1923-12-22 — Page 10

BOOKS.

MEN WHO WRITE.

JOSEPH CONRAD.

[BY ERNEST RHYS.] The rare tribute Conrad once paid his old sea master, Fenitore Cooper, suggests the terms on which one would like to speak of X own books. "He knows the

en and he knows the sea.

He has the knowledge of simple

Kearts.

THE CHINA MAIL.

and Lingard's life story in th dian Ocean. to the coast.gof | Malay and Gulana, to the Mediter

ranean, and surrounding all, the mysterious, inscrutable, ever thifting" Mirror of the Sea.

strange

In the book of that title we have a key to Conrad's workshop; and an- seamen in his tales, for the indom other can be had in his Personal Htable spirit in man that will not Record," If you want to see gleld to fent or the onions of des- how a theme grows under his fruction. The struggle of the Nan hands, look up the chapters Shan with the Typhoon becomes an "The Mirror" that descrilic fable of man's struggle with seem- the

adventurings of overwhelming enemies, the Tremolino, and then turn to ingly When the captain and mate see the "Nostromo," and "The Arrow of terrific column of water running Gold." The "Mirror" and the upright in the black dark, and fal-Recortl" are 'Conrad's two con- When curiosity ling on the bridge with a crash, wo, fession-books, too, draw breath as the captain tempted me to ask which of all his mutters: "Keep her facing it books was nearest his heart, he

THE LOST, FLUTE.

The spirit, the pecullar force and charm of Chinese poetry He largely in delicato antithesis and the re- petulon of whole phrases with but a word altered, whereby the inind's eye sees the image from a changed angle and reads each successive picture in the light of the earlier A Activious example will las trete

Beauty is framed iri her window. The bamboos strain upwards to

the sky.

She leans out from her window, My emotions are aroused. Bearing, this skeleton plan in the mind, much otherwise incom prehensible description of river

legs; 1 careful, or it will ch away. (2nd Century.E.C.).

"THE HOUR HAS CONE.” (The warrior off to the wirs instructs his wife how to gird on his armour. This done he pro-

eeds...)

Knot solidly

my quiver.

thongs of

I have watered, for eight days, our vegetables, and I have not forgotten to transplant the chry jsanthemums.

Now, tremble, and go away. For I must take on the terribla look with which I shall go to meet aronemies." (8th Century A.D.)

He wrote as well' always acling it-that's the way to said, pointing to a copy of "The banks,lilies, stellar phenomens and dying arrow: When a boat is.

That

as any novelist of his time.' A generous praise-some people who find the older novelists long- winded, may think too generous, What one likes in it is that recog, kion of a fellow craftsman, which Lips to link up Cooper's "Pilot" with "The Nigger of the Narcissus" "Typhoon, and set Long Tom Coffin beside James Waite or Cap

in MacWhirr.

get through. That's enough for any

man."

Typhoon" and "Youth," that prose song of young adventure's unquenchable desire, have both a cathartic quality in them. They show Conrad's large figurative art, by which sea and seamen, or it may be city and citizens, workers, plot ters and strivers, become the

symbolic apparatus of our whole

human predicament.

THE GREAT SEA-CHANGE,

Mirror" which had been carried to sea many times during the war.

"That!"

Of his longer sagas, if we choose three to

represent him. The Nigger of the Narcissus," "Lord Jim," and "Nostromo" may serve as a typical triad. Of the shorter ones, Typhoon," "Youth," and The Secret Sharer." The last is added here, because he declared it most thoroughly satisfied his lown canon of the short story,

THE SECRET OF HIS STYLE. Fortunate, we may think, that

The secret of his style, his supple Conrad began his seafaring before. the great sea-change came. Iause of written English-not his How earlier days, before the big liners mother tongue-remains. altered the measure, a seaman on a did he attain it? By that same schooner, or a trading steamer, be vehement obsession in his task, came part of his ship; he learnt to sparing nothing flesh and blood love, to Individualize, her. It has can give, which you find in the been said that Conrad was the first story of how he wrote "Nostromo." novelist "to take psychology to There you perceive that writing a extra-long book is to Conrad like making sea, and that may seem vagant. There were other sea stories before his, in which the souls of mea and the soul of a ship counted for more than the marine sensation. But Conrad set thought as the test, treated the ship as a live creature, and made the ship's deck the stage for the mystery play of man against the elements. When you hear him speak of his art, you understand better how keenly. he takes it,

