Two Enthusiasms

AMONG good memories I cherish particularly the recollection of my youthful friendship with Sir Sidney Colvin, the biographer of Landor and Keats, professor of Fine Arts at Cambridge, and then for many years curator of prints at the British Museum. His generous kindness meant much to a college boy. As everyone knew, he had been the first discoverer and adviser of Stevenson’s talent.¹ Stevenson was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood (my twenty-first birthday present to myself was the pocket edition in four volumes of Stevenson’s Letters which Colvin had edited), and in the summer of 1911 a college mate and I had bicycled all the way from Oxford to Edinburgh to investigate Tusitala’s footprints, I had even gone so far as to hunt out the country rectory where Colvin and Stevenson first met, at Cockfield in Suffolk.² I wrote to Colvin to tell him about all this. At a time when the old Stevenson ‘ idolatry ’ was beginning to show signs of an undertow, this boyish zeal may well have pleased him.

But Colvin was much more than just the kindly procurator of a well-loved author. His Memories and Notes of Persons and Places, 1852-1912, gives a deep view into the Victorian Age — which really was an age; something organic and patterned, like the slice of a ham, whereas what we live in now sometimes seems more like a jelly that refuses to jell. (Both phenomena have their advantages.) When Colvin died, his executor, Mr. E. V. Lucas, arranged his correspondence for sale at the Anderson Galleries. A study of that sale catalogue (Anderson Catalogue No. 2267, May 7, 1928) shows his many relationships. Colvin’s career as mediator between artists and the decorous world of publishers — he knew intimately most of the figures from Ruskin, Browning, and Meredith down to Hugh Walpole — would be the theme of an interesting essay. He was always, as Stevenson said, somewhat the Stern Parent. It was characteristic of him that when Stephen Phillips dined with him he warned the butler not to replenish the poet’s wineglass more than twice. Phillips used to tell with much grievance how hard he tried to catch the discreet servant’s eye.

In my own small doings Colvin served as link between two major enthusiasms, Stevenson and Conrad. Though the men were very different, and Conrad had no high opinion of Stevenson’s work, there was a sort of continuity; for while Stevenson was writing his last and finest book, which burst his brain and killed him, Conrad was reading proof of his first novel. Surely one of the most curious episodes in literary history is that of the thin, dark-eyed, and dying Cambridge man, Jacques, to whom Conrad showed his manuscript aboard the Torrens in 1892 and who chose just the right reply when Conrad asked him if it was worth finishing. ‘Distinctly,’he said. Too much or too little fervor would have been equally distasteful to Conrad; ‘distinctly’ was just the needed word. And the next year Galsworthy was a passenger in the Torrens; I believe that his intention was to go to Samoa to see Stevenson. He never got there, and the fact that the mate of the ship he sailed in was to be an even greater writer was a paradox he could hardly have anticipated.

One of my trophies is a little drawing of the Torrens by an old sea captain who was her cabin boy just after Conrad had left her. If you are interested in ships, you can look up her record in Lubbock’s Colonial Clippers. Surely one of the most covetable ‘items’ in the world is that now owned by Mr. George Keating, the ‘Certificate of Competency as Master’ issued on November 11, 1886, to Conrad Korzeniowski by the Lords of the Committee of Privy Council for Trade.³ I have always wondered if poor Jacques, who died soon after reaching Australia, ever wrote home to his family any impressions of the seaman whose manuscript he read.

My chief boyhood treasure, which Colvin gave me, was a letter of Stevenson’s, written from Mentone in the earliest days of his friendship with Colvin, in which the youth wrote, ‘I am full of litterary [sic] schemes.’ This I once parted with in a too impulsive moment, and though I tried hard some years later to retrace it, I never could find it again. Probably it gladdens the heart of some collector somewhere, which is as it should be. The purpose of all such trophies is to give pleasure, not to lie hidden in vaults.

One of my greatest treasures still is the copy of Travels with a Donkey (inscribed ‘from Modestine per R. L. S.’) which Stevenson gave his good Bournemouth physician, the doctor with the sadly appropriate initials, Dr. T. B. Scott. This was a gift from that openhanded Caliph of amenity, A. E. N. I prize no less my copy of Moral Emblems signed by Lloyd Osbourne, who describes himself in the inscription as ‘the little boy for whom they were written’; and my Wrong Box (Scribner, 1889) is also signed by Osbourne, who was its co-author. This admirable farce, which is certainly well up among contenders for the most subtly amusing spoof in our language, gives a portrait of an old gentleman whose wits have been addled by a passion for public lecturing.

There was a curious psychic episode in connection with its publication. Stevenson’s friend, Charles Baxter, a lawyer in Edinburgh, received a copy fresh from the press. When the book arrived he wrote in it his name and the date (June 17, 1889) and began reading it in the train on his way home from his office to the suburbs. He found the character of Michael Finsbury ‘a rather ill-natured caricature’ of himself, and was so annoyed that he put the book away and did not write to the author. Weeks later he received a letter from R. L. S. in Samoa saying: ‘Did you die on June 17 or what happened to you? My wife saw you come up to the house with an angry look. She rushed to meet you and you vanished.’ Baxter, with legal precision, made a note of this coincidence in his copy and had his father witness it. I remember seeing that identical copy at Drake’s bookshop some fifteen years ago.

