Nor, one feels, did he write even the casual jottings on life and the arts in Things that Have Interested Me for any other reason than that it pleased him to do it. The jottings vary in quality from ephemeral social and political comment to sharply-realised accounts of “things seen,” vivid notes of self-analysis, confessions of the tastes and experiences of an epicure of life with a strong preference for leaving the world better than he found it. Mr. Bennett gives us here a jigsaw portrait of himself. We can reconstruct it from the bits—a man shy and omniscient, simple and ostentatious, Beau Nash from the Five Towns.
III
MR. CONRAD AT HOME
Mr. Conrad is nothing of a peacock. You may stare at him as long as you like, but he will never respond with a sudden spread of gorgeous vanities. He is more like some bird that takes on the protective colouring of the earth and delights in avoiding rather than in attracting the prying eye. Flatter him as you will; call him a phœnix or a bird of paradise: he may be secretly pleased but he will only croak gruffly in reply, “To have the gift of words is no such great matter.” He does not know how to play up to our inquisitive admiration. We may think, as when we take up A Personal Record, that now at last we have caught him in a position in which he is bound to show us his fine feathers. But it is a vain hope. Glimpses we get—amazing glimpses—but never the near and detailed spectacle we desire. He protests that he is no cynic, but is he sure that he does not find a cynical amusement in tantalising our curiosity? Otherwise, would he have written in the preface to Notes on Life and Letters that “perhaps it will do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after the process of tidying-up), a little bowed, and receding from the world not because of weariness or misanthropy, but for other reasons that cannot be helped”? It may be that Mr. Conrad can suggest more enticing mysteries by a portrait of a piece of an author’s back than other writers can by a full-length representation, showing the polish on the boots and the crease in the trousers. In art the half (or very much less) is greater than the whole. Still, Mr. Conrad’s principal object in showing us the back is that it may leave us unsatisfied and speculating. He does not intend to satisfy us. It is as though he had written on the title-page of his autobiography: “Thus far and no further.”
At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics, realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust. “No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg. Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His first demand of an author is truth—not absolute truth, but the truth that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found—if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father.”
Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and Schopenhauer:
Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting—on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
I confess I dislike this contention among the various literary forms—poetry, fiction, history, biography, drama and essay—as to which of them is nearest grace. It is not the form that seizes the truth, but the imagination of the artist working through the form. Imagination and the sense of life are as necessary to a good historian as to a good novelist. Artists need not quarrel for precedence for any particular art in a world in which all the great books that have so far been written could be packed into a little room. At the same time, it is well that a novelist should take his art as seriously as Aristotle took the art of poetry. It often requires an exaggeration to bring the truth into prominence. And, in any case, the exaggerations of the novelists in this respect have as a rule been modest compared to the exaggerations of the poets.
If Mr. Conrad is to be believed, however, the novelist is the rival, not only of the historian, but of the moralist. He warmly denies that he is a didactic writer, but at least he holds that in all great fiction a moral is implicit that he who runs may read:
That a sacrifice must be made, that something has to be given up, is the truth engraved in the innermost recesses of the fair temple built for our edification by the masters of fiction. There is no other secret behind the curtain. All adventure, all love, every success is resumed in the supreme energy of an act of renunciation.
One would have to think hard in order to fit Tristram Shandy and The Pickwick Papers into this—if the word is not forbidden—formula. Perhaps it is a formula more applicable to tragic than to comic writing. Mr. Conrad as critic often seems to be defining his own art rather than the art of fiction in general. He knows what he himself is aiming at in literature, and he looks for the same fine purpose in his fellow-writers. We feel this when he requires of the novelist “many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope.” This, he declares, “is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.” “To be hopeful in an artistic sense,” he adds, “it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.” There surely speaks the author of Youth and Typhoon. And the image of the same author may be seen in the remark that “I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he”—the novelist—“should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.” Mr. Conrad cannot escape from the shadow of his own genius. It falls on every page of his criticism as fatally as any formula, though more vividly. His protest against what has been called “stylism” is simply the protest of one who did not approach the art of literature through that door. He is praising not merely Maupassant but his ideal self when he tells us: