Suspended Judgments Part 24

None of us know! None of us can ever know! It is enough that in this extraordinary story the wild strange link which once and again in the history of a generation binds so strangely two persons together, almost as though their a.s.sociation were the result of some aeon-old everlasting Recurrence, is once more thrown into tragic relief and given the tender beauty of an austere imagination.

Not every one can feel the spell of Emily Bronte or care for her work. To some she must always remain too ungracious, too savage, too uncompromising. But for those who have come to care for her, she is a wonderful and a lovely figure; a figure whose full significance has not even yet been sounded, a figure with whom we must come more and more to a.s.sociate that liberation of what we call love from the mere animalism of s.e.xual pa.s.sion, which we feel sometimes, and in our rarer moments, to be one of the richest triumphs of the spirit over the flesh.

It may be that Emily Bronte is right. It may be that a point can be reached--perhaps is already being reached in the lives of certain individuals--where s.e.xual pa.s.sion is thus surpa.s.sed and transcended by the burning of a flame more intense than any which l.u.s.t can produce.

It may be that the human race, as time goes on, will follow closer and closer this ferocious and spiritual girl in tearing aside the compromises of our hesitating timidity and plunging into the ice-cold waters of pa.s.sions so keen and translunar as to have become chaste. It may be so--and, on the other hand, it may be that the old sly earth-G.o.ds will hold their indelible sway over us until the "baseless fabric" of this vision leaves "not a rack behind"! In any case, for our present purpose, the reading of Emily Bronte strengthens us in our recognition that the only wisdom of life consists in leaving all the doors of the universe open.

Cursed be they who close any doors! Let that be our literary as it is our philosophical motto.

Little have we gained from books, little from our pa.s.sionate following in the steps of the great masters, if, after all, we only return once more to the narrow prejudices of our obstinate personal convictions.

From ourselves we cannot escape; but we can, unfortunately, hide ourselves from ourselves. We can hide ourselves "full-fathom-five"

under our convictions and our principles. We can hide ourselves under our theories and our philosophies. It is only now and again, when, by some sudden devastating flash, some terrific burst of the thunder of the great G.o.ds, the real lineaments of what we are show up clearly for a moment in the dark mirror of our shaken consciousness.

It is well not to let the memory of those moments pa.s.s altogether away.

The reading of the great authors will have been a mere epicurean pastime if it has not made us recognise that what is important in our life is something that belongs more closely to us than any opinion we have inherited or any theory we have gained or any principle we have struggled for.

It will have been wasted if it has not made us recognise that in the moments when these outward things fall away, and the true self, beyond the power of these outward things, looks forth defiantly, tenderly, pitifully upon this huge strange world, there are intimations and whispers of something beyond all that the philosophers have ever dreamed, hidden in the reservoirs of being and ready to touch us with their breath.

Our reading of these n.o.ble writings will have been no more than a gracious entertainment if we have not come to see that the enormous differences of their verdicts prove conclusively that no one theory, no one principle, can cover the tremendous field. But such reading will have had but a poor effect if because of this radical opposition in the voices reaching us we give up our interest in the great quest.

For it is upon our retaining our interest that the birthright of our humanity depends.

We shall never find what we seek; that is certain enough. We should be G.o.ds, not men, if we found it. But we should be less than men, and beasts--if we gave up the interest of the search, the tremulous vibrating interest, which, like little waves of ether, hovers over the cross-roads where all the great ways part.

Something outside ourselves drives us on to seek it--this evasive solution of a riddle that seems eternal--and when, weary with the effort of refusing this or the other premature solution, weary with the effort of suspending our judgment and standing erect at that parting of the ways, we long in our hearts to drift at leisure down one of the many soothing streams, it is only the knowledge that it is not our intrinsic inmost self that so collapses and yields up the high prerogative of doubt, but some lesser self in us, some tired superficial self, which keeps us back from that betrayal.

The courage with which Emily Bronte faced life, the equanimity with which she faced death, were in her case closely a.s.sociated with the quiet desolate landscape which surrounded her.

As my American poet says, it is only in the country that we can look upon these fatal necessities and see them as they are. To be born and to die fall into their place when we are living where the smell of the earth can reach us.

There will always be a difference between those who come from the country and those who come from the town; and if a time ever arrives when the cities of men so cover the earth that there will be room no longer for any country-bred persons in our midst, something will in that hour pa.s.s away forever from art and literature, and, I suspect, from philosophy too.

For you cannot acquire this quality by any pleasant trips through picturesque scenery. It is either in you or it is not in you. You either have the slow, tenacious, humorous, patient, imaginative instincts of the country-born; or you have the smart, quick, clever, witty, fanciful, lively, receptive, caustic turn of mind of those bred in the great cities.

We all come to the town, "some in rags and some in jags and some in velvet gowns"; but the country-born always recognises the country-born, and there is a natural affinity between them.

