A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose, is an attitude and an achievement that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.

How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole France, when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier ready to die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe." And he goes on:

He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect, to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with an anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais.

Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did not, however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he was more nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and his love of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in the cafes. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even better than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood and attitude in the fine essay called On Saying Good-bye. Meditating on life as "a sustained good-bye," he writes:

Life is a cheap table d'hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of Hamlet, over corpses piled up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not in his leaning out to new things—that may be mere curiosity—but in his power to abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of adieus.

This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the old moods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in whom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once saying, in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own "power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the story of a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the bud, and the fruit to the flower." Though he rejoiced in change as a politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a philosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from is the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman—

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end"—

the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been," wrote Pascal, "there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever." Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, a Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?

There you have a passage which, in the light of events, seems strangely prophetic. Kettle certainly got his "good lines" at Ginchy. He gave his life greatly for his ideal of a free Ireland in a free Europe.

This suggests that underlying his Hamlet there was a man of action as surely as there was a jester. He was a man with a genius for rising to the occasion—for saying the fine word and doing the fine thing. He compromised often, in accordance with his "realistic" view of things; but he never compromised in his belief in the necessity of large and European ideals in Ireland. He stood by all good causes, not as an extremist, but as a helper somewhat disillusioned. But his disillusionment never made him feeble in the middle of the fight. He was the sworn foe of the belittlers of Ireland. One will get an idea of the passion with which he fought for the traditional Ireland, as well as for the Ireland of coming days, if one turns to his rhymed reply to a living English poet who had urged the Irish to forget their history and gently cease to be a nation. The last lines of this poem—Reason in Rhyme, as he called it—are his testament to England no less than his call to Europeanism is his testament to Ireland:

Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease: Free, we are free to be your friend. And when you make your banquet, and we come. Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, Closing a battle, not forgetting it. With not a name to hide, This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead Must come with all her history on her head. We keep the past for pride: No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb: No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers, No rudest men who died To tear your flag down in the bitter years. But shall have praise, and three times thrice again, When at the table men shall drink with men.

That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made him regard with such horror the execution of Pearse and Connolly, and the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men as having all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedom of Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessed the right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington, who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imagination from which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to me from France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror." When I saw him in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Week and its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have been exaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from the last, or all but the last, of his letters home:

We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think that the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them—one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades.

There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the "good lines" that Kettle had always desired.



XXIV

MR. J.C. SQUIRE

It would not have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievement of Mr. Squire as a poet. He laboured under the disadvantage of being also a wit. It used to be said of Ibsen that a Pegasus had once been shot under him, and one was alarmed lest the reverse of this was about to happen to Mr. Squire, and lest a writer who began in the gaiety of the comic spirit should end soberly astride Pegasus. When, in Tricks of the Trade, he announced that he was going to write no more parodies, one had a depressed feeling that he was about to give up to poetry what was meant for mankind. Yet, on reading Mr. Squire's collected poems in Poems: First Series, it is difficult not to admit that it was to write serious verse even more than parody and political epigram that he was born.

He has arranged the poems in the book in the order of their composition, so that we can follow the development of his powers and see him, as it were, learning to fly. To read him is again and again to be reminded of Donne. Like Donne, he is largely self-occupied, examining the horrors of his own soul, overburdened at times with thought, an intellect at odds with the spirit. Like Donne, he will have none of the merely poetic, either in music or in imagery. He beats out a music of his own and he beats out an imagery of his own. In his early work, this sometimes resulted in his poems being unable to rise far from the ground. They seemed to be labouring on unaccustomed wings towards the ether. What other living poet has ever given a poem such a title as Antinomies on a Railway Station? What other has examined himself with the same X-rays sort of realism as Mr. Squire has done in The Mind of Man? The latter, like many of Mr. Squire's poems, is an expression of fastidious disgust with life. The early Mr. Squire was a master of disgust, and we see the same mood dominant even in the Ode: In a Restaurant, where the poet suddenly breaks out:—

Soul! This life is very strange, And circumstances very foul Attend the belly's stormy howl.

The ode, however, is not merely, or even primarily, an expression of disgust. Here, too, we see Mr. Squire's passion for romance and energy. Here, too, we see him as a fisherman of strange imagery, as when he describes the sounds of the restaurant band as they float in upon him from another room and die again:—

Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a glass Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pass.

