It was the same with the perhaps more difficult problem of literature. Even to-day there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts — very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet “Read what you like”, he said, and all his books, “mangy and worthless,” as he called them, but certainly they were many and various, were to be had without asking. To read what one liked because one liked it, never to pretend to admire what one did not — that was his only lesson in the art of reading. To write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant — that was his only lesson in the art of writing. All the rest must be learnt for oneself. Yet a child must have been childish in the extreme not to feel that such was the teaching of a man of great learning and wide experience, though he would never impose his own views or parade his own knowledge. For, as his tailor remarked when he saw my father walk past his shop up Bond Street, “There goes a gentleman that wears good clothes without knowing it.”
In those last years, grown solitary and very deaf, he would sometimes call himself a failure as a writer; he had been “jack of all trades, and master of none.” But whether he failed or succeeded as a writer, it is permissible to believe that he left a distinct impression of himself on the minds of his friends. Meredith saw him as “Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” in his earlier days; Thomas Hardy, years later, looked at the “spare and desolate figure” of the Schreckhorn and thought of him,
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.
But the praise he would have valued most, for though he was an agnostic nobody believed more profoundly in the worth of human relationships, was Meredith’s tribute after his death: “He was the one man to my knowledge worthy to have married your mother.” And Lowell, when he called him “L.S., the most lovable of men”, has best described the quality that makes him, after all these years, unforgettable.
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
THE OTWAYS, perhaps, inherited their love of reading from the ancient dramatist whose name they share, whether they descend from him (as they like to think) or not. Penelope, the oldest unmarried daughter, a small dark woman turned forty, her complexion a little roughened by country life, her eyes brown and bright, yet subject to strange long stares of meditation or vacancy, had always, since the age of seven, been engaged in reading the classics. Her father’s library, though strong chiefly in the literature of the East, had its Popes, its Drydens, its Shakespeares, in various stages of splendour and decay; and if his daughters chose to amuse themselves by reading what they liked, certainly it was a method of education which, since it spared his purse, deserved his benediction.
That education it could be called, no one nowadays would admit. All that can be said in its favour was that Penelope Otway was never dull, gallantly ambitious of surmounting small hillocks of learning, and of an enthusiasm which greater knowledge might perhaps have stinted or have diverted less fortunately into the creation of books of her own. As it was, she was content to read and to talk, reading in the intervals of household business, and talking when she could find company, on Sundays for the most part, when visitors came down, and sat on fine summer days under the splendid yew tree on the lawn.
On this occasion, a hot morning in August, her old friend David Lowe was distressed, but hardly surprised, to find five magnificent volumes lying on the grass by her chair, while Penelope acknowledged his presence by putting her fingers between the pages of a sixth and looking at the sky.
“Joseph Conrad,” he said, lifting the admirable books — solid, stately, good-looking, yet meant for a long life-time of repeated re-reading — on to his knee. “So I see you have made up your mind. Mr. Conrad is a classic.”
“Not in your opinion,” she replied; “I remember the bitter letters you wrote me when you read The Arrow of Gold and The Rescue. You compared him to an elderly and disillusioned nightingale singing over and over, but hopelessly out of tune, the one song he had learned in his youth.”
“I had forgotten,” said David, “but it is true. The books puzzled me after those early novels, Youth, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, which we thought so magnificent. I said to myself perhaps it is because he is a foreigner. He can understand us perfectly when we talk slowly, but not when we are excited or when we are at our ease. There is nothing colloquial in Conrad; nothing intimate; and no humour, at least of the English kind. And those are great drawbacks for a novelist, you will admit. Then, of course, it goes without saying that he is a romantic. No one objects to that. But it entails a terrible penalty — death at the age of forty — death or disillusionment. If your romantic persists in living, he must face his disillusionment. He must make his music out of contrasts. But Conrad has never faced his disillusionment. He goes on singing the same songs about sea captains and the sea, beautiful, noble, and monotonous; but now I think with a crack in the flawless strain of his youth. It is a mind of one fact; and such a mind can never be among the classics.”
