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CASTLES IN SPAIN
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The title is after the first piece in the collection.
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CONTENTS
Castles in Spain. An Address
Where We Stand
International Thought
On Expression
Reminiscences of Conrad
Time, Tides, and Taste
Foreword to “Green Mansions.”
A Note on Sentiment
Preface to Conrad’s Plays
Burning Leaves
After Seeing a Play in 1903
Six Novelists in Profile
Books as Ambassadors
Faith of a Novelist
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Castles in Spain. An Address
Castles in Spain denotes dreams, brought to life or otherwise; Galsworthy discourses here on civic matters.
Galsworthy speaks of short term of life of a civic body, and consequent difficulty of clearing up towns into models for all residents, which would take longer.
Brings to mind So Well Remembered, by James Hilton, who portrayed just such a visionary as Galsworthy here expounds the need of, and his life's achievement of seeing his vision come through.
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Galsworthy discusses his era as opposite to older ages when cathedrals and pyramids were built, assuming a similarity of purpose in all older constructions.
Much of the underlying assumptions are questionable, at the very least. Assumptions of last century about pyramids and other great structures around the world, presumed tombs or places of human sacrifices by the then explorers, are likely to have been nothing of the sort, and are now thought far older than imagined previously, built by technology yet incomprehended rather than, as presumed, by slave labour kept very poor. Such assumptions were by those whose immediate roots were in slave labour cultures, either explicitly or otherwise those of colonial empires.
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" ... The old builders of pyramids, mosques and churches built for no physical advantage in this life. They carved and wrought and slowly lifted stone on stone for remote and, as they thought, spiritual ends. We moderns mine and forge and mason-up our monuments to the immediate profit of our bodies. ... "
"Sons of Darkness and Children of Light, both have worshipped a half-truth. The ancients built for to-morrow in another world, forgetting that all of us have a to-day in this. They spent riches and labour to save the souls of their hierarchy, but they kept their labourers so poor that they had no souls to save. They left astounding testimony to human genius and tenacity, but it never seems to have ruffled their consciousness that they fashioned the beautiful with slavery, misery, and blood."
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Galsworthy is unaware of the horrible irony.
" ... Before the industrial era set in, men used to make things by hand; they were in some sort artists, with at least the craftsman’s pride in their work. Now they press buttons, turn wheels; don’t make completed articles; work with monotony at the section of an article — so many hours of machine-driving a day, the total result of which is never a man’s individual achievement. ... "
It isn't that its about past and his era, either. It's that, when faced with superior handicraft and handbook weaves of India, where British wanted to sell their cheape factory products instead, they - the Brits - achieved their aims by chopping off fingers of weavers and other artisans instead, driving a whole land- until then wealthy and famous for her superior craft - into desperate poverty.
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Another huge irony here.
"The tendency of modern “Production” is to centre a man’s interest not in his working day, but outside of it — at least, in the lower ranks of industry. The old artificers absorbed culture, such as it was, from their work. In these days culture, such as it is, is grafted on to the workman in his leisure, as antidote to wheel-driving. ... "
And thus the superiority of ancient caste system of India, which was based on categorisation of work, NOT on possession of land or titles bestowed by a royalty. Work defining and forming a person's very nature, character and spirit, was, has always been the comprehension behind the idea. By not relating race, or wealth and possessions, to caste, as elsewhere, Indian thinking separated people from possesssions where a question of spirit comes, and kept those as incidental matters, not trivialised, but nor essential.
In fact, royals weren't set apart in India, much less presumed possessing divine blood; theirs was the caste of warriors and protectors, to which belonged every soldier, fighter and guard, charged with protection of anyone helpless, unarmed and in need of protection. Nor were marriages of royals limited within caste, much less within royalty.
In fact, the very name of India, in India, is Bhaarata, after an ancient king Bharata, whose mother was not a royal.
The word India, given by outsiders who had to cross a river Indus to get to India, was never India's name for India, by any community of India- thus the fraud of Aryan migration theory, invented by Brits to justify their own invasion and colonisation and loot. Aryans belonged to India, as indicated by India's not being named after the river Indus in any language of India.
The word India, given derives from the name Indus of a river whose real name, Indian, is Sindhu, which literally means ocean, indicating that the civilisation in and of India watched as an ocean between India and Asia was terminated and a river flowed there instead as Himaalayan ranges rising out of that ocean were seen, all recounted in Indian ancient history as known in India, until Macaulay policy of turning a nation into a broken land of slaves by breaking her soul was adopted and brought inyo execution by British.
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" ... We used to have the manor-house with half-a-dozen hovels in its support. Now we have twenty miles of handsome residences with a hundred and twenty miles of ugly back streets, reeking with smoke and redolent of dulness, dirt, and discontent. The proportions are still unchanged, and ... "
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"Beauty, alone, in the largest sense of the word — the yearning for it, the contemplation of it — has civilised mankind.
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Prophetic, even though the prophesy here split - WWII had unimaginable genocide and much, much more; at the end, nuclear power, without which it may have gone on!
" ... The Great War was a little war compared with that which, through the development of scientific destruction, might be waged next time. ... "
And again -
"The next war will be fought from the air, and from under the sea, with explosives, gas, and the germs of disease. It may be over before it is declared. The final war necessary for the complete extirpation of mankind will be fought, perhaps, with atomic energy; and we shall have no occasion to examine the moon, for the earth will be as lifeless."
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" ... We never get ahead of time. For instance, we have just let slip a chance to revitalise the country life of England. At demobilisation we might have put hundreds of thousands on the land, which needs them so very badly. And we have put in all not so many as the war took off the land. Life on the land means hard work and few cinemas; but it also means hearty stock for the next generation, and the power of feeding ourselves on an island which the next war might completely isolate. A nation which never looks ahead is in for rude awakenings."
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July 25, 2021 - July 25, 2021.
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Where We Stand
Galsworthy discusses civilisation and aims thereof, and whether it's been arrived at, after WWI.
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" ... Without agreeing on any ethical definition we may admit that the most civilised state will be that wherein is found the greatest proportionate number of happy, healthy, wise, and gentle citizens. ... "
That, in India, is referred to as "RaamRaajya", "The Regime of God (and King) Raama", for that is how its memory lingers in deep subconscious of India.
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"The march of mankind is directed neither by his will, nor by his superstitions, but by the effect of his great and, as it were, accidental discoveries on his average nature. The discovery and exploitation of language, of fire, of corn, of ships, of metals, of gunpowder, of printing, of coal, steam, electricity, of flying machines (atomic energy has still to be exploited), acting on a human nature which is, practically speaking, constant, moulds the real shape of human life, under all the agreeable camouflage of religions, principles, policies, personages, and ideas. After the discovery and exploitation of gunpowder and printing, the centuries stood somewhat still, until, with coal, steam, and modern machinery, a swift industrialism set in, which has brought the world to its recent state."
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"Prussian “will to power” did not cause, it followed and crowned with thorns, the rising wave of German industry and wealth. And outstanding personalities such as Gladstone and Bismarck are rather made outstanding by the times they live in, then make those times outstanding."
Hence the short-lived nature of their memories - unlike memories of, say, Buddha and other Divine Avataars, or Pythagoras and Euclid and Galileo and other great thinkers and artists. Einstein will be remembered, royal and other ruling political persons not so much.
