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 post-cards. 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
—till next week, as like 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 anemic 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 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 aggrandizement, 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 sà? 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 among
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 imagined phrases—even he
has his place among kings, demagogues,
priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, cabinet
ministers, Fabians, bricklayers, apostles, ants,
scientists, Kafirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants,
lawyers, dandies, microbes, and constellations
of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a
moral end in itself.
Here I perceive (without speaking offense)
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 vécu. I have
existed, obscure among the wonders and
terrors of my time, as the Abbé Sieyès, 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 vécu, 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
"Émile" 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 recognize 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 Brunetière 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 among
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 hairbreadth 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 farm-house 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 courtesies. 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 specialty. 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 in 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 characterize 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 overmatched
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 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
à la Jean Jacques Rosseau 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 burned at the end of the day—the
litter of a cruel battle-field, 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 realizing
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 gray-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.
Afterward 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 garçon).—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 afterward, 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, faraway 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 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.