“But he is a great writer! A great writer!” cried Penelope, gripping the arms of her chair. “How shall I prove it to you? Admit, in the first place, that your views are partial. You have skipped; you have sipped; you have tasted. From The Nigger of the Narcissus you have leapt to The Arrow of Gold. Your gimcrack theory is a confection of cobwebs spun while you shave, chiefly with a view to saving yourself the trouble of investigating and possibly admiring the work of a living writer in your own tongue. You are a surly watch-dog; but Conrad you will have to admit.”
“My ears are pricked,” said David; “explain your theory.”
“My theory is made of cobwebs, no doubt, like your own. But of this I am certain. Conrad is not one and simple; no, he is many and complex. That is a common case among modern writers, as we have often agreed. And it is when they bring these selves into relation — when they simplify, when they reconcile their opposites — that they bring off (generally late in life) those complete books which for that reason we call their masterpieces. And Mr. Conrad’s selves are particularly opposite. He is composed of two people who have nothing whatever in common. He is your sea captain, simple, faithful, obscure; and he is Marlow, subtle, psychological, loquacious. In the early books the Captain dominates; in the later it is Marlow at least who does all the talking. The union of these two very different men makes for all sorts of queer effects. You must have noticed the sudden silences, the awkward collisions, the immense lethargy which threatens at every moment to descend. All this, I think, must be the result of that internal conflict. For while Marlow would like to track every motive, explore every shadow, his companion the sea captain is for ever at his elbow saying.. the world, the temporal world, rests on a very few simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills.’ Then again, Marlow is a man of words; they are all dear to him, appealing, seductive. But the sea captain cuts him short. ‘The gift of words’, he says, ‘is no great matter’. And it is the sea captain who triumphs. In Conrad’s novels personal relations are never final. Men are tested by their attitude to august abstractions. Are they faithful, are they honourable, are they courageous? The men he loves are reserved for death in the bosom of the sea.
Their elegy is Milton’s ‘Nothing is here to wail... nothing but what may quiet us in a death so noble’ — an elegy which you could never possibly speak over the body of any of Henry James’ characters, whose intimacies have been personal — with each other.”
“Pardon me,” said David, “an apparent rudeness. Your theory may be a good one, but the moment you quote Conrad himself theories turn to moonshine. Unfortunate art of criticism, which only shines in the absence of the sun! I had forgotten the spell of Conrad’s prose. It must be of extraordinary strength, since the few words you have quote
d rouse in me an overpowering hunger for more.” He opened The Nigger of the Narcissus and read: “On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest...”
“The men turned in wet and turned out stiff to face the redeeming and ruthless exactions of their obscure fate.”
“It is not fair,” he said, “to quote such scraps, but even from them I get an extreme satisfaction.”
“Yes,” said Penelope, “they’re fine in the grand deliberate manner which has in it the seeds of pomposity and monotony. But I almost prefer his sudden direct pounce right across the room like a cat on a mouse. There’s Mrs. Schomberg, for instance, ‘a scraggy little woman with long ringlets and a blue tooth’, or a dying man’s voice ‘like the rustle of a single dry leaf driven along the smooth sand of a beach’. He sees once and he sees for ever. His books are full of moments of vision. They light up a whole character in a flash. Perhaps I prefer Marlow the instinctive to Captain Whalley the moralist. But the peculiar beauty is the product of the two together. The beauty of surface has always a fibre of morality within. I seem to see each of the sentences you have read advancing with resolute bearing and a calm which they have won in strenuous conflict, against the forces of falsehood, sentimentality, and slovenliness. He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life.
He has his duty to letters as sailors have theirs to their ships. And indeed he praises those inveterate landlubbers, Henry James and Anatole France, as though they were bluff sea dogs who had brought their books to port without compasses in a gale of wind.”
