--if crime can ever be justified? for, as the same intelligent man said to me: "as it is, those people" (meaning germans) "have very nearly the whole world in their economic grip. their prestige is even greater than their actual strength. it can get for them practically everything they want. then why risk it?" and there was no apparent answer to the question put in that way. i must also say that the poles had no illusions about the strength of russia. those illusions were the monopoly of the western world. next day the librarian of the university invited me to come and have a look at the library which i had not seen since i was fourteen years old. it was from him that i learned that the greater part of my father's mss. was preserved there. he confessed that he had not looked them through thoroughly yet, but he told me that there was a lot of very important letters bearing on the epoch from '60 to '63, to and from many prominent poles of that time: and he added: "there is a bundle of correspondence that will appeal to you personally. those are letters written by your father to an intimate friend in whose papers they were found. they contain many references to yourself, though you couldn't have been more than four years old at the time. your father seems to have been extremely interested in his son." that afternoon i went to the university, taking with me _my_ eldest son. the attention of that young englishman was mainly attracted by some relics of copernicus in a glass case. i saw the bundle of letters and accepted the kind proposal of the librarian that he should have them copied for me during the holidays. in the range of the deserted vaulted rooms lined with books, full of august memories, and in the passionless silence of all this enshrined wisdom, we walked here and there talking of the past, the great historical past in which lived the inextinguishable spark of national life; and all around us the centuries-old buildings lay still and empty, composing themselves to rest after a year of work on the minds of another generation. no echo of the german ultimatum to russia penetrated that academical peace. but the news had come. when we stepped into the street out of the deserted main quadrangle, we three, i imagine, were the only people in the town who did not know of it. my boy and i parted from the librarian (who hurried home to pack up for his holiday) and walked on to the hotel, where we found my wife actually in the car waiting for us to take a run of some ten miles to the country house of an old school-friend of mine. he had been my greatest chum. in my wanderings about the world i had heard that his later career both at school and at the university had been of extraordinary brilliance--in classics, i believe. but in this, the iron-grey moustache period of his life, he informed me with badly concealed pride that he had gained world fame as the inventor--no, inventor is not the word--producer, i believe would be the right term--of a wonderful kind of beetroot seed. the beet grown from this seed contained more sugar to the square inch--or was it to the square root?--than any other kind of beet. he exported this seed, not only with profit (and even to the united states), but with a certain amount of glory which seemed to have gone slightly to his head. there is a fundamental strain of agriculturalist in a pole which no amount of brilliance, even classical, can destroy. while we were having tea outside, looking down the lovely slope of the gardens at the view of the city in the distance, the possibilities of the war faded from our minds. suddenly my friend's wife came to us with a telegram in her hand and said calmly: "general mobilisation, do you know?" we looked at her like men aroused from a dream. "yes," she insisted, "they are already taking the horses out of the ploughs and carts." i said: "we had better go back to town as quick as we can," and my friend assented with a troubled look: "yes, you had better." as we passed through villages on our way back we saw mobs of horses assembled on the commons with soldiers guarding them, and groups of villagers looking on silently at the officers with their note-books checking deliveries and writing out receipts. some old peasant women were already weeping aloud. when our car drew up at the door of the hotel, the manager himself came to help my wife out. in the first moment i did not quite recognise him. his luxuriant black locks were gone, his head was closely cropped, and as i glanced at it he smiled and said: "i shall sleep at the barracks tonight." i cannot reproduce the atmosphere of that night, the first night after mobilisation. the shops and the gateways of the houses were of course closed, but all through the dark hours the town hummed with voices; the echoes of distant shouts entered the open windows of our bedroom. groups of men talking noisily walked in the middle of the roadway escorted by distressed women: men of all callings and of all classes going to report themselves at the fortress. now and then a military car tooting furiously would whisk through the streets empty of wheeled traffic, like an intensely black shadow under the great flood of electric lights on the grey pavement. but what produced the greatest impression on my mind was a gathering at night in the coffee-room of my hotel of a few men of mark whom i was asked to join. it was about one o'clock in the morning. the shutters were up. for some reason or other the electric light was not switched on, and the big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's faces by. i saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. all the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road which did not seem to lead to moral annihilation. i remember one of those men addressing me after a period of mournful silence compounded of mental exhaustion and unexpressed forebodings. "what do you think england will do? if there is a ray of hope anywhere it is only there." i said: "i believe i know what england will do" (this was before the news of the violation of belgian neutrality arrived), "though i won't tell you, for i am not absolutely certain. but i can tell you what i am absolutely certain of. it is this: if england comes into the war, then, no matter who may want to make peace at the end of six months at the cost of right and justice, england will keep on fighting for years if necessary. you may reckon on that." "what, even alone?" asked somebody across the room. i said: "yes, even alone. but if things go so far as that england will not be alone." i think that at that moment i must have been inspired. well done--1918 i. it can be safely said that for the last four years the seamen of great britain have done well. i mean that every kind and sort of human being classified as seaman, steward, foremast hand, fireman, lamp-trimmer, mate, master, engineer, and also all through the innumerable ratings of the navy up to that of admiral, has done well. i don't say marvellously well or miraculously well or wonderfully well or even very well, because these are simply over-statements of undisciplined minds. i don't deny that a man may be a marvellous being, but this is not likely to be discovered in his lifetime, and not always even after he is dead. man's marvellousness is a hidden thing, because the secrets of his heart are not to be read by his fellows. as to a man's work, if it is done well it is the very utmost that can be said. you can do well, and you can do no more for people to see. in the navy, where human values are thoroughly understood, the highest signal of commendation complimenting a ship (that is, a ship's company) on some achievements consists exactly of those two simple words "well done," followed by the name of the ship. not marvellously done, astonishingly done, wonderfully done--no, only just: "well done, so-and-so." and to the men it is a matter of infinite pride that somebody should judge it proper to mention aloud, as it were, that they have done well. it is a memorable occurrence, for in the sea services you are expected professionally and as a matter of course to do well, because nothing less will do. and in sober speech no man can be expected to do more than well. the superlatives are mere signs of uninformed wonder. thus the official signal which can express nothing but a delicate share of appreciation becomes a great honour. speaking now as a purely civil seaman (or, perhaps, i ought to say civilian, because politeness is not what i have in my mind) i may say that i have never expected the merchant service to do otherwise than well during the war. there were people who obviously did not feel the same confidence, nay, who even confidently expected to see the collapse of merchant seamen's courage. i must admit that such pronouncements did arrest my attention. in my time i have never been able to detect any faint hearts in the ships' companies with whom i have served in various capacities. but i reflected that i had left the sea in '94, twenty years before the outbreak of the war that was to apply its severe test to the quality of modern seamen. perhaps they had deteriorated, i said unwillingly to myself. i remembered also the alarmist articles i had read about the great number of foreigners in the british merchant service, and i didn't know how far these lamentations were justified. in my time the proportion of non-britishers in the crews of the ships flying the red ensign was rather under one-third, which, as a matter of fact, was less than the proportion allowed under the very strict french navigation laws for the crews of the ships of that nation. for the strictest laws aiming at the preservation of national seamen had to recognise the difficulties of manning merchant ships all over the world. the one-third of the french law seemed to be the irreducible minimum. but the british proportion was even less. thus it may be said that up to the date i have mentioned the crews of british merchant ships engaged in deep water voyages to australia, to the east indies and round the horn were essentially british. the small proportion of foreigners which i remember were mostly scandinavians, and my general impression remains that those men were good stuff. they appeared always able and ready to do their duty by the flag under which they served. the majority were norwegians, whose courage and straightness of character are matters beyond doubt. i remember also a couple of finns, both carpenters, of course, and very good craftsmen; a swede, the most scientific sailmaker i ever met; another swede, a steward, who really might have been called a british seaman since he had sailed out of london for over thirty years, a rather superior person; one italian, an everlastingly smiling but a pugnacious character; one frenchman, a most excellent sailor, tireless and indomitable under very difficult circumstances; one hollander, whose placid manner of looking at the ship going to pieces under our feet i shall never forget, and one young, colourless, muscularly very strong german, of no particular character. of non-european crews, lascars and kalashes, i have had very little experience, and that was only in one steamship and for something less than a year. it was on the same occasion that i had my only sight of chinese firemen. sight is the exact word. one didn't speak to them. one saw them going along the decks, to and fro, characteristic figures with rolled-up pigtails, very dirty when coming off duty and very clean-faced when going on duty. they never looked at anybody, and one never had occasion to address them directly. their appearances in the light of day were very regular, and yet somewhat ghostlike in their detachment and silence. but of the white crews of british ships and almost exclusively british in blood and descent, the immediate predecessors of the men whose worth the nation has discovered for itself to-day, i have had a thorough experience. at first amongst them, then with them, i have shared all the conditions of their very special life. for it was very special. in my early days, starting out on a voyage was like being launched into eternity. i say advisedly eternity instead of space, because of the boundless silence which swallowed up one for eighty days--for one hundred days--for even yet more days of an existence without echoes and whispers. like eternity itself! for one can't conceive a vocal eternity. an enormous silence, in which there was nothing to connect one with the universe but the incessant wheeling about of the sun and other celestial bodies, the alternation of light and shadow, eternally chasing each other over the sky. the time of the earth, though most carefully recorded by the half-hourly bells, did not count in reality. it was a special life, and the men were a very special kind of men. by this i don't mean to say they were more complex than the generality of mankind. neither were they very much simpler. i have already admitted that man is a marvellous creature, and no doubt those particular men were marvellous enough in their way. but in their collective capacity they can be best defined as men who lived under the command to do well, or perish utterly. i have written of them with all the truth that was in me, and with an the impartiality of which i was capable. let me not be misunderstood in this statement. affection can be very exacting, and can easily miss fairness on the critical side. i have looked upon them with a jealous eye, expecting perhaps even more than it was strictly fair to expect. and no wonder--since i had elected to be one of them very deliberately, very completely, without any looking back or looking elsewhere. the circumstances were such as to give me the feeling of complete identification, a very vivid comprehension that if i wasn't one of them i was nothing at all. but what was most difficult to detect was the nature of the deep impulses which these men obeyed. what spirit was it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity? no outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them together or had ever shaped their unexpressed standards. it was very mysterious. at last i came to the conclusion that it must be something in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a loose agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes of mankind. who can tell how a tradition comes into the world? we are children of the earth. it may be that the noblest tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men's precarious lives. but once it has been born it becomes a spirit. nothing can extinguish its force then. clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle dialectics of revolt or fear, may obscure it for a time, but in very truth it remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and shame. ii. the mysteriously born tradition of sea-craft commands unity in a body of workers engaged in an occupation in which men have to depend upon each other. it raises them, so to speak, above the frailties of their dead selves. i don't wish to be suspected of lack of judgment and of blind enthusiasm. i don't claim special morality or even special manliness for the men who in my time really lived at sea, and at the present time live at any rate mostly at sea. but in their qualities as well as in their defects, in their weaknesses as well as in their "virtue," there was indubitably something apart. they were never exactly of the earth earthly. they couldn't be that. chance or desire (mostly desire) had set them apart, often in their very childhood; and what is to be remarked is that from the very nature of things this early appeal, this early desire, had to be of an imaginative kind. thus their simple minds had a sort of sweetness. they were in a way preserved. i am not alluding here to the preserving qualities of the salt in the sea. the salt of the sea is a very good thing in its way; it preserves for instance one from catching a beastly cold while one remains wet for weeks together in the "roaring forties." but in sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets much further than the seaman's skin, which in certain latitudes it takes the opportunity to encrust very thoroughly. that and nothing more. and then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse and prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never penetrated either the one or the other? the sea is uncertain, arbitrary, featureless, and violent. except when helped by the varied majesty of the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile--a grey, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. its very immensity is wearisome. at any time within the navigating centuries mankind might have addressed it with the words: "what are you, after all? oh, yes, we know. the greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring enigma of space. yes. but our lives have been nothing if not a continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons." ah, but the charm of the sea! oh, yes, charm enough. or rather a sort of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and a medusa's head whose stare is terror. that sort of charm is calculated to keep men morally in order. but as to sea-salt, with its particular bitterness like nothing else on earth, that, i am safe to say, penetrates no further than the seamen's lips. with them the inner soundness is caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised to hear) the main ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea. being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. it has also in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost invariably, to be found in the temperament of a true seaman. but i repeat that i claim no particular morality for seamen. i will admit without difficulty that i have found amongst them the usual defects of mankind, characters not quite straight, uncertain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness, small meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact with the shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little fantastic. i have even had a downright thief in my experience. one. this is indeed a minute proportion, but it might have been my luck; and since i am writing in eulogy of seamen i feel irresistibly tempted to talk about this unique specimen; not indeed to offer him as an example of morality, but to bring out certain characteristics and set out a certain point of view. he was a large, strong man with a guileless countenance, not very communicative with his shipmates, but when drawn into any sort of conversation displaying a