combination of literary and human qualities which is readableness, and there are others who interest many people in many generations, and yet do not write well. To most readers Dickens is as delightful when he writes slovenly sentences as when he writes at his best. Scott, the demigod, pours out his great romances in an inexpressive fluid. On the other hand, Walter Pater writes infallibly well. These illustrations are intended to define a difference which is a fact in literature, and are not to be carried to any conclusive comparison. The difference exists and it is not a strange fact. It is strange, however, and deplorable, that Conrad, who spins yarns about the sea, master of a kind of subject-matter that would make his books as popular as Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island, should be one of those who can write but cannot make an inevitably attractive and winning book.

Either he knows his fault and cannot help it, or he wills it and does not consider it a fault. There is evidence on this question. Several of his stories are put in the mouth of Marlow, an eloquent, reflective, world-worn man. In one place Conrad says, "We knew that we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences." The story Marlow tells is no more inconclusive and rambling than most of the other stories, so that one is forced to conclude that Marlow's character as narrator is Conrad's concession to his own self-observed habit of mind. In another place Conrad says: "The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel, but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine." Evidently Conrad prefers or pretends to prefer the haze to the kernel.

In an essay on Henry James he openly scorns the methods usual to fiction of "solution by rewards and punishments, by crowned love, by fortune, by a broken leg or sudden death,” and says: “Why the reading public, which as a body has never laid upon the story-teller the command to be an artist, should demand from him this sham of divine omnipotence is utterly incomprehensible." Thus Mr. Conrad flings down the gauntlet to those demands of readers which greater men than he and Mr. James have been happy to satisfy without sacrifice of wisdom and reality. For reward, the "British Public, ye who love me not," allow one of his books, The Outcast of the Islands, to be out of print, except in the Tauchnitz edition, and do not buy many of his other books.

A further announcement of his literary creed he made in a kind of artistic confession published a few years ago. "His (the prose writer's) answer to those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit, demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused, who demand to be promptly improved or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or charmed, must run thus: 'My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel it is before all to make you see. . . . If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm - all you demand; perhaps also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.""

A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once. Nostromo is told forward and backward in the first half of the book, and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all

proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book. Lord Jim is clumsily confused. The first few chapters are narrated in the third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, as a more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other stories the point of view fails. In The Nigger of the Narcissus are conferences between two people in private which no third person could overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by one of the crew. In Typhoon, where a steamer with deck almost vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engineroom, hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse hair, of immense strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and good-natured, as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in the darkness!

Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the magic rug, and even then the space-o'erleaping imagination resents being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when Conrad's

descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold, perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.

Conrad's propensity for exposition is allied, no doubt, with his admiration for Mr. Henry James, of whom he has written an extremely "literary" and confusing appreciation. Too much interest in masters like Flaubert and Mr. James is not gentlemanly in a sailor, and it cannot help a sailor turned writer, who pilots a ship through a magnificent struggle with a typhoon, leads us into the bewitching terror of the African jungle, and guides us to Malay lands where the days are full of savage love, intrigue, suicide, murder, piracy, and all forms of picturesque and terrific death. Mr. Conrad finds that there are "adventures in which only choice souls are involved, and Mr. James records them with a fearless and insistent fidelity to the péripéties of the contest and the feelings of the combatants." That is true and fine, no doubt, but the price which Mr. Conrad pays for his ability to discover it is the fact that hundreds of thousands of readers of good masculine romance are not reading Lord Jim, or finding new "Youth" in a young mate's wondrous vision of the East, or welcoming a new hero in Captain Whalley. A man who can conceive the mournful tale of Karain and the fight between the half crazy white men at an African trading post has a kind of adventure better, as adventure, than the experiences of Mr. James's choice souls. Stevenson knew all about Mr. James and his "péripéties,” but he could stow that knowledge on one side of his head, and from the other side spin Treasure Island and The Wrecker. The Sacred Fount never could have befuddled the chronicle of the amiable John Silver, but in Mr. Conrad's An Outcas of the Islands, where it seems to be a question which white man will kill the

other, after a dramatic meeting in the presence of a Malay heroine, each man stands still before our eyes and radiates states of mind.

