word vowel; he transposed the 'v' and 'w' sounds, so that it became wowvel; I have been told that he would even write it so. He pronounced used as two syllables, something like usit.

In conversing, he often dropped into French for a sentence or two. Oftener still, he used a phrase of French apparently without knowing it. Quite commonly he would address one as my dear, as a Frenchman says mon cher.

The very wealth of his knowledge of our language, with its slang and familiar idioms, made these quaint lapses sound doubly whimsical; his talk thus gained a singular individuality, and it might be said that he spoke English with an unEnglish grace. His taste was unerring; he must have had many of his early lessons in the vernacular from the fo'c'sle, yet one never heard him use a 'vulgar' expression.

HE

others' work, no man was ever a sterner judge of his own.

His friendships with other men of letters mostly dated from the time when his own reputation was still to make, and I think they must have been begun by the volition and acts of those men, for I cannot 'see' him making first advances. In those days he resembled a de jure sovereign, sure of his rights, but with his claim to the succession not yet before the world, and he was proud to the verge of arrogance. The tacit claim of Henley, poet, critic, veteran editor, and beloved master of men, to homage from the newcomer, Conrad merely ignored. Assuredly, if Scott or Stendhal, or Dickens or Flaubert (or, for that matter, Marryat or Fenimore Cooper) had risen from the grave, he would have paid that homage, but it was not in him to vail his topsails to a contemporary.

His delight in Dickens dated from his boyhood. Of other (English) novelists of the past I can remember hearing him speak of two only, the two sailor-authors just mentioned. He had a whole-hearted admiration for both, especially Cooper. We all love the gallant Marryat; most of us have loved the good Cooper; they His attitude toward what he did not provided noble entertainment for two

E HAD read much of English history and memoirs, and of the best fiction in the language, but, I think, not much poetry. Classics apart, the power of enjoying the poetry of any language other than one's own is probably very rare.

work, but he liked it. Readers of A Personal Record know how and why he loved that harbor; indeed, to this day it is a romantic scene. He was also fond of a large photograph, which hung in the hall, of a full-rigged, frigate-built ship, with painted ports, every stitch set and drawing in a breeze just strong enough to keep her moving and no more.

He did not often talk about his books, but he liked to recall the circumstances and diverse places in which some of them were written. The Nigger of the Narcissus (affectionately The Nigger), which seemed to be his own favorite among his works, was begun during his honeymoon, I think in Brittany. He told me how Almayer's Folly, begun in Malayan ports and seas, was, longo intervallo, taken up again during weeks and months of enforced leisure while a steamer, newly built for the FrenchCanadian emigrant service, lay alongside a wharf, a place of pilgrimage for financial gentlemen (in silk hats) from Paris, and a Sunday show for Rouen citizens; how it was continued in lodgings in the Vauxhall Bridge Road, in the upper reaches of the Congo, in a Geneva hospital, and other improbable places.

inimical, or, at best, slighting. I once quoted some lines of Andrea del Sarto, and, as one does, added 'Isn't that how it goes?' To which he answered indifferently: 'I don't remember: to be more truthful, I don't know; I do not know my Browning.' Another time he was criticizing a story deliberately written in the New Arabian Nights vein, and said: 'Ah, yes, I dare say it is very good of its kind; I don't know my Stevenson at all well, but ought to do much better than that!' Which seemed to me almost blasphemy.

His preferences and antipathies were very strong and very definite, but it was not easy to predict his views of the work of writers who were his contemporaries; they were often (it must be said) colored by personal feeling. Wells and Henry James were of his friends, and he spoke of their books with enthusiasm; there were others, of even equal fame but not personally known to him, whose work he preferred to ignore. The writing of others, to whom much lower seats have been allotted but who were his friends, had his warm approval. Having said thus much I must add that nothing, not even friendship, which meant so much to him, ever made him condone or tolerate what seemed to him bad or insincere work. His foible was endearing, for it was bound up with loyalty, and whatsoever fault may be found with him as a critic of

Marryat's father had put him into the Army, and if Cooper had written only his fine epic of the backwoods, these two would never have darkened the doors of Conrad's Pantheon. Yet, when all is said, seamanship is an art.

