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CHAPTER V
In the career of the most unliterary of writers, in the sense
that literary ambition had never entered the world of his
imagination, the coming into existence of the first book is quite
an inexplicable event. In my own case I cannot trace it back to
any mental or psychological cause which one could point out and
hold to. The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity
for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational
stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen at any rate was there, and
there is nothing wonderful in that. Everybody keeps a pen (the
cold steel of our days) in his rooms in this enlightened age of
penny stamps and halfpenny postcards. In fact, this was the
epoch when by means of postcard and pen Mr. Gladstone had made
the reputation of a novel or two. And I too had a pen rolling
about somewhere--the seldom-used, the reluctantly-taken-up pen of
a sailor ashore, the pen rugged with the dried ink of abandoned
attempts, of answers delayed longer than decency permitted, of
letters begun with infinite reluctance and put off suddenly till
next day--tell next week as likely as not! The neglected,
uncared-for pen, flung away at the slightest provocation, and
under the stress of dire necessity hunted for without enthusiasm,
in a perfunctory, grumpy worry, in the "Where the devil is the
beastly thing gone to?" ungracious spirit. Where indeed! It
might have been reposing behind the sofa for a day or so. My
landlady's anaemic daughter (as Ollendorff would have expressed
it), though commendably neat, had a lordly, careless manner of
approaching her domestic duties. Or it might even be resting
delicately poised on its point by the side of the table-leg, and
when picked up show a gaping, inefficient beak which would have
discouraged any man of literary instincts. But not me! "Never
mind. This will do."
O days without guile! If anybody had told me then that a devoted
household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and
importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the
fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had
touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never
deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief. There are
imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for
indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile. Perhaps, had that
seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly
saddened. "Alas!" I would have thought, looking at him with an
unmoved face, "the poor fellow is going mad."
I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world
where the journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of
heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the
prophetical management of the Meteorological Office, but where
the secret of human hearts cannot be captured either by prying or
praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my
friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I
should turn into a writer of tales.
To survey with wonder the changes of one's own self is a
fascinating pursuit for idle hours. The field is so wide, the
surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but
curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not
weary easily of it. I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who
rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit--who
really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on
fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last
habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality. Neither
am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking
forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a
detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.
And that's a pity. They are unlucky. These two kinds, together
with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those
unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great
French writer has put it) "the whole universe vanishes into blank
nothingness," miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is
short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions. The
ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel
and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith,
hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish,
that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be
ethical at all. I would fondly believe that its object is purely
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if
you like, but in this view--and in this view alone--never for
despair! Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end
in themselves. The rest is our affair--the laughter, the tears,
the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a
steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind--that's
our affair! And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every
phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may
be our appointed task on this earth. A task in which fate has
perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with
a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder,
the haunting terror, the infinite passion and the illimitable
serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the
sublime spectacle.
Chi lo sa? It may be true. In this view there is room for every
religion except for the inverted creed of impiety, the mask and
cloak of arid despair; for every joy and every sorrow, for every
fair dream, for every charitable hope. The great aim is to
remain true to the emotions called out of the deep encircled by
the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or
the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter
nothing at all.
The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem
full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has
a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
place; and amongst them the poet as the seer par excellence.
Even the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome
task should be a man with the steeled heart, is worthy of a
place, providing he looks on with undimmed eyes and keeps
laughter out of his voice, let who will laugh or cry. Yes! Even
he, the prose artist of fiction, which after all is but truth
often dragged out of a well and clothed in the painted robe of
imaged phrases--even he has his place amongst kings, demagogues,
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, Cabinet Ministers, Fabians,
bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers,
sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes and constellations
of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself.
Here I perceive (speaking without offence) the reader assuming a
subtle expression, as if the cat were out of the bag. I take the
novelist's freedom to observe the reader's mind formulating the
exclamation, "That's it! The fellow talks pro domo."
