K.
The Slav in Conrad
Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.
The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word; for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain, they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a yawn in their reader.
The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works, distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers. We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after. For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of Victory; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of dead bodies.
K.
SICK IDEALISM
Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit): A Tragedy in Four Acts; Pandora’s Box, by Frank Wedekind. New York: Albert and Charles Boni.
Poor, foolish Frank Wedekind. Hapless Idealist. Luckless dreamer. Have you read Der Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box? He wrote them—this enfevered fancier. In two kindred flashes of madness he illuminated several hundred sheets of paper and out of them—out of their blood-shot words and illegitimate truths—a new figure is born for the bookshelf. Not an old figure in new binding and fresh rouge. Not a Lescaut or a Thaïs or a Nana. This mocking idealist of virtue removes indeed the eighth veil from Salome. He hurls into the midst of the twittering parlor thinkers and sex chatterers a most disturbing answer to the eternal question, “What is woman?” It didn’t disturb me because I don’t believe it. And anyway, I don’t mean that kind of disturbance. I mean, virtuous reader, it is impossible to consume Wedekind without blushing. If you were disappointed in Shakespeare and Balzac and Casanova and Jacques Tournebrouche and could find nothing to blush at in them, do not despair. Here is a fellow, this Wedekind, who will daub a real blush out of a rouge pot, a miserable fellow whom you can condemn and ostracize and, having relegated him to his proper place, enjoy thoroughly or secretly or not at all.
It was Wedekind who first made people blush by a tasteless dissertation on the ignorant smugness recognized by society as the proper state for a young woman’s mind. He called it Spring’s Awakening. It was chiefly instrumental in awakening theatrical writers and managers. They spread the blush at $2 a head and waxed fat. But how did they spread the blush? Did they talk like Wedekind did? Did the mawkish plagiarist Cosmo Hamilton talk like Wedekind—tastelessly, vilely, brutally, and—horrors!—indelicately? Not he. Mr. Hamilton and the other get-rich-quick propagandists wouldn’t talk that way for the world. They are nice gentlemen. Not for them the idealist’s leer. Rather the bathroom wink. They will reveal a delicious girl in her delicious boudoir wearing a delicious nightie. They will make her out a virtuous girl, charmingly endowed but utterly stainless.