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Prophetic, again -
"The war has not changed human nature ... It has destroyed some autocracies and created others which threaten fresh tyrannies of the part over the whole. It has revolutionised Russia, probably for ever; and has wasted the youth and wealth of Europe to such a degree as to shift the real storm-centre of the world to the Pacific Ocean and the three unexhausted countries lying east and west thereof. ... "
If he meant U.S., Japan and China, the last one rose much later, post WWII, and not for good; or did he mean something South of U.S., or Australia? The last is still technically a dominion, though, a century later, albeit by choice.
" ... It has exaggerated the conception of nationalism and, on the whole, lowered that of individual liberty."
Unclear how WWI did the former, at least; latter, one may relate to Russian revolution, but honestly, that again points at his concept of humanity being strictly restricted to Europe- for he isn't seeing enslavement of colonial subjects by Europe, or treatment of "native" locals anywhere in colonies and ex colonies where European settlers were citizens in his era and "native" locals were not given that status.
In fact, the very word "native" being treated as a pejorative is still so much a norm, decades after colonial era is mostly over, that one cannot believe Europe reads at all, or U.S. or other European ancestry lands for that matter, much less think - if they read, theyd be aware of Shaw's discourse making mincemeat out of such attitude in his Apple Cart; if they thought, they'd realise the truth of it, whether they read it or not.
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" .. It has greatly advanced the emancipation of women, and loosened family life. ... "
Galsworthy supported women's suffrage and emancipation in that he wrote about a woman's right to opt out of a marriage she was unhappy in; but he is quite unaware of how, by juxtaposing the two halves of that sentence, he's firmly supporting women's enslavement to what's euphemistically called family, but is in reality male ownership, not only of property and home, but of children and women therein, and worse - men assuming rights while another male is not in sight, is most often not even seen as inappropriate, on the contrary, even when situations are close to that of Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire, with or without the actual rape.
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" ... Only a wildered pelican here and there croaks of the need to concentrate national attention on chaining the tides and using water-driven electricity, on opening up oil-deposits, or converting coal into oil. Coal is a curse, if there is any way of doing without it. For, with all its usefulness, its smoke has done more to destroy health and happiness than any of our great discoveries. And, even if it were rendered smokeless, it has still to be extracted, and millions of men in this beautiful world must work below ground. ... And why this fatalistic attitude about coal? Simply because we are still in the rut made by an exploited discovery acting on average human nature: we know that we have huge unextracted stores of coal; many of us own coal-mines or shares therein; more of us make a living by extracting coal: our rulers depend on the votes of a coal-worshipping community; we want wealth quickly; in sum, we are human beings and prefer each of us his own immediate profit to what will benefit us all in the future. ... "
And things are only worse, despite grown awareness about environmental concerns and related health concerns, now exponentially worse, and not just in U.K. but in U.S. too, a century later.
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" ... America and Japan are going our way fast, becoming town-ridden, industry-mad communities. The next great war will probably begin between them. ... "
Slightly incorrect, that's all; they ended it, instead. Begun by, again, Germany.
" ... Even the Chinese are now infected by the Western idea of maximum wealth to the square mile. Their “advanced” men are saying, “We must adopt Western methods or we cannot compete with Western industry.” ... "
China geared up later, but is now polluting U.S. West coast, via Chinese East coast pollution wafting all the way across Pacific - and more!
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"The teaching profession should be honoured before all others ... "
That, precisely, was Indian caste system! And yet, European colonial invaders trampled it underfoot, England because of following Macaulay policy, and Portuguese one step further, executing hundreds simply for being the caste that's teacher among other professions! Arrogance of religious superiority complex? Or merely racism?
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July 25, 2021 - July 25, 2021.
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International Thought
About concerns regarding destructive powers and political uncertainty, need of international understanding and law, and whether it's enforceable.
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Slightly off, there -
" ... science more hopeful of perfecting poison gas than of abating coal-smoke or curing cancer; ... "
Galsworthy forgets, mist people work for a living, and those with independent means rarely took to hard work, of mind and more, of science with no guarantees of success, fame, or return on expenses, even in his time - with very few exceptions like Rutherford. Now this is even more so - British royals are revered as intellectual if one is "interested" in "history " and "architecture", which generally amounts to curiosity about ones own ancestors and buildings the family owns!
But although military usages pay immediately and better, cancer research does go on - what's funny is if Galsworthy thought the two were alternative options of careers for any individual at any stage after high school, when most careers are open, but culture usually dictates choices. In U.S., this might mean football or rock music for a male, and not much beyond a hope of surviving well for a girl, even now. Those with wealthy parents who pay for education are most likely to go into a moneymaking path, law or business management, if bright enough to get in.
Those that choose science are likely to have been abused through school as "nerds, geeks", bullied in every way, and labeled unpopular.
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" ... Sport, which still keeps a flag of idealism flying, is perhaps the most saving grace in the world at the moment, with its spirit of rules kept, and regard for the adversary, whether the fight is going for or against. ... "
Galsworthy is speaking of cricket as taught and played in public schools of U.K., - he'd be shocked if he saw Concussion, or read the Grisham novel about baseball and injuries caused by intention. But closer to his time and home and sport, there was the English team vicious enough to victimise a superior team, Australia, with bodyline bowling - ball deliberately aimed at body of batsmen; Bradsman was amongst the victims, fortunately not damaged as he could have been, and Patodi (senior) (who then played for England, this being before independence of India) was the only player to resign in protest made explicitly.
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" ... Destructive science has gone ahead out of all proportion. It is developing so fast that each irresponsible assertion of national rights or interests brings the world appreciably nearer to ruin. Without any doubt whatever the powers of destruction are gaining fast on the powers of creation and construction. In old days a thirty years’ war was needed to exhaust a nation; it will soon be (if it is not already) possible to exhaust a nation in a week by the destruction of its big towns from the air. The conquest of the air, so jubilantly hailed by the unthinking, may turn out the most sinister event that ever befell us, simply because it came before we were fit for it — fit to act reasonably under the temptation of its fearful possibilities. The use made of it in the last war showed that; and the sheeplike refusal of the startled nations to face the new situation, and unanimously ban chemical warfare and the use of flying for destructive purposes, shows it still more clearly. No one denies that the conquest of the air was a great, a wonderful achievement; no one denies that it could be a beneficent achievement if the nations would let it be. But mankind has not yet, apparently, reached a pitch of decency sufficient to be trusted with such an inviting and terribly destructive weapon. ... "
As WWII showed, Battle of Britain and London Blitz hsd to be fought when inflicted by Germany, but the only remedy was bombing of Berlin and other German cities, for one; banning air war would be of no use with enemy ready to flout such bans. Chemical weapons were, and indeed have Noreen, banned for decades; but China is letting loose biological weapons around the world by creating them in laboratories and simply denying, and acting outraged about WHO demands of inspection, while continuously claiming huge swathes of territories around on land and sea, occupying others, and generally worse.
Gandhian preaching only succeeds with good guys stepping back when attacked - which has, for decades, resulted in the enemy attacking non stop, killing, and worse, genocides unacknowledged and not taken cognisance thereof. Imagine media clampdown on Nazi atrocities and genocide, for sake of Gandhian principles; well, that's been practiced where India is concerned.
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" ... If neither Science nor Finance will agree to think internationally, there is probably nothing for it but to kennel-up in disenchantment, and wait for an end which can’t be very long in coming — not a complete end, of course, say a general condition of affairs similar to that which existed recently in the famine provinces of Russia."
Would that be "famine" in Ukraine for reasons identical to the Ireland "potato famine"?
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Why Galsworthy thinks that the professionals he describes would free of political ideology, or temptations of material nature, is hard to see. Its even harder to see why hed think they'd all agree with him.
