America is the land of cherished illusions. Americans prefer to believe that they are innocent, innocent of immorality after marriage, innocent of dishonesty in business, innocent of incompatibility between husbands and wives. Americans do not like to admit the existence (in the family) of passion, of unscrupulousness, of temperament. They have made a code for what is to be done, and what is not to be done, and whatever differs is un-American. If their right hands offend them they cut them off rather than admit possession. They believed in international morality when none existed, and when they were made to face the disagreeable fact of war, cast off the nations of the earth, and continued to believe in national morality.
In America prostitution is tolerated in practice, but forbidden in print. All homes are happy unless there is proof to the contrary, and then they are un-American. In its wilful idealism America is determined that at all costs we shall appear to be innocent. And a novel which should begin with the leaders in social conformity, who keep hard and clean the code, and should sweep through the great middle classes that may escape its rigors themselves, but exact them of others, might present the pageant, the social history, the epic of America.
Of course, Mrs. Wharton's novel does nothing of the sort. This is how Tolstoy, or H. G. Wells, or Ernest Poole would have written "The Age of Innocence." They would have been grandiose, epical; their stories would have been histories of culture. It would have been as easy to have called their books broad as it is to call Mrs. Wharton's fine novel narrow. Tendencies, philosophies, irrepressible outbursts would have served as their protagonists, where hers are dwellers in Fifth Avenue or Waverly Place—a cosmopolitan astray, a dowager, a clubman yearning for intellectual sympathy.
And yet in the long run it comes to much the same thing. The epic novelists prefer the panorama: she the drawing-room canvas. They deduce from vast philosophies and depict society. She gives us the Mingotts, the Mansons, the Van der Luydens—society, in its little brownstone New York of the '70's—and lets us formulate inductively the code of America. A little canvas is enough for a great picture if the painting is good.
Indeed, the only objection I have ever heard urged against Mrs. Wharton's fine art of narrative is that it is narrow—an art of dress suit and sophistication. And this book is the answer. For, of course, her art is narrow—like Jane Austen's, like Sheridan's, like Pope's, like Maupassant's, like that of all writers who prefer to study human nature in its most articulate instead of its broadest manifestations. It is narrow because it is focussed, but this does not mean that it is small. Although the story of "The Age of Innocence" might have been set in a far broader background, it is the circumstances of the New York society which Mrs. Wharton knows so well that give it a piquancy, a reality that "epics" lack. They are like the accidents of voice, eye, gesture which determine individuality. Yet her subject is America.
This treating of large themes by highly personal symbols makes possible Mrs. Wharton's admirable perfection of technique. Hers is the technique of sculpture rather than the technique of architecture. It permits the fine play of a humor that has an eye of irony in it, but is more human than irony. It makes possible an approach to perfection. Behold Mrs. Manson Mingott, the indomitable dowager, Catherine:
The immense accretions of flesh which had descended on her in middle life, like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her… into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation…. Around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
Her art is restrained, focussed upon those points where America, in its normality and in its eccentricity, has become articulate. Therefore it is sharp and convincing.
Who is the central figure in this story where the leaven of intellectual and emotional unrest works in a society that has perfected its code and intends to live by it? Is it Newland Archer, who bears the uncomfortable ferment within him? Is it his wife, the lovely May, whose clear blue eyes will see only innocence? Is it the Countess Olenska, the American who has seen reality and suffered by it, and sacrifices her love for Newland in order to preserve his innocence? No one of these is the center of the story, but rather the idea of "the family," this American "family," which is moral according to its lights, provincial, narrow—but intensely determined that its world shall appear upright, faithful, courageous, in despite of facts, and regardless of how poor reality must be tortured until it conforms. And the "family" as Mrs. Wharton describes it is just the bourgeois Puritanism of nineteenth century America.
Was May right when, with the might of innocence, she forced Newland to give up life for mere living? Was the Countess right when, in spite of her love for him, she aided and abetted her, making him live up to the self-restraint that belonged to his code? The story does not answer, being concerned with the qualities of the "family," not with didacticism.
It says that the insistent innocence of America had its rewards as well as its penalties. It says, in so far as it states any conclusion definitely, that a new and less trammeled generation must answer whether it was the discipline of its parents that saved the American family from anarchy, or the suppressions of its parents that made it rebellious. And the answer is not yet.
"The Age of Innocence" is a fine novel, beautifully written, "big" in the best sense, which has nothing to do with size, a credit to American literature—for if its author is cosmopolitan, this novel, as much as her earlier "Ethan Frome," is a fruit of our soil.
November 6, 1920.
Mrs. Wharton found the age of innocence in the 1870's; Mr. Hergesheimer discovers an age of no innocence in the 1920's. In "The Age of Innocence," the lovely May, a creature of society's conventions, loses her husband and then regains the dulled personality left from the fire of passion. In "Cytherea" the less lovely, but equally moral Fanny loses her Lee because she cannot satisfy his longings and nags when she fails. But she does not regain him when his love chase is over, because he is burned out. Athene and Aphrodite, the graces of the mind, the seductions of the person of the Countess Olenska, together draw Newland Archer, husband of May; but it is Aphrodite only, Cytherean Aphrodite, who, being sex incarnate, is more than mere temptations of the flesh, that wrecks Fanny's home.
In the '70's the poor innocents of society believed their code of honor impregnable against sex. They dressed against sex, talked against sex, kept sex below the surface. The suppression froze some of them into rigidity and stiffened all. But they had their compensations. By sacrificing freedom for personal desire they gained much security. Good husbands required more than a lure of the body to take them off. And when they gave up a great romance for respectability, like Newland Archer, at least they remained gentlemen. There was a tragedy of thwarted development, of martyred love, of waste; but at least self-respect, however misguided, remained.