Stevenson’s letters have lost little of their savor. Glancing through them again recently, I found his comment on a British lecturer who was coming to this country in 1884 to give us some cultural assistance. ‘Let him resist the fatal British tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its inhabitants.’

From Colvin I first heard of Joseph Conrad, and like to think that I have Conrad’s own name written in that one of his books which was dearest to himself, The Mirror of the Sea. He had sailed almost everywhere else, but never crossed the North Atlantic until he came to New York in the Tuscania in 1923. Captain Bone was then master of the Tuscania, and Conrad’s fellow passenger was the Captain’s brother, Muirhead Bone. Surely the finest portrait ever done of Conrad is that etching by Muirhead Bone showing him as he was on that voyage, sitting up late in his dressing gown talking of old days at sea. It shows the austere Ulysses aspect of that grimly noble head.

This was Conrad’s first experience of modern liners, and, while he paid tribute to every cunning device of comfort and precaution that marks our great steamships, the old master in sail spoke in his final comment that hotel life is much the same everywhere. A number of newspaper men went down the bay in the revenue cutter to meet the Tuscania at Quarantine. I had TheMirror of the Sea in my pocket, and Captain Bone wrote in it a formal shipmaster’s manifest: ‘Duly delivered at New York, in good order and condition, Captain Joseph Conrad. David Wm. Bone, Master, R. M. S. Tuscania, May Day 1923.’ This was witnessed in signature by the invoice himself.

The first essay in The Mirror of the Sea is called ‘Landfalls and Departures’ (a landfall is the sailor’s first sight of land after a voyage, when he ‘falls in with the land’) and Muirhead Bone gracefully illustrated the first page of that essay with a little watercolor sketch of the Fire Island Lightship, which was Conrad’s first glimpse of North America. One surprising similarity which I have never seen mentioned always strikes me in The Mirror: in some of the sketches Conrad’s mood and tone are identically those of a man he had probably never read, whose life was as different as possible from his own — Charles Lamb.

It is well to remember, in thinking about Conrad, that he was a foreigner. Long years at sea, long years as a writer in England, did not suppress but only drove inward his native quality. His wildly improbable career raises the deepest problems of art and consciousness. Surely the Slavic accent of his speech was an analogy of the thought within. His Polish habit of extreme politeness very likely gave a misleading impression of his apparent assimilation. I doubt if in all their years of affectionate relation a man so indestructibly English as Colvin divined Conrad’s essential detachment from Anglo-Saxon ideas. A brilliant book by Gustav Morf, The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, tries to recapture him for his native land, showing how deep Polish idiom and Polish folk tales were imbedded in his work. Dr. Morf suggests that Conrad’s loneliness accounts for his choice of exiled, outcast, and frustrated characters. At the very front of Morf’s book is a phrase that shows we are dealing with an order of ideas totally different from English. The portrait of the superbly bearded Apollo Korzeniowski, Conrad’s revolutionist father, is thus described: ‘The eyes of a dreamer, the beard of a man whose accounts with the world at large are closed.’

But Conrad was even more foreign than an expatriated Pole. He came from a land remoter still, the land of the poet’s imagination. He always resented being classified as a maritime writer. ‘The English have tried to imprison me on an island in the ocean,’ he wrote. ‘They never did that to anyone but Napoleon.’ The sea was the ancient enemy in many of his stories, but the sea was a symbol. In March 1917, he wrote to Colvin, apropos of The Shadow Line: ‘Perhaps you won’t find it presumptious [sfc] if after 22 years of work I may say that I have not been very well understood. I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer, a romantic writer — and also a realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the ideal values of things.’ Perhaps in the sea he found the purest area of uncompromised insolubility which is available for any artist. Its appalling unconcern is disastrously complete. Even when he settled in England he kept near it. We learn from the late Neil Munro that in 1898, when he had already published four books (including the immortal Nigger), Conrad actually spent three days in Glasgow looking for a ship. Luckily he did n’t find one; he went back and wrote Lord Jim.

His great countryman, Paderewski, once opened a war-time appeal for Poland in these memorable words: ‘I have to speak to you of a country which is not yours, in a language which is not mine.’ That was even more true of Conrad. The indescribable refreshment he brought to his fellow émigrés from that dominion of ideal values, and the extraordinary enthusiasm of their homage, testify to that element of strangeness which Bacon identified as a character of great art. His career as writer was necessarily studded with the small comedies inseparable from the lives of those who dwell far abroad from their own folk. No example is better than the instance when the offer of knighthood was sent him in its alarmingly official envelope. It lay long unopened on his desk, so long that the Prime Minister was gravely embarrassed and had to send a personal messenger to investigate. Conrad had thought it was the income tax.

One of the greatest things he ever wrote, the Preface to the Nigger, was for many years omitted from his books because his English publishers thought it too proud a manifesto to come from an almost unknown writer. But in that preface he spoke as does a great king entering his kingdom.