very painstaking earnestness. he was fair and candid-eyed, of a very satisfactory smartness, and, from the officerof-the-watch point of view,--altogether dependable. then, suddenly, he went and stole. and he didn't go away from his honourable kind to do that thing to somebody on shore; he stole right there on the spot, in proximity to his shipmates, on board his own ship, with complete disregard for old brown, our night watchman (whose fame for trustworthiness was utterly blasted for the rest of the voyage) and in such a way as to bring the profoundest possible trouble to all the blameless souls animating that ship. he stole eleven golden sovereigns, and a gold pocket chronometer and chain. i am really in doubt whether the crime should not be entered under the category of sacrilege rather than theft. those things belonged to the captain! there was certainly something in the nature of the violation of a sanctuary, and of a particularly impudent kind, too, because he got his plunder out of the captain's state-room while the captain was asleep there. but look, now, at the fantasy of the man! after going through the pockets of the clothes, he did not hasten to retreat. no. he went deliberately into the saloon and removed from the sideboard two big heavy, silver-plated lamps, which he carried to the fore-end of the ship and stood symmetrically on the knight-heads. this, i must explain, means that he took them away as far as possible from the place where they belonged. these were the deeds of darkness. in the morning the bo'sun came along dragging after him a hose to wash the foc'sle head, and, beholding the shiny cabin lamps, resplendent in the morning light, one on each side of the bowsprit, he was paralysed with awe. he dropped the nozzle from his nerveless hands--and such hands, too! i happened along, and he said to me in a distracted whisper: "look at that, sir, look." "take them back aft at once yourself," i said, very amazed, too. as we approached the quarterdeck we perceived the steward, a prey to a sort of sacred horror, holding up before us the captain's trousers. bronzed men with brooms and buckets in their hands stood about with open mouths. "i have found them lying in the passage outside the captain's door," the steward declared faintly. the additional statement that the captain's watch was gone from its hook by the bedside raised the painful sensation to the highest pitch. we knew then we had a thief amongst us. our thief! behold the solidarity of a ship's company. he couldn't be to us like any other thief. we all had to live under the shadow of his crime for days; but the police kept on investigating, and one morning a young woman appeared on board swinging a parasol, attended by two policemen, and identified the culprit. she was a barmaid of some bar near the circular quay, and knew really nothing of our man except that he looked like a respectable sailor. she had seen him only twice in her life. on the second occasion he begged her nicely as a great favour to take care for him of a small solidly tied-up paper parcel for a day or two. but he never came near her again. at the end of three weeks she opened it, and, of course, seeing the contents, was much alarmed, and went to the nearest police-station for advice. the police took her at once on board our ship, where all hands were mustered on the quarterdeck. she stared wildly at all our faces, pointed suddenly a finger with a shriek, "that's the man," and incontinently went off into a fit of hysterics in front of thirty-six seamen. i must say that never in my life did i see a ship's company look so frightened. yes, in this tale of guilt, there was a curious absence of mere criminality, and a touch of that fantasy which is often a part of a seaman's character. it wasn't greed that moved him, i think. it was something much less simple: boredom, perhaps, or a bet, or the pleasure of defiance. and now for the point of view. it was given to me by a short, black-bearded a.b. of the crew, who on sea passages washed my flannel shirts, mended my clothes and, generally, looked after my room. he was an excellent needleman and washerman, and a very good sailor. standing in this peculiar relation to me, he considered himself privileged to open his mind on the matter one evening when he brought back to my cabin three clean and neatly folded shirts. he was profoundly pained. he said: "what a ship's company! never seen such a crowd! liars, cheats, thieves. . . " it was a needlessly jaundiced view. there were in that ship's company three or four fellows who dealt in tall yarns, and i knew that on the passage out there had been a dispute over a game in the foc'sle once or twice of a rather acute kind, so that all card-playing had to be abandoned. in regard to thieves, as we know, there was only one, and he, i am convinced, came out of his reserve to perform an exploit rather than to commit a crime. but my black-bearded friend's indignation had its special morality, for he added, with a burst of passion: "and on board our ship, too--a ship like this. . ." therein lies the secret of the seamen's special character as a body. the ship, this ship, our ship, the ship we serve, is the moral symbol of our life. a ship has to be respected, actually and ideally; her merit, her innocence, are sacred things. of all the creations of man she is the closest partner of his toil and courage. from every point of view it is imperative that you should do well by her. and, as always in the case of true love, all you can do for her adds only to the tale of her merits in your heart. mute and compelling, she claims not only your fidelity, but your respect. and the supreme "well done!" which you may earn is made over to her. iii. it is my deep conviction, or, perhaps, i ought to say my deep feeling born from personal experience, that it is not the sea but the ships of the sea that guide and command that spirit of adventure which some say is the second nature of british men. i don't want to provoke a controversy (for intellectually i am rather a quietist) but i venture to affirm that the main characteristic of the british men spread all over the world, is not the spirit of adventure so much as the spirit of service. i think that this could be demonstrated from the history of great voyages and the general activity of the race. that the british man has always liked his service to be adventurous rather than otherwise cannot be denied, for each british man began by being young in his time when all risk has a glamour. afterwards, with the course of years, risk became a part of his daily work; he would have missed it from his side as one misses a loved companion. the mere love of adventure is no saving grace. it is no grace at all. it lays a man under no obligation of faithfulness to an idea and even to his own self. roughly speaking, an adventurer may be expected to have courage, or at any rate may be said to need it. but courage in itself is not an ideal. a successful highwayman showed courage of a sort, and pirate crews have been known to fight with courage or perhaps only with reckless desperation in the manner of cornered rats. there is nothing in the world to prevent a mere lover or pursuer of adventure from running at any moment. there is his own self, his mere taste for excitement, the prospect of some sort of gain, but there is no sort of loyalty to bind him in honour to consistent conduct. i have noticed that the majority of mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skins; and the proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole to an advanced age. you find them in mysterious nooks of islands and continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly boastful. there is nothing more futile under the sun than a mere adventurer. he might have loved at one time--which would have been a saving grace. i mean loved adventure for itself. but if so, he was bound to lose this grace very soon. adventure by itself is but a phantom, a dubious shape without a heart. yes, there is nothing more futile than an adventurer; but nobody can say that the adventurous activities of the british race are stamped with the futility of a chase after mere emotions. the successive generations that went out to sea from these isles went out to toil desperately in adventurous conditions. a man is a worker. if he is not that he is nothing. just nothing--like a mere adventurer. those men understood the nature of their work, but more or less dimly, in various degrees of imperfection. the best and greatest of their leaders even had never seen it clearly, because of its magnitude and the remoteness of its end. this is the common fate of mankind, whose most positive achievements are born from dreams and visions followed loyally to an unknown destination. and it doesn't matter. for the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort. in other and in greater words, what is needed is a sense of immediate duty, and a feeling of impalpable constraint. indeed, seamen and duty are all the time inseparable companions. it has been suggested to me that this sense of duty is not a patriotic sense or a religious sense, or even a social sense in a seaman. i don't know. it seems to me that a seaman's duty may be an unconscious compound of these three, something perhaps smaller than either, but something much more definite for the simple mind and more adapted to the humbleness of the seaman's task. it has been suggested also to me that the impalpable constraint is put upon the nature of a seaman by the spirit of the sea, which he serves with a dumb and dogged devotion. those are fine words conveying a fine idea. but this i do know, that it is very difficult to display a dogged devotion to a mere spirit, however great. in everyday life ordinary men require something much more material, effective, definite and symbolic on which to concentrate their love and their devotion. and then, what is it, this spirit of the sea? it is too great and too elusive to be embraced and taken to a human breast. all that a guileless or guileful seaman knows of it is its hostility, its exaction of toil as endless as its ever-renewed horizons. no. what awakens the seaman's sense of duty, what lays that impalpable constraint upon the strength of his manliness, what commands his not always dumb if always dogged devotion, is not the spirit of the sea but something that in his eyes has a body, a character, a fascination, and almost a soul--it is his ship. there is not a day that has passed for many centuries now without the sun seeing scattered over all the seas groups of british men whose material and moral existence is conditioned by their loyalty to each other and their faithful devotion to a ship. each age has sent its contingent, not of sons (for the great mass of seamen have always been a childless lot) but of loyal and obscure successors taking up the modest but spiritual inheritance of a hard life and simple duties; of duties so simple that nothing ever could shake the traditional attitude born from the physical conditions of the service. it was always the ship, bound on any possible errand in the service of the nation, that has been the stage for the exercise of seamen's primitive virtues. the dimness of great distances and the obscurity of lives protected them from the nation's admiring gaze. those scattered distant ships' companies seemed to the eyes of the earth only one degree removed (on the right side, i suppose) from the other strange monsters of the deep. if spoken of at all they were spoken of in tones of half-contemptuous indulgence. a good many years ago it was my lot to write about one of those ships' companies on a certain sea, under certain circumstances, in a book of no particular length. that small group of men whom i tried to limn with loving care, but sparing none of their weaknesses, was characterised by a friendly reviewer as a lot of engaging ruffians. this gave me some food for thought. was it, then, in that guise that they appeared through the mists of the sea, distant, perplexed, and simple-minded? and what on earth is an "engaging ruffian"? he must be a creature of literary imagination, i thought, for the two words don't match in my personal experience. it has happened to me to meet a few ruffians here and there, but i never found one of them "engaging." i consoled myself, however, by the reflection that the friendly reviewer must have been talking like a parrot, which so often seems to understand what it says. yes, in the mists of the sea, and in their remoteness from the rest of the race, the shapes of those men appeared distorted, uncouth and faint--so faint as to be almost invisible. it needed the lurid light of the engines of war to bring them out into full view, very simple, without worldly graces, organised now into a body of workers by the genius of one of themselves, who gave them a place and a voice in the social scheme; but in the main still apart in their homeless, childless generations, scattered in loyal groups over all the seas, giving faithful care to their ships and serving the nation, which, since they are seamen, can give them no reward but the supreme "well done." tradition--1918 "work is the law. like iron that lying idle degenerates into a mass of useless rust, like water that in an unruffled pool sickens into a stagnant and corrupt state, so without action the spirit of men turns to a dead thing, loses its force, ceases prompting us to leave some trace of ourselves on this earth." the sense of the above lines does not belong to me. it may be found in the note-books of one of the greatest artists that ever lived, leonardo da vinci. it has a simplicity and a truth which no amount of subtle comment can destroy. the master who had meditated so deeply on the rebirth of arts and sciences, on the inward beauty of all things,--ships' lines, women's faces--and on the visible aspects of nature was profoundly right in his pronouncement on the work that is done on the earth. from the hard work of men are born the sympathetic consciousness of a common destiny, the fidelity to right practice which makes great craftsmen, the sense of right conduct which we may call honour, the devotion to our calling and the idealism which is not a misty, winged angel without eyes, but a divine figure of terrestrial aspect with a clear glance and with its feet resting firmly on the earth on which it was born. and work will overcome all evil, except ignorance, which is the condition of humanity and, like the ambient air, fills the space between the various sorts and conditions of men, which breeds hatred, fear, and contempt between the masses of mankind, and puts on men's lips, on their innocent lips, words that are thoughtless and vain. thoughtless, for instance, were the words that (in all innocence, i believe) came on the lips of a prominent statesman making in the house of commons an eulogistic reference to the british merchant service. in this name i include men of diverse status and origin, who live on and by the sea, by it exclusively, outside all professional pretensions and social formulas, men for whom not only their daily bread but their collective character, their personal achievement and their individual merit come from the sea. those words of the statesman were meant kindly; but, after all, this is not a complete excuse. rightly or wrongly, we expect from a man of national importance a larger and at the same time a more scrupulous precision of speech, for it is possible that it may go echoing down the ages. his words were: "it is right when thinking of the navy not to forget the men of the merchant service, who have shown--and it is more surprising because they have had no traditions towards it--courage as great," etc., etc. and then he went on talking of the execution of captain fryatt, an event of undying memory, but less connected with the permanent, unchangeable conditions of sea service than with the wrong view german minds delight in taking of englishmen's psychology. the enemy, he said, meant by this atrocity to frighten our sailors away from the sea. "what has happened?" he goes on to ask. "never at any time in peace have sailors stayed so short a time ashore or shown such a readiness to step again into a ship." which means, in other words, that they answered to the call. i should like to know at what time of history the english merchant service, the great body of merchant seamen, had failed to answer the call. noticed or unnoticed, ignored or commanded, they have answered invariably the call to do their work, the very conditions of which made them what they are. they have always served the nation's needs through their own invariable fidelity to the demands of their special life; but with the development and complexity of material civilisation they grew less prominent to the nation's eye among all the vast schemes of national industry. never was the need greater and the call to the services more urgent than to-day. and those inconspicuous workers on whose qualities depends so much of the national welfare have answered it without dismay, facing risk without glory, in the perfect faithfulness to that tradition which the speech of the statesman denies to them at the very moment when he thinks fit to praise their courage . . . and mention his surprise! the hour of opportunity has struck--not for the first time--for the merchant service; and if i associate myself with all my heart in the admiration and the praise which is the greatest reward of brave men i must be excused from joining in any sentiment of surprise. it is perhaps because i have not been born to the inheritance of that tradition, which has yet fashioned the fundamental part of my character in my young days, that i am so consciously aware of it and venture to vindicate its existence in this outspoken manner. merchant seamen have always been what they are now, from their earliest days, before the royal navy had been fashioned out of the material they furnished for the hands of kings and statesmen. their work has made them, as work undertaken with single-minded devotion makes men, giving to their achievements that vitality and continuity in which their souls are expressed, tempered and matured through the succeeding generations. in its simplest definition the work of merchant seamen has been to take ships entrusted to their care from port to port across the seas; and, from the highest to the lowest, to watch and labour with devotion for the safety of the property and the lives committed to their skill and fortitude through the hazards of innumerable voyages. that was always the clear task, the single