The Ode: In a Restaurant is perhaps the summit of Mr. Squire's writing as a poet at odds with himself, a poet who floats above the obscene and dull realities of every day, "like a draggled seagull over dreary flats of mud." He has already escaped into bluer levels in the poem, On a friend Recently Dead, written in the same or the following year. Here he ceases to be a poet floating and bumping against a ceiling. He is now ranging the heaven of the emancipated poets. Even when he writes of the common and prosaic things he now charges them with significance for the emotions. He is no longer a satirist and philosopher, but a lover. How well he conjures up the picture of the room in which his friend used to sit and talk:—

Capricious friend! Here in this room, not long before the end, Here in this very room six months ago You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so. Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough, You saw books, pictures, as I see them now. The sofa then was blue, the telephone Listened upon the desk and softly shone Even as now the fire-irons in the grate, And the little brass pendulum swung, a seal of fate Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying ... And then you never had a thought of dying.

How much richer, too, by this time Mr. Squire's imagery has become! His observation is both exact and imaginative when he notes how—

the frail ash-tree hisses With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

Elsewhere in the same poem Mr. Squire has given us a fine new image of the brevity of man's life:—

And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones, Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over.

It was not, however, till The Lily of Malud appeared that readers of poetry in general realized that Mr. Squire was a poet of the imagination even more than of the intellect. This is a flower that has blossomed out of the vast swamps of the anthropologists. It is the song of the ritual of initiation. Mr. Squire's power in the sphere both of the grotesque and of lovely imagery is revealed in the triumphant close of this poem:—

And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting gods of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see.

But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies. And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green: A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour, Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen: Something holy in the past that came and did not last, But she knows not what it was.

It is easy to see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finally from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned to express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted in his nerves by the ugliness of circumstances. Not that he has shut himself up in an enchanted world: he still remains a poet of this agonizing earth. In The Stronghold he summons up a vision of "easeful death," only to turn aside from it as Christian turned aside from the temptations on his way:—

But, O, if you find that castle, Draw back your foot from the gateway, Let not its peace invite you, Let not its offerings tempt you, For faded and decayed like a garment, Love to a dust will have fallen, And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, And hope will have gone with pain; And of all the throbbing heart's high courage Nothing will remain.

And these later poems are not only nobler in passion than the early introspective work; they are also more moving. Few of the "in memoriam" poems of the war touch the heart as does that poem, To a Bulldog, with its moving close:—

And though you run expectant as you always do To the uniforms we meet, You will never find Willy among all the soldiers Even in the longest street.

Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought, Even now were the old words said, If I tried the old trick, and said "Where's Willy?" You would quiver and lift your head.

And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious, And wait for the word to spring. Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again, You innocent old thing.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa, While you lie there asleep on the floor; For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of, And he won't be coming here any more.

Of the new poems in the book, one of the most beautiful is August Moon. The last verses provide an excellent example of Mr. Squire's gift both as a painter of things and a creator of atmosphere:—

A golden half-moon in the sky, and broken gold in the water.

In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold: Three or four little plates of gold on the river: A little motion of gold between the dark images Of two tall posts that stand in the grey water. A woman's laugh and children going home. A whispering couple, leaning over the railings, And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in.

I have always known all this, it has always been, There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change.

I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.

Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low sound Like the constant shutting of very distant doors.

Doors that are letting people over there Out to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit world and the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, been suggested so expressively in any other poem.

Now that these poems have been collected into a single volume it is possible to measure the author's stature. His book will, I believe, come as a revelation to the majority of readers. A poet of original music, of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has now taken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day. Poems: First Series, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can no longer regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to the brilliant lighter-hearted moods of Steps to Parnassus and Tricks of the Trade. He has brought us gifts better even than those.



XXV

R. JOSEPH CONRAD

1. THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR

Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He has called himself "the most unliterary of writers." He did not even begin to write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like to be more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt as to the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his brief critical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December, 1857; the Encyclopaedia Britannica says 1856; Mr. Conrad himself declares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old or thereabouts" in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer 1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up without any impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse in his teens. Before he began to write Almayer's Folly he "had written nothing but letters and not very many of these." "I never," he declares, "made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life. The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those precious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and immobility of a daydream."

At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage or pedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a man of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance with English literature began at the age of eight with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us a picture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a white border in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's study chair, "with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the pile of loose pages." While he was still a boy he read Hugo and Don Quixote and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel. He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even in his childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every human being, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No passage in his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly as that in which he writes: "It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I grow up I shall go there.'" Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regard Heart of Darkness as his greatest story. Heart of Darkness surely began to be written on the day on which the boy of nine "or thereabouts" put his finger on the blank space of the map of Africa and prophesied.

