Notes on Life and Letters

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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 cross-
roads. 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.