The lover who finds fault with his sweetheart because he is so proud of her, is perfectly human and also perfectly logical. So our reason for dwelling on Mr. Conrad's shortcomings is because his books are thoroughly worth consideration. His advent is really important. More than any other new writer he is master of the ancient eloquence of English style; no one since Stevenson has surpassed in fiction the cadence and distinction of his prose. Never has an English sailor written so beautifully, never has artist had such full and authoritative knowledge of the sea, except Pierre Loti. Stevenson and Kipling are but observant landsmen after all. Marryatt and Clarke Russell never wrote well, though they tell absorbing tales. There is promise in Mr. Jack London, but he is not a seaman at heart. Herman Melville's eccentric genius, greater than any of these, never led him to construct a work of art, for all his amazing power of thought and language. Conrad stands alone with his two gifts of sea experience and cultivation of style. He has lived on the sea, loved it, fought it, believed in it, been baffled by it, body and mind. To know its ways, to be master of the science of its winds and waves and the ships that brave it, to have seen men and events and the lands and waters of the earth with the eye of a sailor, the heart of a poet, the mind of a psychologist --artist and ship-captain in one - here is a combination through which Fate has conspired to produce a new writer about the most wonderful of all things, the sea and the mysterious lands beyond it.

If we grant that he is not master of the larger units of style, that is, of construction, we can assert that in the lesser units, sentence for sentence, he is a fine writer of the English tongue. There is a story that he learned English first from the Bible, and his vigorous primal usages of words, his racial idioms and ancient

rich metaphors warrant the idea that he came to us along the old broad highway of English speech and thought, the King James version. His sentences, however, are not biblical as Stevenson's and Kipling's often are, but show a modern sophistication and intellectual deliberateness. He frequently reminds us that he is a Slav who learned French along with his native tongue, that he has read Flaubert and Maupassant, and alas, Mr. Henry James. Approaching our language as an adult foreigner, he goes deep to the derivative meanings of words, their powerful first intentions, which familiarity has disguised from most of us native-born to English. He has achieved that ring and fluency which he has declared should be the artist's aim. If equal excellence made similarity, his sentences, often his sentence sequences, would not find themselves out of place in Stevenson's The Wrecker or The Ebb Tide, or in a perfect English translation of Loti. The sea pictures I have in my mind are those of Whistler and Mr. Charles Woodbury and Loti and Conrad. Conrad's prose lifts to passages of great poetic beauty, in which the color of the sea, its emotional aspects, its desolation and its blitheness, are mingled with its meaning for the men who sail it, its "austere servitude," its friendliness and its treachery.

"The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet. Round her the abysses of sky and sea 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, disappeared, intent on its own destiny. . . . The august loneliness of her path lent dignity to the sordid inspiration of her pilgrimage. She drove foaming to the southward, as if guided by the courage of a high endeavor. The smiling greatness of the sea dwarfed the extent of time."

A reviewer recommending a man he

admires should make ample recognition of his faults, in order that none may complain of being invited to an entertainment heralded above its true merit; then it should be his duty to lure the reader and speed the writer. No fairer temptation can be offered the reader than to quote a passage from the end of "Youth," and no more honest praise can be offered to Mr. Conrad than to say that it is a selected, but by no means unique, specimen of his genius.

A crew that have left a burning ship in boats find an Eastern port at night. The weary men tie to the jetty and go to sleep. This is the young mate's narrative years after, the narrative of the reflective and eloquent Marlow: "I was lying in a flood of light, and the sky had never looked so far, so high, before. I opened my eyes and lay without moving. And then I saw the men of the East-they were looking at me. The whole length of the jetty was full of people. I saw brown, bronze, yellow faces, the black eyes, the glitter, the color of an Eastern crowd. And all these beings stared without a murmur, without a sigh, without a movement. They stared

down at the boats, at the sleeping men who at night had come to them from the sea. Nothing moved. The fronds of palms stood still against the sky. Not a branch stirred along the shore, and the brown roofs of hidden houses peeped through the green foliage, through the big leaves that hung shining and still like leaves forged of heavy metal. This was the East of the navigators, so old, so mysterious, resplendent and somber, living and unchanged, full of danger and promise. . . . I have known its fascinations since: I have seen the mysterious shores, the still water, the lands of brown nations, where a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their strength. But for me all the East is contained in that vision of my youth. It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it. I came upon it from a tussle with the sea and I was young and I saw it looking at me. And this is all that is left of it! Only a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour, of youth!"