Not so with this trivial, lawless country club set of the 1920's, drunk part of the time and reckless all of it, codeless, dutiless, restless. For the virtuous among them Aphrodite, a vulgar, shameless Aphrodite, was a nightly menace; for the weak among them (such as Peyton Morris), a passion to be resisted only by fear; for the wayward, like Lee, she was the only illusion worth pursuing. To resist for a woman was to become "blasted and twisted out of her purpose," to be "steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow"; to resist for a man was to lose the integrity of his personality. There were no moral compensations, for there is no morality but self-development, at least in Mr. Hergesheimer's town of Eastlake. There is no god for a man in love but Cytherea.
And this is one way of describing Mr. Hergesheimer's study of love in idleness in the 1920's. Another way would be to call it an essay upon insecurity, although the word essay is too dry to use in a story which is fairly awash with alcohol. The war, the story seems to say, sapped our security of property and comfort and life. But insecurity is an insidious disease that spreads, like bacteria, where strength is relaxed. It infects the lives of those who have lost their certainties and become doubtful of their wills. In this relaxed society of the 1920's, where nothing seemed certain but the need of money and a drink, insecurity spread into married life. Not even the well-mated were secure in the general decline of use and wont. A home wrecked by vague desires running wild—that is the theme of "Cytherea."
Or take a third view of this provocative book. The triangle we have had tiresomely with us, but it is woman's love that is, perversely, always the hero. Hergesheimer studies the man, studies him not as will, or energy, or desire a-struggle with duty or morality, but merely as sex. Man's sex in love, man's sex dominated by Cytherea, is his theme. This is new, at least in fiction, for there man is often swept away, but seldom dominated by sex. And indeed Hergesheimer has to find his man in the relaxed society to which I have referred, a society wearied by unchartered freedom, where business is profitable but trivial, where duty and religion exist only as a convention, disregarded by the honest, upheld by the hypocritical, a society where Cytherea marks and grips her own. Even so, it is an achievement.
Cytherea in the story is a doll with a glamorous countenance, bought and cherished by Lee Randon as a symbol of what he did not find in his married life, what no man finds and keeps, because it is an illusion. Cytherea is Lee Randon's longing for emotional satisfaction, a satisfaction that is not to be of the body merely. And when he meets Savina Grove, a pathological case, whose violent sex emotions have been inhibited to the bursting point, he thinks (and fears) that he has found his heart's desire. In the old, old stories their elopement would have been their grand, their tragic romance. In this cruel novel it is tragic, for she dies of it; but she is not Cytherea; she is earthly merely; it is felt that she is better dead.
It is a cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost worthless society with just enough of the charm of the Restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its unsparing analyses of man's sex impulses (by all odds the most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow, honester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, although certain that there is no principle but selfishness, and that it is folly to limit desire for the sake of absolutes, like righteousness, or generalities, like the human race. It is a cruel study of women, for Fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire.
All this is not new in outline. One can find the essence of this story in monkish manuals. There the menace of Cytherea was not evaded. There the weaknesses of man's sex were categoried with less psychology but more force. What is new in Hergesheimer's book is merely the environment in which his characters so disastrously move and an insight into the mechanism of their psychology which earlier writers lacked. I have called it a story of the age of no innocence, but that would be the author's term, not mine; for indeed his characters seem to display as naive an innocence as Mrs. Wharton's of the laws of blood and will, and they know far less of practical morality. The "Age of Moral Innocence" I should rechristen Hergesheimer's book.
Critics will raise, and properly, a question as to the worth of his materials. He is not studying a "ripe" society, as was Mrs. Wharton, but the froth of the war, the spume of country clubs, the trivialities of the strenuous but unproductive rich. This is a just criticism as far as it goes, and it lessens the solidity, the enduring interest, of his achievement. True, it was in such a society that he could best pursue the wiles of Cytherea. He has a right to pitch his laboratory where he pleases, and out of some very sordid earth he has contrived some beauty. Nevertheless, you cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, skilled though you may be.
I should be more inclined, however, in a comparison with Mrs. Wharton, to criticize his lack of detachment. That able novelist, who is bounded so exclusively in her little social world, nevertheless stands apart from it and sees it whole. Mr. Hergesheimer has his feet still deep in the soil. He is too much a part of his country club life. He means, perhaps, to be ironical, but in truth he is too sympathetic with the desires, emotional and aesthetic, that he expresses to be ironical until the close. There is a surprise, too sharp a surprise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity." He is so much and so lusciously at home with cocktails, legs, limousine parties, stair-sittings, intra-matrimonial kissings (I mention the most frequent references) that one distrusts the sudden sarcasm of his finale. It would have been better almost if he had been a Count de Gramont throughout, for he has aflairfor the surroundings of amorous adventure and is seldom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton saw, the picture in perspective from the first. His book will disgust some and annoy others because its art is muddied by a lingering naturalism and too highly colored by the predilections of the artist.
It is a skilful art, nevertheless, and "Cytherea" confirms a judgment long held that Mr. Hergesheimer is one of the most skilful craftsmen in English in our day. And this I say in spite of his obvious failure to grasp inevitably the structure of the English sentence. He is one of the most honest analysts of a situation, also; one of the most fearless seekers of motives; one of the ablest practisers of that transmutation of obscure emotion into the visible detail of dress, habit, expression, which is the real technique of the novelist. His fault is a defect in sympathy, a lack of spiritual appreciation, if I may use and leave undefined so old-fashioned a term. His virtue lies in the rich garment of experience which careful observation and skilful writing enable him to wrap about his imaginative conceptions. It is this which makes his novels so readable for the discriminating at present, and will make them useful historical records in the future. One aspect of a troublesome period when the middle generation achieved the irresponsibility without the earnestness of youth he has caught in "Cytherea." It is unfortunate that it is a partial portrait of important motives in people who themselves are of little importance; and it is doubly unfortunate that he has been too much a part of his muddy world to be as good an interpreter as he is a witness of its life.