aim, the simple ideal, the only problem for an unselfish solution. the terms of it have changed with the years, its risks have worn different aspects from time to time. there are no longer any unexplored seas. human ingenuity has devised better means to meet the dangers of natural forces. but it is always the same problem. the youngsters who were growing up at sea at the end of my service are commanding ships now. at least i have heard of some of them who do. and whatever the shape and power of their ships the character of the duty remains the same. a mine or a torpedo that strikes your ship is not so very different from a sharp, uncharted rock tearing her life out of her in another way. at a greater cost of vital energy, under the wellnigh intolerable stress of vigilance and resolution, they are doing steadily the work of their professional forefathers in the midst of multiplied dangers. they go to and fro across the oceans on their everlasting task: the same men, the same stout hearts, the same fidelity to an exacting tradition created by simple toilers who in their time knew how to live and die at sea. allowed to share in this work and in this tradition for something like twenty years, i am bold enough to think that perhaps i am not altogether unworthy to speak of it. it was the sphere not only of my activity but, i may safely say, also of my affections; but after such a close connection it is very difficult to avoid bringing in one's own personality. without looking at all at the aspects of the labour problem, i can safely affirm that i have never, never seen british seamen refuse any risk, any exertion, any effort of spirit or body up to the extremest demands of their calling. years ago--it seems ages ago--i have seen the crew of a british ship fight the fire in the cargo for a whole sleepless week and then, with her decks blown up, i have seen them still continue the fight to save the floating shell. and at last i have seen them refuse to be taken off by a vessel standing by, and this only in order "to see the last of our ship," at the word, at the simple word, of a man who commanded them, a worthy soul indeed, but of no heroic aspect. i have seen that. i have shared their days in small boats. hard days. ages ago. and now let me mention a story of to-day. i will try to relate it here mainly in the words of the chief engineer of a certain steamship which, after bunkering, left lerwick, bound for iceland. the weather was cold, the sea pretty rough, with a stiff head wind. all went well till next day, about 1.30 p.m., then the captain sighted a suspicious object far away to starboard. speed was increased at once to close in with the faroes and good lookouts were set fore and aft. nothing further was seen of the suspicious object, but about halfpast three without any warning the ship was struck amidships by a torpedo which exploded in the bunkers. none of the crew was injured by the explosion, and all hands, without exception, behaved admirably. the chief officer with his watch managed to lower the no. 3 boat. two other boats had been shattered by the explosion, and though another lifeboat was cleared and ready, there was no time to lower it, and "some of us jumped while others were washed overboard. meantime the captain had been busy handing lifebelts to the men and cheering them up with words and smiles, with no thought of his own safety." the ship went down in less than four minutes. the captain was the last man on board, going down with her, and was sucked under. on coming up he was caught under an upturned boat to which five hands were clinging. "one lifeboat," says the chief engineer, "which was floating empty in the distance was cleverly manoeuvred to our assistance by the steward, who swam off to her pluckily. our next endeavour was to release the captain, who was entangled under the boat. as it was impossible to right her, we set-to to split her side open with the boat hook, because by awful bad luck the head of the axe we had flew off at the first blow and was lost. the rescue took thirty minutes, and the extricated captain was in a pitiable condition, being badly bruised and having swallowed a lot of salt water. he was unconscious. while at that work the submarine came to the surface quite close and made a complete circle round us, the seven men that we counted on the conning tower laughing at our efforts. "there were eighteen of us saved. i deeply regret the loss of the chief officer, a fine fellow and a kind shipmate showing splendid promise. the other men lost--one a.b., one greaser, and two firemen--were quiet, conscientious, good fellows." with no restoratives in the boat, they endeavoured to bring the captain round by means of massage. meantime the oars were got out in order to reach the faroes, which were about thirty miles dead to windward, but after about nine hours' hard work they had to desist, and, putting out a sea-anchor, they took shelter under the canvas boat-cover from the cold wind and torrential rain. says the narrator: "we were all very wet and miserable, and decided to have two biscuits all round. the effects of this and being under the shelter of the canvas warmed us up and made us feel pretty well contented. at about sunrise the captain showed signs of recovery, and by the time the sun was up he was looking a lot better, much to our relief." after being informed of what had been done the revived captain "dropped a bombshell in our midst," by proposing to make for the shetlands, which were _only_ one hundred and fifty miles off. "the wind is in our favour," he said. "i promise to take you there. are you all willing?" this--comments the chief engineer--"from a man who but a few hours previously had been hauled back from the grave!" the captain's confident manner inspired the men, and they all agreed. under the best possible conditions a boat-run of one hundred and fifty miles in the north atlantic and in winter weather would have been a feat of no mean merit, but in the circumstances it required uncommon nerve and skill to carry out such a promise. with an oar for a mast and the boat-cover cut down for a sail they started on their dangerous journey, with the boat compass and the stars for their guide. the captain's undaunted serenity buoyed them all up against despondency. he told them what point he was making for. it was ronas hill, "and we struck it as straight as a die." the chief engineer commends also the ship steward for the manner in which he made the little food they had last, the cheery spirit he manifested, and the great help he was to the captain by keeping the men in good humour. that trusty man had "his hands cruelly chafed with the rowing, but it never damped his spirits." they made ronas hill (as straight as a die), and the chief engineer cannot express their feelings of gratitude and relief when they set their feet on the shore. he praises the unbounded kindness of the people in hillswick. "it seemed to us all like paradise regained," he says, concluding his letter with the words: "and there was our captain, just his usual self, as if nothing had happened, as if bringing the boat that hazardous journey and being the means of saving eighteen souls was to him an everyday occurrence." such is the chief engineer's testimony to the continuity of the old tradition of the sea, which made by the work of men has in its turn created for them their simple ideal of conduct. confidence--1919 i. the seamen hold up the edifice. they have been holding it up in the past and they will hold it up in the future, whatever this future may contain of logical development, of unforeseen new shapes, of great promises and of dangers still unknown. it is not an unpardonable stretching of the truth to say that the british empire rests on transportation. i am speaking now naturally of the sea, as a man who has lived on it for many years, at a time, too, when on sighting a vessel on the horizon of any of the great oceans it was perfectly safe to bet any reasonable odds on her being a british ship--with the certitude of making a pretty good thing of it at the end of the voyage. i have tried to convey here in popular terms the strong impression remembered from my young days. the red ensign prevailed on the high seas to such an extent that one always experienced a slight shock on seeing some other combination of colours blow out at the peak or flag-pole of any chance encounter in deep water. in the long run the persistence of the visual fact forced upon the mind a half-unconscious sense of its inner significance. we have all heard of the well-known view that trade follows the flag. and that is not always true. there is also this truth that the flag, in normal conditions, represents commerce to the eye and understanding of the average man. this is a truth, but it is not the whole truth. in its numbers and in its unfailing ubiquity, the british red ensign, under which naval actions too have been fought, adventures entered upon and sacrifices offered, represented in fact something more than the prestige of a great trade. the flutter of that piece of red bunting showered sentiment on the nations of the earth. i will not venture to say that in every case that sentiment was of a friendly nature. of hatred, half concealed or concealed not at all, this is not the place to speak; and indeed the little i have seen of it about the world was tainted with stupidity and seemed to confess in its very violence the extreme poorness of its case. but generally it was more in the nature of envious wonder qualified by a half-concealed admiration. that flag, which but for the union jack in the corner might have been adopted by the most radical of revolutions, affirmed in its numbers the stability of purpose, the continuity of effort and the greatness of britain's opportunity pursued steadily in the order and peace of the world: that world which for twenty-five years or so after 1870 may be said to have been living in holy calm and hushed silence with only now and then a slight clink of metal, as if in some distant part of mankind's habitation some restless body had stumbled over a heap of old armour. ii. we who have learned by now what a world-war is like may be excused for considering the disturbances of that period as insignificant brawls, mere hole-and-corner scuffles. in the world, which memory depicts as so wonderfully tranquil all over, it was the sea yet that was the safest place. and the red ensign, commercial, industrial, historic, pervaded the sea! assertive only by its numbers, highly significant, and, under its character of a trade--emblem, nationally expressive, it was symbolic of old and new ideas, of conservatism and progress, of routine and enterprise, of drudgery and adventure--and of a certain easy-going optimism that would have appeared the father of sloth itself if it had not been so stubbornly, so everlastingly active. the unimaginative, hard-working men, great and small, who served this flag afloat and ashore, nursed dumbly a mysterious sense of its greatness. it sheltered magnificently their vagabond labours under the sleepless eye of the sun. it held up the edifice. but it crowned it too. this is not the extravagance of a mixed metaphor. it is the sober expression of a not very complex truth. within that double function the national life that flag represented so well went on in safety, assured of its daily crust of bread for which we all pray and without which we would have to give up faith, hope and charity, the intellectual conquests of our minds and the sanctified strength of our labouring arms. i may permit myself to speak of it in these terms because as a matter of fact it was on that very symbol that i had founded my life and (as i have said elsewhere in a moment of outspoken gratitude) had known for many years no other roof above my head. in those days that symbol was not particularly regarded. superficially and definitely it represented but one of the forms of national activity rather remote from the close-knit organisations of other industries, a kind of toil not immediately under the public eye. it was of its navy that the nation, looking out of the windows of its world-wide edifice, was proudly aware. and that was but fair. the navy is the armed man at the gate. an existence depending upon the sea must be guarded with a jealous, sleepless vigilance, for the sea is but a fickle friend. it had provoked conflicts, encouraged ambitions, and had lured some nations to destruction--as we know. he--man or people--who, boasting of long years of familiarity with the sea, neglects the strength and cunning of his right hand is a fool. the pride and trust of the nation in its navy so strangely mingled with moments of neglect, caused by a particularly thick-headed idealism, is perfectly justified. it is also very proper: for it is good for a body of men conscious of a great responsibility to feel themselves recognised, if only in that fallible, imperfect and often irritating way in which recognition is sometimes offered to the deserving. but the merchant service had never to suffer from that sort of irritation. no recognition was thrust on it offensively, and, truth to say, it did not seem to concern itself unduly with the claims of its own obscure merit. it had no consciousness. it had no words. it had no time. to these busy men their work was but the ordinary labour of earning a living; their duties in their ever-recurring round had, like the sun itself, the commonness of daily things; their individual fidelity was not so much united as merely co-ordinated by an aim that shone with no spiritual lustre. they were everyday men. they were that, eminently. when the great opportunity came to them to link arms in response to a supreme call they received it with characteristic simplicity, incorporating self-sacrifice into the texture of their common task, and, as far as emotion went, framing the horror of mankind's catastrophic time within the rigid rules of their professional conscience. and who can say that they could have done better than this? such was their past both remote and near. it has been stubbornly consistent, and as this consistency was based upon the character of men fashioned by a very old tradition, there is no doubt that it will endure. such changes as came into the sea life have been for the main part mechanical and affecting only the material conditions of that inbred consistency. that men don't change is a profound truth. they don't change because it is not necessary for them to change even if they could accomplish that miracle. it is enough for them to be infinitely adaptable--as the last four years have abundantly proved. iii. thus one may await the future without undue excitement and with unshaken confidence. whether the hues of sunrise are angry or benign, gorgeous or sinister, we shall always have the same sky over our heads. yet by a kindly dispensation of providence the human faculty of astonishment will never lack food. what could be more surprising for instance, than the calm invitation to great britain to discard the force and protection of its navy? it has been suggested, it has been proposed--i don't know whether it has been pressed. probably not much. for if the excursions of audacious folly have no bounds that human eye can see, reason has the habit of never straying very far away from its throne. it is not the first time in history that excited voices have been heard urging the warrior still panting from the fray to fling his tried weapons on the altar of peace, for they would be needed no more! and such voices have been, in undying hope or extreme weariness, listened to sometimes. but not for long. after all every sort of shouting is a transitory thing. it is the grim silence of facts that remains. the british merchant service has been challenged in its supremacy before. it will be challenged again. it may be even asked menacingly in the name of some humanitarian doctrine or some empty ideal to step down voluntarily from that place which it has managed to keep for so many years. but i imagine that it will take more than words of brotherly love or brotherly anger (which, as is well known, is the worst kind of anger) to drive british seamen, armed or unarmed, from the seas. firm in this indestructible if not easily explained conviction, i can allow myself to think placidly of that long, long future which i shall not see. my confidence rests on the hearts of men who do not change, though they may forget many things for a time and even forget to be themselves in a moment of false enthusiasm. but of that i am not afraid. it will not be for long. i know the men. through the kindness of the admiralty (which, let me confess here in a white sheet, i repaid by the basest ingratitude) i was permitted during the war to renew my contact with the british seamen of the merchant service. it is to their generosity in recognising me under the shore rust of twenty-five years as one of themselves that i owe one of the deepest emotions of my life. never for a moment did i feel among them like an idle, wandering ghost from a distant past. they talked to me seriously, openly, and with professional precision, of facts, of events, of implements, i had never heard of in my time; but the hands i grasped were like the hands of the generation which had trained my youth and is now no more. i recognised the character of their glances, the accent of their voices. their moving tales of modern instances were presented to me with that peculiar turn of mind flavoured by the inherited humour and sagacity of the sea. i don't know what the seaman of the future will be like. he may have to live all his days with a telephone tied up to his head and bristle all over with scientific antennae like a figure in a fantastic tale. but he will always be the man revealed to us lately, immutable in his slight variations like the closed path of this planet of ours on which he must find his exact position once, at the very least, in every twenty-four hours. the greatest desideratum of a sailor's life is to be "certain of his position." it is a source of great worry at times, but i don't think that it need be so at this time. yet even the best position has its dangers on account of the fickleness of the elements. but i think that, left untrammelled to the individual effort of its creators and to the collective spirit of its servants, the british merchant service will manage to maintain its position on this restless and watery globe. flight--1917 to begin at the end, i will say that the "landing" surprised me by a slight and very characteristically "dead" sort of shock. i may fairly call