The Common Reader
from the eyes of other men. . . . I went with him to hear what he had to
say, for shepherds talk quite differently from other men.
Happily this shepherd had little to say, even under the stimulus of the
inevitable mug of beer, about the Unknown Country, for the only remark
that he did make proves him either a minor poet, unfit for the care of
sheep, or Mr. Belloc himself masquerading with a fountain pen. That is
the penalty which the habitual essayist must now be prepared to face. He
must masquerade. He cannot afford the time either to be himself or to be
other people. He must skim the surface of thought and dilute the
strength of personality. He must give us a worn weekly halfpenny instead
of a solid sovereign once a year.
But it is not Mr. Belloc only who has suffered from the prevailing
conditions. The essays which bring the collection to the year 1920 may
not be the best of their authors’ work, but, if we except writers like
Mr. Conrad and Mr. Hudson, who have strayed into essay writing
accidentally, and concentrate upon those who write essays habitually, we
shall find them a good deal affected by the change in their
circumstances. To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to
write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people
coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know
good writing from bad. They do it, but instinctively draw out of harm’s
way anything precious that might be damaged by contact with the public,
or anything sharp that might irritate its skin. And so, if one reads Mr.
Lucas, Mr. Lynd, or Mr. Squire in the bulk, one feels that a common
greyness silvers everything. They are as far removed from the
extravagant beauty of Walter Pater as they are from the intemperate
candour of Leslie Stephen. Beauty and courage are dangerous spirits to
battle in a column and a half; and thought, like a brown paper parcel in
a waistcoat pocket, has a way of spoiling the symmetry of an article. It
is a kind, tired, apathetic world for which they write, and the marvel
is that they never cease to attempt, at least, to write well.
But there is no need to pity Mr. Clutton Brock for this change in the
essayist’s conditions. He has clearly made the best of his circumstances
and not the worst. One hesitates even to say that he has had to make any
conscious effort in the matter, so naturally has he effected the
transition from the private essayist to the public, from the
drawing-room to the Albert Hall. Paradoxically enough, the shrinkage in
size has brought about a corresponding expansion of individuality. We
have no longer the “I” of Max and of Lamb, but the “we” of public bodies
and other sublime personages. It is “we” who go to hear the _Magic
Flute_; “we” who ought to profit by it; “we”, in some mysterious way,
who, in our corporate capacity, once upon a time actually wrote it. For
music and literature and art must submit to the same generalisation or
they will not carry to the farthest recesses of the Albert Hall. That
the voice of Mr. Clutton Brock, so sincere and so disinterested, carries
such a distance and reaches so many without pandering to the weakness of
the mass or its passions must be a matter of legitimate satisfaction to
us all. But while “we” are gratified, “I”, that unruly partner in the
human fellowship, is reduced to despair. “I” must always think things
for himself, and feel things for himself. To share them in a diluted
form with the majority of well-educated and well-intentioned men and
women is for him sheer agony; and while the rest of us listen intently
and profit profoundly, “I” slips off to the woods and the fields and
rejoices in a single blade of grass or a solitary potato.
In the fifth volume of modern essays, it seems, we have got some way
from pleasure and the art of writing. But in justice to the essayists of
1920 we must be sure that we are not praising the famous because they
have been praised already and the dead because we shall never meet them
wearing spats in Piccadilly. We must know what we mean when we say that
they can write and give us pleasure. We must compare them; we must bring
out the quality. We must point to this and say it is good because it is
exact, truthful, and imaginative:
Nay, retire men cannot when they would; neither will they, when it were
Reason; but are impatient of Privateness, even in age and sickness,
which require the shadow: like old Townsmen: that will still be sitting
at their street door, though thereby they offer Age to Scorn . . .
and to this, and say it is bad because it is loose, plausible, and
commonplace:
With courteous and precise cynicism on his lips, he thought of quiet
virginal chambers, of waters singing under the moon, of terraces where
taintless music sobbed into the open night, of pure maternal mistresses
with protecting arms and vigilant eyes, of fields slumbering in the
sunlight, of leagues of ocean heaving under warm tremulous heavens, of
hot ports, gorgeous and perfumed. . . .
It goes on, but already we are bemused with sound and neither feel nor
hear. The comparison makes us suspect that the art of writing has for
backbone some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an
idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and
thus compelling words to its shape, that the diverse company which
included Lamb and Bacon, and Mr. Beerbohm and Hudson, and Vernon Lee and
Mr. Conrad, and Leslie Stephen and Butler and Walter Pater reaches the
farther shore. Very various talents have helped or hindered the passage
of the idea into words. Some scrape through painfully; others fly with
every wind favouring. But Mr. Belloc and Mr. Lucas and Mr. Lynd and Mr.
Squire are not fiercely attached to anything in itself. They share the
contemporary dilemma—that lack of an obstinate conviction which lifts
ephemeral sounds through the misty sphere of anybody’s language to the
land where there is a perpetual marriage, a perpetual union. Vague as
all definitions are, a good essay must have this permanent quality about
it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that
shuts us in, not out.
[Footnote 13: _Modern English Essays_, edited by Ernest Rhys,
5 vols. (Dent).]
_Joseph Conrad_[14]
Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our
phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or
ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to
take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of
mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable
appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the
country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that
for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors
with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host
that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke
English with a strong foreign accent.
Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our
memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially,
and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later
years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in
England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by
some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people
of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen,
driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed
him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in
process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and
there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously
upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement
is, of course, to be found, where men have at all times found it, in his
beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she
looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could
never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been
gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a
strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather
than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or
insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little
somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then
how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and
majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit
and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this
incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his
critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the
habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of
English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they
complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the
voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as
difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when _Figaro_ is
played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of
sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they
conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of
scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That
beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince
them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and
to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the
bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not
hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride,
its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad,
how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is
concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill
work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little
saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their
power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a
constant quality of Conrad’s prose.
For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a
leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young
people. Until _Nostromo_ was written his characters, as the young were
quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle
the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers,
used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at
peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth
honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in
sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and
austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested
characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in
their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose
praises he was never tired of celebrating:
They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts nor
hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted,
unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent these
men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as going about their
work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew
toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no
desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to
inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the
sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a