January 21, 1922.
I have looked through more essays upon poetry than I care to remember without finding anywhere a discussion of poetry for the unpoetical. A recent writer, it is true, has done much to show that the general reader daily indulges in poetry of a kind without knowing it. But the voluminous literature of poetics is well-nigh all special. It is written for students of rhythm, for instinctive lovers of poetry, for writers of verse, for critics. It does not treat of the value of poetry for the average, the unpoetical man— it says little of his curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the share in all good poetry that belongs to him.
By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean in this instance the average intelligent reader, who has passed through the usual formal education in literature, who reads books as well as newspapers and magazines, who, without calling himself a litterateur, would be willing to assert that he was fairly well read and reasonably fond of good reading. Your doctor, your lawyer, the president of your bank, and any educated business man who has not turned his brain into a machine, will fit my case.
Among such excellent Americans, I find that there exists a double standard as regards all literature, but especially poetry. Just as the newspapers always write of clean politics with reverence— whatever may be the private opinions and practices of their editorial writers—so intelligent, though unpoetic, readers are accustomed to speak of poetry with very considerable respect. It is not proper to say, "I hate poetry," even if one thinks it. To admit ignorance of Tennyson or Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one skimmed through them in college and has never disturbed the dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered, sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he everheardof Browning," by one who had penetrated about as far into Browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut it crawls over. I well remember seeing a lady of highly respectable culture hold up her hands in horror before a college graduate who did not know who Beowulf was. Neither did she, in any true sense of knowing. But her code taught her that the "Beowulf," like other "good poetry," should be upon one's list of acquaintances.
What these Americans really think is a very different matter. The man in the trolley-car, the woman in the rocking-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer, most lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts were opened, give simply a categorical negative. They do not like poetry, or they think they do not like it; in either case with the same result. The rhythm annoys them (little wonder, since they usually read it as prose), the rhyme seems needless, the inversions, the compressions perplex their minds to no valuable end. Speaking honestly, they do not like poetry. And if their reason is the old one,
I do not like you, Dr. Fell;The reason why I cannot tell,
it is none the less effective.
But the positive answers are no more reassuring. Here in America especially, when we like poetry, we like it none too good. The "old favorites" are almost all platitudinous in thought and monotonous in rhythm. We prefer sentiment, and have a weakness for slush. Pathos seems to us better than tragedy, anecdote than wit. Longfellow was and is, except in metropolitan centres, our favorite "classical" poet; the poetical corner and the daily poem of the newspapers represent what most of us like when we do go in for verse. The truth is that many of the intelligent in our population skip poetry in their reading just because itispoetry. They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occasionally, or they read good poetry badly.
This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the literary critic. His usual comment is that either one loves poetry or one does not, and that is all there is to be said about it. If the general reader neglects poetry, why then he belongs to the Lost Tribes and signifies nothing for Israel.
I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based on the theory that every man worthy of literary salvation must at all times love and desire the best literature, which is poetry—and this is a fallacy. It is as absurd as if he should ask most of us to dwell in religious exaltation incessantly, or to live exclusively upon mountain peaks, or to cultivate rapture during sixteen hours of the twenty-four. The saints, the martyrs, the seers, the seekers, and enthusiasts have profited nobly by such a regime, but not we of common clay. To assume in advocating the reading of poetry that one should substitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis Thompson for the illustrated weekly,The Ring and the Bookfor a magazine, and read "The Golden Treasury" through instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be disproved. And yet this is the implication of much literary criticism.
But the sin of the general reader who refuses all poetry is much more deadly, for it is due not to enthusiasm, but to ignorance. It is true that the literary diet recommended by an aesthetic critic would choke a healthy business man; but it is equally true that for all men whose emotions are still alive within them, and whose intelligence permits the reading of verse, poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air and exercise. We do not need fresh air and exercise constantly. We can get along very comfortably without them. But if they are not essential commodities, they are important ones, and so is poetry—a truth of which modern readers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of fire until he burned his hand in a blazing bush.
I do not mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save the state. But he should not (no danger that he will) read poetry. And for another class there is nothing in poetry. The emotionally dying or dead; the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities, their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship or politics or sport—they, too, are often useful citizens, and usually highly prosperous; but they would waste their time upon literature of any variety, and especially upon poetry.
There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind of general reader, who is neither defective nor dead in his emotions; and this means, after all, a very large percentage of all readers. If I had space I should use them all, for I realize that the convention we have adopted for poetry makes us skip, in our magazines, as naturally from story to story over the verse between as from stone to stone across the brook. However, I choose only two, which seem to me as convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for the moralist, its beauty for the aesthete, its packed knowledge for the scholar.
The first has often been urged before and far more often overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after year through routine, through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite realizing what we are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole, or any part of it, perhaps, in complete unity. Words, acts, sights, pass through our experience hazily, suggesting meanings which we never fully grasp. Grief and love, the most intense, perhaps, of sensations, we seldom understand except by comparison with what has been said of the grief and love of others. Happiness remains at best a diffused emotion—felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some moment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities. Is this true? Test it by any experience that is still fresh in memory. See how dull, by comparison with the vivid colors of the scene itself, are even now your ideas of what it meant to you, how obscure its relations to your later life. The moment you fell in love, the hour after your child had died, the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel that began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle household strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sunders two who love each other—all these I challenge you to define, to explain, to lift into the light above the turbid sea of complex currents which is life.
