Complete Works of Joseph Conrad (Illustrated) (859 page)

The author himself (I use his own words) “suspects” that what he has written “may be theology after all.”  It may be.  It is not my place either to allay or to confirm the author’s suspicion of his own work.  But I will state its main thesis: “That science regarded in the gross dictates the spirituality of man and strongly implies a spiritual destiny for individual human beings.”  This means: Existence after Death — that is, Immortality.

To find out its value you must go to the book.  But I will observe here that an Immortality liable at any moment to betray itself fatuously by the forcible incantations of Mr. Stead or Professor Crookes is scarcely worth having.  Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call of Eusapia Palladino?  That woman lives on the top floor of a Neapolitan house, and gets our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer, and die — she gets them to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a curtain.  This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one’s faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one would long to do.

And to believe that these manifestations, which the author evidently takes for modern miracles, will stay our tottering faith; to believe that the new psychology has, only the other day, discovered man to be a “spiritual mystery,” is really carrying humility towards that universal provider, Science, too far.

* * * * *

We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself.  It is not for nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the altar, murmurs, “Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?”  Since the day of Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the world.  What humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immortality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy on the Day of Judgment.

And, for the rest, during this transient hour of our pilgrimage, we may well be content to repeat the Invocation of Sar Peladan.  Sar Peladan was an occultist, a seer, a modern magician.  He believed in astrology, in the spirits of the air, in elves; he was marvellously and deliciously absurd.  Incidentally he wrote some incomprehensible poems and a few pages of harmonious prose, for, you must know, “a magician is nothing else but a great harmonist.”  Here are some eight lines of the magnificent Invocation.  Let me, however, warn you, strictly between ourselves, that my translation is execrable.  I am sorry to say I am no magician.

“O Nature, indulgent Mother, forgive!  Open your arms to the son, prodigal and weary.

“I have attempted to tear asunder the veil you have hung to conceal from us the pain of life, and I have been wounded by the mystery. . . . Œdipus, half way to finding the word of the enigma, young Faust, regretting already the simple life, the life of the heart, I come back to you repentant, reconciled, O gentle deceiver!”

THE ASCENDING EFFORT — 1910

Much good paper has been lamentably wasted to prove that science has destroyed, that it is destroying, or, some day, may destroy poetry.  Meantime, unblushing, unseen, and often unheard, the guileless poets have gone on singing in a sweet strain.  How they dare do the impossible and virtually forbidden thing is a cause for wonder but not for legislation.  Not yet.  We are at present too busy reforming the silent burglar and planning concerts to soothe the savage breast of the yelling hooligan.  As somebody — perhaps a publisher — said lately: “Poetry is of no account now-a-days.”

But it is not totally neglected.  Those persons with gold-rimmed spectacles whose usual occupation is to spy upon the obvious have remarked audibly (on several occasions) that poetry has so far not given to science any acknowledgment worthy of its distinguished position in the popular mind.  Except that Tennyson looked down the throat of a foxglove, that Erasmus Darwin wrote
The Loves of the Plants
and a scoffer
The Loves of the Triangles
, poets have been supposed to be indecorously blind to the progress of science.  What tribute, for instance, has poetry paid to electricity?  All I can remember on the spur of the moment is Mr. Arthur Symons’ line about arc lamps: “Hung with the globes of some unnatural fruit.”

Commerce and Manufacture praise on every hand in their not mute but inarticulate way the glories of science.  Poetry does not play its part.  Behold John Keats, skilful with the surgeon’s knife; but when he writes poetry his inspiration is not from the operating table.  Here I am reminded, though, of a modern instance to the contrary in prose.  Mr. H. G. Wells, who, as far as I know, has never written a line of verse, was inspired a few years ago to write a short story,
Under the Knife
.  Out of a clock-dial, a brass rod, and a whiff of chloroform, he has conjured for us a sensation of space and eternity, evoked the face of the Unknowable, and an awesome, august voice, like the voice of the Judgment Day; a great voice, perhaps the voice of science itself, uttering the words: “There shall be no more pain!”  I advise you to look up that story, so human and so intimate, because Mr. Wells, the writer of prose whose amazing inventiveness we all know, remains a poet even in his most perverse moments of scorn for things as they are.  His poetic imagination is sometimes even greater than his inventiveness, I am not afraid to say.  But, indeed, imaginative faculty would make any man a poet — were he born without tongue for speech and without hands to seize his fancy and fasten her down to a wretched piece of paper.