myself an amphibious creature. a good half of my active existence has been passed in familiar contact with salt water, and i was aware, theoretically, that water is not an elastic body: but it was only then that i acquired the absolute conviction of the fact. i remember distinctly the thought flashing through my head: "by jove! it isn't elastic!" such is the illuminating force of a particular experience. this landing (on the water of the north sea) was effected in a short biplane after one hour and twenty minutes in the air. i reckon every minute like a miser counting his hoard, for, if what i've got is mine, i am not likely now to increase the tale. that feeling is the effect of age. it strikes me as i write that, when next time i leave the surface of this globe, it won't be to soar bodily above it in the air. quite the contrary. and i am not thinking of a submarine either. . . . but let us drop this dismal strain and go back logically to the beginning. i must confess that i started on that flight in a state--i won't say of fury, but of a most intense irritation. i don't remember ever feeling so annoyed in my life. it came about in this way. two or three days before, i had been invited to lunch at an r.n.a.s. station, and was made to feel very much at home by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my good fortune to meet. then i was taken into the sheds. i walked respectfully round and round a lot of machines of all kinds, and the more i looked at them the more i felt somehow that for all the effect they produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric design. so i said to commander o., who very kindly was conducting me: "this is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at, one must have been up." he said at once: "i'll give you a flight to-morrow if you like." i postulated that it should be none of those "ten minutes in the air" affairs. i wanted a real business flight. commander o. assured me that i would get "awfully bored," but i declared that i was willing to take that risk. "very well," he said. "eleven o'clock to-morrow. don't be late." i am sorry to say i was about two minutes late, which was enough, however, for commander o. to greet me with a shout from a great distance: "oh! you are coming, then!" "of course i am coming," i yelled indignantly. he hurried up to me. "all right. there's your machine, and here's your pilot. come along." a lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a hut: two of them began to button me into the coat, two more were ramming a cap on my head, others stood around with goggles, with binoculars. . . i couldn't understand the necessity of such haste. we weren't going to chase fritz. there was no sign of fritz anywhere in the blue. those dear boys did not seem to notice my age--fifty-eight, if a day--nor my infirmities--a gouty subject for years. this disregard was very flattering, and i tried to live up to it, but the pace seemed to me terrific. they galloped me across a vast expanse of open ground to the water's edge. the machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cottage, and much more imposing. my young pilot went up like a bird. there was an idle, ablebodied ladder loafing against a shed within fifteen feet of me, but as nobody seemed to notice it, i recommended myself mentally to heaven and started climbing after the pilot. the close view of the real fragility of that rigid structure startled me considerably, while commander o. discomposed me still more by shouting repeatedly: "don't put your foot there!" i didn't know where to put my foot. there was a slight crack; i heard some swear-words below me, and then with a supreme effort i rolled in and dropped into a basket-chair, absolutely winded. a small crowd of mechanics and officers were looking up at me from the ground, and while i gasped visibly i thought to myself that they would be sure to put it down to sheer nervousness. but i hadn't breath enough in my body to stick my head out and shout down to them: "you know, it isn't that at all!" generally i try not to think of my age and infirmities. they are not a cheerful subject. but i was never so angry and disgusted with them as during that minute or so before the machine took the water. as to my feelings in the air, those who will read these lines will know their own, which are so much nearer the mind and the heart than any writings of an unprofessional can be. at first all my faculties were absorbed and as if neutralised by the sheer novelty of the situation. the first to emerge was the sense of security so much more perfect than in any small boat i've ever been in; the, as it were, material, stillness, and immobility (though it was a bumpy day). i very soon ceased to hear the roar of the wind and engines--unless, indeed, some cylinders missed, when i became acutely aware of that. within the rigid spread of the powerful planes, so strangely motionless i had sometimes the illusion of sitting as if by enchantment in a block of suspended marble. even while looking over at the aeroplane's shadow running prettily over land and sea, i had the impression of extreme slowness. i imagine that had she suddenly nosedived out of control, i would have gone to the final smash without a single additional heartbeat. i am sure i would not have known. it is doubtless otherwise with the man in control. but there was no dive, and i returned to earth (after an hour and twenty minutes) without having felt "bored" for a single second. i descended (by the ladder) thinking that i would never go flying again. no, never any more--lest its mysterious fascination, whose invisible wing had brushed my heart up there, should change to unavailing regret in a man too old for its glory. some reflections on the loss of the titanic--1912 it is with a certain bitterness that one must admit to oneself that the late _s.s. titanic_ had a "good press." it is perhaps because i have no great practice of daily newspapers (i have never seen so many of them together lying about my room) that the white spaces and the big lettering of the headlines have an incongruously festive air to my eyes, a disagreeable effect of a feverish exploitation of a sensational god-send. and if ever a loss at sea fell under the definition, in the terms of a bill of lading, of act of god, this one does, in its magnitude, suddenness and severity; and in the chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind. i say this with all the seriousness the occasion demands, though i have neither the competence nor the wish to take a theological view of this great misfortune, sending so many souls to their last account. it is but a natural _reflection_. another one flowing also from the phraseology of bills of lading (a bill of lading is a shipping document limiting in certain of its clauses the liability of the carrier) is that the "king's enemies" of a more or less overt sort are not altogether sorry that this fatal mishap should strike the prestige of the greatest merchant service of the world. i believe that not a thousand miles from these shores certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction--to speak plainly--by rather ill-natured comments. in what light one is to look at the action of the american senate is more difficult to say. from a certain point of view the sight of the august senators of a great power rushing to new york and beginning to bully and badger the luckless "yamsi"--on the very quay-side so to speak--seems to furnish the shakespearian touch of the comic to the real tragedy of the fatuous drowning of all these people who to the last moment put their trust in mere bigness, in the reckless affirmations of commercial men and mere technicians and in the irresponsible paragraphs of the newspapers booming these ships! yes, a grim touch of comedy. one asks oneself what these men are after, with this very provincial display of authority. i beg my friends in the united states pardon for calling these zealous senators men. i don't wish to be disrespectful. they may be of the stature of demi-gods for all i know, but at that great distance from the shores of effete europe and in the presence of so many guileless dead, their size seems diminished from this side. what are they after? what is there for them to find out? we know what had happened. the ship scraped her side against a piece of ice, and sank after floating for two hours and a half, taking a lot of people down with her. what more can they find out from the unfair badgering of the unhappy "yamsi," or the ruffianly abuse of the same. "yamsi," i should explain, is a mere code address, and i use it here symbolically. i have seen commerce pretty close. i know what it is worth, and i have no particular regard for commercial magnates, but one must protest against these bumble-like proceedings. is it indignation at the loss of so many lives which is at work here? well, the american railroads kill very many people during one single year, i dare say. then why don't these dignitaries come down on the presidents of their own railroads, of which one can't say whether they are mere means of transportation or a sort of gambling game for the use of american plutocrats. is it only an ardent and, upon the whole, praiseworthy desire for information? but the reports of the inquiry tell us that the august senators, though raising a lot of questions testifying to the complete innocence and even blankness of their minds, are unable to understand what the second officer is saying to them. we are so informed by the press from the other side. even such a simple expression as that one of the look-out men was stationed in the "eyes of the ship" was too much for the senators of the land of graphic expression. what it must have been in the more recondite matters i won't even try to think, because i have no mind for smiles just now. they were greatly exercised about the sound of explosions heard when half the ship was under water already. was there one? were there two? they seemed to be smelling a rat there! has not some charitable soul told them (what even schoolboys who read sea stories know) that when a ship sinks from a leak like this, a deck or two is always blown up; and that when a steamship goes down by the head, the boilers may, and often do break adrift with a sound which resembles the sound of an explosion? and they may, indeed, explode, for all i know. in the only case i have seen of a steamship sinking there was such a sound, but i didn't dive down after her to investigate. she was not of 45,000 tons and declared unsinkable, but the sight was impressive enough. i shall never forget the muffled, mysterious detonation, the sudden agitation of the sea round the slowly raised stern, and to this day i have in my eye the propeller, seen perfectly still in its frame against a clear evening sky. but perhaps the second officer has explained to them by this time this and a few other little facts. though why an officer of the british merchant service should answer the questions of any king, emperor, autocrat, or senator of any foreign power (as to an event in which a british ship alone was concerned, and which did not even take place in the territorial waters of that power) passes my understanding. the only authority he is bound to answer is the board of trade. but with what face the board of trade, which, having made the regulations for 10,000 ton ships, put its dear old bald head under its wing for ten years, took it out only to shelve an important report, and with a dreary murmur, "unsinkable," put it back again, in the hope of not being disturbed for another ten years, with what face it will be putting questions to that man who has done his duty, as to the facts of this disaster and as to his professional conduct in it--well, i don't know! i have the greatest respect for our established authorities. i am a disciplined man, and i have a natural indulgence for the weaknesses of human institutions; but i will own that at times i have regretted their--how shall i say it?--their imponderability. a board of trade--what is it? a board of . . . i believe the speaker of the irish parliament is one of the members of it. a ghost. less than that; as yet a mere memory. an office with adequate and no doubt comfortable furniture and a lot of perfectly irresponsible gentlemen who exist packed in its equable atmosphere softly, as if in a lot of cotton-wool, and with no care in the world; for there can be no care without personal responsibility--such, for instance, as the seamen have--those seamen from whose mouths this irresponsible institution can take away the bread--as a disciplinary measure. yes--it's all that. and what more? the name of a politician--a party man! less than nothing; a mere void without as much as a shadow of responsibility cast into it from that light in which move the masses of men who work, who deal in things and face the realities--not the words--of this life. years ago i remember overhearing two genuine shellbacks of the old type commenting on a ship's officer, who, if not exactly incompetent, did not commend himself to their severe judgment of accomplished sailor-men. said one, resuming and concluding the discussion in a funnily judicial tone: "the board of trade must have been drunk when they gave him his certificate." i confess that this notion of the board of trade as an entity having a brain which could be overcome by the fumes of strong liquor charmed me exceedingly. for then it would have been unlike the limited companies of which some exasperated wit has once said that they had no souls to be saved and no bodies to be kicked, and thus were free in this world and the next from all the effective sanctions of conscientious conduct. but, unfortunately, the picturesque pronouncement overheard by me was only a characteristic sally of an annoyed sailor. the board of trade is composed of bloodless departments. it has no limbs and no physiognomy, or else at the forthcoming inquiry it might have paid to the victims of the _titanic_ disaster the small tribute of a blush. i ask myself whether the marine department of the board of trade did really believe, when they decided to shelve the report on equipment for a time, that a ship of 45,000 tons, that _any_ ship, could be made practically indestructible by means of water-tight bulkheads? it seems incredible to anybody who had ever reflected upon the properties of material, such as wood or steel. you can't, let builders say what they like, make a ship of such dimensions as strong proportionately as a much smaller one. the shocks our old whalers had to stand amongst the heavy floes in baffin's bay were perfectly staggering, notwithstanding the most skilful handling, and yet they lasted for years. the _titanic_, if one may believe the last reports, has only scraped against a piece of ice which, i suspect, was not an enormously bulky and comparatively easily seen berg, but the low edge of a floe--and sank. leisurely enough, god knows--and here the advantage of bulkheads comes in--for time is a great friend, a good helper--though in this lamentable case these bulkheads served only to prolong the agony of the passengers who could not be saved. but she sank, causing, apart from the sorrow and the pity of the loss of so many lives, a sort of surprised consternation that such a thing should have happened at all. why? you build a 45,000 tons hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people (for if it had been for the emigrant trade alone, there would have been no such exaggeration of mere size), you decorate it in the style of the pharaohs or in the louis quinze style--i don't know which--and to please the aforesaid fatuous handful of individuals, who have more money than they know what to do with, and to the applause of two continents, you launch that mass with two thousand people on board at twenty-one knots across the sea--a perfect exhibition of the modern blind trust in mere material and appliances. and then this happens. general uproar. the blind trust in material and appliances has received a terrible shock. i will say nothing of the credulity which accepts any statement which specialists, technicians and office-people are pleased to make, whether for purposes of gain or glory. you stand there astonished and hurt in your profoundest sensibilities. but what else under the circumstances could you expect? for my part i could much sooner believe in an unsinkable ship of 3,000 tons than in one of 40,000 tons. it is one of those things that stand to reason. you can't increase the thickness of scantling and plates indefinitely. and the mere weight of this bigness is an added disadvantage. in reading the reports, the first reflection which occurs to one is that, if that luckless ship had been a couple of hundred feet shorter, she would have probably gone clear of the danger. but then, perhaps, she could not have had a swimming bath and a french cafe. that, of course, is a serious consideration. i am well aware that those responsible for her short and fatal existence ask us in desolate accents to believe that if she had hit end on she would have survived. which, by a sort of coy implication, seems to mean that it was all the fault of the officer of the watch (he is dead now) for trying to avoid the obstacle. we shall have presently, in deference to commercial and industrial interests, a new kind of seamanship. a very new and "progressive" kind. if you see anything in the way, by no means try to avoid it; smash at it full tilt. and then--and then only you shall see the triumph of material, of clever contrivances, of the whole box of engineering tricks in fact, and cover with glory a commercial concern of the most unmitigated sort, a great trust, and a great ship-building yard, justly famed for the super-excellence of its material and workmanship. unsinkable! see? i told you she was unsinkable, if only handled in accordance with the new seamanship. everything's in that. and, doubtless, the board of trade, if properly approached, would consent to give the needed instructions to its examiners of masters and mates. behold the examination-room of the future. enter to the grizzled examiner a young man of modest aspect: "are you well up in modern seamanship?" "i hope so, sir." "h'm, let's see. you are at night on the bridge in charge of a 150,000 tons ship, with a motor track, organloft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1,500 cafe waiters, two sailors and a boy, three collapsible boats as per board of trade regulations, and going at your three-quarter speed of, say, about forty knots. you perceive suddenly right ahead, and close