" ... The exchange of international thought, which alone can save us, is the exchange of thought between craftsmen — between the statesmen of the different countries; the lawyers of the different countries; the scientists, the financiers, the writers of the different countries. We have the mediums of exchange (however inadequately made use of) for the statesmen and the lawyers, but the scientists (inventors, chemists, engineers) and the financiers, the two sets of craftsmen in whose hands the future of the world chiefly lies, at present lack adequate machinery for the exchange of international thought, and adequate conception of the extent to which world responsibility now falls on them. If they could once realise the supreme nature of that responsibility, the battle of salvation should be half won."
International relationships forged between such professionals survived WWII only when money mattered more. Where ideology mattered often enough it was a choice between nation and relationships.
Easy to see this - if one isn't born and brought up German, one only has to visit Germany and chance to hear a German speak of a non German scientist of the time who didn't help "because he was a friend of Einstein", which is stated in a tone not accusatory as much as convicting the scientist unfriendly to Nazi Germany after Einstein was forced to flee!
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" ... Any real work of art, individual and racial though it be in root and fibre, is impersonal and universal in its appeal. Art is one of the great natural links (perhaps the only great natural link) between the various breeds of men, and to scotch its gentling influence in time of war is to confess ourselves still apes and tigers. ... "
Wonder what Galsworthy would say about the Nazi projects related to art, thievery thereof, and destruction on huge scale when losing the war. Wish he could see The Monuments Men!
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July 25, 2021 - July 25, 2021.
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On Expression
AN ADDRESS
"Expression is my subject; and no mariner embarking on the endless waters of the Atlantic in a Canadian canoe could feel more lost than the speaker who ventures on a theme so wide and inexhaustible. ... "
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"In short, expression, whether of laws, psychology, episode, or feeling, should be humane, and refrain from torturing the wits of mankind."
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"The mention of slang bends the mind almost insensibly towards the great American language; for some, as you know, have claimed that the Americans already have a language of their own. Let us avoid hyperbole. If Americans, with some exceptions, speak American, they still write English, and generally very good English. ... "
"We English have quite as much divergence between our spoken and our written language, with this difference perhaps: Americans who talk in jargon often write good English; but Britons who speak the wondrous treble called cockney, and the blurred ground-bass of the Yorkshire and Lancashire towns, rarely express themselves at all in written words. And yet dare we condemn cockney — a lingo whose waters, in Southern England, seem fast flooding in over the dykes of the so-called Oxford accent, and such other rural dialects as are left?"
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"Yet none of us would have The Ancient Mariner — that almost perfect narrative poem — expressed in prose: it is unthinkable.
"“The moving Moon went up the sky, And nowhere did abide; Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside—”"
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Was John Galsworthy truly unable to see the genius of Charlie Chaplin when cinema was still in its infancy, and sound was yet to arrive?
" ... When seeing a play, I am curiously absorbed in the dialogue — the interest, emotions, and suspense aroused by it. However birds may sing, streams flow, and thunders roll, on the stage; however luridly, austerely, symbolically, classically, or realistically the scene be architectured, I am seeking the human figure and the words of his mouth — the “Out, out, brief candle!” And this is unfortunate, because dramatic expression through mere words seems to be going out of fashion. Cinema, revue, ballet, puppet show, and the architectural designer — all are in conspiracy to lower its importance. When enjoying a film, a ballet, a book by Mr. Gordon Craig I become uneasy. What if words are doomed — merely to be used to fill in the interstices of architecture, the intervals between jazz music, or just written on a board! What if the dramatist is to become second fiddler, a hack hired and commissioned! Shakespeare remarked: “The play’s the thing!” We echo the saying, feel virtuous, and take our tickets for “The Three-Cornered Hat,” “Lilac Time,” “Charlie Chaplin,” and “The Follies”; or, bemoaning the absence of British drama, sit down to wait for a National Theatre."
Now, the paragraph quoted seems so out of sync! Old fashioned snobs still tom-tom a theatrical performer, with diction of a conquistadores lingo, stylised dialogue delivery and little else; those not yet enamoured of being poseurs, though, know that that has nothing to do with expressing a thought, an emotion, much less porstraying a character. Cinema has come closer to life than theatre could ever be, and grown tremendously as an art, using every possible art, and sense - with exception of touch, smell and taste of course - to convey a story, a philosophy and more.
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" ... English language is the word-coin of well-nigh one hundred and seventy million white people, spread over nearly half the land surface of the earth. It is the language of practically every sea; the official tongue of some three hundred and fifty million brown and black and yellow people; the accredited business medium of the world; and more and more taught in South America, Japan, and some European countries. ... "
"brown and black and yellow"??!!!
Fact is, Europe skin tone ranges from uncooked to medium rare, while in lands with sun being less rare, life lived in light has skins develop tones from medium rare to well done to roasted. Nature adapts, and babies are born with nature anticipating needs of the skin to absorb the amount of light expected, from precious little to brilliant to blinding, so humans are protected, with skins suited to confitions.
One would think a meat eater would understand thus, having known how his food changes colour depending on amount of time it's in pan on fire! Science has, meanwhile, understood that pale skins are bordering albino, a disease, not a flattering that the so called whites think it is - and of course, no human is "white", as birds and animals can be; no bride in white in church has given illusion of or looked naked!
Who hasnt seen just how much golden are the supposed white are after a couple of generations in California? Indian brides joining their spouses in Europe or U.S. are several shades paler, returning to the genetic truth of ancestry, on the other hand, just as Indian babies often quite pink in infancy are suitably tanned before teenage is over, boys so more than girls.
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"The most beneficent task which the League of Nations could perform would be the conjuring of an arrangement to this end from the peoples of the earth. The ideal course is an adoption by agreement of a single second language to be taught in all countries. And I regret profoundly that there seems little likelihood of any such consummation."
Would he have been quite so eager if he had realised the likelihood of this language being Hindi or Arabic instead? Or would he then argue for non native speakers of this language not be treated as second tier, on par with the native English speakers treating others?
" ... The Napoleonic wars left French the predominant medium of mental exchange. French is still perhaps the leading speech in Europe. But French will never now spread effectively by natural means beyond Europe and North Africa. The decline of Europe, the expansion of the British Empire, the magnetism and ever-increasing power of America, are making English the real world-language. Its tide was never before so high. This is a solemn thought for us who believe in our mother tongue and all it stands for — our hopes, our learning, our customs, our history, and our dreams."
Germany meanwhile being central to Europe silently hopes it would be German instead, which seemed a real likelihood during WWII years, and is back to possibility now post EU expansion into East Europe with Germany literally at center and most neighbouring countries more conversant with the language, several in fact using it or a variation of it amongst their own in their lands.
Then there's Spanish, what with lands across South Atlantic being predominantly Spanish speaking; Chinese, with the population of China still over a third of the world, and other candidates - including Bengali, apparently now the third most spoken language, with its rich literature.
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"For us private English folk who directly or indirectly are concerned with the welfare of the English language, there seems to be the duty of never losing sight of its world destiny. Surely we are not entitled to the slippered, unbraced word-garb of stay-at-homes; we need the attire of language braced and brushed, and fit to meet all glances. For our language is on view as never language was.
"I often wonder, if only I didn’t know English, what I should think of the sound of it, well talked. I believe I should esteem it a soft speech very pleasant to the ear, varied but unemphatic, singularly free from guttural or metallic sounds, restful, dignified, and friendly. I believe — how prejudiced one is! — that I would choose it, well spoken, before any language in the world, not indeed as the most beautiful, but as the medium of expression of which one would tire last. Blend though it be, hybrid between two main stocks, and tinctured by many a visiting word, it has acquired rich harmony of its own, a vigorous individuality. It is worthy of any destiny, however wide."
