The Unemployed

It is singular that in England, where any feelings of definite rank are at their least distinctive, the barriers between class and class are at the apex of rigidity. Yet they are – these barriers – singularly unsuspected. Who would suspect that a plasterer of a house in building would not eat in the same room with a bricklayer? And yet – to make the limitations most visible – who would not sympathize with a man of gentle birth whose sister insisted on marrying a railway porter? And these barriers are the causes of strange ignorances between class and class. What, for instance, do we know of the life of the poor man? He has never been voiced: he is, in the nature of the case, inarticulate. We enter his house seldom or never; if he rises in the world he forgets very soon. He may remember the material objects of his former life: he forgets how the world looked; he forgets his early views, his early knowledge.

Yet at certain times the poor man is omnipresent. He invades us, he fills us with fears, with misgivings, and he makes our hearts bleed. It is, for instance, impossible for a humane man to think of Sunderland, where firm after firm of shipbuilders has failed and shut down his work; where there is a whole town on the verge of starvation – it is impossible for a man with any heart at all to think of Sunderland without at least looking at the hedgerows with misgivings. In his garden the autumn blackbirds may be calling; the tall clumps of dahlias stand motionless and polychromatic, awaiting the first touch of frost. But his eyes will wander to the hedgerows when he thinks of the stricken town. For, if God sends a store of berries for the birds, so the saying is, the winter will be a hard one. And if this winter is a hard one – then God help the stricken towns.

And the poor are breaking in on us everywhere. They break in on us as we drive through the streets. We see them in their knots, in their bands, at street corners; the parks are full of them, the public squares. We drive past these broken knots with a touch of fear. If the winter is very hard – they may crowd together. They may sack West London. We are the men whose hearts bleed for them – but how, if passing through the streets they catch us afoot, shall we be able to escape from them? In the last unemployed riots our mothers were driving to the city. They met the unemployed; it was with great difficulty that they escaped with their lives.

They penetrate to our ears poignantly in the sounds of music. We are walking down deserted streets of a Sunday in church time and suddenly in the quiet we hear the high clear notes of a tin-whistle, bird-like, swift. A very burly navvy, white-whiskered, pink-cheeked, is walking down the middle of the road. We hear him play the ‘Shaking of the Sheets’, ‘My Lady Greensleeves’ and an eighteenth-century country dance whose name we have forgotten. He is an out-of-work from Buckingham. We sit in our restaurant, the windows open, and suddenly there rises up, in excellent voices, with perfect precision, the madrigal called the ‘Pie and the Apple’; it is succeeded by ‘The Five Bells of Osney’, in canon. Out-of-works from Manchester are walking down the middle of the street. They are the unemployed: tramps do not sing madrigals or play those ancient tunes with such ‘technique’.

With pity, with fear, or with music – in a hundred ways – the poor man is breaking in on us. Perhaps it is not worse than it used to be. We remember that as small children the most familiar song we knew was one that used to be sung by bands of dirtily clad men in the frosty days:

We were so familiar with this song we used to sing it to our toys.

But of knowledge of the lives and aspirations of the poor man how little we have. We are barred off from him by the invisible barriers: we have no records of his views in literature. It is astonishing how little literature has to show of the life of the poor. Of late years we can call to mind only the two Bettesworth books which, excellent in their way, treat the poor man objectively. Mr W.H. Davies, one of whose impressions of poverty we print in the present number, has written his autobiography. But this is the autobiography of the tramp, not of a man who makes his living by working with his hands. Otherwise, although we can lay no claim to omniscience, it may be considered a fairly safe step to say that of the thousands of books that pour upon us day by day and year by year, the percentage which gives us any insight into the inner workings of the poor man’s mind is either infinitesimal or non-existent.

A serious attempt has now been made to fill in this lacuna, and since the principal aim of The English Review is by means of the literature which it prints and the literature to which it calls attention to ascertain where we stand and to aid in the comprehension of one kind of mind by another, we feel no hesitation in seriously commending this work to our readers. It is called A Poor Man’s House, and is written by Mr Stephen Reynolds.1 Mr Reynolds, we understand, was in his earlier days a science student of some distinction, but circumstances forced him to abandon a career which, if any career could do it, ought to train the young men in the habit of mind to constater – to register, that is – not to theorize along Utopian lines. Owing apparently to some freak of his character, or to some social malaise, Mr Reynolds seems to have abandoned suddenly his contacts with what he calls contemptuously ‘the cultured classes’, and to have taken up his quarters in the cottage of a Devonshire fisherman. Here it seems that he has definitely supported himself for several years by acting as mate to the fisherman in question, and by rowing summer visitors for hire. Such a career, if it do not argue a disposition more romantic than that of any other boy who runs away to sea, should at least suffice to prove that Mr Reynolds’ nature is no ordinary one.

His attitude, since he writes for that very cultured world he so much despises, is one of unreasonable and jaunty aggression. He flings, as it were, his cap into his reader’s face at the very outset; being a scientist he utters his theory with a dogmatism that is a little distressing to ears used to a finer note, but his attitude is no doubt due to youth – though we are uncertain as to the author’s age; his dogmatism is due to his scientific training, to his consciousness that he knows his subject.

He knows his subject:

For his first marriage and towards setting up house Tony succeeded in saving twenty shillings. [Tony is the fisherman whose assistant Mr Reynolds became.]

He gave it to his mother in gold to keep safely for him, and the day before the wedding he asked for it. ‘Yu knows we an’t got no bloody sovereigns,’ said his father. It had all been spent in food and clothes for the younger children. So Tony went to sea that night and earned five shillings. A shilling of that too he gave to his mother; then started off on foot for the village where his girl was living and awaiting him. She had a little saved up: he knew that, though he feared it might have gone like his. They were married, however; they fed, rejoiced, and joked; and ‘for to du the thing proper like’, they hired a trap to drive them home. With what money was left they embarked on married life, and their children made no unreasonable delay about coming. ‘Aye!’ says Tony, ‘I’d du the same again – though ’twas hard times often.’

Before I left Seacombe I asked a fisherman’s wife, who was expecting her sixth or seventh child, whether she had enough money in hand to go through with it all; for I knew that her husband was unlikely to earn anything just then. ‘I have,’ she said, ‘an’ p’raps I an’t. It all depends. If everything goes all right, I’ve got enough to last out, but if I be so ill as I was wi’ the last one, what us lost, then I an’t. Howsbeever I don’t want nort now. Us’ll see how it turns out.’ She went on setting her house in order, preparing baby-linen and making ready to ‘go up over’, with perfect courage and tranquillity. When one thinks of the average educated woman’s fear of childbed, although she can have doctors, nurses, anaesthetics and every other alleviation, the contrast is very great, more especially as the fisherman’s wife had good reason to anticipate much pain and danger, in addition to the possibility of her money giving out.

Those are not extraordinary instances, chosen to show how courageous people can be sometimes; on the contrary, they are quite ordinary illustrations of a general attitude among the poor towards life. To express it in terms of a theory which in one form or another is accepted by nearly all thinkers – the poor have not only the Will to Live, they have the Courage to Live.

This passage gives a sufficient taste, both of Mr Reynolds’s singular powers of observation and of his philosophic methods. His deductions we could have spared, but inasmuch as it was probably what Mr Reynolds would call his Will to make Deductions which buoyed him up to make his very admirable observations, to refuse to tolerate the one for the sake of the other would be an act of perversity. Mr Reynolds writes of the poor man with a comprehension that is all the more valuable because it is inspired with a great tenderness.

English Review, 1 (December 1908), 161–4.

George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody

Let us – to get the statement out of the way – begin by saying that Professor Saintsbury cannot write. He cannot write so as to make himself reasonably intelligible, and this is a nuisance. For, greedy to read him, we are compelled to cast back in sentence after sentence simply to discover what he means. Thus of Drayton he says: ‘In some moods I am a very little prouder of being an Englishman than I should have been if the Polyolbion did not exist.’ Would it not have been easier to write – and how much easier to read – ‘The Polyolbion adds little to my pride of race’?

But that is very little to the point. Professor Saintsbury is giving us a work perhaps the most valuable, certainly the most salutary, that could have been written at this period of English literature. For there was never a day when the technical side of the Art of Letters was more neglected or so jeered at. With his voice reaching so many hearers, the author of English Prosody attempts to redress this balance. It is safe to say that the history of literature is a series of chronicles recording how great literature has risen out of technical controversies. The Elizabethans were great writers because of the technical controversies that preceded them and their works; the Cockney school of poets were great poets because of the classical traditions of the eighteenth century. The literature of today is a poor thing, because we have no trained writers who, bursting the bonds of the conventions which have trained them, have achieved an ease of phrase, a mastery of form.