THE stream of writings upon American history has been flowing strongly for a century, until now the field is buried deep with monographs, documents, biographies, textbooks, and political or institutional studies. A wilderness of separate works of all kinds and of all degrees of merit confronts the student, but within the last few years the conviction has been felt by many that the time has arrived when the results of research and interpretation may well be given a lasting,

general form. As a result of this idea the publication has been begun of no less than seven elaborate, comprehensive works, and by this time they have progressed sufficiently far to enable us to see how the historian of to-day digests the redundant mass of historical information hitherto produced. At the same time, however, the current of historical writing continues to flow in all its accustomed channels so that the general works, as they issue from the press, are accompanied by a steady

stream of lesser volumes, amplifying and modifying the historical knowledge of the country while it is in the process of being summed up.

In the first place there are still documents to be published with editorial comments and elucidations; and while state governments and historical societies are busy with public archives, a minor form of original source, just now high in favor for artistic reproduction, is the narrative of early travel. For example, there has recently been printed the diary of George Washington, describing his journey in 1784 from the Potomac to the Ohio River with a view to planning for a trans-Appalachian canal. In every line the clearheaded, far-sighted, and prosaic nature of the future President appears.1 This is now published in full with copious notes and explanations and an enthusiastic, rather magniloquent introduction by Archer Butler Hulbert. For a later period, when the frontier had been pushed back from the Ohio to the Mississippi, we have the Personal Narrative of Fordham, a lively young Englishman, who traveled in 1817 to an English colony in Illinois, now published with copious notes by Frederic Austin Ogg. In this we find the same frontier types of settlers met in Pennsylvania by Washington and little changed. Still later is the journal of J. W. Audubon, son of the famous naturalist, who led a party of forty-niners to California by way of Texas and New Mexico. His tale of adventure and suffering is now edited by Frank H. Hodder,3 as a further

2

1 Washington and the West. Being George Washington's Diary of September 1784, .. and a Commentary upon the same. By ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT. New York: The Century Company. 1905.

2 Personal Narrative of Travels. By ELIAS PYM FORDHAM. Edited by FREDERIC AUSTIN OGG. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company. 1906.

3 Audubon's Western Journal: 1849-1850. By JOHN W. AUDUBON. With Biographical Memoir by his daughter, MARIA R. AUDUBON. Introduction, Notes and Index by FRANK H. HODDER. Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company. 1906.

contribution to frontier description. No one of these volumes adds anything material to the history of the country, but their social and local antiquarian interest is considerable and their editing is as admirable as their typography, paper, and binding.

eyes

But the printing of sources is not history. That demands the effort of a writer to show us the past, not through the of any one man, but as it actually was; and the extent to which he succeeds depends wholly upon his ability, training, and purpose. At the outset one encounters the book whose author relies upon the facts ascertained by others and contributes nothing but his own rearrangement, which may be highly valuable but is quite as likely to be narrow and inaccurate. A book of this character is one upon The French Blood in America, by Lucien J. Fosdick; which may be described as a collection of miscellaneous information about French Huguenots who migrated to this country, and about persons of prominence in American history for whom some degree of French ancestry can be traced. The purpose of the whole is to exalt the part played by Huguenot exiles and their descendants, but the claims advanced are so boundless and the critical ability displayed so slender as to provoke incredulity.

Equally based upon the labors of other people, but better balanced, are two large volumes by De Alva S. Alexander entitled A Political History of New York. The author appears to have consulted only standard histories and biographies, and so adds nothing to our knowledge of the field, while his point of view is so personal that the work consists of little more than a chronicle of nominations, elections, and struggles for party leadership from the days of Burr and Clinton to those of

4 The French Blood in America. By LUCIEN J. FOSDICK. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1906.

A Political History of the State of New York. By DE ALVA STANWOOD ALEXANDER. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1906.