There is little doubt that French literature made a stronger appeal to Conrad than English. He had the highest reverence for Flaubert; I have heard him declaim admirably a sonorous passage from Julien l'Hospitalier. Maupassant, Flaubert's great disciple, he admired for his technique. Stendhal he ranked very high; the only book he ever lent me was Le Rouge et le Noir.

In the other arts he was not much interested. I have seen a pleasing sketch by Muirhead Bone, 'Conrad Listening to Music,' but I never heard him speak of music, or heard any in his house. My memory is empty, also, of anything said by him about pictures. For him, as for many others, a picture was a record of its subject; just that and no more. Yet some rough pencil sketches of his which I have seen prove at least that he had some appreciation of the difficulties of pictorial art and some power of drawing. If the subject had charm or interest for him, and the record seemed accurate, he liked the picture. In the study at Bishopsbourne was a large eighteenth century engraving of the Old Harbor of Marseilles; it was not a meritorious

long absences from England it seemed to me that time changed him very little. He grew thinner with the passing of the years, and his hair gradually became streaked with grey. The quasi-nautical style of his dress was abandoned, and he adopted what tailors call country clothes, often wearing leathern gaiters, though he seldom walked. During the War riding breeches, with polished leggings, carried some suggestion of uniform.

Our evening talks while we sat smoking, between supper and bedtime, are among the pleasantest recollections of my life. He was a delightful host, for he made you feel his own interest in all you said or did. His was a profoundly sincere nature, and he was in nothing more sincere than in this. He had that great gift, the talent for friendship. During the four-and-twenty years of my personal knowledge of him he rose from obscurity to fame, and his fame grew continuously. We were separated by great gulfs of space and time, and letters between us were few, yet, when we met, it was as if there had been no separation. I have known no other man who could so easily and naturally pick up such threads. The meaning of this will be best understood by Anglo-Indians, and those others whose life in their own country is measured by months and their absences by years. There are few who, like Con

rad, not only look for and welcome the home-comings of the exile, but almost succeed in making him forget that he has been away. Fewer still, perhaps, would do this if their own lives had, in the interval, undergone changes of magnitude, including a notable rise in fortune and the achievement of a great figure in the world. Through all comings and goings and all changes Conrad was faithful, and remained always in sympathy.

Once, in Canterbury, when we had been looking at the cathedral, he said, 'You know I often forget that I am not an Englishman,' and in this as in all else he was sincere. He loved England (all that that name stands for, not just Canterbury, or London, or the countryside of this small island) more and better than many do who bear the name of Englishmen. His love sprang partly from a profound admiration of what, very loosely, may be called the political side of the national genius. An aristocrat by temperament and conviction as well as by birth, he, whose family and friends had been persecuted, plundered, exiled under a stupid and brutal bureaucracy, knew the English theory of political liberty as much more than a rhetorical phrase. It is now a habit with natives of this favored realm to speak of their rulers at best indulgently. Conrad, the Pole, on the other hand, whole-heartedly believed in British governance, especially in British diplomacy and foreign policy. He was immensely gratified when, late in the War, the Admiralty permitted him

to serve in an armed vessel 'made up' as a Norwegian brig, in the North Sea submarine hunt. I have no space to tell here the tale of this adventure, a tale which he related with an almost boyish glee. They had 'no luck;' U-boat commanders had grown extremely wary; manders had grown extremely wary; but, like a good fighting man, he bore no malice. When, a year after the Armistice, I came home and met him, he spoke I came home and met him, he spoke temperately and with a marked absence of bitterness. 'In a very few years,' said he, 'we shall walk arm-in-arm with them again. It must be so, and it will be right.' I had a meal with him in town on the day of his return from America; he was in fine spirits, delighted with his trip. Thanks to the kindness of his American Thanks to the kindness of his American friends (of whom he spoke very warmly), and their well-judged planning of the tour, what might have been a severe nervous strain had been, in fact, a refreshing holiday. The visit had also, I understood, been very successful from understood, been very successful from the financial point of view.

That was in the summer of 1923. In the autumn I spent a night at 'Oswald's,' and we played a game of billiards and had what was to be our last talk, for I went abroad again, and when I returned in the following year it was only a few weeks before his sudden death.

