Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (857 page)

My acquaintance with Stephen Crane was brought about by Mr. Pawling, partner in the publishing firm of Mr. William Heinemann.

One day Mr. Pawling said to me: “Stephen Crane has arrived in England.  I asked him if there was anybody he wanted to meet and he mentioned two names.  One of them was yours.”  I had then just been reading, like the rest of the world, Crane’s
Red Badge of Courage
.  The subject of that story was war, from the point of view of an individual soldier’s emotions.  That individual (he remains nameless throughout) was interesting enough in himself, but on turning over the pages of that little book which had for the moment secured such a noisy recognition I had been even more interested in the personality of the writer.  The picture of a simple and untried youth becoming through the needs of his country part of a great fighting machine was presented with an earnestness of purpose, a sense of tragic issues, and an imaginative force of expression which struck me as quite uncommon and altogether worthy of admiration.

Apparently Stephen Crane had received a favourable impression from the reading of the
Nigger of the Narcissus
, a book of mine which had also been published lately.  I was truly pleased to hear this.

On my next visit to town we met at a lunch.  I saw a young man of medium stature and slender build, with very steady, penetrating blue eyes, the eyes of a being who not only sees visions but can brood over them to some purpose.

He had indeed a wonderful power of vision, which he applied to the things of this earth and of our mortal humanity with a penetrating force that seemed to reach, within life’s appearances and forms, the very spirit of life’s truth.  His ignorance of the world at large — he had seen very little of it — did not stand in the way of his imaginative grasp of facts, events, and picturesque men.

His manner was very quiet, his personality at first sight interesting, and he talked slowly with an intonation which on some people, mainly Americans, had, I believe, a jarring effect.  But not on me.  Whatever he said had a personal note, and he expressed himself with a graphic simplicity which was extremely engaging.  He knew little of literature, either of his own country or of any other, but he was himself a wonderful artist in words whenever he took a pen into his hand.  Then his gift came out — and it was seen then to be much more than mere felicity of language.  His impressionism of phrase went really deeper than the surface.  In his writing he was very sure of his effects.  I don’t think he was ever in doubt about what he could do.  Yet it often seemed to me that he was but half aware of the exceptional quality of his achievement.

This achievement was curtailed by his early death.  It was a great loss to his friends, but perhaps not so much to literature.  I think that he had given his measure fully in the few books he had the time to write.  Let me not be misunderstood: the loss was great, but it was the loss of the delight his art could give, not the loss of any further possible revelation.  As to himself, who can say how much he gained or lost by quitting so early this world of the living, which he knew how to set before us in the terms of his own artistic vision?  Perhaps he did not lose a great deal.  The recognition he was accorded was rather languid and given him grudgingly.  The worthiest welcome he secured for his tales in this country was from Mr. W. Henley in the
New Review
and later, towards the end of his life, from the late Mr. William Blackwood in his magazine.  For the rest I must say that during his sojourn in England he had the misfortune to be, as the French say,
mal entouré
.  He was beset by people who understood not the quality of his genius and were antagonistic to the deeper fineness of his nature.  Some of them have died since, but dead or alive they are not worth speaking about now.  I don’t think he had any illusions about them himself: yet there was a strain of good-nature and perhaps of weakness in his character which prevented him from shaking himself free from their worthless and patronising attentions, which in those days caused me much secret irritation whenever I stayed with him in either of his English homes.  My wife and I like best to remember him riding to meet us at the gate of the Park at Brede.  Born master of his sincere impressions, he was also a born horseman.  He never appeared so happy or so much to advantage as on the back of a horse.  He had formed the project of teaching my eldest boy to ride, and meantime, when the child was about two years old, presented him with his first dog.

I saw Stephen Crane a few days after his arrival in London.  I saw him for the last time on his last day in England.  It was in Dover, in a big hotel, in a bedroom with a large window looking on to the sea.  He had been very ill and Mrs. Crane was taking him to some place in Germany, but one glance at that wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes.  The last words he breathed out to me were: “I am tired.  Give my love to your wife and child.”  When I stopped at the door for another look I saw that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring wistfully out of the window at the sails of a cutter yacht that glided slowly across the frame, like a dim shadow against the grey sky.

Those who have read his little tale, “Horses,” and the story, “The Open Boat,” in the volume of that name, know with what fine understanding he loved horses and the sea.  And his passage on this earth was like that of a horseman riding swiftly in the dawn of a day fated to be short and without sunshine.

TALES OF THE SEA — 1898

It is by his irresistible power to reach the adventurous side in the character, not only of his own, but of all nations, that Marryat is largely human.  He is the enslaver of youth, not by the literary artifices of presentation, but by the natural glamour of his own temperament.  To his young heroes the beginning of life is a splendid and warlike lark, ending at last in inheritance and marriage.  His novels are not the outcome of his art, but of his character, like the deeds that make up his record of naval service.  To the artist his work is interesting as a completely successful expression of an unartistic nature.  It is absolutely amazing to us, as the disclosure of the spirit animating the stirring time when the nineteenth century was young.  There is an air of fable about it.  Its loss would be irreparable, like the curtailment of national story or the loss of an historical document.  It is the beginning and the embodiment of an inspiring tradition.