He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny. Mr. Conrad has never been in a hurry, even in telling a story. He has waited on fate rather than run to meet it. "I was never," he declares, "one of those wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a washtub for the sake of the fun." On the other hand, he seems always to have followed in his own determined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals and saints do. Alexander or Napoleon could not have seized the future with a more splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad, when, though he did not yet know six words of English, he came to the resolve: "If a seaman, then an English seaman." He has always been obedient to a star. He likes to picture himself as a lazy creature, but he is really one of the most dogged day-labourers who have ever served literature. In Typhoon and Youth he has written of the triumph of the spirit of man over tempest and fire. We may see in these stories not only the record of Mr. Conrad's twenty years' toil as a seaman, but the image of his desperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue. "Line by line," he writes, "rather than page by page, was the growth of Almayer's Folly." He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow. He speaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginative writer even more than of the manual labourer. "I have," he adds, "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." He declares, indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative writing is "something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn." This is to make the profession of literature a branch of the heroic life. And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as a Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one who had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it is true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand tragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. In The End of the Tether, in Freya of the Seven Isles, in Victory, it is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the ruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as in Samson Agonistes, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us utterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness; Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage never to submit or yield." Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living rivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line—are not all these fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories is always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not been so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As it is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he published Chance that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober," and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety—"asceticism of sentiment," he calls it—in his literary work as at sea. He has been compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of Dostoevsky—an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky did for strange demons and goblins—that population of grotesque characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature. That is why one reads the volume called Youth for the third and fourth time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.



2. TALES OF MYSTERY

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light—a little light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that. With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana" which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master—his master, at least, in the art of the long novel—Henry James. I do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like Chance, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a ghost story, however—and The Turn of the Screw is one of the great ghost stories of literature—he remains supremely master of his materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart and compass.

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's Under Western Eyes, for instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive. To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets—often from the depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in Heart of Darkness is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel—the daughter of the defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine of Chance—he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"—so the narrator of Chance begins one of his sentences; and it is not in the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny—when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories Typhoon and The Secret Sharer, the latter of which appeared in the volume called 'Twixt Land and Sea. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house in Kidnapped. In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. Typhoon was, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—let us not shrink from praise—one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.

He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."

And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right."

Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in The Secret Sharer in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the "tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than in Typhoon. It is a study in eccentric human relations—the relations between the captain and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal—an ironic fable of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship in order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in Freya of the Seven Isles and elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin—tragic ruin against which no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy of the high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider till the bitter end. His Youth is just such a comedy of the peacockry of adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.

All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated the flesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not want to give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manly men as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us the complete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering characters in them. In reading such a book as Under Western Eyes we feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it has not been used to spell a magnificent man.

Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out as awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody discovered it. In Chance and Lord Jim he is not content to tell us a straightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by which it was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us the feeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas and harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of reconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired of the thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That is why some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They are books of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is by the way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramatic writing, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of an epic of description.

Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most people in believing, in three of his volumes of short stories—in Typhoon, Youth, and 'Twixt Land and Sea. His fame will, I imagine, rest chiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests on their shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance—written in terms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has written little epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which are unique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature.



XXVI

MR. RUDYARD KIPLING

1. THE GOOD STORY-TELLER

Mr. Kipling is an author whom one has loved and hated a good deal. One has loved him as the eternal schoolboy revelling in smells and bad language and dangerous living. One has loved him less, but one has at least listened to him, as the knowing youth who could tell one all about the ladies of Simla. One has found him rather adorable as the favourite uncle with the funny animal stories. One has been amazed by his magnificent make-believe as he has told one about dim forgotten peoples that have disappeared under the ground. One has detested him, on the other hand, as the evangelist with the umbrella—the little Anglo-Indian Prussian who sing hymns of hate and Hempire.

Luckily, this last Kipling is allowed an entirely free voice only in verse. If one avoids Barrack Room Ballads and The Seven Seas, one misses the worst of him. He visits the prose stories, too, it is true, but he does not dominate them in the same degree. Prose is his easy chair, in which his genius as a humorist and anecdotalist can expand. Verse is a platform that tempts him at one moment into the performance of music-hall turns and the next into stump orations the spiritual home of which is Hyde Park Corner rather than Parnassus. Recessional surprises one like a noble recantation of nearly all the other verse Mr. Kipling has written. But, apart from Recessional, most of his political verse is a mere quickstep of bragging and sneering.

His prose, certainly, stands a third or a fourth reading, as his verse does not. Even in a world which Henry James and Mr. Conrad have taught to study motives and atmospheres with an almost scientific carefulness, Mr. Kipling's "well-hammered anecdotes," as Mr. George Moore once described the stories, still refuse to bore us.