Any philosophic student of the history of music will tell you that the study of counterpoint exists, not to teach counterpoint, but first to eliminate those whose sacred fire will not carry them through a period of arduous labours. Secondly, it teaches the composer how to break its own laws. The English composer of today is trained, if perfunctorily; so, too, the English artist. Even the English dramatist understands that he must learn something of stage-craft. It is only the writer who considers that all that goes to the making of a book are the pen in his hand and the vine-leaves in his hair. Professor Saintsbury is providing us with a treatise on the harmony and counterpoint of English verse.

The English language is the perfect vehicle of poets; as a medium for prose it is too vague and too rich. The ideal paragraph in French prose is a framed set of facts which move us on account of the precision of the language. The best paragraph of English prose is a rhythm of words of poetic association. Hence it arises that the most exquisite statements of fact in the English language are to be found in blank-verse speeches.

It is only with Professor Saintsbury’s treatment of Elizabethan blank verse that – deferring an extended review until the issue of the third volume – we concern ourselves with for the present. English lyric verse differs from most sentimental verse – differs, that is to say, to put the distinction at its broadest, from the verse of the troubadours – mainly in that it is written for non-formal and irregular musical airs. English blank verse, on the other hand, differs radically from all other verse.

We read lately in the columns of a usually esteemed contemporary, and from the pen of a writer much looked up to, the statement that ‘A speech of Shakespeare’s blank verse consists of a bundle of unrhymed decasyllabic lines.’ This seems almost incredible. It would be utterly incredible were we not aware that it is the prevailing impression of the practising literary world today. Yet we have professors of literature and blessed words like ‘phonetic syzygy’, or ‘vowel colouring’, and ‘stopped lines’.

We wish that every Englishman would read the portions of Professor Saintsbury’s book in which he deals with blank verse. There are, of course, other books, but we know of none which so hammers home the argument. For blank verse is not a bundle of lines: it is a collection of statements, whether of fact or of mood; it is expressed in rhythmic language, divisible into beats of ten or of some multiple of ten syllables. The point is that it is the statement not the line that is the unit. You could not speak of ‘a blank verse’.

We do not think that Professor Saintsbury anywhere states this theory with so much precision. In fact, as a good student of prosody rather than of poetry, he a little omits to consider that it is the sense as much as the breath that unites a ‘period.’ Says he, speaking of the Two Gentlemen of Verona: ‘[Fourteeners and stanzas] are nothing like so frequent as in the Errors and in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The blank verse itself, too, is even less run on than in either of the others – stop or no stop at the end of the line, each is formed with a single respiration.’ And we take it from this that Professor Saintsbury’s unit of blank verse is a respiration of whatever length.

We may, indeed, be in disagreement with our author as to small points. Of Marlowe he says: ‘Yet he was not yet entirely free of the single-moulded line even here’ – when he is commenting on

Here, indeed, if we look solely to the prosody, there is a suspicion of stoppedness. Yet as soon as we read it in conjunction with the sense of the passage we see that the ‘He of you all’ of the first passage is held by the mind, which awaits the completion of the statement – is held as if by a sort of capillary attraction, so that the whole passage is a single unit.

But though Professor Saintsbury ignores a little this factor in the knitting together of blank verse, we have little quarrel with him. It is, of course, his duty to overstate his case. And the wise poet will study the History of English Prosody. For the wise poet – like another wise man – will ‘keep all his limbs very supple’. The most skilful artist in verse of the nineteenth century, Christina Rossetti, was very largely a product of metrical exercises. She was in the habit, that is to say, of writing daily a number of verses to bouts-rimés.1 And to this without much doubt, she owed both her unrivalled metrical skill and her singularly large and apt vocabulary. This, indeed, is the merest common sense. For the constant practice of verse drills both the eye and the ear, and the constant swimming in the depths of metre will produce in a poet capabilities for rhythmical cadences. It will, indeed, produce such a yearning for intricate and musical forms that when the Idea comes to him – when, in fact, the Muse is paying her visit – he will satisfy them and himself.

 

English Review, 1 (January 1909), 374–6.

The Work of W.H. Hudson

That saint was one of the best beloved who was called ‘of the birds’. That author is one of the best beloved we have, whom we picture – don’t we see him? – walking, silent, in a tranquil garden, towards evening, peering up at the families of swifts – ‘never more than eight’ – that career with shrill and ecstatic shrieks around the tower of the church he served, or walking, a book in his clasped hands behind his back, with softened footfalls to watch the thrushes on the lawn, running with their suddenly arrested dashes, beside the sundial that marked hours so serene. We may say that all humanity loves a lover of birds. St Francis preached to them; Gilbert White moved amongst them with softened footfalls and tranquil attention. And perhaps the image that most appeals to us of an omnipotent and a tender Creator is that of Him Who feeds the young ravens in their nests and has attention for the fall of a sparrow.

No doubt we love the lovers of birds not so much because we ourselves love the little people of heaven and earth as because for the successful watching by hedgerows certain lovable qualities are necessary – certain qualities of self-effacement, of patience, of tranquil observation, and of quiet movement. If, in fact, we do not desire, in the woods or the open, to startle little and easily frightened beings, we must possess those actual qualities. There must be nothing staccato in our motions; there must be nothing fugitive in our visits.

If we walk along a wood-path all the busy life around us will continue unconcerned and at no great distance – for just so long as we continue moving. But the moment that we come to a sudden halt we shall hear the rustle of fugitive wings, the sibilant and special alarm-cry of the robin will replace the conversational chatter of many small birds. Similarly, upon the ploughed downs, so long as we continue to walk upon our business the plover near at hand will run upon its own affairs or sit still in the furrows. But if we come to a sudden halt the plovers will flap all across the skies, the rooks fly away down the hill, and the partridges, with their startled skimming, brush over the nearest ridge. We shall have disturbed the rhythm of life.

To avoid causing this disturbance a man must be either a person who comes to a halt very gradually or one who comes so often that he will be accepted and be granted, as it were, the freedom of coppice or of furrow. The birds must, in fact, get used to seeing him about until they come to regard him, not as a marauder or a spy, but as one whose business it is to be abroad, motionless and silent in the solitudes. For this there are necessary a patience and a pensiveness that, in a restless age, we find attractive, and this, perhaps, is why we love bird-watchers, whether or no we love birds or have the faculties ourselves to watch successfully.

We may regard Green Mansions as revealing the secret of Mr Hudson’s personality. It is the story of a man who goes into a forest, in beneath the huge boughs that are the mansions for so many beings. And here, in the green twilight, going often and steadfastly, he is aware of a voice, a bird-voice, that, invisible in its origin, dogs his footsteps, in the secret places of Ecuador, as here at home in a coppice the robin will accompany us, flitting from bush to bush, invisible and uttering its sweet cry, half of warning, half of companionship. The man goes often and often into the forest, and at last, shyly and capriciously, the being of the bird-voice reveals herself to him. She is a woman with the spirit of a bird, with the elusive charm, with the tender and fluttering mind, with the coloured and tenuous form, with the fluting and thrilling voice. In the soul of the man there arises an immense, an overpowering passion for this bird-creature, for this protectress of all living things of the forest, for this spirit-woman who is at one with all perching, fluttering, and creeping things. And when – since union between man and spirit is in the nature of things impossible – the man loses the wood-being he is filled for ever with a pervading, an endless regret.

That is Mr Hudson. He reveals himself: he shows us in the book the nature of the dream that he has dreamed. He is – in his being as an author – a man silent, hungry-eyed, filled with a regret and with an ideal. The ideal is to find a Being with whom he may be at one, a Being who, in return, will be at one with all the creatures of all the Green Mansions of the world. The regret is that he is born a man, since to man this union cannot ever be granted.

So we may picture him, silent, devoured by a passion, standing by a hedgerow, gazing in between the leaves, into the deep and glamorous interior, watching hungrily the little creatures who flutter about the hem of invisible garments.