“Certainly he was a strange apparition to descend upon these shores in the last part of the nineteenth century — an artist, an aristocrat, a Pole,” said David. “For after all these years I cannot think of him as an English writer. He is too formal, too courteous, too scrupulous in the use of a language which is not his own. Then of course he is an aristocrat to the backbone. His humour is aristocratic — ironic, sardonic, never broad and free like the common English humour which descends from Falstaff. He is infinitely reserved. And the lack of intimacy which I complain of may perhaps be due, not merely to those ‘august abstractions’ as you call them, but to the fact that there are no women in his books.”
“There are the ships, the beautiful ships,” said Penelope. “They are more feminine than his women, who are either mountains of marble or the dreams of a charming boy over the photograph of an actress. But surely a great novel can be made out of a man and a ship, a man and a storm, a man and death and dishonour?”
“Ah, we are back at the question of greatness,” said David. “Which, then, is the great book, where, as you say, the complex vision becomes simple, and Marlow and the sea captain combine to produce a world at once exquisitely subtle, psychologically profound, yet based upon a very few simple ideas ‘so simple that they must be as old as the hills’?”
“I have just read Chance,’” said Penelope. “It is a great book, I think. But now you will have to read it yourself, for you are not going to accept my word, especially when it is a word which I cannot define. It is a great book, a great book,” she repeated.
The Cosmos
AND what is Cosmos, Mr. Sanderson?’ asks Sister Edith. ‘What is the meaning of the word?’ And then I go off like a rocket and explode in stars in the empyrean.” These two large volumes are full of the sparks that fell from that constantly recurring explosion. For Mr. Cobden-Sanderson was always trying to explain to somebody — it might be Professor Tyndall (“I gave him my own view of human destiny, namely, the ultimate coalescence of the human intellect in knowledge with its other self, the Universe”), it might be Mr. Churchill, it might be a strange lady whose motor-car had broken down on the road near Malvern — what the word Cosmos meant. He had learned gradually and painfully himself. For at first the world seemed to him to have no order whatsoever. Everything was wrong. It was wrong for him to become a clergyman; it was wrong to take a degree; it was wrong to remain at the Bar. It was wrong that he, who had three dress-suits already, should order another from Poole and pay for it with his wife’s money. But what then was right? That was by no means so apparent. “What was I to do?” he asked himself at three o’clock in the morning in the year 1882, “aching with exhaustion and nervous horror.” Ought he to live in Poplar and work among the poor? Ought he to devote his life to the work of the Charity Organization Society? What ought he to give in return for all that he received? For some time — and the candour with which these private struggles are laid bare is no small part of the deep interest of these diaries — he vacillated and procrastinated and drank beef-tea at eleven o’clock in the morning. Lady Carlisle accused him of “dreamy egotism”. His doctor laughed at his concern for his health. His father was deeply disappointed that he should give up the Bar — and for what? His wife confessed that when she read “what I wrote about the mountains, and repeated little phrases, she thought me, and had always thought me at such moments, quite a lunatic!” But once in his early distress he had found that life became suddenly “rounded off and whole” by a very simple expedient; he had bought a gridiron and cooked a chop. Now, several years later, relief began to filter through from the same channels. Since he enjoyed using his hands, said Mrs. Morris when he consulted her, why should he not learn to bind books? He took lessons at once, and became, with a speed which astonished him, capable of making “something beautiful and as far as human things can be, permanent.” It was an astonishing relief from attending to the affairs of the London and North Western Railway Company. But the Book Beautiful, as he called it, though tooled magnificently and bound in rose-red morocco, was not an end in itself. It was only a humble beginning — something well-made which served to put his own mind and body in order and so in harmony with the greater order which he was beginning, as he pared and gilded, to perceive transcending all human affairs. For there was a unity of the whole in which the virtues and even the vices of mankind were caught up and put to their proper uses. Once attain to that vision, and all things fell into their places. From that vantage ground the white butterfly caught in the spider’s net was “all in the world’s plan” and Englishmen and Germans blowing each other’s heads off in the trenches were “brothers not enemies” conspiring to “create the great emotions which in turn create the greater creation.” To envisage this whole and to make the binding of books and the printing of books and everything one did and said and felt further this end was work enough for one lifetime.