It must be almost 30 years since "The Nigger" began to run in Hen- Jay's "New Review," and surprised he lesser public by the freshness and originality of its tale-writing. the opening chapters James Waite heaved up his gigantic head with an effect akin to that of Hogarth's callous boatman and disastrous deportee, in the cartoon of the Idle Prentice" sent to tea. in the story the sheer power --the draftsmanship, and the writer's imaginative control of his theme-sea, ship, and ill-assorted crew, hold the readers with actuali ty absolute. The companion ship to the Narcissus is the Nan-Shan in "Typhoon," a story which is in idea the human converse of the other. The whole voyage of the Narcissus is overcast by the ominous chief figure. Whereas in "Typhoon" it is as if the writer. had set out to show. how a plain man, an ordinary, unimaginative sea captain, could hold by his single-minded devotion ed

By good fortune it fortun- down, me once to travel hia ship and his seamen together past the estuary of Thames and under the most terrible stress- Medway, to seek out

the

Berce tempest without, Chinese sea master in his Kentish retreat,

chaos' within. It is a mighty tale, and written with an artistic re- straint, and an insistence on the matter-of-fact details of the sea-

manship, that reader it thrice con- vincing. There is the true epic savor in this common sailors' Odysse. Conrad has designed the tough old ship and her master on identical lines; they have the sarme resistant fibre in them, and they stand, like other ships and

HENRY HOOPER.

The killer whose crood was, "I will have nothing.. within these walls that is

not mine-that does not oboy my will,"

and the adventure gave me a new sense of the craftman's love of his craft, of the qualities that count, and the things that matter or do

not matter in the true saga. With the same zest he spoke of his Kentish countryside, and his wish that his boys should grow up.men of Kent. Yet, beyond his coun- try squire's demesne, one saw the greatervista stretching on Poland, to the islands of Almayer's

to

"THE WOMEN OF PA” At Pa, the river is as rapid as a caught in its currents it travels three thousand in a few days.

It is fortunate that your husbands have to ascend it-this river." (Li-Tai-Pa... 702-763.) ---

•

•

the elements of horticulture be comes rationally coherent. It is to the skill with which the translator of the collection under review indicates this radical connection to the inexperienced reader that the volume will owe whatever success

"THE PROPITIOUS STORMS." it may enjoy, It is not stated in

I cursed the rain that splashed the Preface whether the Chinese text was consulted in the refraqsla-upon my roof and prevented me tion from French to English, but from sleeping. Lcursed the wind there is little doubt that the transla- which played havoc with my gar- tion attains its high standard of den.

that peculiar But you camel' And I thanked felicity through quality of the French language, the rain, since you were forced to remove your wet dress, and I which curiously enables the oriental thought to fit much more closely thanked the wind which cane and blew out my lamp." (Chang Won- into its Romance setting than into the jagged and austere Anglo- kien 1879.) Saxon.

This, however, should not be understood in the least as decrying the notabic achievement of making Chinese thought at once readable

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THE SCHOOL OF VIRTUE. and compromised herself with

[BY VIOLET TWEEDALE)

The aged Duchess of Bowater had lived to see the historic home and all its lands, narrowly escape passing out of the family posses- sion. In the course of a rather unfortunate domestic carcer the I have quoted these particular present Duke has, among other examples in the attempt to show

financial misfortunes, allowed. that Chinese literature is

not matters to drift into an almost Legge's dull chessboard of rigid hopeless muddle. The descend formalism, but a field where the ants of the family who make the emotions have as free play as any-old castle their home are quite