Prejudiced indeed!
" ... As with the lover of flowers who, through the moving seasons of the year, walks in his garden, watching the tulip and the apple blossom, the lilac, the iris, and the rose bloom in their good time, and cannot tell which most delights his eyes, nor when his garden reaches its full sweetness, so it is with us who love good English. Chaucer, Shakespeare, the makers of the Authorised Version, Defoe, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Burke, or Bright, you cannot crown the English of any one of these and say “Here the pinnacle was definitely reached.” ... "
Best was yet to come when he wrote this, or just about beginning to, but it isn't clear if he was aware of the peak. And no, it was none of those he mentions.
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July 25, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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Reminiscences of Conrad
About Joseph Conrad.
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"Many writers knew my dead friend, and will write of him better than I; but no other writer knew him quite so long, or knew him both as sailor and novelist.
"It was in March 1893 that I first met Conrad on board the English sailing ship “Torrens” in Adelaide Harbour. He was superintending the stowage of cargo. Very dark he looked in the burning sunlight ... He seemed to me strange on an English ship. For fifty-six days I sailed in his company."
" ... I, supposed to be studying navigation for the Admiralty Bar, would every day work out the position of the ship with the captain. On one side of the saloon table we would sit and check our observations with those of Conrad, who from the other side of the table would look at us a little quizzically. For Conrad had commanded ships, and his subordinate position on the “Torrens” was only due to the fact that he was then still convalescent from the Congo experience which had nearly killed him. Many evening watches in fine weather we spent on the poop. Ever the great teller of a tale, he had already nearly twenty years of tales to tell. Tales of ships and storms, of Polish revolution, of his youthful Carlist gun-running adventure, of the Malay seas, and the Congo; and of men and men: all to a listener who had the insatiability of a twenty-five-year-old.
"When, seven or eight years later, Conrad, though then in his best period and long acclaimed a great writer by the few, was struggling, year in year out, to keep a roof over him amidst the apathy of the many who afterwards fell over each other to read him in his worst period, I remember urging him to raise the wind by tale-telling in public. He wouldn’t, and he was right. Still, so incomparable a raconteur must have made a success, even though his audience might have missed many words owing to his strange yet fascinating accent.
"On that ship he talked of life, not literature; and it is not true that I introduced him to the life of letters. At Cape Town, on my last evening, he asked me to his cabin, and I remember feeling that he outweighed for me all the other experiences of that voyage. ... "
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Galsworthy quotes a part of a letter from Conrad, laudatory about writing of Henry James.
Wasn't it Henry James whose explicit and very derogatory account of a dalliance was quoted from a work of his by a woman pointing out at the vicious nature of the writing of some of the male celebrated authors towards half of humanity, which has never been of the slightest account towards any negative consideration of their worth but has added hugely to violence against women instead, accounted or otherwise?
Was Galsworthy aware of such writings, and did he merely ignore it all? If so, what price his own support of women's rights, lives, dignity? Part time stance?
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"It was the sea that gave Conrad to the English language. A fortunate accident — for he knew French better than English at that time. He started his manhood, as it were, at Marseilles. In a letter to me (1905) he says: “In Marseilles I did begin life thirty-one years ago. It’s the place where the puppy opened his eyes.” He was ever more at home with French literature than with English, spoke that language with less accent, liked Frenchmen, and better understood their clearer thoughts. And yet, perhaps, not quite an accident; for after all he had the roving quality which has made the English the great sea nation of the world; and, I suppose, instinct led him to seek in English ships the fullest field of expression for his nature. England, too, was to him the romantic country; it had been enshrined for him, as a boy in Poland, by Charles Dickens, Captain Marryat, Captain Cook, and Franklin the Arctic explorer. ... "
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"Chance, in 1914 — an indifferent Conrad — at last brought him fortune. From that year on to the end his books sold well; yet, with the exception of The Secret Sharer and some parts of Victory, none of his work in that late period was up to his own exalted mark. Was it natural that popular success should have coincided with the lesser excellence? ... "
" ... The shining work of his great period was before their time; it places him among the finest writers of all ages. Conrad’s work, from An Outcast of the Islands to The Secret Agent, his work in The Secret Sharer, in the first chapters of The Rescue (written in 1898), and of some portions of Victory, are to his work in The Arrow of Gold and the last part of The Rescue as the value of pearl to that of mother-of-pearl. He was very tired toward the end; he wore himself clean out. To judge him by tired work is absurd; to lump all his work together, as if he were always the same Conrad, imperils a just estimate of his greatness."
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"A spurt was characteristic of Conrad’s endings; he finished most of his books in that way — his vivid nature instinctively staged itself with dramatic rushes. Moreover, all those long early years he worked under the whip-lash of sheer necessity."
" ... He was always loyal to what he had at heart — to his philosophy, to his work, and to his friends; he was loyal even to his dislikes (not few) and to his scorn. People talk of Conrad as an aristocrat; I think it rather a silly word to apply to him. His mother’s family, the Bebrowskis, were Polish landowners; the Korzeniowskis, too, his father’s family, came, I think, of landowning stock; but the word aristocrat is much too dry to fit Conrad; he had no touch with “ruling,” no feeling for it, except, maybe, such as is necessary to sail a ship; he was first and last the rover and the artist, with such a first-hand knowledge of men and things that he was habitually impatient with labels and pigeon-holes, with cheap theorising and word debauchery. He stared life very much in the face, and distrusted those who didn’t. Above all, he had the keen humour which spiflicates all class and catalogues, and all ideals and aspirations that are not grounded in the simplest springs of human nature. He laughed at the clichés of so-called civilisation. His sense of humour, indeed, was far greater than one might think from his work. He had an almost ferocious enjoyment of the absurd. Writing seemed to dry or sardonise his humour. But in conversation his sense of fun was much more vivid; it would leap up in the midst of gloom or worry, and take charge with a shout."
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"Many might suppose that Conrad would naturally settle by the sea. He never did. He had seen too much of it; like the sailor who when he turns into his bunk takes care that no sea air shall come in, he lived always well inland. The sea was no favourite with one too familiar with its moods. He disliked being labelled a novelist of the sea. He wrote of the sea, as perhaps no one, not even Herman Melville, has written; but dominant in all his writing of the sea is the note of struggle and escape. His hero is not the sea, but man in conflict with that cruel and treacherous element. Ships he loved, but the sea — no. Not that he ever abused it, or talked of it with aversion; he accepted it as he accepted all the inscrutable remorselessness of Nature. It was man’s job to confront Nature with a loyal and steady heart — that was Conrad’s creed, his contribution to the dignity of life. ... He was sardonic, but he had none of the cynicism characteristic of small, cold-hearted beings."
"He was not an egoist; he had far too much curiosity and genuine interest in things and people to be that. I don’t mean to say that he had not an interest in himself and a belief in his own powers. His allusions to his work are generally disparaging; but at heart he knew the value of his gifts; and he liked appreciation, especially from those (not many) in whose judgment he had faith.