At the same time, they make a different appeal to us from their appeal of twenty or twenty-five years ago. In the early days, we half-worshipped Mr. Kipling because he told us true stories. Now we enjoy him because he tells us amusing stories. He conquered us at first by making us think him a realist. He was the man who knew. We listened to him like children drinking in travellers' tales. He bluffed us with his cocksure way of talking about things, and by addressing us in a mysterious jargon which we regarded as a proof of his intimacy with the barrack-room, the engine-room, the racecourse, and the lives of generals, Hindus, artists, and East-enders. That was Mr. Kipling's trick. He assumed the realistic manner as Jacob assumed the hairy hands of Esau. He compelled us to believe him by describing with elaborate detail the setting of his story. And, having once got us in the mood of belief, he proceeded to spin a yarn that as often as not was as unlike life as A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. His characters are inventions, not portraits. Even the dialects they speak—dialects which used to be enthusiastically spoken of as masterly achievements of realism—are ludicrously false to life, as a page of Mulvaney's or Ortheris's talk will quickly make clear to any one who knows the real thing. But with what humour the stories are told! Mr. Kipling does undoubtedly possess the genius of humour and energy. There are false touches in the boys' conversation in The Drums of the Fore and Aft, but the humour and energy with which the progress of the regiment to the frontier, its disgrace and its rescue by the drunken children, are described, make it one of the most admirable short stories of our time.

His humour, it must be admitted, is akin to the picaresque. It is amusing to reflect as one looks round the disreputable company of Mr. Kipling's characters, that his work has now been given a place in the library of law and order. When Stalky and Co. was published, parents and schoolmasters protested in alarm, and it seemed doubtful for a time whether Mr. Kipling was to be reckoned among the enemies of society. If I am not mistaken, The Spectator came down on the side of Mr. Kipling, and his reputation as a respectable author was saved.

But the parents and the schoolmasters were not nervous without cause. Mr. Kipling is an anarchist in his preferences to a degree that no bench of bishops could approve. He is, within limits, on the side of the Ishmaelites—the bad boys of the school, the "rips" of the regiment. His books are the praise of the Ishmaelitish life in a world of law and order. They are seldom the praise of a law and order life in a world of law and order. Mr. Kipling demands only one loyalty (beyond mutual loyalty) from his characters. His schoolboys may break every rule in the place, provided that somewhere deep down in their hearts they are loyal to the "Head." His pet soldiers may steal dogs or get drunk, or behave brutally to their heart's content, on condition that they cherish a sentimental affection for the Colonel. Critics used to explain this aspect of Mr. Kipling's work by saying that he likes to show the heart of good in things evil. But that is not really a characteristic of his work. What he is most interested in is neither good nor evil but simply roguery. As an artist, he is a barn rebel and lover of mischief. As a politician he is on the side of the judges and the lawyers. It was his politics and not his art that ultimately made him the idol of the genteel world.



2. THE POET OF LIFE WITH A CAPITAL HELL

Everybody who is older than a schoolboy remembers how Mr. Rudyard Kipling was once a modern. He might, indeed, have been described at the time as a Post-Imperialist. Raucous and young, he had left behind him the ornate Imperialism of Disraeli, on the one hand, and the cultured Imperialism of Tennyson, on the other. He sang of Imperialism as it was, or was about to be—vulgar and canting and bloody—and a world that was preparing itself for an Imperialism that would be vulgar and canting and bloody bade him welcome. In one breath he would give you an invocation to Jehovah. In the next, with a dig in the ribs, he would be getting round the roguish side of you with the assurance that:—

If you've ever stole a pheasant-egg behind the keeper's back, If you've ever snigged the washin' from the line, If you've ever crammed a gander in your bloomin' 'aversack, You will understand this little song o' mine.

This jumble—which seems so curious nowadays—of delight in piety and delight in twopence-coloured mischiefs came as a glorious novelty and respite to the oppressed race of Victorians. Hitherto they had been building up an Empire decently and in order; no doubt, many reprehensible things were being done, but they were being done quietly: outwardly, so far as was possible, a respectable front was preserved. It was Mr. Kipling's distinction to tear off the mask of Imperialism as a needless and irritating encumbrance; he had too much sense of reality—too much humour, indeed—to want to portray Empire-builders as a company of plaster saints. Like an enfant terrible, he was ready to proclaim aloud a host of things which had, until then, been kept as decorously in the dark as the skeleton in the family cupboard. The thousand and one incidents of lust and loot, of dishonesty and brutality and drunkenness—all of those things to which builders of Empire, like many other human beings, are at times prone—he never dreamed of treating as matters to be hushed up, or, apparently, indeed, to be regretted. He accepted them quite frankly as all in the day's work; there was even a suspicion of enthusiasm in the heartiness with which he referred to them. Simple old clergymen, with a sentimental vision of an Imperialism that meant a chain of mission-stations (painted red) encircling the earth, suddenly found themselves called upon to sing a new psalm:—

