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.