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" ... Conrad was a most voracious reader, and he was trilingual. A Slav temperament, a life of duty and adventure, vast varied reading, and the English language — those were the elements from which his highly individual work emerged. ... No one could help Conrad. He had to subdue to the purposes of his imagination a language that was not native to him; to work in a medium that was not the natural clothing of his Polish temperament. ... I think perhaps he most delighted in the writings of Turgenev; but there is not the slightest evidence that he was influenced by him. He loved Turgenev’s personality, and disliked Tolstoi’s. The name Dostoievsky was in the nature of a red rag to him. I am told that he once admitted that Dostoievsky was “deep as the sea.” Perhaps that was why he could not bear him, or possibly it was that Dostoievsky was too imbued with Russian essence for Polish appetite. In any case, his riderless extremisms offended something deep in Conrad."
"I saw little of Conrad during the war. Of whom did one see much? He was caught in Poland at the opening of that business, and it was some months before he succeeded in getting home. Tall words, such as “War to end War” left him, a continental and a realist, appropriately cold. When it was over he wrote: “So I send these few lines to convey to you both all possible good wishes for unbroken felicity in your new home and many years of peace. At the same time I’ll confess that neither felicity nor peace inspire me with much confidence. There is an air of ‘the packed valise’ about these two divine but unfashionable figures. I suppose the North Pole would be the only place for them, where there is neither thought nor heat, where the very water is stable, and the democratic bawlings of the virtuous leaders of mankind die out into a frozen, unsympathetic silence.” Conrad had always a great regard for men of action, for workmen who stuck to their last and did their own jobs well; he had a corresponding distrust of amateur omniscience and handy wiseacres; he curled his lip at political and journalistic protestation; cheap-jackery and clap-trap of all sorts drew from him a somewhat violently expressed detestation. I suppose what he most despised in life was ill-educated theory, and what he most hated, blatancy and pretence. He smelled it coming round the corner and at once his bristles would rise. He was an extremely quick judge of a man. I remember a dinner convoked by me, that he might meet a feminine compatriot of his own married to one who was not a compatriot. The instant dislike he took to that individual was so full of electricity that we did not dine in comfort. The dislike was entirely merited. ... "
" ... In Nostromo Conrad made a continent out of just a sailor’s glimpse of a South American port, some twenty years before. In The Secret Agent he created an underworld out of probably as little actual experience. On the other hand, we have in The Nigger, in Youth and Heart of Darkness the raw material of his own life transmuted into the gold of fine art. People, and there are such, who think that writers like Conrad, if there be any, can shake things from their sleeve, would be staggered if they could have watched the pain and stress of his writing life. ... His wife tells me that a sort of homing instinct was on him in the last month of his life, that he seemed sometimes to wish to drop everything and go back to Poland. Birth calling to Death — no more than that, perhaps, for he loved England, the home of his wandering, of his work, of his last long landfall.
"If to a man’s deserts is measured out the quality of his rest, Conrad shall sleep well."
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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Time, Tides, and Taste
"Save as museum pieces in the unvisited rooms of the Past, how very few books live! In the whole range of English literature down to 1800, who, except by professors and their pupils as part of education, is widely read? Shakespeare. Save for some dozen or so still well-thumbed volumes, the others — even Chaucer, Bunyan, Milton, Dryden, Johnson, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Jeremy Taylor — are but venerable names. Of all the great English writers, poets and novelists of the nineteenth century, who are now really coram populo?
"Dickens, Stevenson, and Mark Twain; with Shelley, Scott, Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Trollope, and Tennyson, dipped into; and the readers of such as Byron, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Poe, the Brontes, Marryat, Charles Reade, Browning, Blackmore, Artemus Ward, Whitman, Herman Melville, confined to two or three surviving books apiece. I speak not here of connoisseurs, students, or bookworms, but of the reading public at large."
"And how amusing it is to watch the wheel of criticism turning — to see a Dostoievsky displace a Turgenev, a Tchehov displace both; a Dreiser replace a Norris, a Lewis a Dreiser, Un Tel a Lewis, a Dreiser Un Tel; a Proust displace a France ... "
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" ... For literary fame — not the brand in publishers’ advertisements, nor the bay-leaf grown in cafés, but that which clings on, though blasted every other decade — is mysteriously entwined with public favour, and curiously detached from critical pronouncement. .. "
" ... For literary fame — not the brand in publishers’ advertisements, nor the bay-leaf grown in cafés, but that which clings on, though blasted every other decade — is mysteriously entwined with public favour, and curiously detached from critical pronouncement. .. "
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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Foreword to “Green Mansions.”
" ... For of all living authors — now that Tolstoi has gone — I could least dispense with W. H. Hudson. Why do I love his writing so? I think because he is, of living writers that I read, the rarest spirit, and has the clearest gift of conveying to me the nature of that spirit. Writers are to their readers little new worlds to be explored; and each traveller in the realms of literature must needs have a favourite hunting ground, which, in his good-will — or perhaps merely in his egoism — he would wish others to share with him.
"The great and abiding misfortunes of most of us writers are twofold: We are, as worlds, rather common tramping ground for our readers, rather tame territory; and as guides and dragomans thereto we are too superficial, lacking clear intimacy of expression; in fact, — like guide or dragoman — we cannot let folk into the real secrets, or show them the spirit, of the land.”"
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"A really great writer such as this is no more to be circumscribed by a single word than America by the part of it called New York. The expert knowledge which Hudson has of Nature gives to all his work backbone and surety of fibre, and to his sense of beauty an intimate actuality. But his real eminence and extraordinary attraction lie in his spirit and philosophy. ... "
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" ... The book is soaked through and through with a strange beauty. I will not go on singing its praises, or trying to make it understood, because I have other words to say of its author."
" ... Style should not obtrude between a writer and his reader; it should be servant, not master. To use words so true and simple that they oppose no obstacle to the flow of thought and feeling from mind to mind, and yet by juxtaposition of word-sounds set up in the recipient continuing emotion or gratification — this is the essence of style; and Hudson’s writing has pre-eminently this double quality. ... "
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" ... His work is a vision of natural beauty and of human life as it might be, quickened and sweetened by the sun and the wind and the rain, and by fellowship with all the other forms of life — the truest vision now being given to us, who are more in want of it than any generation has ever been. A very great writer, and — to my thinking — the most valuable our age possesses."
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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A Note on Sentiment
"Sentiment (so far as literature is concerned) may be defined, I suppose, as the just verbal expression of genuine feeling; it becomes sentimentalism when the feeling is not genuine, or when the expression strikes the reader as laid on with too thick a pen. I find a good instance of the difference in a certain novel of my own, written at a time of stress, and re-read for the first time in calm days six years later. I found it sentimental, and started to revise it. By cutting out thirty thousand words, or just one quarter of the book, without omitting or altering any of the incidents, or eliminating any of the characters, simply by chopping words out of almost every sentence and thereby removing the over-expression, I reduced the sentimentalism to sentiment, so far as I could judge.
"In any definition of sentiment or sentimentalism, reader, in fact, as well as writer, is involved. That there is nothing absolute in the matter will be admitted even by holders of literary opinions canonised in coterie — nothing more absolute than in canonised opinion itself. Time plays skittles with the definitions of sentiment as freely as with the views of the criticaster. ... There are readers, for instance, who hold that literature should not stir emotion in any way connected with life, but only rouse a kind of gloating sensation in the brain, and such readers — the equivalent of the old “aesthetes” — are highly vocal. There is the type of critic, with whom certain sorts of emotional expression, however thickly traced, escape the charge “sentimental” because connected with “the sportsman and the gentleman,” but to whom certain other kinds are “slop,” because not so well connected. There is the complication of the label. Label an author sentimental, and whatever he writes is sentimental, whether it really is or not. And, finally, every writer who expresses feeling at all has his own particular unconscious point of over-expression. Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, even Bernard Shaw — not as a rule laid under this charge — can be sentimental in their own particular ways. The whole subject is intricate; nor is it helpful that what is sentimental to an Englishman is not sentimental to a Frenchman, and so forth."
