Other People’s Books

Like most people, I possess a number of books which I have not read. I am not referring to volumes, such as the Speculum Morale of Vincent of Beauvais or the commentary of Œcolampadius on St. John’s Gospel, which I bought merely because they looked pleasant and which nobody on earth could be expected to read. I mean books in English and of comparatively recent date. There is, for example, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, for which, in a weak moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling that, as a cogitative being, I ought not leave so notable a stone unturned. The feeling passed and never came back. And there is Ranke’s History of the Popes—up to the present undisturbed by me; there are The Last Days of Pompeii, Romola, Vittoria, Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott, What Maisie knew, What Katy did, and dozens of other modern works, some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, and others of which, I am sure, I shall never begin. But it makes no difference. Whether he has read them or not, a man’s own books get, in a manner, stale to him. If a book remains for years unopened on one’s shelves it becomes increasingly difficult to read it. Yet if one finds another edition of it in somebody else’s house one may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one may read or re-read almost anything one finds.

So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a place previously unknown to me. It is bestrewn with books; and, penned to the house by the brilliant summer weather, I have been doing some miscellaneous reading. For one thing I have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas Hardy’s verse. How extraordinarily good it is! And how remarkably he has gone on improving, especially as a metrist. But more than ever, after a heavy dose of these compressed statements of his point of view, one realizes his determined and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in Wessex Poems, and in places one laughs outright at it. He illustrated the book himself, his drawing is naïve, and the sketch of two floors of a church, the pews (and two lovers) above, and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an “I will be grim at all costs” air about it that robs it of all its horror. The story attached is a neat one. The man is a consumptive about to die; he asks the woman if she loves him? She falsely says “Yes” in order to brighten his last hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe in which the telling of such lies is a moral obligation. There is another small drama in which a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling her old lover that she wishes she had married him and that her child could have been his child, and asking him to see that the brutal husband does not ill-treat the child. The brutal husband remarries and does ill-treat the child. One day he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife’s grave, and demands by what right he is there. The lover, remembering the death-bed remark and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, says that he has every right to be there as he was really the father of the child. His supposed offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked after carefully, and he spends his time wondering whether he was justified in telling, etc. Probably these stories, if expanded into novels, might convince; as narrative poems they do not; and when they are squeezed into the brief compass of the Satires of Circumstance they are grotesquely Life as Thomas Hardy makes it and not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it.

It is a little bold in these days to admit that one hasn’t read the whole of Mr. Conrad’s works, but until this week I had never laid hands on Almayer’s Folly. It was his first book. In his Reminiscences he gives an account of how it was begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when he was a sea captain and carried about the ocean for five years until (when he was thirty-five) he finished it. When, half-done and laid by, it was yellowing and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, and asked him if it was worth completing. The passenger, with a nice economy of words, answered “Distinctly,” and Captain Conrad was thus encouraged to proceed. I had read all this before, and also the novelist’s statement that before this he had not attempted literature and had hardly ever written even a letter—though I suppose there must have been an occasional entry in a log. I have certainly been surprised by the craftsmanship of Almayer’s Folly. Not only is the structure good, but the writing, except in one or two places, is astonishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It is absurdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, lies in the dullness of the principal character. It is difficult to keep up one’s interest in a person whose main characteristic is his impotence. But it doesn’t matter so much here as it might, for the subsidiary story of Dain and Nina is very fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is none of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean river (its topography is not always clear to me) on whose overgrown banks they all live and the changes of which, night and day, are described with marvellous eloquence and certainty.