But in addition, Mr. Cobden-Sanderson felt the inevitable desire to explain the meaning of the word Cosmos to all and sundry, to Sister Edith and to Professor Tyndall. The volumes are full of attempts at explanation. He was not quite certain what he meant; nevertheless he must “repeat and repeat” and so “get relief.” He laboured, too, under a groundless fear that he might catch the contagion of Jane Austen’s style. Instead of becoming clearer, therefore, the vision, iterated and reiterated, becomes more and more nebulous, until after two volumes of explanation we are left asking, with Sister Edith: “But, Mr. Sanderson, how does one ‘fly to the great Rhythm’? What is the extraordinary ring of harmony within harmony that encircles us; what reason is there to suppose that a mountain wishes us well or that a lake has a profound moral meaning to impart? What, in short, does the word Cosmos mean?” Whereupon the rocket explodes, and the red and gold showers descend, and we look on with sympathy, but feel a little chill about the feet and not very clear as to the direction of the road.
But the man himself, who sent his rockets soaring into such incongruous places (he would write a letter about the Ideal to The Times) is neither vapid nor insipid nor wrapped round, as so many idealists tend to become, in comfortable cotton wool. On the contrary, he was for ever being stung and taunted, as he carried on his business of bookbinder and printer, by the uncompromising creature who was perched upon his shoulders. There were days when the gold would not stick on his lettering; days when on “turning the leather down at the headb
and I found it too short.” Then he flew into a passion of rage, “tore the leather off the board, and cut it, and cut it, and slashed it with a knife.” I did this, he reflected the next moment, I who have seen the vision can yet fall into ecstasies of vulgar anger! The vision forced him to test everything by its light, no matter what the effort, the unpopularity, the despondency it caused. What did the Coronation mean? he asked. What did the Boer War mean? Nothing could be taken for granted.
But by degrees the ideal got the upper hand. The sense of reality grew fainter. Often he seemed to be passing out of the body into a trance of thought. “ I think I am more related to the hills and the streams... than to men and women,” he wrote. He roamed off among the mountains to dream and worship. He felt that his part was no longer among the fighters but among the dreamers. Now and then, chiefly in the Swiss chalet of Lady Russell, he came down to dinner dressed in a dressing-gown, with a brush and comb bag on his head, housemaid’s gloves on his hands, holding a fan, and was “very merry”. But his sense of humour seems to have been suffocated by the effort which he made persistently to “overcome the ordinariness of ordinary life”. The cat was wonderful, and the moon; the charwoman and the oak tree; the bread and the butter; the night and the stars. Everything seems to suffer a curious magnification. Nothing exists in itself but only as a means to something else. The solid objects of daily life become rimmed with high purposes, significant, symbolical. The people who drift through these diaries — even Swinburne and Morris — have become curiously thin; we see the stars shining through their backbones. It is in no way incongruous or surprising then to find him in his old age slipping off secretly on dark nights to the river. In his hand he carried a mysterious box swathed round with tape. Looking round him to see that he was not observed, he pitched his burden over the parapet into the water. It was thus that he bequeathed the Doves Type to the river; thus that he saved the ideal from desecration. But one night he missed his aim. Two pages wrapped in white paper lodged upon a ledge above the stream. He could see them, but he could not reach them. What was he to do? he asked himself, in bewilderment and amazement. The authorities might send for him; he might be cross-examined. Well, so be it. If they asked him to explain himself he would “take refuge in the infinitudes”. “My idea was magnificent; the act was ridiculous,” he said. “Besides,” he reflected, “nothing was explicable.” And perhaps he was right.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 457