This, of course, is a picture of the being who seems to look out at us from the pages of the books, not of the Mr Hudson who walks the streets of London Town, or sits watching the gulls from a rock on the Lizard. A writer reveals himself in his books as distinct from the writer in his person, the Rousseau who is shadowed in the Nouvelle Héloïse being different enough from the unpleasing person who abandoned his children on the doorsteps of orphanages. Nor yet is this picture of a hungry and silent man by a hedgerow any more than a partial portrait of a phase. There is the gallant and amorous horseman of the Purple Land, with many loves and jingling spurs, up to the eyes in South American revolutions, outwitting the bulls of the pampas, bronzed in the tropical sunlight. There is the genial and sardonic traveller who troubles with his appearance the uneasy minds of tramps on the South Downs. There is the indignant Mr Hudson of Birds in London, fulminating against the park vandals who condemned the tall elms in Kensington Gardens; there is the Mr Hudson who, uneasily, if gallantly, tries to make a good case for the inhabitants of Cornwall, writing, as it were, amiable compliments to the Celts with his right hand, whilst with his left he sets down instances of their cruelty, so convincingly rendered that they remain like shuddering patches in our memories.1

And, after all, it is the power to render convincingly circumstances observed with zest that most surely makes us know a writer and, if he be lovable, makes us love him. The admirers of Mr Hudson are, relatively speaking, a small band, but we fancy that they are a band inspired with more gratitude for pleasures received and with more affection than fall to the common lot of writers. It is very likely that the majority of Mr Hudson’s champions have been roused to affection for him by this first passage from Nature in Downland, the introduction to the book, the passage that gives the tone, that sets the pace, that affords a taste of the personality:

Here (where Kingston Down slopes away towards the valley of the Ouse), sitting on the dry grass with my face to the wind, I spent two or three hours in gazing at the thistledown. It is a rare thing to see as I saw it that day: the sight of it was a surprise, and I gave myself up to the pleasure of it, wishing for no better thing. It was not only that the sight was beautiful, but the scene was vividly reminiscent of long-gone summer days associated in the memory with the silvery thistledown. The wide extent of unenclosed and untilled earth, its sunburnt colour and its solitariness, where no person was in sight, the burning sun and wind, and the sight of thousands upon thousands of balls or stars of down, reminded me of old days on horseback on the open pampa – an illimitable waste of rust-red thistles, and the sky above covered with its million floating flecks of white.

But the South American thistledown, both of the giant thistle and the cardoon, with its longer flower-heads, was much longer and whiter and infinitely more abundant. By day the air was full of it, and I remember that when out with my brother we often enjoyed seeing it at night. After a day or days of wind it would be found in immense masses in the sheltered hollows or among the tall-standing stalks of the dogplants. These masses gleamed with a strange whitening in the dark, and it used to please us to gallop our horses through them. Horses are nervous, unintelligent creatures, liable to take fright at the most familiar objects, and our animals would sometimes be in terror at finding themselves plunged breast-deep into this insubstantial whiteness, that moved with them and covered them as with a cloud.

The smaller, more fragile English thistledown, in so few places abundant enough to appear an element in the scene is beautiful too, and its beauty is, I am inclined to think, all the greater because of its colour…. It was as if these slight, silvery objects were springing spontaneously into existence, as the heat opened and the wind lifted and bore them away. All round me, and as far off as such slight, gauzy objects could be seen, they were springing up from the grass in this way in hundreds and thousands. Looking long and steadily at them – their birth and their flight – one could fancy that they were living things of delicate aerial form that had existed for a period hidden and unsuspected in the turf, until their time had come to rise like winged ants from the soil and float in the air.

We have transcribed perhaps a little more from this book than is exactly in proportion; but, in the first place, this is the first passage of Mr Hudson’s work that we ever read, and, in the second, it is a pleasure to see flowing from the pen words written so sweetly and so well – and, indeed, we wish we had the time to transcribe, for the sheer delight of it, the whole of this book. And we think that we have not done wrong, for in this passage there is shadowed the whole of the writer – of the writer who, having galloped with young gallantry through the thistledown of early life on the pampas, comes with the fresh eyes of a stranger and the keen love of an exile into green and ancient lands, there to spend long hours in the delight of lying still, of gazing at common things, of giving himself up utterly to the spirit of the place. These are, as it were, the biographical details – and there are biographical details enough cropping up, as reminiscences, as comparisons, or as time framework of romances, throughout Mr Hudson’s long tale of works.

Roughly speaking, we may guess from these that Mr Hudson was born and passed his youth and his early maturity in one or other of the South American republics. He was familiar with the Argentines, with La Plata (A Naturalist in La Plata), with Patagonia (Idle Days in Patagonia), to come, the first of his family for several generations, to settle again in England. And in England, as it were, he has sat about for years – for, say, a quarter of a century, since the earliest of his English reminiscences that we have appear to date (Birds in London) from, the first years of the eighties. Throughout this last quarter of a century he has seemed to saunter from one green contemplation to another, from Sussex through Hampshire2 to Cornwall – with long and leisurely strides, keeping time, as it were, with the rhythm of his thoughts and glancing keenly from side to side at the little and real things of life, halting at a hedgerow to peer in, coming again and again to bracken patches in the bare places of which, sinuous, tawny, their backs marked as with a chain of black arrowheads, the adders sunned themselves. It is that note of sauntering and of returning again and again that seems to distinguish all his books. And then he has his matchless style.

There is about his writing something formal and austere, something almost Spanish in its gravity, something almost naïve and childish – with the clearness of fresh phrases that a child has – in the simplicity of his verbiage. And there is nothing whatever that is literary about it: a delightful man speaks without self-consciousness, an effortless poet soliloquizes in converational tones as if he were talking to himself. He is utterly unspoiled by any literary traditions, literary provincialisms, or the literary hunger for the picturesque, for the derivative-word with associations. He has escaped alike the fatal Wardour Street influences of Pre-Raffaelism and the semi-biblical over-emphasis of Stevensonian word-jugglery. Having a clear and precise mind, he has expressed himself with clearness and precision, using simple words that are sometimes quaint, but never affected. It is for this reason that we are permitted to consider him the most valuable figure that we have in the world of writers of today – the most valuable in that we can learn of him that lesson that most of all we need – the lesson that ‘style’ is a matter of research, not for the striking, the telling, or the obsolescent word, but for the word most fitted to express ourselves to ourselves. No one can learn any tricks from his writing: he has none; no one can increase his vocabulary from a study of Mr Hudson, for Mr Hudson’s vocabulary is quite limited. But with his limited vocabulary and his absence of tricks he has arrived at a vehicle of expression for his thought as simple as that of Christina Rossetti, as limpid as that of M. Anatole France.

With the actual value of his thoughts we are not so much concerned. He is a scientist in his rendering of facts; he is a poet when it comes to his interpretation of their spiritual aspects. We have a very intimate and somewhat cultured friend who uttered words very much as follows:

‘What’s the secret of this man’s fascination?’ – our friend was speaking, not of the man, but of the writer. ‘He’s the most wrong-headed fellow it’s possible to imagine. He runs up against me at every turn. I detest nature books, these products of a Cockney age. He writes them. He is forever sneering at towns: I never set my foot outside London if I can help it. He has all the fads, of simple life, of anti-sporting humanitarianism. He jeers at the affecting epitaph of an ancient huntsman, one of the best and most loyal that ever crossed a saddle. He’s of Colonial origin, and all Colonials are detestable. He upholds every blessed thing that’s most puling in a puling and mawkish century. He gets fits of nerves because he sees an owl in a cage, and that causes him to curse a venerable and splendid city. He believes in exploded theories of race; he upholds the tomfool idea that the Celtic influence is worth a twopenny-piece. And yet I subscribe to several faddy periodicals that I detest for the mere off-chance of finding in them an article – say about seagulls!’ – and there was an ocean of disgust in his enunciation of the word seagulls – ‘by this addle-headed poet. It’s as if I rubbed shoulders with temperance orators and Nonconformists in order to get hold of an apostle of garden cities. And why the devil do I do it?’ Mr —, as will be gathered, is an obstinate Tory; but we are glad to be able, in this attempt at what may be called an apotheosis, to quote such an advocatus diaboli.

The fact is that he searches in these to him squalid byways because he gets so much pleasure out of Mr Hudson’s manner that he forgets his matter until after the book is done. The saying alt … has a double sense, for if Phidias belongs to Peace it is part of the atmosphere of the artist who works in clear and tranquil materials, whether of marble or words, that he confers an atmosphere of restfulness upon his votaries. We are not saying that Mr Hudson’s matter does not matter; but, for the great bulk of his readers, it is all one what he writes about. Who cares for all these things together: La Plata? Hampshire? a Utopia of the Crystal Age? Sussex? Patagonia? cuckoos? barrows? grasshoppers? or the sobriety of Cornish Methodists? We may care, individually, aboGerman writers. Butut one or other, or five or six of these matters. Some of us hate downs, a great many people hate the inhabitants of the West Country. To us the thought of South America is as a continent of boredom. Yet we read with quiet avidity Idle Days in Patagonia, and, concerned as we are with avalanches of new books, dreading new books, we rush helter-skelter to buy the very brand-newest of Mr Hudson, and read with engrossed insatiety The Land’s End. Well! peace belongs to Phidias.