where in the pages of contemporary

d'Agram. His Intrigues in an unnatural desire to possega Linette for his wife, as well as the. strangle hold methods he tried to adopt in order to acquire the exten sive properties and lands compris ing the family domains were alt in keeping with the suave manner which had carried him through in his financial adventures, and ha placed him in the envious though not altogether happy situation of a multi millionaire. The real hero of the day, successful wooer of Linette, and eventual owner of occupants include a daughter, man of forceful character, who, signatures of eminent scholars. literature, although the man of numerous, and the principal Bowater Castle, is Rhys Morgan, a taste will admit that these poets of grand-daughter and great grand- although he had acquired great these either a tangle of pedantic the scattered centuries reach as daughter the latter being the wealth by selling his interests in growth obscures any unity in the clear and untrammelled an ex- beautiful. Linette Trevenna, the adjacent coal mines, where in his original, or the paraphrase assumes

without the realist's somewhat un- to the text the startling relationship pression as any modern realist Duke's cousin, and heroine in the young days he had worked as pit of meticulous expansion to précis.

plot. Among the frequent guests boy, cherished pleasant candour. As always, the

to this ancient seat, various other alleviate the lot of his less fortunate It is therefore a relief to find real artist allows his effects to be branches of the family in the male fellows. The story is fascinating poems converted calmly to prose gained only in the mind of the and female line thrust themselves throughout and towards the climax whose poetical quality is enough to suggest the grace of the original reader; it is a poor poct whose on the hospitality of the Duke, who in the plot the leanings in the success depends on a knowledge is at least aware that the open doors direction of Spiritualism on the part style, while all the traps of metri-

medium being cal translation and imitation of the of the patois of Billingsgate, who

except the immediate family con- monstrated, the principle that to suggest is to nections who are dependent on none other than the old Duchess Chinese forms are avoided. The cannot, with Verlaine, work on the ought now to be closed to all of Morgan and his sister are de only fault which the critic might create, to name is to destroy." If him for a home. A somewhat herself, who throughout the scenes find is a strange jumbling of periods and styles: the epigram these translations serve to suppress extraordinary and not wholly wel in the story remains more or less a little the modern craze for bloody comed guest appears in the person secluded, but plays no small part less but suggestive spade, they international financier, and crst- had not been foiled, would have shovels at the expense of the harm of the elderly Baron d'Agram, in frustrating the plot, which, if it will not have been made in vain. while. friend of Linette's mother.meant the dissolution of a proud but The family name has not always honourable branch of the English been-free from doubtful associa aristocracy and the bartering of tions, particularly where the mole their family seat to an alien name.

-J. W. element was concerned, but this

[The School of Virtue by Violet Verena Trevenna had unfortunate- ly brought herself into disrepute Tweedalo. John Long.·7).

a long voyage: you must be pre-and a close paraphrase. That this pared for storm, a typhoon, on the feat is no mean one is shown by unreadable way and spend sleepless nights the extraordinarily

translations which appear over the and unresting days to reach port,

Nostromo" may seem at a rough glance the most objective of his novels. It is really a subjective per sonal document. Conrad spent two years in South America, and learnt to know Costaguiana as he now, knows Kent itself. Nostromo may be an imported hero, borrowed from the Mediterranean, and originally the padrone of the Tremolino. What matters it? As for that mast delightful of his portraits of women, Antonia, he confessed: Why not be frank about it? I have modelled her on my first love,"

For a last word to show the

temper in which he takes his art, the strenuous will, the modesty and conscience, with which he writes, let me repeat his comment on a copy of Hogarth's finest print, which a friend had sent him: “Ah!"

he said, "it helps to keep me straight.”

A BENJAMIN BRAMPTON

12

Production

The

KILLER

Adapted from the novat of Stewart Edward White,

RAMON.

His tool, his

Leuclman. A slimy

bad breed be car

ried out the will of

the killer.

RUTH · EMORY.

A victim trapped by

wily mad man and hold captive-

at his fortified ranch.

BILL SANBORN.,

Tho hard-boiled

New Yorker who

laughed at,

doubted,

"THE KILLER,"

A THRILLER fought the kill

A breath catching drama, vibrant

with action, seething With sur- prises and throbbing:

The

IRTIS BROWER,

HLOAN).

who made this

When a woman talks to you,

smile at her but do not listen is embarrassingly followed by a lyrical love-poem.