* * * * *

The book
{6}
which in the course of the last few days I have opened and shut several times is not imaginative.  But, on the other hand, it is not a dumb book, as some are.  It has even a sort of sober and serious eloquence, reminding us that not poetry alone is at fault in this matter.  Mr. Bourne begins his
Ascending Effort
with a remark by Sir Francis Galton upon Eugenics that “if the principles he was advocating were to become effective they must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion.”  “Introduced” suggests compulsory vaccination.  Mr. Bourne, who is not a theologian, wishes to league together not science and religion, but science and the arts.  “The intoxicating power of art,” he thinks, is the very thing needed to give the desired effect to the doctrines of science.  In uninspired phrase he points to the arts playing once upon a time a part in “popularising the Christian tenets.”  With painstaking fervour as great as the fervour of prophets, but not so persuasive, he foresees the arts some day popularising science.  Until that day dawns, science will continue to be lame and poetry blind.  He himself cannot smooth or even point out the way, though he thinks that “a really prudent people would be greedy of beauty,” and their public authorities “as careful of the sense of comfort as of sanitation.”

As the writer of those remarkable rustic note-books,
The Bettesworth Book
and
Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer
, the author has a claim upon our attention.  But his seriousness, his patience, his almost touching sincerity, can only command the respect of his readers and nothing more.  He is obsessed by science, haunted and shadowed by it, until he has been bewildered into awe.  He knows, indeed, that art owes its triumphs and its subtle influence to the fact that it issues straight from our organic vitality, and is a movement of life-cells with their matchless unintellectual knowledge.  But the fact that poetry does not seem obviously in love with science has never made him doubt whether it may not be an argument against his haste to see the marriage ceremony performed amid public rejoicings.

Many a man has heard or read and believes that the earth goes round the sun; one small blob of mud among several others, spinning ridiculously with a waggling motion like a top about to fall.  This is the Copernican system, and the man believes in the system without often knowing as much about it as its name.  But while watching a sunset he sheds his belief; he sees the sun as a small and useful object, the servant of his needs and the witness of his ascending effort, sinking slowly behind a range of mountains, and then he holds the system of Ptolemy.  He holds it without knowing it.  In the same way a poet hears, reads, and believes a thousand undeniable truths which have not yet got into his blood, nor will do after reading Mr. Bourne’s book; he writes, therefore, as if neither truths nor book existed.  Life and the arts follow dark courses, and will not turn aside to the brilliant arc-lights of science.  Some day, without a doubt, — and it may be a consolation to Mr. Bourne to know it — fully informed critics will point out that Mr. Davies’s poem on a dark woman combing her hair must have been written after the invasion of appendicitis, and that Mr. Yeats’s “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths” came before radium was quite unnecessarily dragged out of its respectable obscurity in pitchblende to upset the venerable (and comparatively naive) chemistry of our young days.

There are times when the tyranny of science and the cant of science are alarming, but there are other times when they are entertaining — and this is one of them.  “Many a man prides himself” says Mr. Bourne, “on his piety or his views of art, whose whole range of ideas, could they be investigated, would be found ordinary, if not base, because they have been adopted in compliance with some external persuasion or to serve some timid purpose instead of proceeding authoritatively from the living selection of his hereditary taste.”  This extract is a fair sample of the book’s thought and of its style.  But Mr. Bourne seems to forget that “persuasion” is a vain thing.  The appreciation of great art comes from within.