to, something that looks like a large ice-floe. what would you do?" "put the helm amidships." "very well. why?" "in order to hit end on." "on what grounds should you endeavour to hit end on?" "because we are taught by our builders and masters that the heavier the smash, the smaller the damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended to." and so on and so on. the new seamanship: when in doubt try to ram fairly--whatever's before you. very simple. if only the _titanic_ had rammed that piece of ice (which was not a monstrous berg) fairly, every puffing paragraph would have been vindicated in the eyes of the credulous public which pays. but would it have been? well, i doubt it. i am well aware that in the eighties the steamship arizona, one of the "greyhounds of the ocean" in the jargon of that day, did run bows on against a very unmistakable iceberg, and managed to get into port on her collision bulkhead. but the _arizona_ was not, if i remember rightly, 5,000 tons register, let alone 45,000, and she was not going at twenty knots per hour. i can't be perfectly certain at this distance of time, but her seaspeed could not have been more than fourteen at the outside. both these facts made for safety. and, even if she had been engined to go twenty knots, there would not have been behind that speed the enormous mass, so difficult to check in its impetus, the terrific weight of which is bound to do damage to itself or others at the slightest contact. i assure you it is not for the vain pleasure of talking about my own poor experiences, but only to illustrate my point, that i will relate here a very unsensational little incident i witnessed now rather more than twenty years ago in sydney, n.s.w. ships were beginning then to grow bigger year after year, though, of course, the present dimensions were not even dreamt of. i was standing on the circular quay with a sydney pilot watching a big mail steamship of one of our best-known companies being brought alongside. we admired her lines, her noble appearance, and were impressed by her size as well, though her length, i imagine, was hardly half that of the _titanic_. she came into the cove (as that part of the harbour is called), of course very slowly, and at some hundred feet or so short of the quay she lost her way. that quay was then a wooden one, a fine structure of mighty piles and stringers bearing a roadway--a thing of great strength. the ship, as i have said before, stopped moving when some hundred feet from it. then her engines were rung on slow ahead, and immediately rung off again. the propeller made just about five turns, i should say. she began to move, stealing on, so to speak, without a ripple; coming alongside with the utmost gentleness. i went on looking her over, very much interested, but the man with me, the pilot, muttered under his breath: "too much, too much." his exercised judgment had warned him of what i did not even suspect. but i believe that neither of us was exactly prepared for what happened. there was a faint concussion of the ground under our feet, a groaning of piles, a snapping of great iron bolts, and with a sound of ripping and splintering, as when a tree is blown down by the wind, a great strong piece of wood, a baulk of squared timber, was displaced several feet as if by enchantment. i looked at my companion in amazement. "i could not have believed it," i declared. "no," he said. "you would not have thought she would have cracked an egg--eh?" i certainly wouldn't have thought that. he shook his head, and added: "ah! these great, big things, they want some handling." some months afterwards i was back in sydney. the same pilot brought me in from sea. and i found the same steamship, or else another as like her as two peas, lying at anchor not far from us. the pilot told me she had arrived the day before, and that he was to take her alongside to-morrow. i reminded him jocularly of the damage to the quay. "oh!" he said, "we are not allowed now to bring them in under their own steam. we are using tugs." a very wise regulation. and this is my point--that size is to a certain extent an element of weakness. the bigger the ship, the more delicately she must be handled. here is a contact which, in the pilot's own words, you wouldn't think could have cracked an egg; with the astonishing result of something like eighty feet of good strong wooden quay shaken loose, iron bolts snapped, a baulk of stout timber splintered. now, suppose that quay had been of granite (as surely it is now)--or, instead of the quay, if there had been, say, a north atlantic fog there, with a fullgrown iceberg in it awaiting the gentle contact of a ship groping its way along blindfold? something would have been hurt, but it would not have been the iceberg. apparently, there is a point in development when it ceases to be a true progress--in trade, in games, in the marvellous handiwork of men, and even in their demands and desires and aspirations of the moral and mental kind. there is a point when progress, to remain a real advance, must change slightly the direction of its line. but this is a wide question. what i wanted to point out here is--that the old _arizona_, the marvel of her day, was proportionately stronger, handier, better equipped, than this triumph of modern naval architecture, the loss of which, in common parlance, will remain the sensation of this year. the clatter of the presses has been worthy of the tonnage, of the preliminary paeans of triumph round that vanished hull, of the reckless statements, and elaborate descriptions of its ornate splendour. a great babble of news (and what sort of news too, good heavens!) and eager comment has arisen around this catastrophe, though it seems to me that a less strident note would have been more becoming in the presence of so many victims left struggling on the sea, of lives miserably thrown away for nothing, or worse than nothing: for false standards of achievement, to satisfy a vulgar demand of a few moneyed people for a banal hotel luxury--the only one they can understand--and because the big ship pays, in one way or another: in money or in advertising value. it is in more ways than one a very ugly business, and a mere scrape along the ship's side, so slight that, if reports are to be believed, it did not interrupt a card party in the gorgeously fitted (but in chaste style) smoking-room--or was it in the delightful french cafe?--is enough to bring on the exposure. all the people on board existed under a sense of false security. how false, it has been sufficiently demonstrated. and the fact which seems undoubted, that some of them actually were reluctant to enter the boats when told to do so, shows the strength of that falsehood. incidentally, it shows also the sort of discipline on board these ships, the sort of hold kept on the passengers in the face of the unforgiving sea. these people seemed to imagine it an optional matter: whereas the order to leave the ship should be an order of the sternest character, to be obeyed unquestioningly and promptly by every one on board, with men to enforce it at once, and to carry it out methodically and swiftly. and it is no use to say it cannot be done, for it can. it has been done. the only requisite is manageableness of the ship herself and of the numbers she carries on board. that is the great thing which makes for safety. a commander should be able to hold his ship and everything on board of her in the hollow of his hand, as it were. but with the modern foolish trust in material, and with those floating hotels, this has become impossible. a man may do his best, but he cannot succeed in a task which from greed, or more likely from sheer stupidity, has been made too great for anybody's strength. the readers of _the english review_, who cast a friendly eye nearly six years ago on my reminiscences, and know how much the merchant service, ships and men, has been to me, will understand my indignation that those men of whom (speaking in no sentimental phrase, but in the very truth of feeling) i can't even now think otherwise than as brothers, have been put by their commercial employers in the impossibility to perform efficiently their plain duty; and this from motives which i shall not enumerate here, but whose intrinsic unworthiness is plainly revealed by the greatness, the miserable greatness, of that disaster. some of them have perished. to die for commerce is hard enough, but to go under that sea we have been trained to combat, with a sense of failure in the supreme duty of one's calling is indeed a bitter fate. thus they are gone, and the responsibility remains with the living who will have no difficulty in replacing them by others, just as good, at the same wages. it was their bitter fate. but i, who can look at some arduous years when their duty was my duty too, and their feelings were my feelings, can remember some of us who once upon a time were more fortunate. it is of them that i would talk a little, for my own comfort partly, and also because i am sticking all the time to my subject to illustrate my point, the point of manageableness which i have raised just now. since the memory of the lucky _arizona_ has been evoked by others than myself, and made use of by me for my own purpose, let me call up the ghost of another ship of that distant day whose less lucky destiny inculcates another lesson making for my argument. the _douro_, a ship belonging to the royal mail steam packet company, was rather less than one-tenth the measurement of the _titanic_. yet, strange as it may appear to the ineffable hotel exquisites who form the bulk of the first-class crossatlantic passengers, people of position and wealth and refinement did not consider it an intolerable hardship to travel in her, even all the way from south america; this being the service she was engaged upon. of her speed i know nothing, but it must have been the average of the period, and the decorations of her saloons were, i dare say, quite up to the mark; but i doubt if her birth had been boastfully paragraphed all round the press, because that was not the fashion of the time. she was not a mass of material gorgeously furnished and upholstered. she was a ship. and she was not, in the apt words of an article by commander c. crutchley, r.n.r., which i have just read, "run by a sort of hotel syndicate composed of the chief engineer, the purser, and the captain," as these monstrous atlantic ferries are. she was really commanded, manned, and equipped as a ship meant to keep the sea: a ship first and last in the fullest meaning of the term, as the fact i am going to relate will show. she was off the spanish coast, homeward bound, and fairly full, just like the _titanic_; and further, the proportion of her crew to her passengers, i remember quite well, was very much the same. the exact number of souls on board i have forgotten. it might have been nearly three hundred, certainly not more. the night was moonlit, but hazy, the weather fine with a heavy swell running from the westward, which means that she must have been rolling a great deal, and in that respect the conditions for her were worse than in the case of the _titanic_. some time either just before or just after midnight, to the best of my recollection, she was run into amidships and at right angles by a large steamer which after the blow backed out, and, herself apparently damaged, remained motionless at some distance. my recollection is that the _douro_ remained afloat after the collision for fifteen minutes or thereabouts. it might have been twenty, but certainly something under the half-hour. in that time the boats were lowered, all the passengers put into them, and the lot shoved off. there was no time to do anything more. all the crew of the _douro_ went down with her, literally without a murmur. when she went she plunged bodily down like a stone. the only members of the ship's company who survived were the third officer, who was from the first ordered to take charge of the boats, and the seamen told off to man them, two in each. nobody else was picked up. a quartermaster, one of the saved in the way of duty, with whom i talked a month or so afterwards, told me that they pulled up to the spot, but could neither see a head nor hear the faintest cry. but i have forgotten. a passenger was drowned. she was a lady's maid who, frenzied with terror, refused to leave the ship. one of the boats waited near by till the chief officer, finding himself absolutely unable to tear the girl away from the rail to which she dung with a frantic grasp, ordered the boat away out of danger. my quartermaster told me that he spoke over to them in his ordinary voice, and this was the last sound heard before the ship sank. the rest is silence. i daresay there was the usual official inquiry, but who cared for it? that sort of thing speaks for itself with no uncertain voice; though the papers, i remember, gave the event no space to speak of: no large headlines--no headlines at all. you see it was not the fashion at the time. a seaman-like piece of work, of which one cherishes the old memory at this juncture more than ever before. she was a ship commanded, manned, equipped--not a sort of marine ritz, proclaimed unsinkable and sent adrift with its casual population upon the sea, without enough boats, without enough seamen (but with a parisian cafe and four hundred of poor devils of waiters) to meet dangers which, let the engineers say what they like, lurk always amongst the waves; sent with a blind trust in mere material, light-heartedly, to a most miserable, most fatuous disaster. and there are, too, many ugly developments about this tragedy. the rush of the senatorial inquiry before the poor wretches escaped from the jaws of death had time to draw breath, the vituperative abuse of a man no more guilty than others in this matter, and the suspicion of this aimless fuss being a political move to get home on the m.t. company, into which, in common parlance, the united states government has got its knife, i don't pretend to understand why, though with the rest of the world i am aware of the fact. perhaps there may be an excellent and worthy reason for it; but i venture to suggest that to take advantage of so many pitiful corpses, is not pretty. and the exploiting of the mere sensation on the other side is not pretty in its wealth of heartless inventions. neither is the welter of marconi lies which has not been sent vibrating without some reason, for which it would be nauseous to inquire too closely. and the calumnious, baseless, gratuitous, circumstantial lie charging poor captain smith with desertion of his post by means of suicide is the vilest and most ugly thing of all in this outburst of journalistic enterprise, without feeling, without honour, without decency. but all this has its moral. and that other sinking which i have related here and to the memory of which a seaman turns with relief and thankfulness has its moral too. yes, material may fail, and men, too, may fail sometimes; but more often men, when they are given the chance, will prove themselves truer than steel, that wonderful thin steel from which the sides and the bulkheads of our modern sea-leviathans are made. certain aspects of the admirable inquiry into the loss of the titanic--1912 i have been taken to task by a friend of mine on the "other side" for my strictures on senator smith's investigation into the loss of the _titanic_, in the number of _the english review_ for may, 1912. i will admit that the motives of the investigation may have been excellent, and probably were; my criticism bore mainly on matters of form and also on the point of efficiency. in that respect i have nothing to retract. the senators of the commission had absolutely no knowledge and no practice to guide them in the conduct of such an investigation; and this fact gave an air of unreality to their zealous exertions. i think that even in the united states there is some regret that this zeal of theirs was not tempered by a large dose of wisdom. it is fitting that people who rush with such ardour to the work of putting questions to men yet gasping from a narrow escape should have, i wouldn't say a tincture of technical information, but enough knowledge of the subject to direct the trend of their inquiry. the newspapers of two continents have noted the remarks of the president of the senatorial commission with comments which i will not reproduce here, having a scant respect for the "organs of public opinion," as they fondly believe themselves to be. the absolute value of their remarks was about as great as the value of the investigation they either mocked at or extolled. to the united states senate i did not intend to be disrespectful. i have for that body, of which one hears mostly in connection with tariffs, as much reverence as the best of americans. to manifest more or less would be an impertinence in a stranger. i have expressed myself with less reserve on our board of trade. that was done under the influence of warm feelings. we were all feeling warmly on the matter at that time. but, at any rate, our board of trade inquiry, conducted by an experienced president, discovered a very interesting fact on the very second day of its sitting: the fact that the water-tight doors in the bulkheads of that wonder of naval architecture could be opened down below by any irresponsible person. thus the famous closing apparatus on the bridge, paraded as a device of greater safety, with its attachments of warning bells, coloured lights, and all these pretty-pretties, was, in the case of this ship, little better than a technical farce. it is amusing, if anything connected with this stupid catastrophe can be amusing, to see the secretly crestfallen attitude of technicians. they are the high priests of the modern cult of perfected material and of mechanical appliances, and would fain forbid the profane from inquiring into its mysteries. we are the masters of progress, they say, and you should remain respectfully silent. and they take refuge behind their mathematics. i have the greatest regard for mathematics as an exercise of mind. it is the only manner of thinking which approaches the divine. but mere calculations, of which these men make so much, when unassisted by imagination and when they have gained mastery over common sense, are the most deceptive exercises of intellect. two and two are four, and two are six. that is immutable; you may trust your soul to that; but you must be certain first of your quantities. i know how the strength of materials can be calculated away, and also the evidence of one's senses. for it is by some