I suspect that those who have behind them no local, provincial traditions will find it difficult to understand Emily Bronte.

She did not deal in elaborate description; but the earth-mould smells sweet, and the roots of the reeds of the pond-rushes show wavering and dim in the dark water, and "through the hawthorn blows the cold wind," and the white moon drifts over the sombre furze-covered hills; and all these things have pa.s.sed into her style and have formed her style, and all these things are behind the tenacity with which she endures life, and behind the immense mysterious hope with which, while regarding all human creeds as "unutterably vain," she falls back so fiercely upon that "amor intellectualis Dei" which is the burning fire in her own soul.

--"Thou, thou art being and breath; And what thou art can never be destroyed!"

JOSEPH CONRAD

The inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and more ingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the world commends him, and this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad's case.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that he has possessed himself of the secret of the sea more completely than any who write in English except Shakespeare and Swinburne.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he has sounded the ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, the heart of the white man exiled from his kind in the darkness of tropical solitudes.

These things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad's genius lies behind and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am not mistaken, in a region where he has hardly a single rival.

This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of our minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild marsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks.

Conrad's genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to what is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever and the simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed in something much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection of any striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery or jungle solitude.

The margin of the mind! Margin, mid-way between the known and the unknown! Do not the obscure images, called up by the feelings such words suggest, indicate far more intimately than any description of tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritual atmosphere in which he darkly gives us many strange clues?

I seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme "bank and shoal" of our human consciousness, as a place like that across which Childe Roland moved when he came to the "dark tower."

I seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of waving reeds and deep black pools. I seem to see it as a place where patches of dead gra.s.s whistle in a melancholy wind, and where half-buried trunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms.

Others may image it in a different way, perhaps with happier symbols; but the region I have in my mind, crossed by the obscure shapes of dimly beckoning memories, is common to us all.

You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty intimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely approach it with any clairvoyant intelligence. And the reason of that is, it is much further removed from the material reactions of the nerves and the senses than the favourite soil of these people's explorations.

So thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelings which flit to and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression, that it almost seems as though this subconscious borderland were in contact with some animistic inner world--not exactly a supernatural world, but a world removed several stages back from the material one wherein our nerves and our senses function; a world wherein we might be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling, archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent "souls"

of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a plane of existence beyond our rational apprehension.

It is certain that there are many moments in the most naive people's experience when, as they walk in solitude along some common highway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or the indescribable melancholy of a certain road-side pool, or the way the light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particular manner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself from the bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the mind of which I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings.

It is as though something in the material thing before us--some inexplicable "soul" of the inanimate--rushed forth to meet our soul, as if it had been _waiting_ for us for long, long years.

I am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad, through a vague and obscure twilight. It is not easy to express these things; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy of mystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, or series of experiences, in the "great valley" of the mind.

When Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly at a floating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in "Chance"

who is relating the story watches the mud of the road outside the hotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral are making their desperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious "expectancy" which is part of this strange phenomenon, and that curious sudden thrill, "I have been here before! I have seen and heard all this before!" which gives to so many scenes in Conrad that undertone of unfathomable mystery which is so true an aspect of life.

So often are we conscious of it as we read him! We are conscious of it--to give another instance--when Heyst and Lena are talking together in the loneliness of their island of escape, before the unseen enemies descend on them.

The same insight in him and the same extraordinary power of making words malleable to his purpose in dealing with these hidden things may be remarked in all those scenes in his books where men and women are drawn together by love.

Conrad takes no interest in social problems. His interest is only stirred by what is permanent and undying in the relations between men and women. These extraordinary scenes, where Gould and his wife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem and Aissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and Anthony, Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet and peer into the secret depths of one another's beings, are all scenes possessing that universal human element which no change or reform or revolution or improvement can touch or alter.

Without any theory about their "emanc.i.p.ation," Conrad has achieved for women, in these stories of his, an extraordinary triumph. Well does he name his latest book "Victory." The victory of women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over brutality, is one of the main threads running through all his work.

And what women they are! I do not recall any that resemble them in all literature.

Less pa.s.sionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less sentimental than the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of de Maupa.s.sant, Conrad's women have a quality entirely their own, a quality which holds us spell-bound. It is much easier to feel this quality than to describe it. Something of the same element--and it is a thing the positivity of which we have to search out among many crafty negations--may be discerned in some of the women of Shakespeare and, in a lesser degree, in one or two of the young girls in the stories of Turgenief.

I think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise and self-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicated in their moments of withdrawn and reserved silence.

They seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of their femininity, into the depths of some strange s.e.x-secret of which they are themselves only dreamily conscious.

They seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from their own drama, from their own personality, and to lie back upon life, upon the universal mystery of life and womanhood. This they do without, it might seem, knowing what they are doing.