Mr. Ford’s book is adorned with flights into the land of constructive writing, and there is much to learn from the theories and principles expressed on the authority of both Joseph Conrad and Mr. Ford. For, there is no denying that the latter’s style is fluent and clear, picturesque enough to be original yet kept constantly within the bounds of pure English. Mr. Ford says that their greatest admiration for a stylist in any language was given to W. H. Hudson, of whom Conrad said that his writing was like the grass that the good God made to grow—when it was there, one could not tell how it came. The consensus of opinion however would seem to be that Conrad got his greatest inspiration from Turgenev.
Conrad’s philosophy was résuméd in one word, “fidelity.” He was faithful in his adhesion to Herrick’s maxim: To live merrily and trust to good letters. He never believed in using novels as a medium of preaching; if his standards of morality suffered from some of his heroes’ breaches, he would create one who would express the opinions Conrad might have been willing to express himself. Thus did Conrad expound his beliefs anonymously, and because he was a gentleman he always created another hero who would refute the preacher’s arguments. His belief was that one of the most important qualities for a novelist to cultivate was humility, to make himself as little conspicuous as possible to the reader.
Mr. Ford has a heart. Unlike his mind, it is assiduously concealed, but it pierces through the coarse envelope of the purely intellectual interest to which he attempts to confine his biography of Joseph Conrad. None of his memoir may be true, but that does not detract from it as a work of art. He shows no trace of real emotion, and his remembrances carry with them no suggestion of the broken heart which some authors would have assumed had they been writing on the same subject with the material Mr. Ford had at his disposal. His book, whether biography or autobiography, is a beautiful tribute to the man he liked and the author he loved. He says that there never was a word of spoken affection between them, never a personal note which would have revealed to either the inner sentiment the other entertained for his collaborator and playmate. But if Mr. Ford will never know what were Conrad’s feelings for him, readers of the biography will know that Mr. Ford’s book found its first inspiration in his heart, and, shaped by his affection, found expression in his intelligence. The duty which prompted him to write it was one of love, and the real sentiment, never expressed in words, is constantly watching over the author’s shoulder.
My disappointment in Mr. Ford’s book is the treatment of Conrad’s art. Conrad had a form of realism that was nearly unique, blended with an impressionism that was at once captivating and awesome. Colours, sounds, voices, visions, atmospheres, are manipulated to make a harmony and an effectiveness that are sometimes overwhelming, always stirring. He accomplished realism through impressionism, and in this he was as nearly original as one can be in literature. Then he had another great merit; he did not draw conclusions about his characters. He submitted the evidence without plea or prejudice, the reader renders the verdict. He saw life as it is, and man as he wishes to be, and he took them both in at a glance, just as Marlow did in Chance. He registered them and in his hectic leisure reproduced them, and thus made posterity his debtor. And Fidus Ford has made us his debtors for showing Conrad as he appeared to him. I have no doubt he was quite a different Conrad to Stephen Crane, John Galsworthy, Mr. Doubleday, and Mrs. Conrad, but not more lovable and not more worthy of the admiration the whole literary world gives him to-day.
Mr. Hugh l’Anson Fausset, whose English reads like translation from the French and who handles polysyllabic words as a juggler handles gilded balls, has made a study of the seventeenth century’s poet and divine, that is sure to be widely read by the cultured public and to provoke discussion and dissension. He calls his book A Study in Discord and it purports to depict the conflict that went on in Donne, throughout his whole life, between the physical and the spiritual impulses of his nature. Mr. Fausset’s thesis is that neither as poet nor preacher did Donne succeed in resolving these discords. He enjoyed neither physical nor spiritual harmony but was torn in strife between his intelligence and his impulses. The Christian ideal acted as a poison on the natural man in process of proving a purge. Self-consciousness was the only discipline by which his egoism might learn the wisdom of selfishness. The tale of that battle was Donne’s legacy to literature.
“His style, whether as poet or preacher, never achieved either the fresh effusive gaiety, or the assured serenity of absolute Beauty. He could not create beauty out of life; he could not even see the beauty in which the limbs of life were veiled which flamed through and over the bleak anatomy of fact, consecrating the perishable dust and redeeming it of squalor and grossness.”
It is the verdict of a judge, not of a jury and Mr. Fausset can not expect that the world of letters will receive it without protest. But he cites with skill and adroitness the evidence on which it is based, holding Donne up in the successive phases of Pagan, Pensioner and Preacher. Were he more advocate than judge he might have added Penitent, for the sake of both alliteration and fuller justice, for the death of the poetic dean was artistic to a high degree and in the last months of his life after he had preached his last sermon, “Unto the Lord belong the issues of Death,” he achieved an absolute harmony of his life in the ebb-tide. The strings of his character then vibrated with small amplitude in unison.
Donne may be a study in discord, but there is nothing of discord in the writing of Fausset. He uses Donne as a peg on which to hang his concrete thought, and his organised ideas of nature, philosophy and religion. While it is a biography it is also a series of essays in which the vagaries, character and personal appearance of his subject are used to point the moral and adorn the tale. It is never left to the reader to form his own opinion of Donne, his life or his acts; for Fausset blares facts about the motive and the soul and his trumpet gives forth no uncertain sound. Even when Donne in a verse letter to a friend states, “and with vain outward things be no more moved,” Fausset immediately states “yet excessive solitude can so affect a character like Donne’s that only a restoration of 'vain outward things’ can save it from myopia or even madness.”
It required courage to write the life of a man who furnished the material for a masterpiece of English biography. Izaak Walton’s affection for his friend transported him to immoderate commendation of the events of his career, but Mr. Gosse’s Life and Letters of John Donne is just and true. It will immortalise the personality of the poet, just as his somatic features will be perpetuated by the picture in a shroud he so studiously had made.