That, we may take it, is the secret of the matter. It is at once the secret of our enthusiasm, as of our fewness. We do not know that we regard it as a blot on the nation that Mr Hudson’s name is not on all the hoardings. How could it be? With small words this poet gives us peace. You have to blare on some sort of brazen sackbut or psaltery to attract a crowd on fair-day. You will not do it by retiring into the close and meditating on the little lichens of the tombs, by explaining how they dry up and revivify, dry up and show again, minute, speckled, green and orange, as dry season succeeds to rainy and rainy to dry. We know very well that if we ask the next ten men we meet we may find that not one has heard of Mr Hudson; but we are very certain that if we put one of Mr Hudson’s books into the hands of any one of the ten he will conceive a great affection for this writer. It is customary to speak of Mr Hudson as ‘Mr W.H. Hudson, the naturalist’. We should prefer to speak of him as the natural writer. For he is very much more than a naturalist. It is not merely that his range of subject is very wide; that he has written pure romance, pure romantic sociology, or pure poetic imagery, as in the Little Boy Lost; nor is it merely that he possesses the power to observe, the patience to collect, or the delicate phraseology with which to record minute, delicate, or pretty happenings in the green chambers of this earth of many mansions. It is that he has the power – the gift – to draw comparisons; to perceive analogies; to build similes; to let his thoughts wander along delicate and touching lines. It is, in short, because he is a poet. For it is from the power to compare, to perceive the relationships of things, and to let his thoughts wander that the poet derives his attractions. To be able to perceive a relationship to the Kingdom of Heaven in the tesselated pebbles of a brook; to be able to convey how the rustle of wind in the dry, false dodder-grass of a down is at one with the thoughts that pass through the mind of a man – this is the inestimable gift, the inestimable gift of perceiving the greater truths that lurk hidden behind all the pleasant little grasses of the downs and the dry thistle-stalks of the pampas. For the poet by rendering the visible as nearly as may be to perfection, sets stirring in the dulled perceptions of humanity the minute ties that bind us always to the unseen universe. That is why we love Mr Hudson, who perceives all Heaven in the voices of the birds.

English Review, 2 (April 1909), 157–64.

Algernon Charles Swinburne
Born April 5, 1837: Died April 10, 1909

The truer poetry of the great tradition always suggests a flame: a flame of the Muse: a flame of gallant speeches, of splendid endeavour. Of the Victorian poets his was the most epic figure, the most generous, the most traditional. Of him alone it would not seem mockery to say that he smote a lyre. Of the two forms of art – that which seeks to be generous, all-inclusive, and that which is advised and selective – he chose the former, for he was daemonic. Nowadays we have swung somewhat into other courses. Swinburne represented an age of faith: and so variously and very splendidly he sang his faith, which was none the less a faith in that it came in the guise of a negation. Yet even the verse containing the line ‘That no life lives for ever’ must wind up with the assertion ‘That even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea’ so that if he did not believe in ultimate immortality he believed in an ultimate rest.

He came of an older time, of a very fine spirit; and to hear him speak was to be in touch with an old and assuredly a very fine tradition. Today we speak with the lips: if we cannot hope to achieve the broadnesses of Romance, we do at least attempt delicacies and subtleties. For these this great man – this great Figure – cared very little. He grafted on to epic volume a Berserker rage: he was a man of fine frenzies: he spoke not from the lips, but – ‘with hollow mouth’ – he poured out his heart. It is perhaps in the nature of the time that modern verse must be analytical. There are today so many things to see, so many to ‘take stock of ’, that we none of us dare to generalize. We realize very fully that if today we generalize in one direction, tomorrow fresh facts will come to upset our theories. In consequence we are thrown back on ourselves: we have grown personal, intimate, subjective. Mr Swinburne was none of these. He had convictions, and the courage to utter them. Whether he were right we will not say: possibly he was wrong: at any rate he was temerarious. But what a fine temerity!

It is possible that his fame has in England suffered a little eclipse in these latter days, but he remains for the world that surrounds these islands the best-known Englishman, and the Continent, which has not forgotten Byron, will still less forget the name of Swinburne. To the Germans his splendid rhetoric appeals; he learned his art of the French Romantics; the early days of Italy and Greece inspired him. From England he took only the magic of Elizabethan verbiage: thus, if in England his work had a derivative aim, to Europe which ignores our verbal subtleties it was and remains new and very modern. And no doubt even in England a day will come when – the fashions of today being forgotten – the once splendid name of Swinburne will once again be splendid among the names of the greater poets. For of the Victorian poets he was the most generous in the outpourings of his heart, the most nobly unthinking, the bravest, the most flamelike.

English Review, 2 (May 1909), 193–4.

George Meredith, OM
Born February 12, 1828: Died May 18, 1909

Mr Meredith follows Mr Swinburne into the shadows; and now, indeed, the whole Round Table is dissolved. And this phrase seems singularly appropriate for the passing of the last great figure of the Victorian group – the Victorian group that in its literature and culture was so dominated by the Arthurian cycle. Mr Meredith, the great poet, was, perhaps, less under the influence of his age than were any other of his louder-voiced contemporaries. His was a half-comic, a half-ironic spirit. The earnestness which he certainly felt he less persistently pushed into the foreground. The child, as it were, of Dickens – and we have only to look at the pages of All the Year Round, where Evan Harrington appeared as a serial, to see how very much he was the child of Dickens – Mr Meredith achieved a lightness, a resignation that belonged in no sense to Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, Ruskin, and all the others.

For this reason we imagine that he will survive them as a living writer, as a man whose books are read and loved. He had more of an eternal principle in his personality, his mind was less exclusively set upon the fashions and the problems of his own time. His peculiar use of words may stand in his way: but this we are inclined to doubt. Such as it is his language will not be more strange to the reader of tomorrow than is actually the language of Shakespeare or of Herrick to us today, and his thought is never obscure. So that all that the reader of tomorrow will have to do to enjoy, say, One of our Conquerors will be to learn his vocabulary as we have to learn the vocabulary of Shakespeare. And to read, ‘Love in the Valley’ he need make no effort at all. This most precious of all the poems the nineteenth century gave us is as clear, as simple, as soothing, as mysteriously moving as is the Christina of Denmark by Holbein that the intolerable officialdom of our nation appears to be about to permit us to lose.

And, like Mr Swinburne, Mr Meredith has not been buried in the Abbey. That, perhaps, is as well since, because it honours no great man in these days, Westminster Abbey must become the resting-place of mediocrities, amongst whom Mr Meredith would very uneasily rest, since he suffered fools badly. And Mr Meredith’s dust will be at one with the Nature to whom alone he devoted none of his comic touches, in whom alone his ironic spirit discerned a perfect satisfaction.

English Review, 2 (June 1909), 409–10.

C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England

A treatise upon the condition of any people, tranquil, prosperous, and under no stress, must always be a matter of moods. It would be comparatively easy to have written, say, upon the condition of Ireland during the potato famine, or upon the condition of the Netherlands in the days of Alva. But to write about a people mixed in race, united by no common emotions, upheld by no common faith – this is a task calling for impossible qualities if the writer is at all to dogmatize with justness. These impossible qualities Mr Masterman1 does not possess: no man could. And so Mr Masterman wavers from despondency to hope, wavers from hope to caution and ends by saying that he cannot tell where we stand. Mr Masterman is extremely well equipped for his task. He is, we may assume, qualified by his official position to write about the social life of the upper classes: he represents a constituency of the very poor and he has lived amongst them. He has read a great many – perhaps too many – books; he has taken them seriously – perhaps too seriously. We should be the last to quarrel with Mr Masterman for taking imaginative literature seriously and it is, at least, one cheering sign of the time which, intellectually speaking, we regard even more gloomily than does Mr Masterman, that a prominent politician in a ‘serious book’ should quote with so much deference from so many mere novels. That is at least cheering, but for the rest it is a rather gloomy picture with which Mr Masterman presents us. In one sense Mr Masterman has made an advance on any former writer upon national characteristics that we can remember. Most of these, writing as they do from a sphere of observation purely literary, or literary and of Society, have treated only of quite a limited sphere of human life. But there is abroad – and it is a very good thing – a spirit of exploration; not a very strong spirit but still a certain motive force. We know so little of the lives of the great people: the lives of the great people are so little represented in literature. But of late years we have had the minutely photographic Bettesworth book and its sequel, which give us the chance of really studying the vicissitudes and the psychology of the agricultural labourer. We have had Mr Stephen Reynold’s A Poor Man’s House which, more coloured as it is by the author’s personality, is a more vivid study of a class more suspicious, more hardy and more arrogant. We have had Mr Wells’ Kipps, which illuminated for us the psychology of the shop assistant, and his Tono-Bungay, which gave us so really beautiful a rendering of the psychology of the Servants’ Hall. And now we have Mr Masterman pointing out to us the fact that the immense majority of the English people are manual workers functioning in conditions sad enough – an immense crowd, unvocal, with lives quite colourless, working in circumstances frequently of extreme squalor, with joys that to us would seem no joys, with hopes that to us would seem mere hopelessness. Mr Masterman has done this very well, but he has done it a little statistically, a little coldly. For ourselves, we wish that, letting go his literary and his social side, he had given us a more emotional, a more keenly analytical picture of the great people. It is when he gives us pictures of the crowd at the Peckham Election that he is at his most valuable. For the psychology of the poor, and more particularly of the London poor, is one of the great mysteries. The feature of the London poor man that most has moved us is his singular, ironic, and fatalistic cheerfulness. It is because he takes so little account of this that Mr Galsworthy, when he has treated of the lives of the extremely poor, has always seemed to us a misleading guide. His poor are perpetually on the whine: they are perpetually folding their hands: they are perpetually giving up the game. But actually – and it is demonstrable – the poor man very wonderfully keeps on going. He has a fine energy in circumstances where none of those better placed in the world could find heart for energy: he has a fine stoicism and with his motto, ‘We can’t all bloody well have everything’, he goes quietly on towards the workhouse or the grave, uttering by the way those Cockney witticisms which are so full of wisdom and which cast such sudden flashes upon life. Some of this psychology Mr Masterman has caught and rendered, and for this his book is the most valuable. The belabouring of Society has been done too often. Society must necessarily be vapid, aimless and of no account since it has no aims and can have no aim save that of getting through the day. Or again, Mr Masterman’s analysis of the literary life of the day takes too much account of the literature of the immediate present. A despised person, finding his market almost solely in that same vapid, aimless class, the imaginative writer of today pays little attention either to his art or to the means by which he can stir the deeper emotions. If he attempt either of these last he cannot exist for there will be no market for his work. But having run through nearly all the strata of our social conditions, having uttered threats of revolution and gloomy pictures of the mental sterility of his day, Mr Masterman ends up upon a note of caution and adds a short postcript in which he casts doubt upon all that he has written.

