SONNET.

Though thou be lonely as the stars that gaze

Across strange spaces steadfastly; unknown
Though thou shalt move, as tropic petals blown
On wide, cold, silent winds down frozen ways,
Yet from the outward to the inner praise.

Thine ear inclining, must thou hark the tone
Of that Divine whose spiritual throne
Slowly within thy soul these sorrows raise.
The portioned harmony unheard, the slow
Amazing beauty never seen of eye

The peace unsought, the silent power-lo!
These are the spirit's! If the world deny

And leave thee friendless where dark waters flow,
Who walks with God heeds not its passing by.

W. H

JOSEPH CONRAD.

"More praised than read," somebody has dubbed Mr. Conrad. It is true that he has had no sweeping popularity. But the praise that he has received places him in that select upper circle of the serious literary workers among the younger men; and once there it matters little if he be not included in the multitude that count their success by the publisher's check and advertise their genius in the street-car. This does not mean that Mr. Conrad's work is in any degree neglected or obscure; no doubt he could, if he chose, tally a few thousand in his circulation. But he is a sincere workman, and measures his success by his own and not the public's standard. It is, therefore, his misfortune to be in the main a writer's writer. There is about his work

some elusive literary or artistic quality that has drawn the attention more of literary men than of the "great reading public."

Though it accomplishes little to analyze a work of art, yet such study of Mr. Conrad may possibly lead to a keener appreciation of his work, and even avoid misunderstanding. There is, for example, a story called The Idiots in which he seems at first sight to be grossly imitative. It is the story of a young French peasant, proud of his farm, proud of his ancestors and his wife, and hopeful of the future. But his children come to him every one idiots. Finally he takes to drinking; he abuses his wife, and she kills him at last and then commits suicide. Not at all a pretty tale, to be sure, but less revolting of course as Mr. Conrad tells it. One cannot read it without thinking of Maupassant. And it suggests him in many respects. It is just such a charming subject as the Frenchman would choose; and it is told with his lack of hysteria, his restraint, and a good deal of his art. But inspected closely it appears to be a very poor imitation. The tragedy is a little too sweeping, not refined enough; it terrifies sufficiently, but it does not do so with that extreme nicety of selection which Maupassant would show. And the style is too rough-shod; it is not fine and clear-cut. Where Maupassant draws one line, Mr. Conrad blurs in two or three. Here, then, Mr. Conrad might appear open to the charge of imitative, and poorly imitative, work; he might even be accused of careless technique. Neither of which is exactly just.

Before further characterizing his work it may be best to note the development of his material and method. His first book was published in 1895 -Almayer's Folly, a tale of the "civilizing" white man in the Dutch East Indies. The next year An Outcast of the Islands followed, much similar in subject though better in form. Then rapidly appeared Lord Kim, The Inheritors (a collaboration), Children of the Sea, Tales of Unrest, and Youth. They are practically all tales of the sea or the far East, before the great Canal "changed things." The first of them proclaimed a vender of new wares; those following never disappointed. But they were all found a little

puzzling. Other people had written South Sea stories-too many in fact. Stevenson even had written them well. Some of them had "atmosphere" in abundance; many of them had far more "human interest." Yet these later stories were something different, there was a strange new quality unfelt in the older books.

This elusive element fascinated the critics and was given many names. It was called poetic imagination, and artistic insight, and the other pet terms of phrase by which one's opinions may be concealed. But it could not be tucked away into any of the usual pigeon-holes. Some few were exasperated, but the majority called it weird and hurried on to the next chapter. No one, however, has taken much trouble to ask who Mr. Conrad might be; true, it was evident that he had gone down to the sea in ships; and nothing more seemed important. But it seems that Mr. Conrad was born in Poland, and that it was only after some ten or twelve years in English ships that he fell so low as to write books. That seems to me significant. In this curious combination of the Continental, the Slav in fact, and the Briton, much that is baffling in Mr. Conrad's work can be explained.