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" ... But there is danger in too great readiness to pour cold water on the intoxications, whether of self or others. Juice and generosity in verbal expression are possibly more healthy than the under-expression of those afraid to give themselves away. There is a certain meanness in a dry and trained attitude of superiority to emotion, and in that slug-like temperament which prides itself on cold-bloodedness. English training is especially self-conscious.
" ... But there is danger in too great readiness to pour cold water on the intoxications, whether of self or others. Juice and generosity in verbal expression are possibly more healthy than the under-expression of those afraid to give themselves away. There is a certain meanness in a dry and trained attitude of superiority to emotion, and in that slug-like temperament which prides itself on cold-bloodedness. English training is especially self-conscious.
"At root, perhaps a matter of climate; but in later stages, due to our public schools and universities, which strangely influence at second-hand classes not in direct touch with them. The guiding principle of English life and education is a stoicism discouraging all exhibition of emotion, and involving a high degree of self-control. For practical ends it has great value; for the expression and appreciation of art or literature, extremely little. It warps the critical point of view, removing it from an emotional to an ethical and practical basis. To indulge in emotional expression is bad for manners, for progress, trade, and willpower; and, freely using the word sentimental, we stamp on the habit. But art of any kind is based on emotion, and can only be duly apprehended through the emotional faculties. Letting these atrophy and adopting the posture of “sniff,” we become deaf and dumb to art’s true appeal. To “slop over” is the greatest offence an Englishman can commit. We hold it in such horror that our intellectuals often lose the power to judge what is or is not the adequate expression of feeling. But here again we have extraordinary contradictions. For alongside a considerable posture of “sniff” we have a multitude who wallow in the crudest sentimentalism, an audience for whom it is impossible to lay it on too thick."
" ... Or an advocate who will appeal in the most sentimental terms to the patriotism of a jury will stigmatise as “sentimental” appeals to feeling in cases of vivisection, wife-beating or other cruelties. ... The rule in practical life seems to be that your own feeling is sound, and that of your adversary sentimental. ... In fact, in life at large you may be sentimental without being called so only when you are on the side of the majority. ... One does not perhaps exaggerate in saying that we are all sentimentalists; and the difference between us is that most of us safely over-express popular sentiments, and a few of us riskily over-express sentiments which are not popular. Only the latter earn the title “Sentimentalists.”"
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" ... But, as we have seen, sentimentalism is not sentiment. A man may be sentimental and yet be hard as nails; and America certainly excels in a special brand of hard-headedness. Probably America is in more danger from hard-head than from soft heart."
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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Preface to Conrad’s Plays
"CONRAD’S three plays, One Day More, Laughing Anne, and The Secret Agent are all adaptations from stories, and the two in this volume have, curiously enough, the same main theme — the suffering of a woman capable of self-sacrifice. ... I know — that he had fitful longings to write for the stage. And the fact that he never, in all those years, wrote directly for it is to me proof that his nature recoiled too definitely from the limitations which the stage imposes on word painting and the subtler efforts of a psychologist. The novel suited his nature better than the play, and he instinctively kept to it. If, through unhappy accident, he had begun by writing for the stage, without having first experienced the wider freedom and tasted the more exquisite savour of the novel, he would probably have become one of the greatest dramatists of our time. But we should have lost by it, for as a novelist he was in many respects unique."
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"It is, in some sort, fitting that I should write this little introduction, since that first of his adaptations for the stage was made in my studio workroom on Campden Hill. Conrad worked at one end of it, on One Day More, while, at the other end, I was labouring at The Man of Property. He sat at a table close to the big window, I stood at a desk with my back to him, and now and then we would stop and exchange lamentations on the miseries of our respective lots."
"It is, in some sort, fitting that I should write this little introduction, since that first of his adaptations for the stage was made in my studio workroom on Campden Hill. Conrad worked at one end of it, on One Day More, while, at the other end, I was labouring at The Man of Property. He sat at a table close to the big window, I stood at a desk with my back to him, and now and then we would stop and exchange lamentations on the miseries of our respective lots."
"He wrote from Capri in May 1905: “Another piece of news is that (would you believe it?) the Stage Society wishes to perform Tomorrow” (as it was then called) “next June. Colvin wrote me. Several men, and amongst them G. B. Shaw, profess themselves very much struck.” ... "
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"I do not know when Conrad adapted Laughing Anne from the story Because of the Dollars, and indeed never read it till I came to write this preface. Demanding in its short life three scene-sets, none of them easy, and the last exceptionally difficult in stage conditions, it has as yet, I believe, never been performed. It exemplifies that kind of innocence which novelists commonly have as to what will “go down” on the stage. Conrad probably never realised that a “man without hands” would be an almost unbearable spectacle; that what you can write about freely cannot always be endured by the living eye. Anyone who has passed over the Bridge of Galata in the old days — which, very likely, are the new days too — and seen what the beggars there offered to one’s sense of pity, will appreciate the nausea inspired by that particular deformity. ... "
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" ... Those of us, not many, who work in both forms know, to a degree not possible, perhaps, to those who work in one, or work in neither, the cruel obstacles which the physical conditions of the stage put in the way of the sustained mood. ... "
" ... Those of us, not many, who work in both forms know, to a degree not possible, perhaps, to those who work in one, or work in neither, the cruel obstacles which the physical conditions of the stage put in the way of the sustained mood. ... "
That's where cinema wins over stage, hands down!
" ... I would say that the stage, as a faithful vehicle of mood, falls as far short of the novel as the cinema falls short of the stage. ... "
Now that's pure drivel! It's hard to know whether he was merely blinded by his feelings, or unable to see the immense possibilities of the new medium, and that technology was improving by exponential leaps, or something else, but drivel it is.
" ... All art admittedly depends on craft, on the sort of devising which we call technique; even the novel, that most liberal and elastic medium, has its own severities, makes its own rigorous demands on ingenuity, dramatic instinct, and selective power — but they are difficulties to be overcome in a strict privacy by the writer steeped in his mood, camped on his theme without interference. In writing for the stage the cramp of a hundred and one extra influences comes into play, device becomes trick work, selection is dictated to by physical conditions beyond control. The confirmed novelist, accustomed to freedom and his own conscience, is often given to impatience, and a measure of contempt towards even his own writing for the stage. That merely means, as a rule, that he does not realise the basic difference between the two forms. And, however good a novelist such an one may be, he will inevitably be a less good dramatist. A form must “enthuse” one, as the Americans say, before one can do it justice. One cannot approach the stage successfully without profound respect and a deep recognition that its conditions are the essentials of an appeal totally distinct from that of the novel."
And those limitations that restrict stage vanish in Cinema! Then, it's merely a matter of this - does one prefer ones own imagination as a reader, to the realities and interpretation by the artists who come together to make a novel into a film?
And the only limitation that can exist, then, is time - films haven't gone beyond four and half hours, while longnovels spanning several decades might not find that length enough to depict all events and contain all characters. So the television serial wins over the film!
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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Burning Leaves
"WHEN autumn comes, and leaves are gathered into little heaps and slow fire set to them, all who have passed the meridian of life are moved by the acrid odour and the trailing blue of the smoke, as if they saw and scented the leafage of their own pasts burning — leafage which was green and smelled of lemons when it burst from the bud. ... "
If he'd spent an autumn in New England, he'd know beauty of Autumn can surpass that of spring!