sort of calculation involving weights and levels that the technicians responsible for the _titanic_ persuaded themselves that a ship _not divided_ by water-tight compartments could be "unsinkable." because, you know, she was not divided. you and i, and our little boys, when we want to divide, say, a box, take care to procure a piece of wood which will reach from the bottom to the lid. we know that if it does not reach all the way up, the box will not be divided into two compartments. it will be only partly divided. the _titanic_ was only partly divided. she was just sufficiently divided to drown some poor devils like rats in a trap. it is probable that they would have perished in any case, but it is a particularly horrible fate to die boxed up like this. yes, she was sufficiently divided for that, but not sufficiently divided to prevent the water flowing over. therefore to a plain man who knows something of mathematics but is not bemused by calculations, she was, from the point of view of "unsinkability," not divided at all. what would you say of people who would boast of a fireproof building, an hotel, for instance, saying, "oh, we have it divided by fireproof bulkheads which would localise any outbreak," and if you were to discover on closer inspection that these bulkheads closed no more than two-thirds of the openings they were meant to close, leaving above an open space through which draught, smoke, and fire could rush from one end of the building to the other? and, furthermore, that those partitions, being too high to climb over, the people confined in each menaced compartment had to stay there and become asphyxiated or roasted, because no exits to the outside, say to the roof, had been provided! what would you think of the intelligence or candour of these advertising people? what would you think of them? and yet, apart from the obvious difference in the action of fire and water, the cases are essentially the same. it would strike you and me and our little boys (who are not engineers yet) that to approach--i won't say attain--somewhere near absolute safety, the divisions to keep out water should extend from the bottom right up to the uppermost deck of _the hull_. i repeat, the _hull_, because there are above the hull the decks of the superstructures of which we need not take account. and further, as a provision of the commonest humanity, that each of these compartments should have a perfectly independent and free access to that uppermost deck: that is, into the open. nothing less will do. division by bulkheads that really divide, and free access to the deck from every water-tight compartment. then the responsible man in the moment of danger and in the exercise of his judgment could close all the doors of these water-tight bulkheads by whatever clever contrivance has been invented for the purpose, without a qualm at the awful thought that he may be shutting up some of his fellow creatures in a death-trap; that he may be sacrificing the lives of men who, down there, are sticking to the posts of duty as the engine-room staffs of the merchant service have never failed to do. i know very well that the engineers of a ship in a moment of emergency are not quaking for their lives, but, as far as i have known them, attend calmly to their duty. we all must die; but, hang it all, a man ought to be given a chance, if not for his life, then at least to die decently. it's bad enough to have to stick down there when something disastrous is going on and any moment may be your last; but to be drowned shut up under deck is too bad. some men of the _titanic_ died like that, it is to be feared. compartmented, so to speak. just think what it means! nothing can approach the horror of that fate except being buried alive in a cave, or in a mine, or in your family vault. so, once more: continuous bulkheads--a clear way of escape to the deck out of each water-tight compartment. nothing less. and if specialists, the precious specialists of the sort that builds "unsinkable ships," tell you that it cannot be done, don't you believe them. it can be done, and they are quite clever enough to do it too. the objections they will raise, however disguised in the solemn mystery of technical phrases, will not be technical, but commercial. i assure you that there is not much mystery about a ship of that sort. she is a tank. she is a tank ribbed, joisted, stayed, but she is no greater mystery than a tank. the _titanic_ was a tank eight hundred feet long, fitted as an hotel, with corridors, bed-rooms, halls, and so on (not a very mysterious arrangement truly), and for the hazards of her existence i should think about as strong as a huntley and palmer biscuit-tin. i make this comparison because huntley and palmer biscuit-tins, being almost a national institution, are probably known to all my readers. well, about that strong, and perhaps not quite so strong. just look at the side of such a tin, and then think of a 50,000 ton ship, and try to imagine what the thickness of her plates should be to approach anywhere the relative solidity of that biscuit-tin. in my varied and adventurous career i have been thrilled by the sight of a huntley and palmer biscuit-tin kicked by a mule sky-high, as the saying is. it came back to earth smiling, with only a sort of dimple on one of its cheeks. a proportionately severe blow would have burst the side of the _titanic_ or any other "triumph of modern naval architecture" like brown paper--i am willing to bet. i am not saying this by way of disparagement. there is reason in things. you can't make a 50,000 ton ship as strong as a huntley and palmer biscuit-tin. but there is also reason in the way one accepts facts, and i refuse to be awed by the size of a tank bigger than any other tank that ever went afloat to its doom. the people responsible for her, though disconcerted in their hearts by the exposure of that disaster, are giving themselves airs of superiority--priests of an oracle which has failed, but still must remain the oracle. the assumption is that they are ministers of progress. but the mere increase of size is not progress. if it were, elephantiasis, which causes a man's legs to become as large as tree-trunks, would be a sort of progress, whereas it is nothing but a very ugly disease. yet directly this very disconcerting catastrophe happened, the servants of the silly oracle began to cry: "it's no use! you can't resist progress. the big ship has come to stay." well, let her stay on, then, in god's name! but she isn't a servant of progress in any sense. she is the servant of commercialism. for progress, if dealing with the problems of a material world, has some sort of moral aspect--if only, say, that of conquest, which has its distinct value since man is a conquering animal. but bigness is mere exaggeration. the men responsible for these big ships have been moved by considerations of profit to be made by the questionable means of pandering to an absurd and vulgar demand for banal luxury--the seaside hotel luxury. one even asks oneself whether there was such a demand? it is inconceivable to think that there are people who can't spend five days of their life without a suite of apartments, cafes, bands, and such-like refined delights. i suspect that the public is not so very guilty in this matter. these things were pushed on to it in the usual course of trade competition. if to-morrow you were to take all these luxuries away, the public would still travel. i don't despair of mankind. i believe that if, by some catastrophic miracle all ships of every kind were to disappear off the face of the waters, together with the means of replacing them, there would be found, before the end of the week, men (millionaires, perhaps) cheerfully putting out to sea in bath-tubs for a fresh start. we are all like that. this sort of spirit lives in mankind still uncorrupted by the so-called refinements, the ingenuity of tradesmen, who look always for something new to sell, offers to the public. let her stay,--i mean the big ship--since she has come to stay. i only object to the attitude of the people, who, having called her into being and having romanced (to speak politely) about her, assume a detached sort of superiority, goodness only knows why, and raise difficulties in the way of every suggestion--difficulties about boats, about bulkheads, about discipline, about davits, all sorts of difficulties. to most of them the only answer would be: "where there's a will there's a way"--the most wise of proverbs. but some of these objections are really too stupid for anything. i shall try to give an instance of what i mean. this inquiry is admirably conducted. i am not alluding to the lawyers representing "various interests," who are trying to earn their fees by casting all sorts of mean aspersions on the characters of all sorts of people not a bit worse than themselves. it is honest to give value for your wages; and the "bravos" of ancient venice who kept their stilettos in good order and never failed to deliver the stab bargained for with their employers, considered themselves an honest body of professional men, no doubt. but they don't compel my admiration, whereas the conduct of this inquiry does. and as it is pretty certain to be attacked, i take this opportunity to deposit here my nickel of appreciation. well, lately, there came before it witnesses responsible for the designing of the ship. one of them was asked whether it would not be advisable to make each coal-bunker of the ship a water-tight compartment by means of a suitable door. the answer to such a question should have been, "certainly," for it is obvious to the simplest intelligence that the more water-tight spaces you provide in a ship (consistently with having her workable) the nearer you approach safety. but instead of admitting the expediency of the suggestion, this witness at once raised an objection as to the possibility of closing tightly the door of a bunker on account of the slope of coal. this with the true expert's attitude of "my dear man, you don't know what you are talking about." now would you believe that the objection put forward was absolutely futile? i don't know whether the distinguished president of the court perceived this. very likely he did, though i don't suppose he was ever on terms of familiarity with a ship's bunker. but i have. i have been inside; and you may take it that what i say of them is correct. i don't wish to be wearisome to the benevolent reader, but i want to put his finger, so to speak, on the inanity of the objection raised by the expert. a bunker is an enclosed space for holding coals, generally located against the ship's side, and having an opening, a doorway in fact, into the stokehold. men called trimmers go in there, and by means of implements called slices make the coal run through that opening on to the floor of the stokehold, where it is within reach of the stokers' (firemen's) shovels. this being so, you will easily understand that there is constantly a more or less thick layer of coal generally shaped in a slope lying in that doorway. and the objection of the expert was: that because of this obstruction it would be impossible to close the water-tight door, and therefore that the thing could not be done. and that objection was inane. a water-tight door in a bulkhead may be defined as a metal plate which is made to close a given opening by some mechanical means. and if there were a law of medes and persians that a water-tight door should always slide downwards and never otherwise, the objection would be to a great extent valid. but what is there to prevent those doors to be fitted so as to move upwards, or horizontally, or slantwise? in which case they would go through the obstructing layer of coal as easily as a knife goes through butter. anyone may convince himself of it by experimenting with a light piece of board and a heap of stones anywhere along our roads. probably the joint of such a door would weep a little--and there is no necessity for its being hermetically tight--but the object of converting bunkers into spaces of safety would be attained. you may take my word for it that this could be done without any great effort of ingenuity. and that is why i have qualified the expert's objection as inane. of course, these doors must not be operated from the bridge because of the risk of trapping the coal-trimmers inside the bunker; but on the signal of all other water-tight doors in the ship being closed (as would be done in case of a collision) they too could be closed on the order of the engineer of the watch, who would see to the safety of the trimmers. if the rent in the ship's side were within the bunker itself, that would become manifest enough without any signal, and the rush of water into the stokehold could be cut off directly the doorplate came into its place. say a minute at the very outside. naturally, if the blow of a right-angled collision, for instance, were heavy enough to smash through the inner bulkhead of the bunker, why, there would be then nothing to do but for the stokers and trimmers and everybody in there to clear out of the stoke-room. but that does not mean that the precaution of having water-tight doors to the bunkers is useless, superfluous, or impossible. {7} and talking of stokeholds, firemen, and trimmers, men whose heavy labour has not a single redeeming feature; which is unhealthy, uninspiring, arduous, without the reward of personal pride in it; sheer, hard, brutalising toil, belonging neither to earth nor sea, i greet with joy the advent for marine purposes of the internal combustion engine. the disappearance of the marine boiler will be a real progress, which anybody in sympathy with his kind must welcome. instead of the unthrifty, unruly, nondescript crowd the boilers require, a crowd of men _in_ the ship but not _of_ her, we shall have comparatively small crews of disciplined, intelligent workers, able to steer the ship, handle anchors, man boats, and at the same time competent to take their place at a bench as fitters and repairers; the resourceful and skilled seamen--mechanics of the future, the legitimate successors of these seamen--sailors of the past, who had their own kind of skill, hardihood, and tradition, and whose last days it has been my lot to share. one lives and learns and hears very surprising things--things that one hardly knows how to take, whether seriously or jocularly, how to meet--with indignation or with contempt? things said by solemn experts, by exalted directors, by glorified ticket-sellers, by officials of all sorts. i suppose that one of the uses of such an inquiry is to give such people enough rope to hang themselves with. and i hope that some of them won't neglect to do so. one of them declared two days ago that there was "nothing to learn from the catastrophe of the _titanic_." that he had been "giving his best consideration" to certain rules for ten years, and had come to the conclusion that nothing ever happened at sea, and that rules and regulations, boats and sailors, were unnecessary; that what was really wrong with the _titanic_ was that she carried too many boats. no; i am not joking. if you don't believe me, pray look back through the reports and you will find it all there. i don't recollect the official's name, but it ought to have been pooh-bah. well, pooh-bah said all these things, and when asked whether he really meant it, intimated his readiness to give the subject more of "his best consideration"--for another ten years or so apparently--but he believed, oh yes! he was certain, that had there been fewer boats there would have been more people saved. really, when reading the report of this admirably conducted inquiry one isn't certain at times whether it is an admirable inquiry or a felicitous _opera-bouffe_ of the gilbertian type--with a rather grim subject, to be sure. yes, rather grim--but the comic treatment never fails. my readers will remember that in the number of _the english review_ for may, 1912, i quoted the old case of the _arizona_, and went on from that to prophesy the coming of a new seamanship (in a spirit of irony far removed from fun) at the call of the sublime builders of unsinkable ships. i thought that, as a small boy of my acquaintance says, i was "doing a sarcasm," and regarded it as a rather wild sort of sarcasm at that. well, i am blessed (excuse the vulgarism) if a witness has not turned up who seems to have been inspired by the same thought, and evidently longs in his heart for the advent of the new seamanship. he is an expert, of course, and i rather believe he's the same gentleman who did not see his way to fit water-tight doors to bunkers. with ludicrous earnestness he assured the commission of his intense belief that had only the _titanic_ struck end-on she would have come into port all right. and in the whole tone of his insistent statement there was suggested the regret that the officer in charge (who is dead now, and mercifully outside the comic scope of this inquiry) was so ill-advised as to try to pass clear of the ice. thus my sarcastic prophecy, that such a suggestion was sure to turn up, receives an unexpected fulfilment. you will see yet that in deference to the demands of "progress" the theory of the new seamanship will become established: "whatever you see in front of you--ram it fair. . ." the new seamanship! looks simple, doesn't it? but it will be a very exact art indeed. the proper handling of an unsinkable ship, you see, will demand that she should be made to hit the iceberg very accurately with her nose, because should you perchance scrape the bluff of the bow instead, she may, without ceasing to be as unsinkable as before, find her way to the bottom. i congratulate the future transatlantic passengers on the new and vigorous sensations in store for them. they shall go bounding across from iceberg to iceberg at twenty-five knots with precision and safety, and a "cheerful bumpy sound"--as the immortal poem has it. it will be a teeth-loosening, exhilarating experience. the decorations will be louis-quinze, of course, and the cafe shall remain open all night. but what about the priceless sevres porcelain and the venetian glass provided for the service of transatlantic passengers? well, i am afraid all that will have to be replaced by silver goblets and plates. nasty, common, cheap silver. but those who _will_ go to sea must be prepared to put up with a certain amount of hardship. and there shall be no boats. why should there be no boats? because poohbah has said that the fewer the boats, the more people can be saved; and therefore with no boats at all, no one need be