Ow, the loot! Bloomin' loot! That's the thing to make the boys git up an' shoot! It's the same with dogs an' men, If you'd make 'em come again. Clap 'em forward with a Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Whoopee! Tear 'im, puppy! Loo! Loo! Lulu! Loot! Loot! Loot!

Frankly, I wish Mr. Kipling had always written in this strain. It might have frightened the clergymen away. Unfortunately, no sooner had the old-fashioned among his readers begun to show signs of nervousness than he would suddenly feel in the mood for a tune on his Old Testament harp, and, taking it down, would twang from its strings a lay of duty. "Take up," he would sing—

Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild— Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to the new music—music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in The Ballad of "The Bolivar," which runs—

Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell—rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant. It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what delight they would quote the verse:—

So I'll meet 'im later on, At the place where 'e is gone— Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 'E'll be squattin' on the coals, Givin' drink to poor damned souls. An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.

Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity,

began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven men from out of Hell" who went

Rolling down the Ratcliff Road, Drunk, and raising Cain,

were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One even wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture oneself as

Cursed with the curse of Reuben, Seared with the brand of Cain,

though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion against conventions and orthodoxies.

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of his time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not stay at home—the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a thousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited the imagination of youth with deft questions such as—

Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade— Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?

If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wet bamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant; and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go—go—go away from here." Hence an immense increase in the number of passages booked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a gorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his call to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking "shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room, the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of omniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of the Anchor Song, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:—

Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her! Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall! Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy. Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!

Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us, Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free, And its blowing up for night. And she's dropping light on light, And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.

The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not only omniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. He even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships, but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of his verse—not very much, to be quite fair—absolutely detestable. The Ladies seems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in our time. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr. Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair to saddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women which appears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of a kind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one reads The Young British Soldier, with a verse like—

If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loth To shoot when you catch 'em—you'll swing, on my oath!— Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both, And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.

That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logical result of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is a mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:—

Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro— And what should they know of England who only England know? The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.

The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.



XXVII

MR. THOMAS HARDY

1. HIS GENIUS AS A POET

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the opinion of some, is greater as a poet than as a novelist. That is one of the mild heresies in which the amateur of letters loves to indulge. It has about as much truth in it as the statement that Milton was greater as a controversialist than as a poet, or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy has undoubtedly made an original contribution to the poetry of his time. But he has given us no verse that more than hints at the height and depth of the tragic vision which is expressed in Jude the Obscure. He is not by temperament a singer. His music is a still small voice unevenly matched against his consciousness of midnight and storm. It is a flutter of wings in the rain over a tomb. His sense of beauty is frail and midge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. The conceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than the conceptions in his verse. In Tess and Jude destiny presides with something of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except in The Dynasts and a few of the lyrics, there is none of this brooding majesty in his verse. And even in The Dynasts, majestic as the scheme of it is, there seems to me to be more creative imagination in the prose passages than in the poetry.

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate nor sufficiently fastidious to be a great poet. He does not express life easily in beautiful words or in images. There is scarcely a magical image in the hundred or so poems in the book of his selected verse. Thus he writes in I Found Her Out There of one who:—

would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonesse As a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail.

There could not be an uglier and more prosaic exaggeration than is contained in the image in the last line. And prose intrudes in the choice of words as well as in images. Take, for example, the use of the word "domiciled" in the passage in the same poem about—

that western sea, As it swells and sobs, Where she once domiciled.

There are infelicities of the same kind in the first verse of the poem called At an Inn:—

When we, as strangers, sought Their catering care, Veiled smiles bespoke their thought Of what we were.

They warmed as they opined Us more than friends— That we had all resigned For love's dear ends.

"Catering care" is an appalling phrase.

I do not wish to over-emphasize the significance of flaws of this kind. But, at a time when all the world is eager to do honour to Mr. Hardy's poems, it is surely well to refrain from doing equal honour to his faults. We shall not appreciate the splendid interpretation of earth in The Return of the Native more highly for persuading ourselves that:—

Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth,

is a line of good poetry. Similarly the critic, if he is to enjoy the best of Mr. Hardy, must also be resolute not to shut his eyes to the worst in such a verse as that with which A Broken Appointment begins:—

You did not come, And marching time drew on, and wore me numb,— Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving kindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come.