Notice first his material. The earliest book of importance was An Outcast of the Islands. It is mostly a South Sea story, in which a man left there alone becomes slowly morbid; the white man that has come to conquer is subjugated by those very elements, softened, degenerated. An old theme and not very attractive, one must admit; yet this, the least significant part of humanity, can be worked into readable shape by instilling a sufficient quantity of "atmosphere." And that Mr. Conrad does well. The ugly forest is here made to live-not corporate, but somehow possessing an impersonal fatal existence of its own. This quality is predominant, and is the beginning of a significant development.

The Nigger of the Narcissus is more imposing. It narrates the course of the bark Narcissus, in which a negro dying with consumption tries to hide the fact by sundry tricks; a mutiny is vaguely threatened; a storm is survived; and the negro dies and is buried just before they reach land. That, for a good story, is a pretty slender and uninteresting framework. And, to be

honest, the interest is not very absorbing. The whole thing is not much more than a piece of excellent literary handiwork. The characterizations are elaborated with much care; but they fall short. Nobody really walks up and down the Narcissus' decks-though some fairly life-like puppets do a good deal of promendading. The nigger is for us as for his shipmates, and even perhaps for Mr. Conrad, a good deal of a bore. And Donkin the villain is unfortunately overshadowed by the Ebb-Tide's earlier picture of the same type. But if the persons are not alive the non-persons are very much the opposite. The Narcissus has very convincing life, and she lives through a very convincing storm. The background that was made to have life in An Outcast, though changed here to the sea, again is the convincing part of the book. It is not the vague sea of maps and charts and names, it is rather the sea of the forecastle, seen first hand, the sea that you may have had merely suggested as you watched the little tramp sailer pitching past your liner. Here is a bit of it: "The passage had begun; and the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on, lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abyss of sea and sky met in an unattainable frontier. A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same, always monotonous and always imposing. Now and then another wandering white speck, burdened with life, appeared far off and disappeared, intent on its own destiny. The sun looked upon her all day, and every morning rose with a burning round stare of undying curiosity." Not, perhaps, the way a sailor would tell it--but a picture that he would see.

Tales of Unrest marks a long advance. There are several stories, some of them going back to the East, some like The Idiots dwelling in the West. Man has here come more into his own-there is "human interest" in abundance; but he never loses his relation to the background. He is always part of a larger whole, never himself the whole. The background may be still the South Seas-and here Mr. Conrad is at his best; or it may be simply fate writ in large letters, as, again, in The Idiots.

The last book, Youth; a narrative, and two other tales, is much similar. But the art is a little finer. The first story is of the sea again; and it is that

same living forecastle sea. But man has taken a slightly more important position. It is not man subjugated by his surroundings, but fighting them, and given a chance to subjugate. So, too, in the second story, The Heart of Darkness; though it is throughout poetic, almost mystical, it makes man less and less a mere puppet. And such stories at the end of such progress indicate fairly Mr. Conrad's material in a matured form.

Plainly this is not ordinary work in its subject; and, though perhaps not equally plainly, it is not ordinary in treatment. It is at all events obvious that a good deal of literary ability is necessary to make that material over into artistic form. The very uniqueness of matter prejudices one. And though after some reading one's doubts have vanished it is quite worth while to search a little for his secret. The reason that Mr. Conrad does not fail miserably in that task is that he is in no small degree a prose-poet. And the elusive quality in his method of rendering it seems the result of the mixture of the Continental and the British.

The artist in Mr. Conrad is the Continental part. He has that faculty, which Tolstoi and Turgenev and the others have, of taking the routine of life and finding in it some of the beauty that nature offers everywhere. What beauty there can be in the life pictured by The Idiots it is a little hard to see. But there is an artistic beauty, and a natural tragedy there. The Continental mind seems to have in it enough of the fatalist to enjoy putting man into wretched circumstances and watching Fate play the kitten to their pretty spool. Mr. Conrad's Fate shifts form rapidly; it is forest or sea or the demon in men; but it is always looming. So he will take a man's surroundings, and with practically no story to tell create a tragedy that is almost irresistible. Critics have actually called his a Grecian irony. It is no cheerful world that he draws, not a world where a man can easily rise above mere circumstances. His later work gives man a better chance, is a little more hopeful. But it is always irony, and man is pretty thoroughly the puppet of a bigger force that you may call Nature or God or what you will. The philosophy of such an attitude I am not anxious to discuss; but it is, to my mind at least, very un-English, and quite Continental.