Notes on Life and Letters
by . Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co. 1921. 12mo, x+262 pp. $1.90.
EVERYONE likes to have a favorite novelist confess himself. This is the charm of Lockhart’s Scott and of the Autobiography of Trollope. The book before us is indeed hardly an autobiography; but Mr. Conrad informs us that it ’is as near as I shall ever come to déshabillé in public,’and he says further, with justice, that these ‘pieces of writing, whatever be the comment on their display, appertain to the character of the man.’ The literary essays of Howells and James are interesting in themselves, but far more so as coming from skilled and exquisite practitioners of the art discussed. It takes us, as it were, into the inner chamber of Mr. Conrad’s artistic consciousness when he writes: ‘I have in my time told some stories which are (I hate false modesty) both true and lovely. Yet no little girl ever wrote to me in kindly terms. And why? Simply because I am not enough of a Vagabond.’
The whole tone of these Notes is singularly modern. Not only are the subjects recent, — James, Daudet, Maupassant, Anatole France, the great war, above all, Poland and contemporary matters of the sea, — but the thoughts are of to-day, the vivid reflection of a soul which does not live in the past but is intensely and constantly preoccupied with the present. Hardly a single great literary or historical name is introduced for leisurely comparison with the busy, crowding pressure of the immediate hour.
In the literary studies there is a curious subtlety and remoteness, which indicate strongly the influence of James, with his endless shades and distinctions. There is much that is suggestive, much that tends to draw one into the author’s own vein of exhaustive analysis. But some of the comment is rather fine-spun for ordinary mortals, as when he writes of Maupassant; ‘His sensibility is really very great; and it is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly ; unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible premises to an unsophisticated conclusion.’
On the other hand, when Mr. Conrad gets into his familiar world of action, what a difference, what life, what energy, what movement, what color! He revisits his native Cracow at the outbreak of the war, and every street, every house, every stone speaks, to him and to the reader. He touches the sea, and instantly becomes the huge, ever-shifting presence that the readers of his stories know so well: ‘a gray, hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey.’
Most of all, these Notes are winning in that they reveal the sincere, wholesome attitude toward life which readers of the stories love. Mr. Conrad abhors pessimism: ‘What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance.’ He appreciates the value of humility: ‘We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility.’ And he understands the secret of hope, which alone can save life and thought and art from spiritual death: ‘To be hopeful in an artistic sense 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.’ GAMALIEL BRADFORD.