There are hints of the grand style of lyric poetry in these lines, but phrases like "in your make" and "as the hope-hour stroked its sum" are discords that bring it tumbling to the levels of Victorian commonplace.

What one does bless Mr. Hardy for, however, both in his verse and in his prose, is his bleak sincerity. He writes out of the reality of his experience. He has a temperament sensitive beyond that of all but a few recent writers to the pain and passion of human beings. Especially is he sensitive to the pain and passion of frustrated lovers. At least half his poems, I fancy, are poems of frustration. And they, hold us under the spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour's house, even when they leave us most mournful over the emptiness of the world. One can see how very mournful Mr. Hardy's genius is if one compares it with that of Browning, his master in the art of the dramatic lyric. Browning is also a poet of frustrated lovers. One can remember poem after poem of his with a theme that might easily have served for Mr. Hardy—Too Late, Cristina, The Lost Mistress, The Last Ride Together, The Statue and the Bust, to name a few. But what a sense of triumph there is in Browning's tragedies! Even when he writes of the feeble-hearted, as in The Statue and the Bust, he leaves us with the feeling that we are in the presence of weakness in a world in which courage prevails. His world is a place of opulence, not of poverty. Compare The Last Ride Together with Mr. Hardy's The Phantom Horsewoman, and you will see a vast energy and beauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is little but a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning to live for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have loved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened the sadness even more than the beauty of one's memories.

Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly supposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the grave-worm. His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but it is never extinguished. His beautiful lyric, I Look into my Glass, is the cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:—

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say: "Would God, it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest, By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning's "All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee"; but it is also far removed from the "Lo! you may always end it where you will" of The City of Dreadful Night. And despair is by no means triumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy's poems, The Oxen:—

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock, "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If some one said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

The mood of faith, however—or, rather, of delight in the memory of faith—is not Mr. Hardy's prevailing mood. At the same time, his unfaith relates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny. He believes in "the world's amendment." He can enter upon a war without ironical doubts, as we see in the song Men who March Away. More than this, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotism of the world. "How long," he cries, in a poem written some years ago:—

How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels, Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, That are as puppets in a playing hand? When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land, And Patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

But, perhaps, his characteristic attitude to war is to be found, not in lines like these, but in that melancholy poem, The Souls of the Slain, in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country and question a "senior soul-flame" as to how their friends and relatives have kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:—

"And, General, how hold out our sweethearts, Sworn loyal as doves?" "Many mourn; many think It is not unattractive to prink Them in sable for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts Have found them new loves."

"And our wives?" quoth another, resignedly, "Dwell they on our deeds?" "Deeds of home; that live yet Fresh as new—deeds of fondness or fret, Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly, These, these have their heeds."

Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the glory of war. His imagination has always been curiously interested in soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military show. One has only to read The Dynasts along with Barrack-room Ballads to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude of the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician. Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and tobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is the world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous irrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in In the Time of the Breaking of Nations:—

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War's annals will fade into night Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about war are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love. Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers, like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers are always severed both in life and in death:—

Rain on the windows, creaking doors, With blasts that besom the green, And I am here, and you are there, And a hundred miles between!

In Beyond the Last Lamp we have the same mournful cry over severance. There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in the works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one may give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:—

When I re-trod that watery way Some hours beyond the droop of day, Still I found pacing there the twain Just as slowly, just as sadly, Heedless of the night and rain. One could but wonder who they were And what wild woe detained them there.

Though thirty years of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly, That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on— All but the couple; they have gone.

Whither? Who knows, indeed.... And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That love-lane does not exist. There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, while such a lane remain.

And death is no kinder than life to lovers:—

I shall rot here, with those whom in their day You never knew. And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay, Met not my view, Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and the mystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement. There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which "life with the sad, seared face" mirrors itself without disguise. They bring us face to face with an experience intenser than our own. There is nothing common in the tragic image of dullness in A Common-place Day:—

The day is turning ghost, And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively, To join the anonymous host Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe, To one of like degree....

Nothing of tiniest worth Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise, Since the pale corpse-like birth Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays— Dullest of dull-hued days!

Wanly upon the panes The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet Here, while Day's presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He wakens my regret.

In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom achieves music of phrase.

We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of his verse. On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant, more varied, more touched with humour. But his poems are the genuine confessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding not without bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave, and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.



2. A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, Moments of Vision, Mr. Hardy meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at one time or another. Afterwards, the poem in which he does so, is interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains implicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement in literature. The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say: "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own genius.