And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It seizes the moment, the situation, the thought; drags it palpitating from life and flings it, quivering with its own rhythmic movement, into expression. The thing cannot be done in mere prose, for there is more than explanation to the process. The words themselves, in their color and suggestiveness, the rhythms that carry them, contribute to the sense, even as overtones help to make the music.
All this may sound a little exalted to the comfortable general reader, who does not often deal in such intense commodities as death and love. And yet I have mentioned nothing that does not at one time or another, and frequently rather than the opposite, come into his life, and need, not constant, certainly, but at least occasional, interpretation. Death and love, and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is one of the best.
But there is another service that poetry, among all writing, best renders to the general reader,when he needs it; a service less obvious, but sometimes, I think, more important. Poetry insures an extension of youth.
Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibility. Some go through life always clouded, always dull, like a piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that refracts no colors and is empty of light. Others are vivid, impressionable, reacting to every experience. Some of us are most aroused by contact with one another. Interest awakens at the sound of a voice; we are most alive when most with our kind. Others, like Thoreau, respond best in solitude. The very thrush singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves them more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow awave with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, a clear blue air washing over the pasture slopes and down among the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them more than all the men in all the streets of the world. It makes no difference. To every one, dull and vivid, social and solitary, age brings its changes. We may understand better, but the vividness is less, the emotions are tamer. They do not fully respond, as the bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our pulling.
Si jeunesse savait,Si vielliesse pouvait.
But to be able comes before to know. We must react to experiences before it is worth while to comprehend them. And after one is well enmeshed in the routine of plodding life, after the freshness of the emotions (and this is a definition of youth) is gone, it is difficult to react. I can travel now, if I wish, to the coral islands or the Spanish Main, but it is too late.
Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability of youth. Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the faculties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they ever existed. I know no more dismal spectacle than a man talking shop on a moonlit hill in August, a woman gossipping by the rail of a steamer plunging through the sapphire of the Gulf Stream, or a couple perusing advertisements throughout a Beethoven symphony. I will not advance as typical a drummer I once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He was not a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. These people, emotionally speaking, are senile. They should not try to read poetry.
But most of us—even those who are outwardly commonplace, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid," and not "sensitive"—lose our youthful keenness with regret. And that is why poetry, except for the hopelessly sodden, is a tonic worthy of a great price. For the right poetry at the right time has the indubitable power to stir the emotions that experience is no longer able to arouse. I cannot give satisfactory instances, for the reaction is highly personal. What with me stirs a brain cell long dormant to action will leave another unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my meaning, let us take Romance, the kind that one capitalizes, that belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and dwells in Granada or Sicily or the Spanish Main. The middle-aged gentleman on a winter cruise for his jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill from sights alone. If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only because Keats has kept it, in—
… Magic casements, opening on the foamOf perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn, q and Nashe in—
Brightness falls from the air;Queens have died young and fair.
Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's—
Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,And the shouting seas drive by,And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel andswing,And the Southern Cross rides high!Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,That blaze in the velvet blue.
Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd the pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, who thanked God that he had known his world as in his time. Even in these shopworn quotations the power still remains.
Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized experience at hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to find, although no one can find it for you. It is not necessarily exalted, romantic, passionate; it may be comfortable, homely, gentle or hearty, vigorous and cheerful; it may be anything but commonplace, for no true emotion is ever commonplace. I have known men of one poet; and yet that poet gave them the satisfaction they required. I know others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet without poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be less young. As children, most of us would have flushed before the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience, so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform that miracle for greater things than sunrises. This, perhaps, is the best of all reasons why every one except the emotionally senile should sometimes read poetry.
I know at least one honest Philistine who, unlike many Philistines, has traveled through the Promised Land—and does not like it. When his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call it literature, or his aesthetic acquaintances erect affectations and call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings them back to food, money, and other verities. His voice haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skipping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused. He would say that if the lyrics of subtle and passionate emotion and the drab stories of sex experience that make up so many pages of modern anthologies represent a renewal and extension of youth, it was nothisyouth. He prefers to be sanely old rather than erotically young. He will stick to the daily paper and flat prose.
Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern poetry from the argument. There was more good poetry, neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written before our generation than even a maker of anthologies is likely to read. But I am not willing to dodge the issue so readily. Thereismodern poetry for every reader who is competent to read poetry at all. If there is none too much of it, that is his own fault. If there is much that makes no appeal to him, that is as it should be.
It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman whose reading, like his experience, does not often venture beyond the primitive emotions. Why should it not be? The modern lyric is untroubled by the social conscience. It is highly individual, for it is written by men of intense individuality for readers whose imaginations require an intimate appeal. Such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as the average reader demands prose prevailingly. They profit by prose now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry. We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of average readers in recent years that we forget the corresponding growth in the number of individualities that are not average. Much modern poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry they may desire.
The important point to note is that they do not get it. It is they—far more than the Philistines—who complain that modern poetry is insufficient for their needs. The highly personal lyric is probably more perfected, more abundant, and more poignant in its appeal to living minds now than ever before in the history of our civilization. But it occupies only one province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires, far more keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic, more Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts spacious times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes," like Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete," a race and a civilization. He desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely that poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal, which the general reader thinks he would read if he found it instead of "lyrical subtleties" in his pages.
Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us admit the fact freely. But the fault is not altogether the poets'. The fault is in the intractable mediocrity of the age, which resists transference into poetry as stiff clay resists the hoe of the cultivator. The fault lies in the general reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because itispoetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commercialized minds, given over to convention, denying their sentiment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretricious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few poets in English who have possessed some universality of appeal have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the most popular among good English poets in our time; but he has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order to succeed. And Kipling is not read so much as a certain American writer who discovered that by writing verse in prose form he could make the public forget their prejudice against poetry and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm and rime.