lost. but even if there was a flaw in this argument, pray look at the other advantages the absence of boats gives you. there can't be the annoyance of having to go into them in the middle of the night, and the unpleasantness, after saving your life by the skin of your teeth, of being hauled over the coals by irreproachable members of the bar with hints that you are no better than a cowardly scoundrel and your wife a heartless monster. less boats. no boats! great should be the gratitude of passage-selling combines to pooh-bah; and they ought to cherish his memory when he dies. but no fear of that. his kind never dies. all you have to do, o combine, is to knock at the door of the marine department, look in, and beckon to the first man you see. that will be he, very much at your service--prepared to affirm after "ten years of my best consideration" and a bundle of statistics in hand, that: "there's no lesson to be learned, and that there is nothing to be done!" on an earlier day there was another witness before the court of inquiry. a mighty official of the white star line. the impression of his testimony which the report gave is of an almost scornful impatience with all this fuss and pother. boats! of course we have crowded our decks with them in answer to this ignorant clamour. mere lumber! how can we handle so many boats with our davits? your people don't know the conditions of the problem. we have given these matters our best consideration, and we have done what we thought reasonable. we have done more than our duty. we are wise, and good, and impeccable. and whoever says otherwise is either ignorant or wicked. this is the gist of these scornful answers which disclose the psychology of commercial undertakings. it is the same psychology which fifty or so years ago, before samuel plimsoll uplifted his voice, sent overloaded ships to sea. "why shouldn't we cram in as much cargo as our ships will hold? look how few, how very few of them get lost, after all." men don't change. not very much. and the only answer to be given to this manager who came out, impatient and indignant, from behind the plateglass windows of his shop to be discovered by this inquiry, and to tell us that he, they, the whole three million (or thirty million, for all i know) capital organisation for selling passages has considered the problem of boats--the only answer to give him is: that this is not a problem of boats at all. it is the problem of decent behaviour. if you can't carry or handle so many boats, then don't cram quite so many people on board. it is as simple as that--this problem of right feeling and right conduct, the real nature of which seems beyond the comprehension of ticket-providers. don't sell so many tickets, my virtuous dignitary. after all, men and women (unless considered from a purely commercial point of view) are not exactly the cattle of the western-ocean trade, that used some twenty years ago to be thrown overboard on an emergency and left to swim round and round before they sank. if you can't get more boats, then sell less tickets. don't drown so many people on the finest, calmest night that was ever known in the north atlantic--even if you have provided them with a little music to get drowned by. sell less tickets! that's the solution of the problem, your mercantile highness. but there would be a cry, "oh! this requires consideration!" (ten years of it--eh?) well, no! this does not require consideration. this is the very first thing to do. at once. limit the number of people by the boats you can handle. that's honesty. and then you may go on fumbling for years about these precious davits which are such a stumbling-block to your humanity. these fascinating patent davits. these davits that refuse to do three times as much work as they were meant to do. oh! the wickedness of these davits! one of the great discoveries of this admirable inquiry is the fascination of the davits. all these people positively can't get away from them. they shuffle about and groan around their davits. whereas the obvious thing to do is to eliminate the man-handled davits altogether. don't you think that with all the mechanical contrivances, with all the generated power on board these ships, it is about time to get rid of the hundredyears-old, man-power appliances? cranes are what is wanted; low, compact cranes with adjustable heads, one to each set of six or nine boats. and if people tell you of insuperable difficulties, if they tell you of the swing and spin of spanned boats, don't you believe them. the heads of the cranes need not be any higher than the heads of the davits. the lift required would be only a couple of inches. as to the spin, there is a way to prevent that if you have in each boat two men who know what they are about. i have taken up on board a heavy ship's boat, in the open sea (the ship rolling heavily), with a common cargo derrick. and a cargo derrick is very much like a crane; but a crane devised _ad hoc_ would be infinitely easier to work. we must remember that the loss of this ship has altered the moral atmosphere. as long as the _titanic_ is remembered, an ugly rush for the boats may be feared in case of some accident. you can't hope to drill into perfect discipline a casual mob of six hundred firemen and waiters, but in a ship like the _titanic_ you can keep on a permanent trustworthy crew of one hundred intelligent seamen and mechanics who would know their stations for abandoning ship and would do the work efficiently. the boats could be lowered with sufficient dispatch. one does not want to let rip one's boats by the run all at the same time. with six boat-cranes, six boats would be simultaneously swung, filled, and got away from the side; and if any sort of order is kept, the ship could be cleared of the passengers in a quite short time. for there must be boats enough for the passengers and crew, whether you increase the number of boats or limit the number of passengers, irrespective of the size of the ship. that is the only honest course. any other would be rather worse than putting sand in the sugar, for which a tradesman gets fined or imprisoned. do not let us take a romantic view of the so-called progress. a company selling passages is a tradesman; though from the way these people talk and behave you would think they are benefactors of mankind in some mysterious way, engaged in some lofty and amazing enterprise. all these boats should have a motor-engine in them. and, of course, the glorified tradesman, the mummified official, the technicians, and all these secretly disconcerted hangers-on to the enormous ticket-selling enterprise, will raise objections to it with every air of superiority. but don't believe them. doesn't it strike you as absurd that in this age of mechanical propulsion, of generated power, the boats of such ultramodern ships are fitted with oars and sails, implements more than three thousand years old? old as the siege of troy. older! . . . and i know what i am talking about. only six weeks ago i was on the river in an ancient, rough, ship's boat, fitted with a two-cylinder motor-engine of 7.5 h.p. just a common ship's boat, which the man who owns her uses for taking the workmen and stevedores to and from the ships loading at the buoys off greenhithe. she would have carried some thirty people. no doubt has carried as many daily for many months. and she can tow a twenty-five ton water barge--which is also part of that man's business. it was a boisterous day, half a gale of wind against the flood tide. two fellows managed her. a youngster of seventeen was cox (and a first-rate cox he was too); a fellow in a torn blue jersey, not much older, of the usual riverside type, looked after the engine. i spent an hour and a half in her, running up and down and across that reach. she handled perfectly. with eight or twelve oars out she could not have done anything like as well. these two youngsters at my request kept her stationary for ten minutes, with a touch of engine and helm now and then, within three feet of a big, ugly mooring buoy over which the water broke and the spray flew in sheets, and which would have holed her if she had bumped against it. but she kept her position, it seemed to me, to an inch, without apparently any trouble to these boys. you could not have done it with oars. and her engine did not take up the space of three men, even on the assumption that you would pack people as tight as sardines in a box. not the room of three people, i tell you! but no one would want to pack a boat like a sardine-box. there must be room enough to handle the oars. but in that old ship's boat, even if she had been desperately overcrowded, there was power (manageable by two riverside youngsters) to get away quickly from a ship's side (very important for your safety and to make room for other boats), the power to keep her easily head to sea, the power to move at five to seven knots towards a rescuing ship, the power to come safely alongside. and all that in an engine which did not take up the room of three people. a poor boatman who had to scrape together painfully the few sovereigns of the price had the idea of putting that engine into his boat. but all these designers, directors, managers, constructors, and others whom we may include in the generic name of yamsi, never thought of it for the boats of the biggest tank on earth, or rather on sea. and therefore they assume an air of impatient superiority and make objections--however sick at heart they may be. and i hope they are; at least, as much as a grocer who has sold a tin of imperfect salmon which destroyed only half a dozen people. and you know, the tinning of salmon was "progress" as much at least as the building of the _titanic_. more, in fact. i am not attacking shipowners. i care neither more nor less for lines, companies, combines, and generally for trade arrayed in purple and fine linen than the trade cares for me. but i am attacking foolish arrogance, which is fair game; the offensive posture of superiority by which they hide the sense of their guilt, while the echoes of the miserably hypocritical cries along the alley-ways of that ship: "any more women? any more women?" linger yet in our ears. i have been expecting from one or the other of them all bearing the generic name of yamsi, something, a sign of some sort, some sincere utterance, in the course of this admirable inquiry, of manly, of genuine compunction. in vain. all trade talk. not a whisper--except for the conventional expression of regret at the beginning of the yearly report--which otherwise is a cheerful document. dividends, you know. the shop is doing well. and the admirable inquiry goes on, punctuated by idiotic laughter, by paid-for cries of indignation from under legal wigs, bringing to light the psychology of various commercial characters too stupid to know that they are giving themselves away--an admirably laborious inquiry into facts that speak, nay shout, for themselves. i am not a soft-headed, humanitarian faddist. i have been ordered in my time to do dangerous work; i have ordered, others to do dangerous work; i have never ordered a man to do any work i was not prepared to do myself. i attach no exaggerated value to human life. but i know it has a value for which the most generous contributions to the mansion house and "heroes" funds cannot pay. and they cannot pay for it, because people, even of the third class (excuse my plain speaking), are not cattle. death has its sting. if yamsi's manager's head were forcibly held under the water of his bath for some little time, he would soon discover that it has. some people can only learn from that sort of experience which comes home to their own dear selves. i am not a sentimentalist; therefore it is not a great consolation to me to see all these people breveted as "heroes" by the penny and halfpenny press. it is no consolation at all. in extremity, in the worst extremity, the majority of people, even of common people, will behave decently. it's a fact of which only the journalists don't seem aware. hence their enthusiasm, i suppose. but i, who am not a sentimentalist, think it would have been finer if the band of the _titanic_ had been quietly saved, instead of being drowned while playing--whatever tune they were playing, the poor devils. i would rather they had been saved to support their families than to see their families supported by the magnificent generosity of the subscribers. i am not consoled by the false, written-up, drury lane aspects of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but the exposure of arrogant folly. there is nothing more heroic in being drowned very much against your will, off a holed, helpless, big tank in which you bought your passage, than in dying of colic caused by the imperfect salmon in the tin you bought from your grocer. and that's the truth. the unsentimental truth stripped of the romantic garment the press has wrapped around this most unnecessary disaster. protection of ocean liners {8}--1914 the loss of the _empress of ireland_ awakens feelings somewhat different from those the sinking of the _titanic_ had called up on two continents. the grief for the lost and the sympathy for the survivors and the bereaved are the same; but there is not, and there cannot be, the same undercurrent of indignation. the good ship that is gone (i remember reading of her launch something like eight years ago) had not been ushered in with beat of drum as the chief wonder of the world of waters. the company who owned her had no agents, authorised or unauthorised, giving boastful interviews about her unsinkability to newspaper reporters ready to swallow any sort of trade statement if only sensational enough for their readers--readers as ignorant as themselves of the nature of all things outside the commonest experience of the man in the street. no; there was nothing of that in her case. the company was content to have as fine, staunch, seaworthy a ship as the technical knowledge of that time could make her. in fact, she was as safe a ship as nine hundred and ninety-nine ships out of any thousand now afloat upon the sea. no; whatever sorrow one can feel, one does not feel indignation. this was not an accident of a very boastful marine transportation; this was a real casualty of the sea. the indignation of the new south wales premier flashed telegraphically to canada is perfectly uncalled-for. that statesman, whose sympathy for poor mates and seamen is so suspect to me that i wouldn't take it at fifty per cent. discount, does not seem to know that a british court of marine inquiry, ordinary or extraordinary, is not a contrivance for catching scapegoats. i, who have been seaman, mate and master for twenty years, holding my certificate under the board of trade, may safely say that none of us ever felt in danger of unfair treatment from a court of inquiry. it is a perfectly impartial tribunal which has never punished seamen for the faults of shipowners--as, indeed, it could not do even if it wanted to. and there is another thing the angry premier of new south wales does not know. it is this: that for a ship to float for fifteen minutes after receiving such a blow by a bare stem on her bare side is not so bad. she took a tremendous list which made the minutes of grace vouchsafed her of not much use for the saving of lives. but for that neither her owners nor her officers are responsible. it would have been wonderful if she had not listed with such a hole in her side. even the _aquitania_ with such an opening in her outer hull would be bound to take a list. i don't say this with the intention of disparaging this latest "triumph of marine architecture"--to use the consecrated phrase. the _aquitania_ is a magnificent ship. i believe she would bear her people unscathed through ninety-nine per cent. of all possible accidents of the sea. but suppose a collision out on the ocean involving damage as extensive as this one was, and suppose then a gale of wind coming on. even the _aquitania_ would not be quite seaworthy, for she would not be manageable. we have been accustoming ourselves to put our trust in material, technical skill, invention, and scientific contrivances to such an extent that we have come at last to believe that with these things we can overcome the immortal gods themselves. hence when a disaster like this happens, there arises, besides the shock to our humane sentiments, a feeling of irritation, such as the hon. gentleman at the head of the new south wales government has discharged in a telegraphic flash upon the world. but it is no use being angry and trying to hang a threat of penal servitude over the heads of the directors of shipping companies. you can't get the better of the immortal gods by the mere power of material contrivances. there will be neither scapegoats in this matter nor yet penal servitude for anyone. the directors of the canadian pacific railway company did not sell "safety at sea" to the people on board the _empress of ireland_. they never in the slightest degree pretended to do so. what they did was to sell them a sea-passage, giving very good value for the money. nothing more. as long as men will travel on the water, the sea-gods will take their toll. they will catch good seamen napping, or confuse their judgment by arts well known to those who go to sea, or overcome them by the sheer brutality of elemental forces. it seems to me that the resentful sea-gods never do sleep, and are never weary; wherein the seamen who are mere mortals condemned to unending vigilance are no match for them. and yet it is right that the responsibility should be fixed. it is the fate of men that even in their contests with the immortal gods they must render an account of their conduct. life at sea is the life in which, simple as it is, you can't afford to make mistakes. with whom the mistake lies here, is not for me to say. i see that sir thomas shaughnessy has expressed his opinion of captain kendall's absolute innocence. this statement, premature as it is, does him honour, for i don't suppose for a moment that the thought of the material issue involved in the verdict of the court of inquiry influenced him in the least. i don't suppose that he is more impressed by the writ of two million dollars nailed (or more likely pasted) to the foremast of the norwegian than i am, who don't believe that the _storstad_ is worth two million shillings. this is merely a move of commercial law, and even the whole majesty of the british empire (so finely invoked by the sheriff) cannot squeeze more than a very moderate quantity of blood out of a stone. sir thomas, in his confident