Mr. Hardy's genius is essentially that of a man who "used to notice such things" as the fluttering of the green leaves in May, and to whom the swift passage of a night-jar in the twilight has "been a familiar sight." He is one of the most sensitive observers of nature who have written English prose. It may even be that he will be remembered longer for his studies of nature than for his studies of human nature. His days are among his greatest characters, as in the wonderful scene on the heath in the opening of The Return of the Native. He would have written well of the world, one can imagine, even if he had found it uninhabited. But his sensitiveness is not merely sensitiveness of the eye: it is also sensitiveness of the heart. He has, indeed, that hypersensitive sort of temperament, as the verse about the hedgehog suggests, which is the victim at once of pity and of a feeling of hopeless helplessness. Never anywhere else has there been such a world of pity put into a quotation as Mr. Hardy has put into that line and a half from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which he placed on the title-page of Tess of the D'Urbervilles:—

Poor wounded name, my bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee!

In the use to which he put these words Mr. Hardy may be said to have added to the poetry of Shakespeare. He gave them a new imaginative context, and poured his own heart into them. For the same helpless pity which he feels for dumb creatures he feels for men and women:

... He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them.

It is the spirit of pity brooding over the landscape in Mr. Hardy's books that makes them an original and beautiful contribution to literature, in spite of his endless errors as an artist.

His last book is a reiteration both of his genius and of his errors. As we read the hundred and sixty or so poems it contains we get the impression of genius presiding over a multitude of errors. There are not half a dozen poems in the book the discovery of which, should the author's name be forgotten, would send the critics in quest of other work from the same magician's hand. One feels safe in prophesying immortality for only two, The Oxen and In Time of "the Breaking of Nations"; and these have already appeared in the selection of the author's poems published in the Golden Treasury Series. The fact that the entirely new poems contain nothing on the plane of immortality, however, does not mean that Moments of Vision is a book of verse about which one has the right to be indifferent. No writer who is so concerned as Mr. Hardy with setting down what his eyes and heart have told him can be regarded with indifference. Mr. Hardy's art is lame, but it carries the burden of genius. He may be a stammerer as a poet, but he stammers in words of his own concerning a vision of his own. When he notes the bird flying past in the dusk, "like an eyelid's soundless blink," he does not achieve music, but he chronicles an experience, not merely echoes one, with such exact truth as to make it immortally a part of all experience. There is nothing borrowed or secondhand, again, in Mr. Hardy's grim vision of the yew-trees in the churchyard by moonlight in Jubilate:

The yew-tree arms, glued hard to the stiff, stark air, Hung still in the village sky as theatre-scenes.

Mr. Hardy may not enable us to hear the music which is more than the music of the earth, but he enables us to see what he saw. He communicates his spectacle of the world. He builds his house lopsided, harsh, and with the windows in unusual places; but it is his own house, the house of a seer, of a personality. That is what we are aware of in such a poem as On Sturminster Foot Bridge, in which perfect and precise observation of nature is allied to intolerably prosaic utterance. The first verse of this poem runs:

Reticulations creep upon the slack stream's face When the wind skims irritably past. The current clucks smartly into each hollow place That years of flood have scrabbled in the pier's sodden base; The floating-lily leaves rot fast.

One could make as good music as that out of a milk-cart. One would accept such musicless verse only from a man of genius. But even here Mr. Hardy takes us home with him and makes us stand by his side and listen to the clucking stream. He takes us home with him again in the poem called Overlooking the River Stour, which begins:

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June's last beam: Like little crossbows animate, The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam.

Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout. And through the stream-shine ripped her way; Planing up shavings made of spray, A moor-hen darted out.

In this poem we find observation leaping into song in one line and hobbling into a hard-wrought image in another. Both the line in which the first appears, however—

Like little crossbows animate,

and the line in which the second happens—

Planing up shavings made of spray,

equally make us feel how watchful and earnest an observer is Mr. Hardy. He is a man, we realize, to whom bird and river, heath and stone, road and field and tree, mean immensely more than to his fellows. I do not suggest that he observes nature without bias—that he mirrors the procession of visible things with the delight of a child or a lyric poet. He makes nature his mirror as well as himself a mirror of nature. He colours it with all his sadness, his helplessness, his (if one may invent the word and use it without offence) warpedness. If I am not mistaken, he once compared a bleak morning in The Woodlanders to the face of a still-born baby. He loves to dwell on the uncomfortable moods of nature—on such things as:—

... the watery light Of the moon in its old age;

concerning which moon he goes on to describe how:

Green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past where mute and cold it globed Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave.

