bungled for so far not a single reviewer has discovered it." After reading the book I replied that it was easy to understand the befuddlement of the critics; for he had shown such sympathy with his hard-driving individualist hero that it would hardly occur to anyone to take the character as a warning and a reproach. You feel that same thing in all his books-in “The Sea Wolf," and especially in "The Mutiny of the Elsinore"; the Nietzschean world-conqueror has conquered London's imagination, in spite of his reason and his conscience. If I have written here with cruel frankness about the personal tragedies of his life, it is because I would not have posterity continue in the misunderstanding of which he complained in the case of "Martin Eden." No, do not make that mistake about his life and its meaning; most certainly it is not a glorification of the red-blooded superman, trampling all things under his feet, gratifying his imperious desires. Rather is it a demonstration of the fact that the world-conquering superman, trampling all things under his feet and gratifying all his desires, commits suicide by swallowing laudanum at the age of forty, because pleasure and wealth and fame have turned to ashes on his lips. Jack's friends say that the cause was a desire for two women at the same time; but I don't believe that a mature, intellectual man will kill himself for such a reason, unless his moral forces have been sapped by years of self-indulgence. It was the "Martin Eden" ending, which had haunted Jack London all his life, and which in the end he made a reality. What a shame, and what a tragedy to our literature, that capitalist America, the philosophy of individualist greed and selfishness, should have stolen away the soul of this man, with all his supreme and priceless gifts! He had seen so clearly our vision of fellowship and social justice-how clearly, let him tell you in his own words, the last words he wrote upon ethical matters: He, who by understanding becomes converted to the gospel of service, will serve truth to confute liars and make them truthtellers; will serve kindness so that brutality will perish; will serve beauty to the erasement of all that is not beautiful. And he who is strong will serve the weak that they may become strong. He will devote his strength not to the debasement and defilement of his weaker fellows, but to the making of opportunity for them to make themselves into men rather than into slaves and beasts. These words are from "The Cry for Justice," "this humanist Holy Book," as London called it. Such words, and actions based upon them, make precious his memory, and will preserve it as long as anything in American literature is preserved. Perhaps the best thing I can add to this chapter is a statement of what I personally owed to him-the utmost one writer can owe to another. When he was at the height of his fame, and I was unknown, I sent him proofs of "The Jungle," explaining that I had been unable to find a publisher, and wished to raise money to publish the book myself. There are many jealousies in the literary world; some who win its laurels by bitter struggle are not eager to raise up rivals. But Jack was not one of these; he wrote a letter about the book, hailing it as "The "Uncle Tom's Cabin' of Wage Slavery," and rallying the Socialist movement as by a bugle-call to its support. If that book went all over the world, it was Jack London's push that started it; and I am only one of a score of authors who might tell the same story of generous and eager support. CHAPTER CIX THE STEALTHY NEMESIS While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame. The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, "Almayer's Folly," and after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim" and "Youth." I used to rave about these books to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret resentment-he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones. Conrad's death has been the occasion for much discussion of the "romanticism" of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he knew how to be. The reason he seems "romantic" is because the scenes and char acters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as street-car traffic to us. One other thing the obituary reviews agree uponthat he was the perfect type of the "pure" artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a venomous fury. The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of twentyone; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, and was nearly forty before his first novel was published. This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches the congregations implore: Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, O hear us when we cry to Thee No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: “a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait." You see, he uses the classic symbol, and unites in one blending the terror of four different races-Greek, Polish, English and Malay. This "stealthy Nemesis" is the enemy of men, and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly and weak. Such is the fact of man's life; and the question then becomes: what shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are "thesis novels," composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord's day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school. Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will be instinctive for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of physical or moral disease. What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism. The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes that the naval officer is the most complete and instinctive snob in the world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the selfmade, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty and boisterous Tory. In "Chance" we meet-but assuredly not by chance!—a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get the heads of all thinking women upon one neck-and then wring the neck! In the same way, in "Under Western Eyes" we get Conrad's view of politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction which has made Poland the curse of Europe. But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance. Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative feats of literature: take "Youth." A young man puts out to sea in an old tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again. When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we come back to it, |