A striking proof of all that I have been writing is to be found in so-called magazine verse. Sneers at magazine poetry are unjust because they are unintelligent. It is quite true that most of it consists of the highly individualistic lyric of which I have spoken above. But in comparison with the imaginative prose of the typical popular magazine, it presents a most instructive contrast. The prose is too frequently sensational or sentimental, vulgar or smart. The verse, even though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes slight, is at least excellent in art, admirable in execution, and vigorous and unsentimental in tone. Regarded as literature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk of magazine prose. Indeed, there is less difference between the best and the worst of our magazines than between the verse and the prose in any one of them.
And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter to be altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals to the general reader, is it not his fault? He neglects the poetry from habit rather than from conviction based on experience. Because he skips it, and has skipped it until habit has become a convention, much of it has become by natural adaptation of supply to demand too literary, too narrow, too subtle and complex for him now. The vicious circle is complete.
This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which in the 'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later transformed our drama, is working now in verse. The poetical revival now upon us may be richer so far in promise than in great poetry, but it is very significant. For one thing, it is advertising poetry, and since poetry is precisely what Shakespeare called it, caviare to the general—a special commodity for occasional use—a little advertising will be good for it. Again, the verse that has sprung from the movement is much of it thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bizarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists; some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their greatness, seem as original and creative as were Browning and Whitman in their day. Probably, like the new painting, the movement is more significant than the movers.
Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, suspend judgment, and look ahead,vers libre, even when morelibrethanvers, is full of meaning—poetic realism, even when more real than poetry, charged with possibility. For with all its imperfections much of this new poetry is trying to mean more than ever before to the general reader. I am not sure that the democracy can be interpreted for him in noble poetry and remain the democracy he knows. And yet I think, and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least, he feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in which we all live—so thrilling beneath the surface—interpreted, swung into that rhythmic significance that will make it part of the vast and flowing stream of all life. I can tolerate many short, rough words in poetry, and much that we have been accustomed to regard as prose, on the way to such a goal.
For I honestly believe that it is better to read fantastic poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry—anything but vulgar and sentimental poetry—than no poetry at all. To be susceptible to no revival of the vivid emotions of youth, to be touched by no thoughts more intense than our own, to be accessible to no imaginative interpretation of the life we lead—this seems to me to be a heavy misfortune. But to possess, as most of us do, our share of all these qualities, and then at no time, in no fitting mood or proffered opportunity, to read poetry—this can only be regarded as deafness by habit and blindness from choice.
Our eyes are more civilized than our ears, and much more civilized than our minds; that is the flat truth, and it accounts for a good deal that puzzles worthy people who wish to reform literature.
Consider the musical comedy of the kind that runs for a year and costs the price of two books for a good seat. Its humor is either good horseplay or vulgar farce, and its literary quality nil. Its music is better, less banal than the words, and, sometimes, almost excellent. But its setting, the costumes, the scenic effects, the stage painting, and, most of all, the color schemes are always artistic and sometimes exquisite. They intrigue the most sophisticated taste, which is not surprising; yet, at the same time, the multitude likes them, pays for them, stays away if they are not right. Eye is an aesthete, ear is, at least, cultivated, mind is a gross barbarian, unwilling to think, and desirous only of a tickle or a prod.
Or to localize the scene and change the angle a trifle, compare the New York ear for music with the New York taste for reading. The audiences who hear good concerts, good operas, good oratorios, and thoroughly appreciate them, far outrun in number the readers of equally artistic or intellectual books. Ear is more cultivated than mind, musical appreciation keener than literary taste. A good stage set on a first night in this same metropolis of the arts, will get a round of applause, when not only often, but usually, perfection of lines, or poignancy of thought in the dialogue, will miss praise altogether. Eye detects sheer beauty instantly, mind lags or is dull to it.
This is a fact; the cause of it let psychologists explain, as they can, of course, very readily. It is a rather encouraging fact, for it seems to indicate that our members educate themselves one at a time, and yet, as parts of a single body corporate, must help each other's education. If we grow critical of the sped-up background of a movie scene, we may grow critical of its sped-up plot. Eye may teach the ear, ear lift the mind to more strenuous intellectual efforts.
And, of course, it explains why the literary reformers have such difficulties with the multitude. Why, they say, do these women, whose dress is admirably designed and colored, whose living rooms are proportioned and furnished in taste, who know good music from bad, and enjoy the former—why do they read novels without the least distinction, without beauty or truth, barely raised above vulgarity? Why, they say, does this man who cooperates with his architect in the building of a country house which would have been a credit to any period, who is a connoisseur in wine and cigars, and unerring in his judgment of pictures, why does he definitely prefer the commonplace in literature? Eye, ear, and tongue are civilized; intellect remains a gross feeder still. Good reading comes last among the arts of taste.
This is not an essay in reform; it is content to be a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine experiences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly mind? The truth is that we are lazy. In a stage full of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music, in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. But fine novels take fine reading; fine essays take fine thinking; fine poetry takes fine feeling. We balk at the effort, and ask, like the audience at the movies, that eye should take the easier way. And hence the American reader still faintly suggests the Fiji Islander, who wears a silk hat and patent leathers on a tattooed naked body.
For all we can tell, that may be the direction of Progress. In 2021 New Yorkers may be gazing at a city beautiful, where even the subways give forth sweet sounds; and reading novelized movies in words of one syllable. Eye may win the race and starve out the other members. It would be a bad future for publishers and authors; and I am against it, even as a possibility. Hence my energies will be devoted to poking, thrilling, energizing, tonicking that lazy old organism, half asleep still—Mind.