Indeed it was not the intention! When I shouldered the bag I was
not aware of the cat inside. But, after all, why not? The fair
courtyards of the House of Art are thronged by many humble
retainers. And there is no retainer so devoted as he who is
allowed to sit on the doorstep. The fellows who have got inside
are apt to think too much of themselves. This last remark, I beg
to state, is not malicious within the definition of the law of
libel. It's fair comment on a matter of public interest. But
never mind. Pro domo. So be it. For his house tant que vous
voudrez. And yet in truth I was by no means anxious to justify
my existence. The attempt would have been not only needless and
absurd, but almost inconceivable, in a purely spectacular
universe, where no such disagreeable necessity can possibly
arise. It is sufficient for me to say (and I am saying it at
some length in these pages): "J'ai vecu." I have existed,
obscure amongst the wonders and terrors of my time, as the Abbe
Sieyes, the original utterer of the quoted words, had managed to
exist through the violences, the crimes, and the enthusiasms of
the French Revolution. "J'ai vecu", as I apprehend most of us
manage to exist, missing all along the varied forms of
destruction by a hair's-breadth, saving my body, that's clear,
and perhaps my soul also, but not without some damage here and
there to the fine edge of my conscience, that heirloom of the
ages, of the race, of the group, of the family, colourable and
plastic, fashioned by the words, the looks, the acts, and even by
the silences and abstentions surrounding one's childhood; tinged
in a complete scheme of delicate shades and crude colours by the
inherited traditions, beliefs, or prejudices--unaccountable,
despotic, persuasive, and often, in its texture, romantic.
And often romantic!. . .The matter in hand, however, is to keep
these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of
literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account
of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying
his own existence; for that such was his purpose is palpably,
even grossly, visible to an unprejudiced eye. But then, you see,
the man was not a writer of fiction. He was an artless moralist,
as is clearly demonstrated by his anniversaries being celebrated
with marked emphasis by the heirs of the French Revolution, which
was not a political movement at all, but a great outburst of
morality. He had no imagination, as the most casual perusal of
"Emile" will prove. He was no novelist, whose first virtue is
the exact understanding of the limits traced by the reality of
his time to the play of his invention. Inspiration comes from
the earth, which has a past, a history, a future, not from the
cold and immutable heaven. A writer of imaginative prose (even
more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his
works. His conscience, his deeper sense of things, lawful and
unlawful, gives him his attitude before the world. Indeed, every
one who puts pen to paper for the reading of strangers (unless a
moralist, who, generally speaking, has no conscience except the
one he is at pains to produce for the use of others) can speak of
nothing else. It is M. Anatole France, the most eloquent and
just of French prose writers, who says that we must recognise at
last that, "failing the resolution to hold our peace, we can only
talk of ourselves."
This remark, if I remember rightly, was made in the course of a
sparring match with the late Ferdinand Brunetiere over the
principles and rules of literary criticism. As was fitting for a
man to whom we owe the memorable saying, "The good critic is he
who relates the adventures of his soul amongst masterpieces," M.
Anatole France maintained that there were no rules and no
principles. And that may be very true. Rules, principles and
standards die and vanish every day. Perhaps they are all dead
and vanished by this time. These, if ever, are the brave, free
days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy
inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to
think, will be set up presently in the old places. But what is
interesting to a writer is the possession of an inward certitude
that literary criticism will never die, for man (so variously
defined) is, before everything else, a critical animal. And, as
long as distinguished minds are ready to treat it in the spirit
of high adventure, literary criticism shall appeal to us with all
the charm and wisdom of a well-told tale of personal experience.
For Englishmen especially, of all the races of the earth, a task,
any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit
of romance. But the critics as a rule exhibit but little of an
adventurous spirit. They take risks, of course--one can hardly
live without that. The daily bread is served out to us (however
sparingly) with a pinch of salt. Otherwise one would get sick of
the diet one prays for, and that would be not only improper, but
impious. From impiety of that or any other kind--save us! An
ideal of reserved manner, adhered to from a sense of proprieties,
from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness,
induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the
adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes
a mere "notice," as it were the relation of a journey where
nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should
be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood
and field, the hair's-breadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh,
the sufferings too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the
traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful
plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance
looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable
adventure. "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to
the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't really. Je vous
donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not. Not all. I am thus
emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a
general. . .
Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and
then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle
Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations
of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls
concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of
sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of
art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute. And
thus this general's daughter came to me--or I should say one of
the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor
ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation. The
eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village
children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers
for the conquest of curtseys. It sounds futile, but it was
really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all
over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance
right to my very table--I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.
She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of
afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.
She marched into my room swinging her stick. . .but no--I mustn't
exaggerate. It is not my speciality. I am not a humoristic
writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she
had a stick to swing.