This is a very proper note for the ending of a book very agreeably and sympathetically written.

English Review, 3 (August 1909), 182–4.

Joseph Conrad

I have been lately taken harshly to task for writing that the Englishman does not much respect Thought or Literature. I have been told that to write that was easy and to prove it impossible. Alas, how easy it is to prove it. Yesterday I was going through Belgium in an express train bound for Calais. In the corridor stood a lamentable little anxious being – an old, yellow, shrivelled Jew draper of Cologne. He was going to London to buy stockings; a sixty-knot gale was blowing and he was terribly afraid of seasickness. He was afraid for his life because he had a weak heart. Now I do not like Jews, I hate all shopkeepers and I particularly dislike the inhabitants of Cologne. But this poor little old man was so miserable that I had to do my best for him – to divert his mind. I talked about stockings and about whether the Frankfurt Gazette is a good paper to advertise in if one wants to make a profitable Israelite marriage for one’s daughters. And still with his eyes of doom gazing not at my face but into the miserable future:

‘Sie sind auch Kaufmann? You also are a shopkeeper?’ he asked.

I answered with the touch of shamefacedness with which one would answer an English bagman, an English barrister, or an English baker – one of the persons who does real things and makes lots and lots of real money – I answered:

‘Nein, Ich bin Schriftsteller – a person who produces writing.’

And, oh wonder, he answered – still with the doomed eyes:

‘Schriftsteller – das ist ein edler Beruf! Writer! That is a noble profession.’

I laughed and said sardonically:

‘Der Herr will etlicher sagen – The gentleman means a wretched profession – one in which there is no money to be made.’ But still with the eyes of doom answered this poor little Jew:

‘Nein – ein edler! Ein edler! – A noble profession! What does the money matter? If one of my daughters could marry a good poet I would not ask any dowry with him.’

And then I felt ashamed: he was so in earnest and so humble before me. But imagine an English linen-draper going to buy stockings with the fear of death and a weak heart and talking with reverence – snatching a moment from the fear of death to talk with reverence of the profession of letters. For suppose it was hypocrisy, or suppose it was a pious opinion, is not it a fine country the mere hypocrisy or the mere pious opinion of whose small Jew linen-drapers takes the form of such homage to virtue?

For with my inhabitant of Cologne – of peddling Cologne – to back me up I suddenly thought the great things that it is permissible to think about literature, about High Literature – the ‘Noble Calling’. And then I began to think about Joseph Conrad, for Literature and Conrad are to me interchangeable terms.

* * * * * *

I do not know in what English criticism of the official type really consists. I think you write something about the style, by which you mean the vocabulary – the odd words that a writer uses. Then you say something – a great deal about the subject. Then you enlarge upon the philosophy – oh, you write a great deal about the philosophy and you plank, in the vulgar phrase, your bottom dollar on the moral lessons of the book under consideration. You point out how it is calculated to leave the reader a better and a wiser man. When you have written a great many exercises of that sort you are recognized as a Critic; you receive a seat at the board of the British Academy and you have the right to vote the Nobel Prize to anyone you like. I think that is the way it goes but I have no means of really knowing.

Now if I may be allowed to jumble up these headings I will try to do so much for the author of Heart of Darkness. I have thought very often that Conrad is an Elizabethan. That is possibly because he is a Pole – and the Poles have the virtues and the powers that served to make nations great in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Roughly speaking, that was when Poland was a great Empire. They were Romantic, they were heroic, they were aristocrats – they were all the impracticable things. You could not expect their greatness to live on into the days of Mr Carnegie or the cotton spindle. It would be like Rupert of the Rhine leading a charge against all of Lord Haldane’s Territorials entrenched on Primrose Hill. But, though this could no longer be done, that is not to say that it is so long ago since Poland was the beloved of the world – of all the world that was not engaged in the breaking up of the prey. And if you cannot have a fortune in the two-and-three-quarter per cents it is a very good thing to be beloved for showing a fine spirit. Thus for me Joseph Conrad is the finest of the Elizabethans.

His preoccupations are with death, destiny, an inscrutable and august force, with the cruel sea, the dark forests of strange worlds or the darker forests that are the hearts of our fellow men. It would not in the least surprise you to come upon a dance of madmen in one of his stories as in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi; it would not in the least surprise you to come on the knocking at the gate of Macbeth; upon all the murders of the Spanish Tragedy; upon the sobbing misery of Celestina; upon the ragged knavery of Lazarillo de Tormes: why, he might have written ‘The branch is cut that might have grown full straight and the laurel bough is burned that flourished once in this learned man’, or he might have written ‘To die is no more than a lasting sleep, a quiet resting from all jealousy, a thing we all pursue’, and above all, ‘It is but giving over of a game that must be lost’. And can you not imagine one of his Arab sheiks, or Marlow, that tremendous old man of the sea, or even the teacher-narrator of Under Western Eyes, gazing upon the face of some woman who had caused a great deal of trouble in some obscure quarter of the world and saying reflectively: ‘Was that the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the palm leaf towns of Parabang?’ For really there is hardly anything that was written by Marlowe or Massinger or Webster or Kyd or Heywood that would not fit into this author’s works.

Of course I mean this in the sense of feeling – of what I should like to express by the word colour. For when we think of the works of the Elizabethans other than Shakespeare, we seem to see a darkness – a darkness of forests illuminated by torches, and when I think of the work of this author I always have the same image. And darkness has very curiously gone out of modern life and literature. We never see it – not the real thick blackness that seems to invade the lungs, the heart, and the very circulation of the blood. Similarly, we never think of death, of ruin, of dishonour, of chivalry, of a careless pursuing of an ideal with nothing but a thin plank between us and the fathomless sea. We never think of them – or if we do it is only for a very short moment. We switch on the electric light and turn our attentions to the evening papers.

But these things – darkness, death, honour, and a careless chivalry are the constant preoccupations of Conrad. In the one particular of honour he differs from the Elizabethans, but they were preoccupied with all the other primitive things that we have forgotten, whilst we have grown kinder. Indeed it is very curious how little space kindness occupies in the work either of Conrad or of the Elizabethans. There is of course the Woman Killed with Kindness – but it is a brutal sort of kindness that refrains from taking a sword to a guilty wife, and leaves her to die of despair and a decline. And of course there is kindness rendered in Lord Jim – that book of all others that has a vivid moral for English readers. But even here it is the kindness of old wise and sad men like Marlow or like Stein for a boy who has failed upon the point of honour. That is what they can understand, for that they can feel. In all the rest there is a desperate sort of remorselessness.