Some pages are so perfect that only quotation is possible **** "When one possesses a treasure one must know how to keep it My friend, yours has two, beautiful

K. WESTMACÓTT LANE. The Lost Flute and other Chinese Lyrics. Translated from the French by Gertrude Laughlin Joenssen, Fisher Unwin & Co.).

SCREENLAND.

SALVAGE.*

PAULINE FREDERICK'S BEST PICTURE.

"Salvage," Pauline Frederick's latest Robertson- Cole super special production, is a story of mother love, that love which passeth all understanding, and does not count too great any sacrifice or suffering.

Miss Frederick plays the part of Bernice Ridgeway, a young woman of fine family and breeding, who

"ROBERTSON-COLE :

PAULINE FREDERICK SALVAGE

THRILLING DRAMA.

WORLD THEATRE'S FINE

FEATURE.

"The Love Brand," Roy Stew- art's latest starring vehicle for Universal, which comes on Sunday to the World Theatre, has its setting in a country of far horizons.

Much of the play was filmed on the suplit mesas and wind swept plains of Southern California, where the atmosphere still presents the romance of the days in the West before its glamour was tarn- ished by "too many people."

It is essentially a play of exterior scenes and the vast acreage of the famous Santa Marguerita rancho, one of the last remaining ranches of the old Spanish land grants in California, was utilized in the making of the production. The ranch contains approximately 260,000 acres, having withju Its boundaries mountains plains, desert, rivers and lakes, and exfen- ding from the Pacific shore to the orange and lemon grooves of the southeastern part of the stale.

Thousands of cattle and horses graze on the open plains, which offer virtually all of the freedom of the unfenced range of earlier days. The story was written especially for Stewart by Raymond L. Schrock, scenario editor at Un- iversal City, and scenarized by Adrian Johnson. Stuart Paton directed.

In the squalor of the New York

which prompted him to ask the doctor if it were not better to let the child die, rather than have a deformed baby bear the Ridgeway has always regarded marriage as a name. In a spirit of hatred 'and tender, beautiful ideal. Disillusion-revolt against the man whose name ment follows closely upon the heels she bears, Bernice strips from her of her marriage to Cyrus Ridge- the costly clothing, the jewels and way, piswer in the financial world. leaves forever the house of Ridge- Despite her efforts to maintain her way. dream, there is borne upon her the fact that her husband's one creed is slums, where, no, questibadi RIŲ)] to get gold, and that his purpose i asked, she seeka to hide her sorrow "marrying "fref #isitë perpetuato-the-and-take up life snow... Chance

family naufeol Ridkéway,

plays into her hands, when Kata. Fate mocks Cyrus however, Martin, a neighbour, the mother of when his heir is born hopelessly a three-year old lttle girl, who deformed. With no regard for the bears a striking resemblance to suffering of his wife, he orders the Bernice, commits suicide to her child taken away, and when Ber room, As Kate Martin, Bernice nice covers from her illness, she through a series of dranistic is told that her baby died. Through episodes works out her destiny and agossiping servant Bernice learns anda at last the happiness her

pa cruelty a mothercheurt covineide

ambition's

THE DESERT GIRL LONGED FOR PARIS

HOW LOVE LED HER THERE

IS THRILLINGLY TOLD IN

MOON MADNESS

PULSE

ACCELERATING ROMANCE

OF OLD WORLD' MYSTERY AND

INTRIGUE

Last show To-day at the

WORLD

THEATRE

A Notable All-Star Cast

EDITH STOREY, WILLIAM COURTLEIGH, JOSEF SWICKARD, WALLACE MCDONALD, IRENE HUNT and SAM DE GRASSE.

Wonderful Desert Scenes, Beautiful Vistas of Paris Latin Quarter

A ROBERTSON-COLE' SPECIAL

SUNDAY and MONDAY, 23rd, and 24th, December

TED

ROY STEWART

IN

LOVE BRAND

"The picturesque romance of life in the great-

open country of Lower California ranches, thousands of cattle, sumas

-the last great frontier, without aresă or law.

to