No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the
door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm,
still sunshine of the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely
helpful, but truth to say I had not known for weeks whether the
sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved
on their appointed courses. I was just then giving up some days
of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel "Nostromo,"
a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still
mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction
with the word "astonishing." I have no opinion on this
discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that can never be
settled. All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the
common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this
earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with the Lord"
for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness
of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the
sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the
shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.
These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to
characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative
effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the
full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to
the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle--
something for which a material parallel can only be found in the
everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round
Cape Horn. For that too is the wrestling of men with the might
of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world, without
the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle under a
sense of over-matched littleness, for no reward that could be
adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a certain
longitude, once won, cannot be disputed. The sun and the stars
and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain;
whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them
your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.
Here they are. "Failure"--"Astonishing": take your choice; or
perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of
paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the
snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in the
sunshine.
"How do you do?"
It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard
nothing--no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment
before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an
inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and
then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
fall from a great height--a fall, let us say, from the highest of
the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the
faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself up
quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair
stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being
uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
civil.
"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly
true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I
didn't howl at her, or start upsetting furniture, or throw myself
on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any other way
at the appalling magnitude of the disaster. The whole world of
Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my seaboard tale),
men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was
not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not
placed in position with my own hands); all the history,
geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles Gould's
silver-mine, and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz de
Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham
heard it pass over his head--in Linda Viola's voice), dominated
even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of
treasure and love--all that had come down crashing about my ears.
I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment
I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"
The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck
training even in a merchant ship will do! This episode should
give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen (a much-
caricatured folk) who had the last say in the formation of my
character. One is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster I
think I have done some honour to their simple teaching. "Won't
you sit down?" Very fair; very fair indeed. She sat down. Her
amused glance strayed all over the room. There were pages of MS.
on the table and under the table, a batch of typed copy on a
chair, single leaves had fluttered away into distant corners;
there were there living pages, pages scored and wounded, dead
pages that would be burnt at the end of the day--the litter of a
cruel battlefield, of a long, long and desperate fray. Long! I
suppose I went to bed sometimes, and got up the same number of
times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate the food put before me,
and talked connectedly to my household on suitable occasions.
But I had never been aware of the even flow of daily life, made
easy and noiseless for me by a silent, watchful, tireless
affection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had been sitting at
that table surrounded by the litter of a desperate fray for days
and nights on end. It seemed so, because of the intense
weariness of which that interruption had made me aware--the awful
disenchantment of a mind realising suddenly the futility of an
enormous task, joined to a bodily fatigue such as no ordinary
amount of fairly heavy physical labour could ever account for. I
have carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a
ship's deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the
evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to
know.
And I love letters. I am jealous of their honour and concerned
for the dignity and comeliness of their service. I was, most
likely, the only writer that neat lady had ever caught in the
exercise of his craft, and it distressed me not to be able to
remember when it was that I dressed myself last, and how. No
doubt that would be all right in essentials. The fortune of the
house included a pair of grey-blue watchful eyes that would see
to that. But I felt somehow as grimy as a Costaguana lepero
after a day's fighting in the streets, rumpled all over and
dishevelled down to my very heels. And I am afraid I blinked
stupidly. All this was bad for the honour of letters and the
dignity of their service. Seen indistinctly through the dust of
my collapsed universe, the good lady glanced about the room with
a slightly amused serenity. And she was smiling. What on earth
was she smiling at? She remarked casually:
"I am afraid I interrupted you."
"Not at all."
She accepted the denial in perfect good faith. And it was
strictly true. Interrupted--indeed! She had robbed me of at
least twenty lives, each infinitely more poignant and real than
her own, because informed with passion, possessed of convictions,
involved in great affairs created out of my own substance for an
anxiously meditated end.
She remained silent for a while, then said with a last glance all
round at the litter of the fray:
"And you sit like this here writing your--your. . ."
"I--what? Oh, yes, I sit here all day."
"It must be perfectly delightful."
I suppose that, being no longer very young, I might have been on
the verge of having a stroke; but she had left her dog in the
porch, and my boy's dog, patrolling the field in front, had
espied him from afar. He came on straight and swift like a
cannon-ball, and the noise of the fight, which burst suddenly
upon our ears, was more than enough to scare away a fit of
apoplexy. We went out hastily and separated the gallant animals.