This, I fear, is a failure, but it is a failure in a common mood of the author's. It is a mood in which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous in its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr. Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him too often under—

Gaunt trees that interlace, Through whose flayed fingers I see too clearly The nakedness of the place.

And Mr. Hardy's vision of the life of men and women transgresses similarly into a denial of gladness. His gloom, we feel, goes too far. It goes so far that we are tempted at times to think of it as a factitious gloom. He writes a poem called Honeymoon Time at an Inn, and this is the characteristic atmosphere in which he introduces us to the bridegroom and bride:

At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, The moon was at the window-square, Deedily brooding in deformed decay— The curve hewn off her cheek as by an adze; At the shiver of morning, a little before the false dawn, So the moon looked in there.

There are no happy lovers or happy marriages in Mr. Hardy's world. Such people as are happy would not be happy if only they knew the truth. Many of Mr. Hardy's poems are, as I have already said, dramatic lyrics on the pattern invented by Robert Browning—short stories in verse. But there is a certain air of triumph even in Browning's tragic figures. Mr. Hardy's figures are the inmates of despair. Browning's love-poems belong to heroic literature. Mr. Hardy's love-poems belong to the literature of downheartedness. Browning's men and women are men and women who have had the courage of their love, or who are shown at least against a background of Browning's own courage. Mr. Hardy's men and women do not know the wild faith of love. They have not the courage even of their sins. They are helpless as fishes in a net—a scarcely rebellious population of the ill-matched and the ill-starred.

Many of the poems in his last book fail through a lack of imaginative energy. It is imaginative energy that makes the reading of a great tragedy like King Lear not a depressing, but an exalting experience. But is there anything save depression to be got from reading such a poem as A Caged Goldfinch:—

Within a churchyard, on a recent grave, I saw a little cage That jailed a goldfinch. All was silence, save Its hops from stage to stage.

There was inquiry in its wistful eye. And once it tried to sing; Of him or her who placed it there, and why, No one knew anything.

True, a woman was found drowned the day ensuing, And some at times averred The grave to be her false one's, who when wooing Gave her the bird.

Apart even from the ludicrous associations which modern slang has given the last phrase, making it look like a queer pun, this poem seems to one to drive sorrow over the edge of the ridiculous. That goldfinch has surely escaped from a Max-Beerbohm parody. The ingenuity with which Mr. Hardy plots tragic situations for his characters in some of his other poems is, indeed, in repeated danger of misleading him into parody. One of his poems tells, for instance, how a stranger finds an old man scrubbing a Statue of Liberty in a city square, and, hearing he does it for love, hails him as "Liberty's knight divine." The old man confesses that he does not care twopence for Liberty, and declares that he keeps the statue clean in memory of his beautiful daughter, who had sat as a model for it—a girl fair in fame as in form. In the interests of his plot and his dismal philosophy, Mr. Hardy identifies the stranger with the sculptor of the statue, and dismisses us with his blighting aside on the old man's credulous love of his dead daughter:

Answer I gave not. Of that form The carver was I at his side; His child my model, held so saintly, Grand in feature. Gross in nature, In the dens of vice had died.

This is worse than optimism.

It is only fair to say that, though poem after poem—including the one about the fat young man whom the doctors gave only six months to live unless he walked a great deal, and who therefore was compelled to refuse a drive in the poet's phaeton, though night was closing over the heath—dramatizes the meaningless miseries of life, there is also to be found in some of the poems a faint sunset-glow of hope, almost of faith. There have been compensations, we realize in I Travel as a Phantom Now, even in this world of skeletons. Mr. Hardy's fatalism concerning God seems not very far from faith in God in that beautiful Christmas poem, The Oxen. Still, the ultimate mood of the poems is not faith. It is one of pity, so despairing as to be almost nihilism. There is mockery in it without the merriment of mockery. The general atmosphere of the poems, it seems to me, is to be found perfectly expressed in the last three lines of one of the poems, which is about a churchyard, a dead woman, a living rival, and the ghost of a soldier:

There was a cry by the white-flowered mound, There was a laugh from underground, There was a deeper gloom around.

How much of the art of Thomas Hardy is suggested in those lines! The laugh from underground, the deeper gloom—are they not all but omnipresent throughout his later and greatest work? The war could not deepen such pessimism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Hardy's war poetry is more cheerful, because more heroic, than his poetry about the normal world. Destiny was already crueller than any war-lord. The Prussian, to such an imagination, could be no more than a fly—a poisonous fly—on the wheel of destiny's disastrous car.

THE END