" ... Out in the open we are framed in the unceasing process of Nature, among plants and birds and animals; in towns bound in mechanical conspiracy to conceal that process; we burn our leaves, and remove the sight of their long decay; we compress slow emotion into swift feeling."
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July 26, 2021 - July 26, 2021.
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After Seeing a Play in 1903
"It is this apt and proper disproportion within us between common-sense and feeling which has produced the masterpieces of our greater modern dramatists. They recognise that men were made for morality and not morality made by men, and that the paramount duty of the playwright is to convey the triumph of the preconceived notion of things in preference to showing the forces of Nature acting and reacting upon human beings; and they give us, week after week and year after year, works which precisely fulfil the requirements of the preponderant common-sense in the body politic, crown and set a seal on that common-sense itself, exalt it to the stars, and bless it with complacency. For our greater modern dramatists are all men of head, men of common-sense, believing to the full in the folly of the artist and the gloom of the interior of desks."
"Men of heart and men of head! Not until we reverse the proportion between these two, not till the moon has shone by day, will our greater modern dramatists believe that the principal things in life are neither marriage nor a position in society, but love and death; that art is rooted in feeling; that inevitability has a certain value; and that the only epic virtue is courage."
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July 27, 2021 - July 27, 2021.
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Six Novelists in Profile
Galsworthy discourses on novels, philosophy, art, ... Charles Dickens, Ivan Turgnev, Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad and Anatole France.
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"MY first profile is that of Charles Dickens, who, born in London in 1812, died at Gadshill in 1870. In that early and in some sort great Victorian Age, English novelists — in spite of much generous revolt against particular social evils — solemnly accepted the conventions, morals, standards, ideals, and enterprises of their day; believed with all their hearts that life was worth living; regarded its current values as absolute; had no ironic misgivings, nor any sense that existence is a tragi-comedy. They saw no grin on the face of Fate. They were almost majestically unselfconscious. Dickens was a true child of his age.
"Shakespeare, two hundred and fifty years earlier, was much more introspective and philosophical. ... "
" ... he was English of the English, and from no other writings can England be so well comprehended even now. If some of his characters were little more than names attached to extravagant attitudes of conduct, they show his genius the more in that we accept them as men and women. He had the persuasiveness of great vitality; he wrote with a fine “gusto.” In the pages of Dickens virtue is virtue, vice is vice, seldom “the twain do meet” in the way they meet in all — except our public men. He paints the ethical with a glaring brush; we should charge at the picture as bulls at red if there were any pretence of art about it. But in those days our novelists did not bother about art. The literary gatherings of that period in England confined themselves, I suspect, to jesting, drink, politics, and oysters. Dickens’s great contemporary, Thackeray, indeed, had heard of art, and thought it worthy of a certain patronage; Dickens himself identified it, I fear, with foreigners, and showed it the back door. He was robust, but it is strange to think of him writing as he did when, not two hundred miles away, such an accomplished artist as Prosper Merimée was writing Carmen and The Venus d’llle, Turgenev was writing Smoke and Torrents of Spring, and across the Atlantic Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter and Edgar Poe his Strange Tales. No one would dream of going to Dickens to learn consciously the art of novel-writing; yet all can draw from him subconsciously the foundation of phrase, for he was a born writer, and the foundation of philosophy, though he was no philosopher."
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" ... Under Jane Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Scott, Dumas, Thackeray and Hugo, the novel attained a certain relation of part to whole; but it was left for one of more poetic feeling and greater sensibility than any of these to perfect its proportions, and introduce the principle of selection, until there was that complete relation of part to whole which goes to the making of what we call a work of art. This writer was Turgenev, as supreme in the art of the novel as Dickens was artless.
" ... Under Jane Austen, Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Scott, Dumas, Thackeray and Hugo, the novel attained a certain relation of part to whole; but it was left for one of more poetic feeling and greater sensibility than any of these to perfect its proportions, and introduce the principle of selection, until there was that complete relation of part to whole which goes to the making of what we call a work of art. This writer was Turgenev, as supreme in the art of the novel as Dickens was artless.
"Ivan Turgenev, born at Orel in Russia in 1818, died at Bougival near Paris in 1883. Critics have usually been preoccupied by his detachment from his native Russian culture, by his variation from the loose-jointed giant Gogol, and the shapeless giant Dostoievsky. Anxiously calling him a Westerner, they have omitted to notice that the West did not influence him so much as he influenced the West. Turgenev achieved his unique position from within himself; he was the finest natural poet who ever wrote novels. It was that which separated him from his great Russian contemporaries, and gave him his distinction and his influence in the West. Russia did not like Turgenev — he had a bad habit. He told the truth. No country likes that. It is considered especially improper in novelists. Russia got rid of him. But if he had never left Russia his work would still have taken the shape it did — because of his instinctive feeling for form. He had a perfect sense of “line moulding and rounding his themes within himself before working them out in written words; and, though he never neglected the objective, he thought in terms of atmosphere rather than in terms of fact. Turgenev, an aristocrat, a man of culture, susceptible to the impression of foreign literatures, devoted to music and painting, a reader and writer of plays and poems, touches Dickens only at three broad but all-important points: the intense understanding they both had of human nature, the intense interest they both took in life, the intense hatred they both felt for cruelty and humbug. Let those who doubt the truth of this last resemblance read Turgenev’s little story Mumu, about the dog of the dumb serf porter Gerasim. No more stirring protest against tyrannical cruelty was ever penned in terms of art. Dickens was the least fastidious of writers, Turgenev one of the most fastidious. Dickens attacked a cruelty, an abuse, an extravagance, directly or by way of frank caricature; Turgenev sank his criticism in objective terms of portraiture. His style in Russian, we are told, is exquisite; even in translations much of its charm and essential flavour lingers. His dialogue is easy, interesting, life-like, yet always significant and revealing; his characters serve the main theme or idea with which he is dealing, but never fail to be real men and women too. His descriptions of Nature are delightful. Byezhin Prairie, A Tryst, Torrents of Spring haunt one with their beauty. The whole of his work is saturated in the halfmelancholy rapture which Nature stirs in a poetic temperament. In his definite prose-poems he was much less of a poet than in his sketches and novels, because self-consciousness destroys true poetry, which is the springing forth of mood and feeling almost in spite of self."
" ... Flaubert, the apostle of self-conscious artistry, never had quite the vital influence that Turgenev exercised on English writers; a certain feeling of enclosure clings about his work, an indoor atmosphere. Against Turgenev that was never charged, not even when, about the year 1907, it became a literary fashion in England to disparage him, because certain of our critics had discovered — rather late, perhaps — a new Russian lamp in Dostoievsky. There was room, one might have thought, for the two lights; but in the literary world it is difficult to light a new lamp without putting out an old one. That is now ancient history, and Turgenev has recovered his name, but not his influence. He is too balanced, and too essentially poetic, for the new age."