A few years ago drums and trumpets in American magazines and publishers' advertisements announced that the essay was coming to its own again. We were to vary our diet of short stories with pleasing disquisitions, to find in books of essays a substitute for the volume of sermons grown obsolete, and to titillate our finer senses by graceful prose that should teach us without didacticism, and present contemporary life without the incumbrance of a plot.
The promise was welcome. American literature has been at its very best in the essay. In the essay, with few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere attained world-wide estimation. Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes were primarily essayists. Hawthorne and Irving were essayists as much as romancers. Franklin was a common sense essayist. Jonathan Edwards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a moral essayist of a high order. And there was Lowell.
Have they had worthy successors? In the years after the Civil War certainly none of equal eminence. But it is too early to say that the trumpets and drums of the last decade were false heralds. The brilliant epithets of Chesterton, the perfect sophistication of Pearsall Smith (an American, but expatriated), the placid depth of Hudson's nature studies, are not paralleled on this side of the water, yet with Crothers, Gerould, Repplier, Colby, Morley, Strunsky, we need not fear comparison in the critical genre, unless it be with the incomparable Max Beerbohm.
Two kinds of expository writing are natural for Americans. The first is a hard-hitting statement, straight out of intense feeling or labored thought. That was Emerson's way (in spite of his expansiveness), and Thoreau's also. You read them by pithy sentences, not paragraphs. They assail you by ideas, not by insidious structures of thought. The second is an easy-going comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and frequently so undignified as not to seem literature. Mark Twain and Josh Billings wrote that way; Ring Lardner writes so to-day.
When the straight-from-the-shoulder American takes time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, or a contributor toThe Saturday Evening Post, takes time to deepen his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does make, literature. More are doing it than the skeptical realize. The new epoch of the American essay is well under way.
But the desire to "make literature" in America is too often wasted. The would-be essayist wastes it in pretty writing about trivial things—neighbors' back yards, books I have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats, humors of the streets—the sort of dilettantish comment that older nations writing of more settled, richer civilizations can do well—that Anatole France and occasional essayists ofPunchorThe Spectatorcan do well and most of us do indifferently. We are a humorous people, but not a playful one. Light irony is not our forte. Strength and humorous exaggeration come more readily to our pens than grace. We are better inspired by the follies of the crowd, or the errors of humanity, than by the whims of culture or aspects of pleasant leisure. And when we try to put on style in the manner of Lamb or Hazlitt, Stevenson or Beerbohm, we seldom exceed the second rate.
When the newspaper and magazine humorists of democracy learn to write better; when the moralists and reformers and critics of American life learn to mature and perfect their thought until what they write is as good as their intentions—then the trumpets and drums may sound again, and with justification. Many have; may others follow.
And perhaps then we can scrap a mass of fine writing about nothing in particular, that calls itself the American literary essay, and yet is neither American in inspiration, native in style, nor good for anything whatsoever, except exercise in words. Out with the dilettantes. We are tired of the merely literary; we want real literature in the essay as elsewhere.
SOME time ago a writer protested against the taboo on "beautiful prose." He asserted that the usual organs of publication, especially in America, reject with deadly certainty all contributions whose style suggests that melodious rhythm which De Quincey and Ruskin made fashionable for their generations, and Stevenson revived in the 'nineties. He complained that the writer is no longer allowed to write as well as he can; that he must abstract all unnecessary color of phrase, all warmth of connotation and grace of rhythm from his style, lest he should seem to be striving for "atmosphere," instead of going about his proper business, which is to fill the greedy stomach of the public with facts.
Unfortunately, this timely fighter in a good cause was too enamored of the art whose suppression he was bewailing. He so far forgot himself as to make his own style "beautiful" in the old- time fashion, and thus must have roused the prejudice of the multitude, who had to study such style in college, and knew from sad experience that it takes longer to read than the other kind.
But there are other and safer ways of combating the taste for flat prose. One might be to print parallel columns of "newspaper English" (which they threaten now to teach in the schools) until the eye sickened of its deadly monotony. This is a bad way. The average reader would not see the point. Paragraphs from a dozen American papers, all couched in the same utilitarian dialect,— simple but not always clear, concise yet seldom accurate, emphatic but as ugly as the clank of an automobile chain,—why, we read thousands of such lines daily! We think in such English; we talk in it; to revolt from this style, to which the Associated Press has given the largest circulation on record, would be like protesting against the nitrogen in our air.
Books and magazines require a different reckoning. The author is still allowed to let himself go occasionally in books—especially in sentimental books. But the magazines, with few exceptions, have shut down the lid, and are keeping the stylistic afflatus under strict compression. No use to show them what they might publish if, with due exclusion of the merely pretty, the sing-song, and the weakly ornate, they were willing to let a little style escape. With complete cowardice, they will turn the general into the particular, and insist that in any case they will not publishyou. Far better, it seems to me, to warn editors and the "practical public" as to what apparently is going to happen if ambitious authors are tied down much longer to flat prose.
It is not generally known, I believe, that post-impressionism has escaped from the field of pictorial art, and is running rampant in literature. At present, Miss Gertrude Stein is the chief culprit. Indeed, she may be called the founder of a coterie, if not of a school.
Her art has been defined recently by one of her admirers, who is also the subject, or victim, of the word-portrait from which I intend later to quote in illustration of my argument. "Gertrude Stein," says Miss Dodge, "is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history." This, being written in psychological and not in post-impressionist English, is fairly intelligible. But it does not touch the root of the matter. Miss Stein, the writer continues, uses "words that appeal to her as having the meaning theyseemto have [that is, if "diuturnity" suggests a tumble downstairs, itmeansa tumble downstairs]. To present her impressions she chooses words for their inherent quality rather than their accepted meaning."
Let us watch the creative artist at her toil. The title of this particular word-picture is "Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia." As the portrait itself has a beginning, but no middle, and only a faintly indicated end, I believe—though in my ignorance of just what it all means I am not sure—that I can quote at random without offense to the impressions derivable from the text.