If you consider the case of the sham escape of Razumov from the police you will see very plainly what I mean. Razumov is in league with – or let us say he is under the obsession of – the Russian secret police. He has to gain the confidence of the revolutionaries, so, to add a touch of verisimilitude, as it were, to advertise his escape, he goes to a madcap boy and announces his desire to borrow money in order to pay the expenses of his escape. The boy has no money; he must rob his father in order to find it. This he does. He comes to Razumov with the money:

That is just all that Razumov had to say. He had forgotten the youth’s existence, though he had made the boy rob his father in order to advertise his escape to the revolutionaries….

It was the stolen money. He was too disdainfully honourable a man to use stolen money. He could not have done it.

And this same unimaginative cruelty of a man blindly pursuing his lost honour dignifies Razumov to the end. It pursues him into the room and into the presence of the sister of the man he betrayed to death – the woman with the trusting eyes who loves him, and whom he loves. He just tells her with the fewest possible words.

You observe those are the fewest possible words in which he could tell her that he was the traitor. Razumov is so set upon regaining his lost honour that even for the sake of the woman with the trusting eyes he cannot take the trouble to prepare her for the revelation he has to make. Then he goes to the revolutionaries in council; denounces himself to them as a police spy, receives his terrible punishment, and his soul is at peace.

It is here that Conrad differentiates himself from the Elizabethans, for they could never have worked themselves up to the pitch of subtlety. They could, as it were, have conceived a Judas, and even the remorse of such an Iscariot. They had very certainly the conception of an avenging providence. But they could not prize honour quite so high. For here is the comment of the wise woman revolutionist on the case of Razumov.

Of course this labouring of, this preoccupation with the idea of the point of honour is very foreign – so foreign that it has obviously come to this author with his foreign blood. It is a thing wholly individualistic and wholly of the aristocrat. And that is what the Poles are – aristocrats and individualists; that is why their land is harried and held down in this age of limited companies and democracy.

For the honour that obsesses all the chief characters of this author is hardly ever a question of public polity – or it might be more just to say that their souls do not treat it as a question of public polity. Lord Jim commits of course a public misdemeanour in deserting his ship because it is full of Mohammedan pilgrims; but for the rest of his life he is haunted not by the thought of thousands of drowned brown men, but by his own honour: Captain Whalley falls from honour, but it is his private soul that is harrowed, so it is with Falk the cannibal – so it is with Razumov, and in an extraordinarily imaginative degree. For the problem of Razumov is hardly to be solved by anyone but the hardest of partisans, and hardly by them. Supposing that you are the most hardened of Tories; supposing that your party is ruling the land as no land has ever been ruled for harshness and repression. On coming home one evening you find Mr Lloyd George, who has mistaken you for an advanced thinker, and he announces that he has murdered Mr Balfour, and calls on you to save him? What exactly would you do? I suppose you would compromise somehow – give the fellow ten minutes’ grace before denouncing him to the police. That would be the sort of rough honour of the hunting field that gives vermin so much law – but to a man with a nice sense of the point of honour it would not be very satisfactory as a solution.

The problem of Razumov was much more terrifying. I have softened it down out of regard to the reader’s feeling, when asking him to put himself in Razumov’s place. And Razumov had never gone fox hunting. But at any rate that is the ceaseless moral of all this author’s work – the being true to your own sense of personal honour. For my honour is not yours – you may with a good conscience commit crimes that would make me sick – you may split infinitives and praise bad books. Your honour is not mine – the other day I shot a fox, and I feel none the worse though truly the fox was among vineyards and in no English hen-roost. But there the moral of all Conrad’s work just is – follow the lines of your private honour, and you will probably starve. But you will never have to confess to the woman you love that you have desecrated her ideals – you will never have to give the woman you love the pain of attending at your dishonoured deathbed, or you will never give the woman you love the infinitely greater pain of having to wait while you go to your death to satisfy the avenging providence that watches over personal honour.

Destiny! The woman you love! Deathbeds and death! How extraordinarily old-fashioned it all sounds! And for the matter of that how singular is Conrad’s theory of the mysticism and awe of a man’s private honour – for, as we see in the case of Razumov, that unfortunate’s private honour was affected without so much as his will coming in question. He did his best to save the Revolutionist, and however much we may dislike Revolutionists or murderers I think it would be a bad world in which the majority of us would not do as much. But to save Haldin was impossible – impossible! The man who was to have driven him away in a sledge was drunk. So that all that Razumov did was to bow to what appeared to him an august and inscrutable destiny. And then the august and inscrutable destiny pursued him to the journey’s end, so that he presents the picture of a flying wretch in the night, to the light of sparse torches, hiding in his arms his face averted from the strokes of pursuing Furies!

I do not know that it is the moral of this author’s whole work, but so it presents itself to me, and with an extraordinary vividness – that when our private and intimate honour is in conflict with the law, we must break the law. For the law is a conventional arrangement of the relations between man and man. But a man’s heart knows! I think that that is what it comes to.

I am aware that to English minds such a moral would appear shocking. We should dismiss Razumov with the trite saying that hard cases make bad law. But I am not sure that such a lesson is not good for this country at this day. I think that we have too much law; I think we think too much about lawmaking. There must come a time when the State can go no further, for the State is a clumsy and blind engine that can do no more than rough-square the material of human lives! We have our fingers too much on our moral pulse when it comes to enacting regulations for the relief of the Unfortunate in the mass: we have too little thought for what is called imagination – for our personal dealings with individuals whom destiny throws in our way.

But in the end I may be representing wrongly Mr Conrad the private gentleman, for I do not on these subjects know in the least what he thinks. Let me hasten to say that, except for his high sense of honour, the author Conrad’s morals are of a limpid correctitude, according to the very best of English standards. He is a deeply religious writer – for the figure of an avenging deity pursues a fearful course through all his pages. If you sin, he says, you must pay for it. Thus, illicit passions and theft, the breach of trust, are punished with death in the case of Nostromo. Thus a breach of the mercantile marine regulation that an officer must stick to his ship until all the passengers have left is punished with a life of penury and dishonour, with death at the end (Lord Jim). Falk the cannibal is punished as a cannibal should be punished, though the crew drop off his ship in Southern latitudes. Spying is punished with endless cares and a certain death (The Secret Agent). In the same work the Police Inspector, that symbol of rectitude and the law, is rewarded with the commendation of his superiors and a career of tranquil success. It is all as it should be – and it is all as it is in life. That is the wonderful thing about it. If there is any pitying of sinners it is not the author who writes the words, it is one of the characters who utters them. The writer, providing only the framework of the story, seems for ever to be enforcing the moral: ‘Be sure your sin shall find you out.’

This is a sombre conviction, and it is all the more odd to find it in a writer of Conrad’s class – for Conrad is one of the two – is one of the three – or let me say one of the two or three English writers who uphold the despised standard of Art for Art’s sake. And of course when I say odd I do not in the least mean that it is odd. For every work of true art must have a profound moral significance. And I will add, that nothing that is not a work of High Art can have any moral significance at all. A work of art is passionless, a work of art is a record, a work of art is above all a symbol and the highest expression of an individual’s struggle for survival. Now all Law, all Morals are the symbol of the struggle for existence of a type. English Law and English Morals are designed to perpetuate the English type; Chinese morals are an attempt to mould a world such as shall be easy for the support of the typical Chinaman. And so it is all the world over. Morals are life; sin is death. The very household laws that a mother frames for her children are intended to lengthen their lives towards that immortality that every mother wishes for her child. And the artist looking upon life and rendering only the results of his considerations produces always for his own type the one lesson – morals stand for life, sin for death.

Of course the type changes; the Universe is very large, and in it there is room for an infinite number of moral cosmogonies. The legendary Chinaman murders his daughters and, in view of the terrible over-population of China he is right in so doing. Razumov – who was probably more a Pole than a Russian – was so [ticklish] upon the point of honour that, although he gave the law its own, his conscience drove him to a death that was worse than a death. For the Poles are a nation of aristocrats, and for their survival it is necessary that the law should not be everything. Of course, if we had a great artist upon Campden Hill1 he would not draw from Life the moral that honour is all important; or that many female subscribers to libraries should be drowned. But he would – he must in one form or the other – so project his view of life that sin should appear like death and the morals of Campden Hill the fount of Honour.

So that the artist drawing life, sombre more or less according to its latitude, is the true, is the only moralist. All the rest are only moralizers: they say what they like, not what is. Let me illustrate what I mean. I, sitting upon Campden Hill, think that there is no law that I will not break if my sympathies are sufficiently appealed to or my passions sufficiently aroused. That is necessary for the survival of my type. I will break any law I want to – but I shall end in dishonour or disgrace. I shall be immured between the stone walls of prisons; I shall be given cocoa in a filthy tin; my prison cell will be next to a drain; I shall sicken and die. Or I shall come to beggary and fade out under Charing Cross railway bridge of a deadly cough. Or I shall die upon the gallows for complicity in the escape of some murderer.

