Books and Persons | Page 9

author to send his children to school in
decent clothes? He whom I am anxious to meet is the man who will not
willingly let die the author who is not yet dead. No society for the
prevention of the death of corpses will help me to pay my butcher's bill.
* * * * *
I know that people buy motor-cars, for the newspapers are full of the

dust of them. I know that they buy seats in railway carriages and
theatres, and meals at restaurants, and cravats of the new colour, and
shares in companies, for they talk about their purchases, and rise into
ecstasies of praise or blame concerning them. I want to learn about the
people who buy new books--modest band who never praise nor blame,
nor get excited over their acquisitions, preferring to keep silence,
preferring to do good in secret! Let an enterprising inventor put a new
tyre on the market, and every single purchaser will write to the Press
and state that he has bought it and exactly what he thinks about it. Yet,
though the purchasers of a fairly popular new book must be as
numerous as the purchasers of a new tyre, not one of them ever "lets
on" that he has purchased. I want some book-buyers to come forward
and at any rate state that they have bought a book, with some account
of the adventure. I should then feel partly reassured. I should know by
demonstration that a book-buyer did exist; whereas at present all I can
do is to assume the existence of a book-buyer whom I have never seen,
and whom nobody has ever seen. It seems to me that if a few
book-buyers would kindly come forward and confess--with proper
statistics--the result would be a few columns quite pleasant to read in
the quietude of September.

JOSEPH CONRAD & THE ATHENÆUM
[_19 Sep. '08_]
The _Athenæum_ is a serious journal, genuinely devoted to learning.
The mischief is that it will persist in talking about literature. I do not
wish to be accused of breaking a butterfly on a wheel, but the
_Athenæum's_ review of Mr. Joseph Conrad's new book, "A Set of
Six," in its four thousand two hundred and eighteenth issue, really calls
for protest. At that age the _Athenæum_ ought, at any rate, to know
better than to make itself ridiculous. It owes an apology to Mr. Conrad.
Here we have a Pole who has taken the trouble to come from the ends
of the earth to England, to learn to speak the English language, and to
write it like a genius; and he is received in this grotesque fashion by the
leading literary journal! Truly, the _Athenæum's_ review resembles
nothing so much as the antics of a provincial mayor round a foreign
monarch sojourning in his town.
* * * * *

For, of course, the _Athenæum_ is obsequious. In common with every
paper in this country, it has learnt that the proper thing is to praise Mr.
Conrad's work. Not to appreciate Mr. Conrad's work at this time of day
would amount to bad form. There is a cliche in nearly every line of the
_Athenæum_'s discriminating notice. "Mr. Conrad is not the kind of
author whose work one is content to meet only in fugitive form," etc.
"Those who appreciate fine craftsmanship in fiction," etc. But there is
worse than clichés. For example: "It is too studiously chiselled and
hammered-out for that." (God alone knows for what.) Imagine the
effect of studiously chiselling a work and then hammering it out!
Useful process! I wonder the _Athenæum_ did not suggest that Mr.
Conrad, having written a story, took it to Brooklands to get it run over
by a motor-car. Again: "His effects are studiously wrought,
_although_--such is his mastery of literary art--they produce a swift and
penetrating impression." Impossible not to recall the weighty judgment
of one of Stevenson's characters upon the _Athenæum_: "Golly, what a
paper!"
* * * * *
The _Athenæum_ further says: "His is not at all the impressionistic
method." Probably the impressionistic method is merely any method
that the _Athenæum_ doesn't like. But one would ask: Has it ever read
the opening paragraph of "The Return," perhaps the most dazzling feat
of impressionism in modern English? The _Athenæum_ says also:
"Upon the whole, we do not think the short story represents Mr.
Conrad's true _métier_" It may be that Mr. Conrad's true _métier_ was,
after all, that of an auctioneer; but, after "Youth," "To-morrow,"
"Typhoon," "Karain," "The End of the Tether," and half a dozen other
mere masterpieces, he may congratulate himself on having made a
fairly successful hobby of the short story. The most extraordinary of all
the _Athenæum's_ remarks is this: "The one ship story here,