Afterwards I told the lady where she would find my wife--just
round the corner, under the trees. She nodded and went off with
her dog, leaving me appalled before the death and devastation she
had lightly made--and with the awfully instructive sound of the
word "delightful" lingering in my ears.
Nevertheless, later on, I duly escorted her to the field gate. I
wanted to be civil, of course (what are twenty lives in a mere
novel that one should be rude to a lady on their account?), but
mainly, to adopt the good sound Ollendorffian style, because I
did not want the dog of the general's daughter to fight again
(encore) with the faithful dog of my infant son (mon petit
garcon).--Was I afraid that the dog of the general's daughter
would be able to overcome (vaincre) the dog of my child?--No, I
was not afraid. . .But away with the Ollendorff method. However
appropriate and seemingly unavoidable when I touch upon anything
appertaining to the lady, it is most unsuitable to the origin,
character and history of the dog; for the dog was the gift to the
child from a man for whom words had anything but an Ollendorffian
value, a man almost childlike in the impulsive movements of his
untutored genius, the most single-minded of verbal
impressionists, using his great gifts of straight feeling and
right expression with a fine sincerity and a strong if, perhaps,
not fully conscious conviction. His art did not obtain, I fear,
all the credit its unsophisticated inspiration deserved. I am
alluding to the late Stephen Crane, the author of "The Red Badge
of Courage," a work of imagination which found its short moment
of celebrity in the last decade of the departed century. Other
books followed. Not many. He had not the time. It was an
individual and complete talent, which obtained but a grudging,
somewhat supercilious recognition from the world at large. For
himself one hesitates to regret his early death. Like one of the
men in his "Open Boat," one felt that he was of those whom fate
seldom allows to make a safe landing after much toil and
bitterness at the oar. I confess to an abiding affection for
that energetic, slight, fragile, intensely living and transient
figure. He liked me even before we met on the strength of a page
or two of my writing, and after we had met I am glad to think he
liked me still. He used to point out to me with great
earnestness, and even with some severity, that "a boy ought to
have a dog." I suspect that he was shocked at my neglect of
parental duties. Ultimately it was he who provided the dog.
Shortly afterwards, one day, after playing with the child on the
rug for an hour or so with the most intense absorption, he raised
his head and declared firmly: "I shall teach your boy to ride."
That was not to be. He was not given the time.
But here is the dog--an old dog now. Broad and low on his bandy
paws, with a black head on a white body and a ridiculous black
spot at the other end of him, he provokes, when he walks abroad,
smiles not altogether unkind. Grotesque and engaging in the
whole of his appearance, his usual attitudes are meek, but his
temperament discloses itself unexpectedly pugnacious in the
presence of his kind. As he lies in the firelight, his head well
up, and a fixed, far-away gaze directed at the shadows of the
room, he achieves a striking nobility of pose in the calm
consciousness of an unstained life. He has brought up one baby,
and now, after seeing his first charge off to school, he is
bringing up another with the same conscientious devotion, but
with a more deliberate gravity of manner, the sign of greater
wisdom and riper experience, but also of rheumatism, I fear.
From the morning bath to the evening ceremonies of the cot you
attend, old friend, the little two-legged creature of your
adoption, being yourself treated in the exercise of your duties
with every possible regard, with infinite consideration, by every
person in the house--even as I myself am treated; only you
deserve it more. The general's daughter would tell you that it
must be "perfectly delightful."
Aha! old dog. She never heard you yelp with acute pain (it's
that poor left ear) the while, with incredible self-command, you
preserve a rigid immobility for fear of overturning the little
two-legged creature. She has never seen your resigned smile when
the little two-legged creature, interrogated sternly, "What are
you doing to the good dog?" answers with a wide, innocent stare:
"Nothing. Only loving him, mamma dear!"
The general's daughter does not know the secret terms of self-
imposed tasks, good dog, the pain that may lurk in the very
rewards of rigid self-command. But we have lived together many
years. We have grown older, too; and though our work is not
quite done yet we may indulge now and then in a little
introspection before the fire--meditate on the art of bringing up
babies and on the perfect delight of writing tales where so many
lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly
away.
Content of CHAPTER V [Joseph Conrad's book: Some Reminiscences]
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