Here then are a few paragraphs where the inherent quality of the words is said to induce new states of consciousness:—
"Bargaining is something and there is not that success. The intention is what if application has that accident results are reappearing. They did not darken. That was not an adulteration…. There is that particular half of directing that there is that particular whole direction that is not all the measure of any combination. Gliding is not heavily moving. Looking is not vanishing. Laughing is not evaporation.
"Praying has intention and relieving that situation is not solemn.There comes that way.
"There is all there is when there has all there has where there is what there is. That is what is done when there is done what is done and the union is won and the division is the explicit visit. There is not all of any visit."
After a hundred lines of this I wish to scream, I wish to burn the book, I am in agony. It is not because I know that wordscannotbe torn loose from their meanings without insulting the intellect. It is not because I see that this is a prime example of the "confusion of the arts." No, my feeling is purely physical. Some one has applied an egg-beater to my brain.
But having calmed myself by a sedative of flat prose from the paper, I realize that Miss Stein is more sinned against than sinning. She is merely a red flag waved by theZeitgeist.
For this is the sort of thing we are bound to get if the lid is kept down on the stylists much longer. Repression has always bred revolt. Revolt breeds extravagance. And extravagance leads to absurdity. And yet even in the absurd, a sympathetic observer may detect a purpose which is honest and right. Miss Stein has indubitably written nonsense, but she began with sense. For wordshavetheir sound-values as well as their sense-values, and prose rhythmsdoconvey to the mind emotions that mere denotation cannot give. Rewrite the solemn glory of Old Testament diction in the flat colorless prose which just now is demanded, and wonder at the difference. Translate "the multitudinous seas incarnadine" into "making the ocean red,"—or, for more pertinent instances, imagine a Carlyle, an Emerson, a Lamb forced to exclude from his vocabulary every word not readily understood by the multitude, to iron out all whimseys, all melodies from his phrasing, and to plunk down his words one after the other in the order of elementary thought!
I am willing to fight to the last drop of ink against any attempt to bring back "fine writing" and ornate rhetoric into prose. "Expression is the dress of thought," and plain thinking and plain facts look best in simple clothing. Nevertheless, if we must write our stories, our essays, our novels, and (who knows) our poems in the flat prose of the news column,—if the editors will sit on the lid,—well, the public will get what it pays for, but sooner or later the spirit of style will ferment, will work, will grow violent under restraint. There will be reaction, explosion, revolution. The public will get its flat prose, and—in addition— not one, but a hundred Gertrude Steins.
THE appearance of the definitive edition of Joseph Conrad, with his interesting critical prefaces included, was a provocation to read and reread his remarkable series of books, the most remarkable contribution to English literature by an alien since the language began. But is it a reason for writing more of an author already more discussed than any English stylist of our time? For myself, I answer, yes, because I have found no adequate definition of the difference between Conrad and us to whom English thinking is native, nor a definition of his place, historically considered, in the modern scheme; no definition, that is, which explains my own impressions of Conrad. And therefore I shall proceed, as all readers should, to make my own.
If you ask readers why they like Conrad, two out of three will answer, because he is a great stylist, or because he writes of the sea. I doubt the worth of such answers. Many buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone there much of late. And many an ardent lover of Conrad would rather be whipped than go from New York to Liverpool on a square-rigged ship.
In any case, these answers, which make up the sum of most writing about Conrad, do not define him. To say that an author is a stylist is about as helpful as to say that he is a thinker. And Conrad would have had his reputation if he had migrated to Kansas instead of to the English sea.
In point of fact, much may be said, and with justice, against Conrad's style. It misses occasionally the English idiom, and sometimes English grammar, which is a trivial criticism. It offends more frequently against the literary virtues of conciseness and economy, which is not a trivial criticism. Conrad, like the writers of Elizabethan prose (whom he resembles in ardency and in freshness), too often wraps you in words, stupefies you with gorgeous repetition, goes about and about and about, trailing phrases after him, while the procession of narrative images halts. He can be as prolix in his brooding descriptions as Meredith with his intellectual vaudeville. Indeed, many give him lip service solely because they like to be intoxicated, to be carried away, by words. A slight change of taste, such as that which has come about since Meredith was on every one's tongue, will make such defects manifest. Meredith lives in spite of his prolixities, and so will Conrad, but neither because they are perfect English stylists.
I am sure also that Conrad, at his very best, is not so good as Melville, at his best, in nautical narrative; as Melville in, say, the first day of the final chase of Moby Dick; I question whether he is as good in sea narrative as Cooper in the famous passage of Paul Jones's ship through the shoals. Such comparisons are, of course, rather futile. They differentiate among excellences, where taste is a factor. Nevertheless, it is belittling to a man who, above almost all others in our language, has brooded upon the mysteries of the mind's action, to say that he is great because he describes so well the sea.
We must seek elsewhere for a definition of the peculiar qualities of Conrad. And without a definition it is easy to admire but hard to estimate and understand him.
I believe, first of all, that Conrad has remained much more a Slav than he, or any of us, have been willing to admit. A friend of mine, married to a Slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding (so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is dangerous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic of the Slav. The Russian novels are full of characters who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and their fates. The structure of the Russian story is determined not by events so much as by the results of passionate brooding upon the situation in which the imagined characters find themselves.
So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In "Nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of a fixed idea; in "The Rescue" upon the result of flinging together elemental characters of the kind that life keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had ever the patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail of it, feeling its contours around and above and beneath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again and again to the task of description, until every impression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded to its source.