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"And so I come to my third profile — that of one who, I am told by some, is still read in his native France, and who, I am told by others, has been laid on the shelf. The great literary achievements of Guy de Maupassant, born in 1850 and dying in 1893, were crowded into a space of but twelve years. His name is popularly associated with the short story, but his full measure, to my thinking, can only be taken through his novels, and tales of medium length like Boule de Suif and Yvette. All his work, long or short, tragic or trivial, is dramatic in essence; and, though he wrote but little for the theatre, he was richly endowed with the qualities that make a great dramatist. In the essentials of style, he is the prince of teachers. The vigour of his vision, and his thought, the economy and clarity of the expression in which he clothed them, have not yet been surpassed. Better than any other writer, he has taught us what to leave out; better than any illustrated for us Flaubert’s maxim: “Study an object till its essential difference from every other is perceived and can be rendered in words.” His work forms a standing rebuke to the confusion, the shallow expressionism, the formless egoism which are not infrequently taken for art. But though disciplined to the finger-nails as a craftsman, he reached and displayed the depths of human feeling. His sardonic nature hated prejudice and stupidity, had in it a vein of deep and indignant pity, a burning curiosity, piercing vision, and a sensitiveness seldom equalled. He was well equipped for the rendering of life."
"His ideal was to make a beautiful thing following his temperament. Since endless controversy rages over the word “beauty,” I shall be forgiven for not plunging into it. But the artist who creates what is living and true has achieved beauty also, in my considered opinion. De Maupassant made many a capture of the shy bird Beauty."
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"It is curious to think that Tolstoi, whose profile is so different, admired him. Born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, and dying in 1910 at Astaporo, Leo Tolstoi began to write when he was twenty-four years old, after a full and energetic youth. Tales of Sevastopol, written during the Crimean War, in which he served in the Russian army, brought him instant celebrity. His chief masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, were written between 1864 and 1873.
"It is curious to think that Tolstoi, whose profile is so different, admired him. Born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana in Russia, and dying in 1910 at Astaporo, Leo Tolstoi began to write when he was twenty-four years old, after a full and energetic youth. Tales of Sevastopol, written during the Crimean War, in which he served in the Russian army, brought him instant celebrity. His chief masterpieces, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, were written between 1864 and 1873.
"Tolstoi is a fascinating puzzle. So singular an instance of artist and reformer rolled into one frame is not, I think, elsewhere to be found. The preacher in him, who took such charge of his later years, was already casting a shadow over the artist-writer of Anna Karenina. There is even an indication of the moralist in the last part of that tremendous novel War and Peace."
"Tolstoi knew his Russian land and the Russian peasant as well, perhaps, as an aristocrat could know them; but he is not so close to the soul and body of Russia as Tchehov, who came of the people, and knew them from inside. The Russia of Tolstoi’s great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, is now a Russia of the past, perhaps only the crust of that Russia of the past — split and crumbled beyond repair. We are fortunate to have those two great pictures of a vanished fabric."
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"Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, born in 1857 of Polish gentry who suffered in the rebellion of 1863, shared as a child his parents’ exile, spent his boyhood in Russian Poland, his early manhood in adventure, and became an officer in British sailing ships, laying up strange store of thought, tradition, life, and language. He gave up the sea for literature, some thirty years ago, became naturalised in England, and began authorship under the name of Joseph Conrad. His twenty odd volumes of fiction, in a language not native to him, with a quality of style so rich and varied, form an unique achievement in the history of literature. The bewildering colour and imagery of his early works were toned with the years to a more sober texture; but, taking his work as a whole, no writer of English has exceeded him in sheer power of word-painting. ... Conrad had, beyond all novelists, the cosmic sense. Throughout the long drama of his work, Fate, powerful and mysterious, plays the star part; his human beings, though highly individualised, perform the minor roles. And from this subordination they derive a pathos and poignancy, an epic quality which attaches to those who struggle to the death against that which must beat them in the end. This feeling that Nature is first, Man second — even when he preserves his moral integrity and puts up a great fight, as he often does in Conrad’s novels — this feeling is not forced on the reader by conscious effort, it reaches to him in subtle ways, from the temperament of the novelist.
"The cosmic sense is rare. We are most of us too definitely anthropomorphic to have it; we see even the Deity from the human point of view; have little of the old Greek sense of our position in the scheme of things. L’état c’est nous. We are the scheme and the working thereof. This may be natural, but from the point of view of Father Time, who for some billions of years looked on a world untenanted by human beings, it is rather a parvenu conviction. Mystery enwraps the cause, the origin, the end of life, yea, even of human life. And acceptance of that mystery brings a certain dignity to existence, the kind of dignity we find in the work of Conrad."
"The fascination of his writing lies in a singular blending of reality with romance — he paints a world of strange skies and seas, rivers, forests, men, strange harbours and ships, all, to our tamed understanding, touched a little by the marvellous. Beyond all modern writers he had lived romance; lived it for many years with a full unconscious pulse, the zest of a young man loving adventure, and before ever he thought to become a writer. How many talents among us are spoiled by having no store of experience and feeling, unconsciously amassed, to feed on! How many writers, without cream inside the churn, are turning out butter!"
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" ... In life’s drama Conrad was on the stage, Anatole France, from his birth in 1844 to his death in 1924, sat in the stalls. His was the detached and learned mind. A pure bookman, bred and born in the centre of bookish knowledge, he was erudite as few men have been, and withal — a scourge. His whip was the most elegant and perhaps the most effective ever wielded. He destroyed with a suavity that has never been excelled. He perforated prejudice and punctured idolatry so adroitly that the ventilation holes were scarcely visible, and the victims felt draughts without knowing why. In his long writing career — he began in 1868 and was still writing at his death in 1924 — he only thrice, if I am not mistaken, assumed the rôle of novelist pure. Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard, Le Lys Rouge and L’Histoire Comique stand out in method from his other work. In them alone is he chiefly student of human character and teller of a tale. In his other books he is first the philosopher and satirist. Even a work of art so remarkable as Thais, a perfect piece of recreation, is in essence critical, and was forged out of a satiric heart. The Bergeret series, though they contain many admirable portraits, was the work of one preoccupied with riddling the prejudices rather than painting the features of human beings. The short masterpiece Le Procurateur de Judée presents an unforgettable effigy of Pontius Pilate, but it was written to clothe in perfection a satiric thought. Poor “Crainquebille” is a very human figure, yet it is rather as a walking indictment of human justice that we cherish and remember him. Even little dog Riquet conveys his tail-fluttering criticism of human habits.
"Anatole France was a subtle and deadly fencer, rather than a trenchant swordsman like Voltaire; his victims still don’t know that they are dead. They read him yet, and call him maître. Unsurpassed for lucidity and supple elegance, his style was the poetry of pure reason. He was very French. We shall never perhaps see again so perfect an incarnation of the witty French spirit. Not without justification did he take the nom de plume of France. ... Born fortunately too late for the glory of being burned or beheaded, he succeeded in being excommunicated by the Vatican. ... L’Affaire Dreyfus brought Anatole France out of the groves of his philosophic fancy, and L’Anneau d’Amethyste was a contribution to Justice almost as potent as Zola’s J’Accuse. ... "
" ... In literature there is never really stagnation; the main current is all the time unobtrusively flowing on. The antics and splashings on the surface are sometimes excessive, sometimes scarcely visible. They are mostly made by little fish, for the big swim in their element with a certain concentration of purpose. ... "
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July 27, 2021 - July 27, 2021.
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Books as Ambassadors
"Have not the Bible, the Koran, and Das Kapital, notwithstanding their intentions, divided men more than all other books whatsoever have united them?"
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July 27, 2021 - July 27, 2021.
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Faith of a Novelist
"A work of fiction, then, should carry the hall-mark of its author so surely as a Goya, a Daumier, a Velasquez, and a Mathew Maris are, as a rule, the unmistakable creations of those masters. ... "
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July 27, 2021 - July 27, 2021.
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July 24, 2021 - July 27, 2021.
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