To this writer of the sea the sea was not an element.  It was a stage, where was displayed an exhibition of valour, and of such achievement as the world had never seen before.  The greatness of that achievement cannot be pronounced imaginary, since its reality has affected the destinies of nations; nevertheless, in its grandeur it has all the remoteness of an ideal.  History preserves the skeleton of facts and, here and there, a figure or a name; but it is in Marryat’s novels that we find the mass of the nameless, that we see them in the flesh, that we obtain a glimpse of the everyday life and an insight into the spirit animating the crowd of obscure men who knew how to build for their country such a shining monument of memories.

Marryat is really a writer of the Service.  What sets him apart is his fidelity.  His pen serves his country as well as did his professional skill and his renowned courage.  His figures move about between water and sky, and the water and the sky are there only to frame the deeds of the Service.  His novels, like amphibious creatures, live on the sea and frequent the shore, where they flounder deplorably.  The loves and the hates of his boys are as primitive as their virtues and their vices.  His women, from the beautiful Agnes to the witch-like mother of Lieutenant Vanslyperken, are, with the exception of the sailors’ wives, like the shadows of what has never been.  His Silvas, his Ribieras, his Shriftens, his Delmars remind us of people we have heard of somewhere, many times, without ever believing in their existence.  His morality is honourable and conventional.  There is cruelty in his fun and he can invent puns in the midst of carnage.  His naïveties are perpetrated in a lurid light.  There is an endless variety of types, all surface, with hard edges, with memorable eccentricities of outline, with a childish and heroic effect in the drawing.  They do not belong to life; they belong exclusively to the Service.  And yet they live; there is a truth in them, the truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give.  His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious.  His greatness is undeniable.

It is undeniable.  To a multitude of readers the navy of to-day is Marryat’s navy still.  He has created a priceless legend.  If he be not immortal, yet he will last long enough for the highest ambition, because he has dealt manfully with an inspiring phase in the history of that Service on which the life of his country depends.  The tradition of the great past he has fixed in his pages will be cherished for ever as the guarantee of the future.  He loved his country first, the Service next, the sea perhaps not at all.  But the sea loved him without reserve.  It gave him his professional distinction and his author’s fame — a fame such as not often falls to the lot of a true artist.

At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, another man wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct.  He is not invincibly young and heroic; he is mature and human, though for him also the stress of adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage.  For James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential part of existence.  He could hear its voice, he could understand its silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception alone.  His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea.  But he loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding.  In his sea tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its immense solitudes.  His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon.  They embrace the colours of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise and the menace of the sea.

He knows the men and he knows the sea.  His method may be often faulty, but his art is genuine.  The truth is within him.  The road to legitimate realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that — only it is expressed in the leisurely manner of his time.  He has the knowledge of simple hearts.  Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the individuality of life and the significance of a type.  It is hard to believe that Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head, Captain Tuck of the packet-ship
Montauk
, or Daggett, the tenacious commander of the
Sea Lion
of Martha’s Vineyard, must pass away some day and be utterly forgotten.  His sympathy is large, and his humour is as genuine — and as perfectly unaffected — as is his art.  In certain passages he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.

He wrote before the great American language was born, and he wrote as well as any novelist of his time.  If he pitches upon episodes redounding to the glory of the young republic, surely England has glory enough to forgive him, for the sake of his excellence, the patriotic bias at her expense.  The interest of his tales is convincing and unflagging; and there runs through his work a steady vein of friendliness for the old country which the succeeding generations of his compatriots have replaced by a less definite sentiment.

Perhaps no two authors of fiction influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career.  Through the distances of space and time those two men of another race have shaped also the life of the writer of this appreciation.  Life is life, and art is art — and truth is hard to find in either.  Yet in testimony to the achievement of both these authors it may be said that, in the case of the writer at least, the youthful glamour, the headlong vitality of the one and the profound sympathy, the artistic insight of the other — to which he had surrendered — have withstood the brutal shock of facts and the wear of laborious years.  He has never regretted his surrender.

AN OBSERVER IN MALAYA
{3}
— 1898

In his new volume, Mr. Hugh Clifford, at the beginning of the sketch entitled “At the Heels of the White Man,” expresses his anxiety as to the state of England’s account in the Day-Book of the Recording Angel “for the good and the bad we have done — both with the most excellent intentions.”  The intentions will, no doubt, count for something, though, of course, every nation’s conquests are paved with good intentions; or it may be that the Recording Angel, looking compassionately at the strife of hearts, may disdain to enter into the Eternal Book the facts of a struggle which has the reward of its righteousness even on this earth — in victory and lasting greatness, or in defeat and humiliation.

And, also, love will count for much.  If the opinion of a looker-on from afar is worth anything, Mr. Hugh Clifford’s anxiety about his country’s record is needless.  To the Malays whom he governs, instructs, and guides he is the embodiment of the intentions, of the conscience and might of his race.  And of all the nations conquering distant territories in the name of the most excellent intentions, England alone sends out men who, with such a transparent sincerity of feeling, can speak, as Mr. Hugh Clifford does, of the place of toil and exile as “the land which is very dear to me, where the best years of my life have been spent” — and where (I would stake my right hand on it) his name is pronounced with respect and affection by those brown men about whom he writes.