pronouncement, stands loyally by a loyal and distinguished servant of his company. this thing has to be investigated yet, and it is not proper for me to express my opinion, though i have one, in this place and at this time. but i need not conceal my sympathy with the vehement protestations of captain andersen. a charge of neglect and indifference in the matter of saving lives is the cruellest blow that can be aimed at the character of a seaman worthy of the name. on the face of the facts as known up to now the charge does not seem to be true. if upwards of three hundred people have been, as stated in the last reports, saved by the _storstad_, then that ship must have been at hand and rendering all the assistance in her power. as to the point which must come up for the decision of the court of inquiry, it is as fine as a hair. the two ships saw each other plainly enough before the fog closed on them. no one can question captain kendall's prudence. he has been as prudent as ever he could be. there is not a shadow of doubt as to that. but there is this question: accepting the position of the two ships when they saw each other as correctly described in the very latest newspaper reports, it seems clear that it was the _empress of ireland's_ duty to keep clear of the collier, and what the court will have to decide is whether the stopping of the liner was, under the circumstances, the best way of keeping her clear of the other ship, which had the right to proceed cautiously on an unchanged course. this, reduced to its simplest expression, is the question which the court will have to decide. and now, apart from all problems of manoeuvring, of rules of the road, of the judgment of the men in command, away from their possible errors and from the points the court will have to decide, if we ask ourselves what it was that was needed to avert this disaster costing so many lives, spreading so much sorrow, and to a certain point shocking the public conscience--if we ask that question, what is the answer to be? i hardly dare set it down. yes; what was it that was needed, what ingenious combinations of ship-building, what transverse bulkheads, what skill, what genius--how much expense in money and trained thinking, what learned contriving, to avert that disaster? to save that ship, all these lives, so much anguish for the dying, and so much grief for the bereaved, all that was needed in this particular case in the way of science, money, ingenuity, and seamanship was a man, and a cork-fender. yes; a man, a quartermaster, an able seaman that would know how to jump to an order and was not an excitable fool. in my time at sea there was no lack of men in british ships who could jump to an order and were not excitable fools. as to the so-called cork-fender, it is a sort of soft balloon made from a net of thick rope rather more than a foot in diameter. it is such a long time since i have indented for cork-fenders that i don't remember how much these things cost apiece. one of them, hung judiciously over the side at the end of its lanyard by a man who knew what he was about, might perhaps have saved from destruction the ship and upwards of a thousand lives. two men with a heavy rope-fender would have been better, but even the other one might have made all the difference between a very damaging accident and downright disaster. by the time the cork-fender had been squeezed between the liner's side and the bluff of the _storstad's_ bow, the effect of the latter's reversed propeller would have been produced, and the ships would have come apart with no more damage than bulged and started plates. wasn't there lying about on that liner's bridge, fitted with all sorts of scientific contrivances, a couple of simple and effective cork-fenders--or on board of that norwegian either? there must have been, since one ship was just out of a dock or harbour and the other just arriving. that is the time, if ever, when cork-fenders are lying about a ship's decks. and there was plenty of time to use them, and exactly in the conditions in which such fenders are effectively used. the water was as smooth as in any dock; one ship was motionless, the other just moving at what may be called dock-speed when entering, leaving, or shifting berths; and from the moment the collision was seen to be unavoidable till the actual contact a whole minute elapsed. a minute,--an age under the circumstances. and no one thought of the homely expedient of dropping a simple, unpretending rope-fender between the destructive stern and the defenceless side! i appeal confidently to all the seamen in the still united kingdom, from his majesty the king (who has been really at sea) to the youngest intelligent a.b. in any ship that will dock next tide in the ports of this realm, whether there was not a chance there. i have followed the sea for more than twenty years; i have seen collisions; i have been involved in a collision myself; and i do believe that in the case under consideration this little thing would have made all that enormous difference--the difference between considerable damage and an appalling disaster. many letters have been written to the press on the subject of collisions. i have seen some. they contain many suggestions, valuable and otherwise; but there is only one which hits the nail on the head. it is a letter to the _times_ from a retired captain of the royal navy. it is printed in small type, but it deserved to be printed in letters of gold and crimson. the writer suggests that all steamers should be obliged by law to carry hung over their stern what we at sea call a "pudding." this solution of the problem is as wonderful in its simplicity as the celebrated trick of columbus's egg, and infinitely more useful to mankind. a "pudding" is a thing something like a bolster of stout ropenet stuffed with old junk, but thicker in the middle than at the ends. it can be seen on almost every tug working in our docks. it is, in fact, a fixed rope-fender always in a position where presumably it would do most good. had the _storstad_ carried such a "pudding" proportionate to her size (say, two feet diameter in the thickest part) across her stern, and hung above the level of her hawse-pipes, there would have been an accident certainly, and some repair-work for the nearest ship-yard, but there would have been no loss of life to deplore. it seems almost too simple to be true, but i assure you that the statement is as true as anything can be. we shall see whether the lesson will be taken to heart. we shall see. there is a commission of learned men sitting to consider the subject of saving life at sea. they are discussing bulkheads, boats, davits, manning, navigation, but i am willing to bet that not one of them has thought of the humble "pudding." they can make what rules they like. we shall see if, with that disaster calling aloud to them, they will make the rule that every steamship should carry a permanent fender across her stern, from two to four feet in diameter in its thickest part in proportion to the size of the ship. but perhaps they may think the thing too rough and unsightly for this scientific and aesthetic age. it certainly won't look very pretty but i make bold to say it will save more lives at sea than any amount of the marconi installations which are being forced on the shipowners on that very ground--the safety of lives at sea. we shall see! * * * * * to the editor of the _daily express_. sir, as i fully expected, this morning's post brought me not a few letters on the subject of that article of mine in the _illustrated london news_. and they are very much what i expected them to be. i shall address my reply to captain littlehales, since obviously he can speak with authority, and speaks in his own name, not under a pseudonym. and also for the reason that it is no use talking to men who tell you to shut your head for a confounded fool. they are not likely to listen to you. but if there be in liverpool anybody not too angry to listen, i want to assure him or them that my exclamatory line, "was there no one on board either of these ships to think of dropping a fender--etc.," was not uttered in the spirit of blame for anyone. i would not dream of blaming a seaman for doing or omitting to do anything a person sitting in a perfectly safe and unsinkable study may think of. all my sympathy goes to the two captains; much the greater share of it to captain kendall, who has lost his ship and whose load of responsibility was so much heavier! i may not know a great deal, but i know how anxious and perplexing are those nearly end-on approaches, so infinitely more trying to the men in charge than a frank right-angle crossing. i may begin by reminding captain littlehales that i, as well as himself, have had to form my opinion, or rather my vision, of the accident, from printed statements, of which many must have been loose and inexact and none could have been minutely circumstantial. i have read the reports of the _times_ and the _daily telegraph_, and no others. what stands in the columns of these papers is responsible for my conclusion--or perhaps for the state of my feelings when i wrote the _illustrated london news_ article. from these sober and unsensational reports, i derived the impression that this collision was a collision of the slowest sort. i take it, of course, that both the men in charge speak the strictest truth as to preliminary facts. we know that the _empress of ireland_ was for a time lying motionless. and if the captain of the _storstad_ stopped his engines directly the fog came on (as he says he did), then taking into account the adverse current of the river, the _storstad_, by the time the two ships sighted each other again, must have been barely moving _over the ground_. the "over the ground" speed is the only one that matters in this discussion. in fact, i represented her to myself as just creeping on ahead--no more. this, i contend, is an imaginative view (and we can form no other) not utterly absurd for a seaman to adopt. so much for the imaginative view of the sad occurrence which caused me to speak of the fender, and be chided for it in unmeasured terms. not by captain littlehales, however, and i wish to reply to what he says with all possible deference. his illustration borrowed from boxing is very apt, and in a certain sense makes for my contention. yes. a blow delivered with a boxing-glove will draw blood or knock a man out; but it would not crush in his nose flat or break his jaw for him--at least, not always. and this is exactly my point. twice in my sea life i have had occasion to be impressed by the preserving effect of a fender. once i was myself the man who dropped it over. not because i was so very clever or smart, but simply because i happened to be at hand. and i agree with captain littlehales that to see a steamer's stern coming at you at the rate of only two knots is a staggering experience. the thing seems to have power enough behind it to cut half through the terrestrial globe. and perhaps captain littlehales is right? it may be that i am mistaken in my appreciation of circumstances and possibilities in this case--or in any such case. perhaps what was really wanted there was an extraordinary man and an extraordinary fender. i care nothing if possibly my deep feeling has betrayed me into something which some people call absurdity. absurd was the word applied to the proposal for carrying "enough boats for all" on board the big liners. and my absurdity can affect no lives, break no bones--need make no one angry. why should i care, then, as long as out of the discussion of my absurdity there will emerge the acceptance of the suggestion of captain f. papillon, r.n., for the universal and compulsory fitting of very heavy collision fenders on the stems of all mechanically propelled ships? an extraordinary man we cannot always get from heaven on order, but an extraordinary fender that will do its work is well within the power of a committee of old boatswains to plan out, make, and place in position. i beg to ask, not in a provocative spirit, but simply as to a matter of fact which he is better qualified to judge than i am--will captain littlehales affirm that if the _storstad_ had carried, slung securely across the stem, even nothing thicker than a single bale of wool (an ordinary, hand-pressed, australian wool-bale), it would have made no difference? if scientific men can invent an air cushion, a gas cushion, or even an electricity cushion (with wires or without), to fit neatly round the stems and bows of ships, then let them go to work, in god's name and produce another "marvel of science" without loss of time. for something like this has long been due--too long for the credit of that part of mankind which is not absurd, and in which i include, among others, such people as marine underwriters, for instance. meanwhile, turning to materials i am familiar with, i would put my trust in canvas, lots of big rope, and in large, very large quantities of old junk. it sounds awfully primitive, but if it will mitigate the mischief in only fifty per cent. of cases, is it not well worth trying? most collisions occur at slow speeds, and it ought to be remembered that in case of a big liner's loss, involving many lives, she is generally sunk by a ship much smaller than herself. joseph conrad. a friendly place eighteen years have passed since i last set foot in the london sailors' home. i was not staying there then; i had gone in to try to find a man i wanted to see. he was one of those able seamen who, in a watch, are a perfect blessing to a young officer. i could perhaps remember here and there among the shadows of my sea-life a more daring man, or a more agile man, or a man more expert in some special branch of his calling--such as wire splicing, for instance; but for all-round competence, he was unequalled. as character he was sterling stuff. his name was anderson. he had a fine, quiet face, kindly eyes, and a voice which matched that something attractive in the whole man. though he looked yet in the prime of life, shoulders, chest, limbs untouched by decay, and though his hair and moustache were only iron-grey, he was on board ship generally called old andy by his fellows. he accepted the name with some complacency. i made my enquiry at the highly-glazed entry office. the clerk on duty opened an enormous ledger, and after running his finger down a page, informed me that anderson had gone to sea a week before, in a ship bound round the horn. then, smiling at me, he added: "old andy. we know him well, here. what a nice fellow!" i, who knew what a "good man," in a sailor sense, he was, assented without reserve. heaven only knows when, if ever, he came back from that voyage, to the sailors' home of which he was a faithful client. i went out glad to know he was safely at sea, but sorry not to have seen him; though, indeed, if i had, we would not have exchanged more than a score of words, perhaps. he was not a talkative man, old andy, whose affectionate ship-name clung to him even in that sailors' home, where the staff understood and liked the sailors (those men without a home) and did its duty by them with an unobtrusive tact, with a patient and humorous sense of their idiosyncrasies, to which i hasten to testify now, when the very existence of that institution is menaced after so many years of most useful work. walking away from it on that day eighteen years ago, i was far from thinking it was for the last time. great changes have come since, over land and sea; and if i were to seek somebody who knew old andy it would be (of all people in the world) mr. john galsworthy. for mr. john galsworthy, andy, and myself have been shipmates together in our different stations, for some forty days in the indian ocean in the early nineties. and, but for us two, old andy's very memory would be gone from this changing earth. yes, things have changed--the very sky, the atmosphere, the light of judgment which falls on the labours of men, either splendid or obscure. having been asked to say a word to the public on behalf of the sailors' home, i felt immensely flattered--and troubled. flattered to have been thought of in that connection; troubled to find myself in touch again with that past so deeply rooted in my heart. and the illusion of nearness is so great while i trace these lines that i feel as if i were speaking in the name of that worthy sailor-shade of old andy, whose faithfully hard life seems to my vision a thing of yesterday. * * * * * but though the past keeps firm hold on one, yet one feels with the same warmth that the men and the institutions of to-day have their merit and their claims. others will know how to set forth before the public the merit of the sailors' home in the eloquent terms of hard facts and some few figures. for myself, i can only bring a personal note, give a glimpse of the human side of the good work for sailors ashore, carried on through so many decades with a perfect understanding of the end in view. i have been in touch with the sailors' home for sixteen years of my life, off and on; i have seen the changes in the staff and i have observed the subtle alterations in the physiognomy of that stream of sailors passing through it, in from the sea and out again to sea, between the years 1878 and 1894. i have listened to the talk on the decks of ships in all latitudes, when its name would turn up frequently, and if i had to characterise its good work in one sentence, i would say that, for seamen, the well street home was a friendly place. it was essentially just that; quietly, unobtrusively, with a regard for the independence of the men who sought its shelter ashore, and with no ulterior aims behind that effective friendliness. no small merit this. and its claim on the generosity of the public is derived from a long record of valuable public service. since we are all agreed that the men of the merchant service are a national asset worthy of care and sympathy, the public could express this sympathy no better than by enabling the sailors' home, so useful in the past, to continue its friendly offices to the seamen of future generations. footnotes {1} yvette and other stories. translated by ada galsworthy. {2} _turgenev_: a study. by edward garnett. {3} _studies in brown humanity_. by hugh clifford. {4} _quiet days in spain_. by c. bogue luffmann. {5} existence after death implied by science. by jasper b. hunt, m.a. {6} _the ascending effort_. by george bourne. {7} since writing the above, i am told that such doors are fitted in the bunkers of more than one ship in the atlantic trade. {8} the loss of the _empress of ireland_. 