Part 18 (1/2)

But, O, if you find that castle, Draw back your foot from the gateway, Let not its peace invite you, Let not its offerings tempt you, For faded and decayed like a garment, Love to a dust will have fallen, And song and laughter will have gone with sorrow, And hope will have gone with pain; And of all the throbbing heart's high courage Nothing will remain.

And these later poems are not only n.o.bler in pa.s.sion than the early introspective work; they are also more moving. Few of the ”in memoriam”

poems of the war touch the heart as does that poem, _To a Bulldog_, with its moving close:--

And though you run expectant as you always do To the uniforms we meet, You will never find w.i.l.l.y among all the soldiers Even in the longest street.

Nor in any crowd: yet, strange and bitter thought, Even now were the old words said, If I tried the old trick, and said ”Where's w.i.l.l.y?”

You would quiver and lift your head.

And your brown eyes would look to ask if I was serious, And wait for the word to spring.

Sleep undisturbed: I shan't say that again, You innocent old thing.

I must sit, not speaking, on the sofa, While you lie there asleep on the floor; For he's suffered a thing that dogs couldn't dream of, And he won't be coming here any more.

Of the new poems in the book, one of the most beautiful is _August Moon_. The last verses provide an excellent example of Mr. Squire's gift both as a painter of things and a creator of atmosphere:--

A golden half-moon in the sky, and broken gold in the water.

In the water, tranquilly severing, joining, gold: Three or four little plates of gold on the river: A little motion of gold between the dark images Of two tall posts that stand in the grey water.

A woman's laugh and children going home.

A whispering couple, leaning over the railings, And somewhere, a little splash as a dog goes in.

I have always known all this, it has always been, There is no change anywhere, nothing will ever change.

I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.

Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low sound Like the constant shutting of very distant doors.

Doors that are letting people over there Out to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit world and the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, been suggested so expressively in any other poem.

Now that these poems have been collected into a single volume it is possible to measure the author's stature. His book will, I believe, come as a revelation to the majority of readers. A poet of original music, of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has now taken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day. _Poems: First Series_, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can no longer regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to the brilliant lighter-hearted moods of _Steps to Parna.s.sus_ and _Tricks of the Trade._ He has brought us gifts better even than those.

XXV

R. JOSEPH CONRAD

1. THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR

Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He has called himself ”the most unliterary of writers.” He did not even begin to write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like to be more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt as to the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his brief critical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December, 1857; the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says 1856; Mr. Conrad himself declares in his reminiscences that he was ”nine years old or thereabouts” in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer 1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up without any impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse in his teens. Before he began to write _Almayer's Folly_ he ”had written nothing but letters and not very many of these.” ”I never,” he declares, ”made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life.

The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those precious imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and immobility of a daydream.”

At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage or pedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a man of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance with English literature began at the age of eight with _The Two Gentlemen of Verona_, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us a picture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a white border in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's study chair, ”with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over the pile of loose pages.” While he was still a boy he read Hugo and _Don Quixote_ and d.i.c.kens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel.

He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even in his childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every human being, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No pa.s.sage in his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly as that in which he writes: ”It was in 1868, when nine years old or thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and putting my finger on the blank s.p.a.ce then representing the unsolved mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute a.s.surance and an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I grow up I shall go _there_.'” Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness of his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder and monstrous fear? Many people regard _Heart of Darkness_ as his greatest story. _Heart of Darkness_ surely began to be written on the day on which the boy of nine ”or thereabouts” put his finger on the blank s.p.a.ce of the map of Africa and prophesied.