Henry James, you will say, was even more patient. Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essentially are. Henry James refines but seldom repeats. Conrad, in such a story as "Gaspar Ruiz" for example, or in "Chance," gives the impression of not caring to understand if only he can fully picture the mind that his brooding imagination draws further and further from its sheath. It is incredible, to one who has not counted, how many times he raises the same situation to the light—the Garibaldean and Nostromo, Mrs. Travers marveling at her knowledge of Lingard's heart—turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back while he broods on. Here is the explanation of Conrad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the reader's interest. As we read Conrad we also brood; we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. Turns of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, or the faces of women, have their chance. And, of course, the excellence, the charm of Conrad's style is that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brooding mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of images that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, in a fathomless pool.
This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time. In time, he may be Slav or English, but certainly is modern of the moderns. The tribute of admiration and imitation from the youth of his own period alone might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imagination afield into the margins of the world, where life still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from Kipling or Masefield. To say that he strikes below the act and the will into realms of the sub- conscious, and studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion, is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among the many writers who have learned of Henry James or moved in parallels beside him.
To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential modernity I should like to propose a more cogent comparison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man whose achievements were in Conrad's own province, who challenges and rewards comparison, Herman Melville.
It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside the works of Conrad. Some one must have done it, so illuminating in both directions is the result. Here are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and description unsurpassed:
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw.
Melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the South Seas, "Typee," "Omoo," which were perfect of their kind, but still only superlative travel books, distinguished in style but seldom lifting beyond autobiography, began another reminiscent narrative in "Moby Dick." In spite of his profound intellectual growth away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled the Marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him, he seems to have meant in "The White Whale" to go back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before thePequodleaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew of all races and temperaments—the civilized, the barbarous, and the savage—in their ship, which is a microcosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper than gain or revenge—all this prepares the reader for something more than incident. From the mood of Defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the atmosphere of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Manfred."
When Conrad could not manage his story he laid it aside, sometimes for twenty years, as with "The Rescue." But Melville was a wilder soul, a greater man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser craftsman. He lost control of his book. He loaded his whaling story with casks of natural history, deck loaded it with essays on the moral nature of man, lashed to its sides dramatic dialogues on the soul, built up a superstructure of symbolism and allegory, until the tale foundered and went down, like thePequod. And then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a dream whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams; and every now and then, as dreams will, it takes on an appearance of reality more vivid than anything in life, more real than anything in Conrad— the meeting with theRacheland her captain seeking his drowned son, the rising of Moby Dick with the dead Parsee bound to his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of Ahab….
In this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs in the midst of confusion, and vivid realities mingled with untrammeled speculation, lies the secret of Melville's purpose, and, by contrast, the explanation of Conrad's modern effect beside him. Melville, friend of Hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on his own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible than man. He sees the will of man trying to control the universe, but failing; crushed if uncowed by the unmeasured power of an evil nature, which his little spirit, once it loses touch with the will of God, vainly encounters. Give man eyes only in the top of his head, looking heavenward, says Ahab, urging the blacksmith, who makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new creature complete. He writes of man at the beginning of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as Ahab, thePequod, and all her crew went down before the lashings and charges of the white whale.
"Oh, Life," says Ahab, "here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead [the carpenter] for a bone to stand on!… I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with." And yet as they approach the final waters "the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vise; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull: 'Stern all! The white whale spouts thick blood!'"
Conrad comes at the height of the age of science. The seas for him are full of dark mysteries, but these mysteries are only the reflections of man. Man dominates the earth and sea, man conquers the typhoon, intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the barbarians of the shallows, man has learned to master all but his own heart. The center of gravity shifts from without to within. The philosopher, reasoning of God and of nature, gives place to the psychologist brooding over an organism that is seat of God and master of the elements. Melville is centrifugal, Conrad centripetal. Melville's theme is too great for him; it breaks his story, but the fragments are magnificent. Conrad's task is easier because it is more limited; his theme is always in control. He broods over man in a world where nature has been conquered, although the mind still remains inexplicable. The emphasis shifts from external symbols of the immensities of good and evil to the behavior of personality under stress. Melville is a moral philosopher, Conrad a speculative psychologist.
The essentially modern quality of Conrad lies in this transference of wonder from nature to the behavior of man, the modern man for whom lightning is only electricity and wind the relief of pressure from hemisphere to hemisphere. Mystery lies in the personality now, not in the blind forces that shape and are shaped by it. It is the difference, in a sense, between Hawthorne, who saw the world as shadow and illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to humanity, and Hardy, who sees in external nature the grim scientific fact of environment. It is a difference between eras more marked in Conrad than in many of his contemporaries, because, like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his romantic heroes against the great powers of nature—tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of romantic setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying; his moral problems are raised only that he may study their effect upon man.
If, then, we are to estimate Conrad's work, let us begin by defining him in these terms. He is a Slav who broods by racial habit as well as by necessity of his theme. He is a modern who accepts the growing control of physical forces by the intellect and turns from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality. From this personality he makes his stories. External nature bulks large in them, because it is when beat upon by adversity, brought face to face with the elemental powers, and driven into strange efforts of will by the storms without that man's personality reaches the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories of his longer novels. His characters are concrete. They are not symbols of the moral nature, like Melville's men, but they are nevertheless phases of personality and therefore they shift and dim from story to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their hearts to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one nevertheless forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which they come, the tales in which they appear. The same phase, indeed, appears under different names in several stories.
Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of the secret of man's relation to the universe; only magnificent fragments of his imagination were salvaged for his books. Conrad sails on an open sea, tamed by wireless and conquered by steel. Mystery for him lies not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers. On them he broods. His achievement is more complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe. There the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. It is an opportunity for the psychologists and, while we are thinking less of the soul, they have rushed to study the mechanics of the brain. It was Conrad's opportunity also to brood upon the romance of personality at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark external force.