It is but the merest justice to say that the transparent honesty of Mr. Bourne’s purpose is undeniable.  But the whole book is simply an earnest expression of a pious wish; and, like the generality of pious wishes, this one seems of little dynamic value — besides being impracticable.

Yes, indeed.  Art has served Religion; artists have found the most exalted inspiration in Christianity; but the light of Transfiguration which has illuminated the profoundest mysteries of our sinful souls is not the light of the generating stations, which exposes the depths of our infatuation where our mere cleverness is permitted for a while to grope for the unessential among invincible shadows.

THE CENSOR OF PLAYS — AN APPRECIATION — 1907

A couple of years ago I was moved to write a one-act play — and I lived long enough to accomplish the task.  We live and learn.  When the play was finished I was informed that it had to be licensed for performance.  Thus I learned of the existence of the Censor of Plays.  I may say without vanity that I am intelligent enough to have been astonished by that piece of information: for facts must stand in some relation to time and space, and I was aware of being in England — in the twentieth-century England.  The fact did not fit the date and the place.  That was my first thought.  It was, in short, an improper fact.  I beg you to believe that I am writing in all seriousness and am weighing my words scrupulously.

Therefore I don’t say inappropriate.  I say improper — that is: something to be ashamed of.  And at first this impression was confirmed by the obscurity in which the figure embodying this after all considerable fact had its being.  The Censor of Plays!  His name was not in the mouths of all men.  Far from it.  He seemed stealthy and remote.  There was about that figure the scent of the far East, like the peculiar atmosphere of a Mandarin’s back yard, and the mustiness of the Middle Ages, that epoch when mankind tried to stand still in a monstrous illusion of final certitude attained in morals, intellect and conscience.

It was a disagreeable impression.  But I reflected that probably the censorship of plays was an inactive monstrosity; not exactly a survival, since it seemed obviously at variance with the genius of the people, but an heirloom of past ages, a bizarre and imported curiosity preserved because of that weakness one has for one’s old possessions apart from any intrinsic value; one more object of exotic
virtù
, an Oriental
potiche
, a
magot chinois
conceived by a childish and extravagant imagination, but allowed to stand in stolid impotence in the twilight of the upper shelf.

Thus I quieted my uneasy mind.  Its uneasiness had nothing to do with the fate of my one-act play.  The play was duly produced, and an exceptionally intelligent audience stared it coldly off the boards.  It ceased to exist.  It was a fair and open execution.  But having survived the freezing atmosphere of that auditorium I continued to exist, labouring under no sense of wrong.  I was not pleased, but I was content.  I was content to accept the verdict of a free and independent public, judging after its conscience the work of its free, independent and conscientious servant — the artist.

Only thus can the dignity of artistic servitude be preserved — not to speak of the bare existence of the artist and the self-respect of the man.  I shall say nothing of the self-respect of the public.  To the self-respect of the public the present appeal against the censorship is being made and I join in it with all my heart.

For I have lived long enough to learn that the monstrous and outlandish figure, the
magot chinois
whom I believed to be but a memorial of our forefathers’ mental aberration, that grotesque
potiche
, works!  The absurd and hollow creature of clay seems to be alive with a sort of (surely) unconscious life worthy of its traditions.  It heaves its stomach, it rolls its eyes, it brandishes a monstrous arm: and with the censorship, like a Bravo of old Venice with a more carnal weapon, stabs its victim from behind in the twilight of its upper shelf.  Less picturesque than the Venetian in cloak and mask, less estimable, too, in this, that the assassin plied his moral trade at his own risk deriving no countenance from the powers of the Republic, it stands more malevolent, inasmuch that the Bravo striking in the dusk killed but the body, whereas the grotesque thing nodding its mandarin head may in its absurd unconsciousness strike down at any time the spirit of an honest, of an artistic, perhaps of a sublime creation.