Now the passionless artist of this peaceful district would say I died as the unpitied wreckage of a sinning and immoral life. And he would be perfectly right. In Campden Hill, a tranquil and law-abiding neighbourhood, the Law so nearly approaches the moral attitude of the population that Law and Morals fade into one another. So the Artist of Kensington, W., will render Life.

But that is enough of morals; let us consider Conrad’s methods. It has been said, and I think with truth, that this author is without an equal for getting an atmosphere; I will add that he is without an equal for describing action. Let us see how these results are arrived at. There is one technical maxim that jumps at the eye all through his work. It is this: Never state: present. And again: Never state: present. I am aware that these words will not be understood by the majority of my readers; I will try to make the meaning plain. The self-appointed work of an artist of Conrad’s type is to make each of his stories an experience for his reader. That is his preoccupation; it is for that that an august and inscrutable providence has set him in the world; if he do anything else he offends against his personal honour.

Now in order to make a narration of events strike the hearer as an experience, the author must make the events narrated strike the senses as nearly as possible as they would be presented by nature herself. Supposing that your name is John, and that you have a friend called James, and for private reasons of his own James takes you into his billiard room and tries to shoot you with a rifle.

Now when that happens to you nothing in the outside world says to you, in so many words, ‘That man is going to shoot me.’ What happens to you roughly is this. You are taken by your friend into a room. You perceive the greenish light thrown upwards from the billiard table by the shaded lamps. You perceive the billiard table. Your friend talks. You answer. You are thinking of what he says; of what you are to answer. You perceive other objects; you perceive that some of the cues are not in the rack, and that the last game marked ended at 100 to 64. James says something else. You notice that his voice is rather high. You answer. You notice that you are saying to yourself, ‘I must keep my temper!’ You also notice that the clock has stopped at 3.17… So it goes on, the whole way through the incident – it is a mixture of things that appear insignificant and of real action.

And the problem of a writer of the school of Conrad is to present to his readers’ senses exactly that train of events. To say that James took John into the billiard room would be statement for such a writer; to present the train of action would be art.

And yet this does not really exhaust the matter – for, of course, statements must be used; indeed, paradoxically, the author of this school has nothing to use but statements. And perhaps, more exact statement of the maxim (for the words ‘Never state: present!’ are a sort of slang of technical phraseology), perhaps an exact lay rendering of the maxim would be ‘Never comment: state.’ For the point that has to be made is that what this type of artist has to avoid is an intrusion of his own personality into the current of his work. He has to be persuasive; he is like a man trying to catch a horse in a field. Before him he stretches out a sieve containing corn; behind his back he conceals a halter. The story is the corn in the sieve; the halter is the author’s comment. If the horse-reader perceives merely the end of it his mind is away up the field.

The following illustration will make plain what I mean. There is a great writer of another school – W.M. Thackeray. Thackeray is the Prince of Comment. Now the effect of his books is very curious. There is a matchless character called Becky Sharp. In Brussels, Miss Sharp takes the bit between her teeth. She gets away from Mr Thackeray. For pages and pages the author just lets his character go on acting. He presents, in fact. We keep on saying again and again: How wonderful she is! How wonderful she is! And then, suddenly, when she is at the height of her achievement, there is a crack like the backfire of an automobile. Mr Thackeray has come into it. It is positively true. He bursts into Brussels to say that he is a very moral gentleman who disapproves of his puppet. And then, instead of seeing Miss Sharp’s red hair any more, we see a tall gentleman with a leonine head, a broken nose, and an odd smile. And we say politely, ‘How clever you are Mr Thackeray.’

That without doubt was what Thackeray wanted. It is an aim like another; it is very nice to extort from thousands of readers ejaculations as to one’s cleverness and sound morality, and thousands and thousands of readers want that sort of thing. But the problem before Conrad when he wrote Lord Jim was to present to us a fair-haired capable son of an English parsonage, waiting in his white canvas tennis shoes upon a boat stage in the sun for the approach of the boat – and of inscrutable and august Destiny.

And never once, never once, during the whole book do we say – if we are unsophisticated readers – ‘How clever Mr Conrad is!’ We say, ‘Oh, poor devil! Oh, poor devil!’ and we hope that God will be kinder to us poor Englishmen!

That is the great achievement of this type of art, and I confess that it is the only type of art that I care for. I don’t mean to say that I cannot read any other kind of book with pleasure. I can get amusement from the works of Mr Nat Gould, or from any kind of book about horses. I can really revel in the adventures of the Irish M. F.H.2 I will read Mr Sponge’s adventures3 until far, far into the night, and a detective story as long as it does not contain Sherlock Holmes I can read on any train journey. But these things are just agreeable complications – I ought, perhaps, to except Mr Sponge. I pass my time with them as I might, not being at all a superior person, at bridge, or any other round game. But when it comes to Lord Jim – why, it is a part of me. Yes, it is a part of my soul, of my life. It has entered into me like the blood in my veins; it has given me my English outlook, though I am a foreigner and have every kind of intellectual contempt for the countrymen of Tuan Jim. But it has made me understand the English-English with such a perfect comprehension – and what one perfectly comprehends one loves!

Now that is a great achievement – for it is a great achievement to have overwhelmed any one soul, and there are few men’s souls that can resist Lord Jim once they have found him out. The egotism of this personal confession is not meant to display myself. It is the best way of showing what this author’s work can do, and as I am perfectly sincere in every word I have written, I hope I may make the impression that I want. It is a question of the public usefulness of this author, of his functions in the Republic, of the service he has done the State. Well, he has made many men better Englishmen.

For he has taken us into wide regions of the earth; he has shown us the sea that is ours and the sparkle of the sun that we desire upon the little waves. He has given us a sense of responsibilities. He has made us desire more sedulously to do our duties. He has taught us above all to desire to be shipshape – to be shipshape on our decks, on our drawing-room carpets, and in the thoughts that we think in our minds.

I am aware that the great protagonist of Thackeray, in the imaginative letters of today, has written:

But are there? Would there be two ways of writing ‘The Man Who Would be King’, or ‘My Lord the Elephant’, or ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, or even Stalky – would there be any other way of writing them? There are other ways of writing other stories; there are other ways of treating other subjects; but, and this is the great truth that is forgotten – just as there is only one way in which a woman can dress and look her level best, so there is only one way in which every given subject, and every given story, can be treated to be at its best.

That is why there is such, tremendous pother about literature in some countries. Immense numbers of foreigners are always getting hold of immense numbers of stories and trying to find out what is the only one way of treating them.

We have seen that Conrad’s method of treatment is to render. Now what about his powers of selection and what about the defects of his merits? He is, we know, concerned before everything else with getting an atmosphere. But is he? I knew at one time very well a writer who collaborated with Conrad in one or two books,5 and has very kindly presented me with the manuscript of these works. I transcribe two passages, underlining the words that are by Conrad:

To yesterday and to-day I say my polite ‘vaya usted con Dios’. What are these days to me? But that far-off day of my romance when from between the blue and white bales in Don Ramon’s darkened store room, at Kingston, I saw the door open before the figure of an old man with the tired, long white face, that day I am not likely to forget. I remember the chilly smell of the typical West Indian store, the indescribable smell of damp gloom, of locos, of pimento, of olive oil, of new sugar, of rum; the glassy double sheen of Ramon’s great spectacles, the mahogany face, while the tap tap, tap, of a cane on the flags went on behind the inner door; the click of the latch; the stream of light. The door, petulantly thrust inwards, struck against some barrels. I remember the rattling of the bolts on that door, and the tall figure that appeared there, snuff-box in hand. In that land of white clothes, that precise, ancient Castilian in black was something to remember. The black cane that had made the tap, tap, tap dangled by a silken cord, from the hand whose delicate, blue-veined, wrinkled wrist ran back into a foam of lawn ruffles. The other hand paused in the act of conveying a pinch of snuff to the nostrils of the hooked nose that had, on the skin stretched tight over the bridge, the polish of old ivory; the elbow pressing the black cocked hat against the side; the legs, one bent, the other bowing a little back – this was the attitude of Seraphina’s father.

Having imperiously thrust the door of the inner room open, he remained immovable, with no intention of entering, and called in a harsh, aged voice: ‘Señor Ramon, Señor Ramon!’ And then twice, ‘Seraphina, Seraphina!’ turning his head back …

The second passage contains no description at all except the description of moods, but it is none the less instructive since it shows Conrad’s desire for actualities, for hard and characteristic phrases set against his collaborator’s more vague personality, so that it stands out in a strong relief:–

It takes long enough to realize that someone is dead at a distance. I had done that. But how long, how long, it needs to know that the life of your heart has come back from the dead. For years afterwards I could not bear to have her out of my sight.

Of our first meeting all I remember is a speechlessness that was like the awed hesitation of our overtried souls before the greatness of a change from the verge of despair to the consummation of a supreme joy. The whole world, the whole of life, had changed all round me: it enveloped me so lightly as not to be felt, so suddenly as not to be believed in, so completely that that whole meeting was an embrace, so softly that at last it lapsed into a sense of rest that was like the fall of a beneficent and welcome death.

For suffering is the lot of man, but not inevitable failure or worthless despair which is without end – suffering the mark of manhood, which bears within its pain a hope of felicity like a jewel set in iron….

Her first words were ‘You broke our compact. You went away whilst I was sleeping.’ Only the deepness of her reproach revealed the depth of her love and the suffering she too had endured to reach a union that was to be without end – and to forgive.

And looking back we see Romance – that subtle thing that is mirage, that is life. It is the goodness of the years we have lived through, of the old time when we did this or that, when we dwelt here or there. Looking back it seems wonderful enough a thing that I who am this and she who is that, commencing so far away a life that, after such sufferings borne together and apart, ended so tranquilly there in a world so stable – that she and I should have passed through so much, good chance and evil chance, sad hours and joyful, all lived down and swept away into the little heap of dust that is a life. That, too, is Romance.

Now two main facts have occurred to me in studying these passages very carefully. One of them is that every word of description is by the other writer, and every word of action is by Conrad. This is a very curious fact, for it would be absurd to ascribe to the other writer greater powers of description, and certainly that apportionment of the task was never consciously made between the two.

I have been casting about in my mind for an explanation of this fact, and just at this very moment I happened to look idly at the motto on the title page of the volume called Youth, and then I noticed that that motto runs:– ‘… But the Dwarf answered: No, something human is dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.’ And that is the great happiness, is the great good fortune of this author’s temperament. We can most of us describe, some of us can get atmospheres – but it is only the very great writer who can so interpenetrate his characters with the seas and skies, or the houses, fabrics, and ornaments that surround them. For that is what Conrad seems to do. It is not what he actually does – actually he sends through all the seas and skies the very beings of the men that look upon them. For a descriptive writer – or rather for a writer noted for his descriptions – he describes very little. Consider this passage from Youth – that most magical of all this author’s pieces of work. The narrator, after having pulled nearly all night in the escape from a wreck, has been guided by a red light, in the depth of a great darkness, into an Eastern harbour. He has fallen asleep in the boat against an unknown quay:–

But when I opened my eyes again the silence was as complete as though it had never been broken. I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never seemed so far, so high before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving.

And then I saw the men of the East – they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the colour of an Eastern crowd. And all these things stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung, shining, and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the ancient navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and sombre, living unchanged, full of danger and promise. And these were the men. I sat up suddenly. A wave of movement passed through the crowd from end to end, passed along the heads, swayed the bodies, ran along the jetty like a ripple on the water, like a breath of wind on a field – and all was still again. I see it now – the wide sweep of the bay, the glittering sands, the wealth of green, infinite and varied, the sea blue like the sea of a dream, the crowd of attentive faces, the blaze of vivid colour – the water reflecting it all, the curve of the shore, the jetty, the high-sterned outlandish craft floating still, and the three boats with the tired men from the West sleeping, unconscious of the land and the people and the violence of the sunshine. They slept thrown across the thwarts, curled on bottom boards, in the careless attitudes of death. The head of the old skipper, leaning back in the stern of the long boat, had fallen on his breast and he looked as though he would never wake. Farther out, old Mahon’s face was upturned to the sky, with the long white beard spread out on his breast as though he had been shot where he sat at the tiller, and a man all in a heap in the bows of the boat slept with both arms embracing the stem-head and with his cheek laid on the gunwale. The East looked at them without a sound.

Now that passage renders the East as no writer has rendered it, and yet how little of real description there is in it. It is the men – the men whose destinies had brought them to that spot who really give the passage its tone – because something human is dearer to this writer than all the pictures of all the East.

And this great and desirable faculty is his not merely because of a technical self-consciousness. We most of us – those of us who have any technical knowledge at all – know that we must not introduce any descriptive writing just for the love of a description. Anybody knows enough to know that. But Conrad’s eye is so formed that it does not notice anything save what carries the story forward. To return to my illustration of the smoking-room murder. A Conrad character would not notice that the clock had stopped at 3.17, or that the cues were not in order, or that the marking of the last game had not been obliterated, unless Conrad desired to point something out – it might be that the murderer was a disorderly person, or that he had been interrupted at the end of a game of billiards by a piece of news that had made him desire to shoot his friend.

I am not by any means saying that there are no passages in the works of Conrad that are not simple pages of description. You will find, for instance, in ‘The End of the Tether’, whole long pages of description of land-fretted seas. But the purposes of these are the purposes of the story. They make so plain to the reader the nature of the seas in which the Sofala carried the burden of the old Captain’s tragedy that when the sinking of the ship comes there is no need to burden the narrative with topographical explanation. All the while one has been on the ship, one has seemed to be so conscious of the ledges of rock below one that when the knife-thrust has come it has seemed for long to be inevitable, and the whole conduct of the story need concern itself only with the feelings of the human beings.

And that is the great faculty of this author – that he can make an end seem inevitable, in every instance the only possible end. He does this by every means – by the explanations of heredity, of temperament, of the nature of sea and sky, by the sound of a song, by the straws in the street. His sense of Destiny differs in its means of expression from that of the Greeks, its intensity is always as great as theirs. Perhaps it is a part of a common Oriental temperament. The Greek Destiny was embodied, commented on, chorussed. It was an all-overwhelming cloud. The Destiny of Conrad’s books is hymned by no Chorus of Captive Women, and by no Bacchantes. That is not the temper of his time or ours. When all sorts of things, all sorts of little coincidences, nowadays force us to a course of action we do not any longer say that Atropos compelled us – we say that it seemed as if every blessed thing conspired to make us do it. And what Conrad does for us is to express for us the Three Sisters in the terms of every blessed thing.

Now this is a very great achievement, a very great enlightenment for our age. I do not mean to say that Conrad is the only writer that does this for us, but I am certain that we have no other – nowhere in the Western World – so exclusively occupied with this consideration, which is, surely, one of the two most important considerations of the world and life. I have heard it said that his books are too long; that his elaboration is over great. But that is the case only for minds very hurried or temperamentally out of tune with this author. For myself I can only say that not one of his works has ever seemed tedious. I like one subject more than another, but the keen pleasure of observing the incidents, the certainty that every incident – that every word, however superfluous they may appear, will in the end show necessary and revelatory – this pleasure I am never without.

And when we consider the great obstacles of language with which this man has struggled, and the unswerving conscientiousness with which this writer has pursued his guiding lights – whether we like or dislike his books – we must be consoled. For if our age can have raised up such a conscience in any walk of life, and if our country can have attracted him to live amongst us, our age and our country must have in it something that is good – in its traditions and its teachings. Indeed, when I think that in a light-hearted way I have poked fun at the artistic conscience of this country I feel a little ashamed. For if Conrad has not earned any huge material success, he has secured a recognition, even from the more Academic, that few men of his greatness have ever secured in their age and their own day. And looking back it seems a wonderful enough thing that this writer, commencing so far away a life that after sufferings, perils, and vicissitudes borne under so many skies and upon so many seas, has its consummation here in a world so stable – that after the seas where he passed through so much, good chance and evil chance, upon this foreign shore he should receive the acknowledgment of his services from the State, and the applause alike of the Orthodox and of the Critical. That, too, is Romance.

English Review, 10 (December 1911), 68–83.

1 A Poor Man’s House. By Stephen Reynolds. (London: John Lane.)

1 [A sequence of rhyme-words given to a poet to turn into a poem.]

1 The Land’s End.

2 Hampshire Days (1903)

1 [Charles Masterman, Ford’s contemporary and one of his closest friends, was literary editor of the Daily News from 1903, an MP 1906–14, and briefly a member of Asquith’s Cabinet, 1914–15. He was then put in charge of a secret wartime propaganda department at Wellington House, for which Ford wrote two volumes.]

1 [Ford lived with Violet Hunt at her Kensington house, South Lodge, on Campden Hill Road, from 1910 to 1915.]

2 [Master of Foxhounds]

3 [R.S. Surtees, Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour, 1853.]

4[In Kipling’s ‘In the Neolithic Age’ the speaker’s Totem tells him: ‘There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right!’]

5[Ford himself! He quotes the opening and conclusion of Romance.]