135

looked almost for a naval guard; at the least one looked for some corporate representation of the sailors of England. With all his fame he was proud to be a master mariner; the simple marine honor, the flag spread upon the coffin, might well, it seemed, have been rendered to this seaman at his voyage end. But the sea wind from the Downs, sighing through the trees of that green place, fluttered no flag, there was no symbol or emblem of his calling at that sailor's burial. Only some three or four elderly men who, by their appearance, perhaps were seafarers; shipmasters, it may be, whose voyaging was over. There was a little party of writers and journalists, among them, his white hair streaming in the summer breeze, one whose noble elegy, 'Inveni Portam,' appeared a few days later.

'And so' (wrote Cunninghame Graham of his friend) 'we left him with his sails all duly furled, ropes flemished down, and with the anchor holding truly in the kind Kentish earth, until the Judgment Day.'

Not the world of letters only, but the wider world of men and women, is much the poorer for the passing of Joseph Conrad. For, as the Dean of Canterbury (who, I think, knew him only through his books) has said, 'If one quality more than another may be singled out as the special theme of his writings, it is honor, fidelity, loyalty to trust. . . . A great and noble-minded man, a prophetic man, a man led by the Spirit.'

By Maurice Baring

From the Saturday Review, London

I

HAVE never met Paul Valéry, but even an American can hardly pass the summer in Paris without hearing anecdotes of one of the most talked of literary men in France. One evening I was sitting on a terrace chatting with a young French university student. He began bemoaning his approaching vacation in Haute Savoie. Paul Valéry had recently come to spoil the spontaneity of life in the delightful rural community where my friend had passed his happy childhood summers. Valéry visits a friend whose estate borders that of the family of the student. These neighboring families are intimate, and often dine together. Hence my friend knows Valéry. I could not help questioning him on his aversion to a vacation in such excellent company, and here is what he told me.

Such a gloriole surrounds Valéry that silence reigns whenever he approaches, everybody waiting eagerly for whatever profound statement he may let fall. Whenever he is present, the dinner is a bore. Nobody speaks. After a long, almost unbearable silence, Valéry says, 'I had a fine walk to-day.' Everybody listens greedily to these long awaited words, looks at his neighbor, smiles approval, and then waits for what the great man will deign to utter next. Silence again thrills the room until Valéry finishes another course. If the domestic delays in bringing this, Valéry may be moved to utter, 'I found the water in the lake too cool for a swim to-day.' After these gracious words, a

OUT how about the water in the

BUT how about the water in the

whose secrets were impenetrable even for him. And when he added 'to-day,' he may have meant that he will soon be able to bathe in this lake, and give us the results of his experience. It was no doubt an announcement of a new book he is about to write on some great subject that even he himself cannot tell us about until to-morrow.

Then all the villagers applaud, and write their friends that Valéry is about to give the world a new book in which he expounds a new philosophy.

My friend once applied for the position of secretary to Valéry. He was recommended by Valéry's best friend. He was not even considered for the position, however, because Valéry wanted no one he knew for secretary, nor anyone with any intelligence. He wanted no one who would make suggestions to him, criticize his work, or even understand it. A mere machine, it seems, suffices for a secretary.

I do not know whether Valéry has written anything on how to choose a secretary, but perhaps one can be pardoned for not having read everything the great man has written, when he is so fearful of imparting something for nothing in return that it is reported that even his best friend pays enormous prices for a single copy of his limited editions, receives only type-written letters from him, signed by a secretary, and has paid for every signature of Valéry that is in his possession.

My friend was once present at a large reception given to Valéry by some three hundred of his friends when he returned

from the assembled guests glides into silence, which continues until the end of the meal. No conversation is possible unless Valéry speaks. One is there only to listen to him. Nothing matters but him, and what he says; and this consists of platitudes.

But by that evening, word runs in the village that Paul Valéry has had a fine walk, and that he found the lake water too cool for a swim. Many villagers approve this wisdom, and forbid their children to begin to bathe for another week. Then all the good people congratulate each other on the presence in their midst of a great man and profound philosopher.

But one, much wiser than the rest, ventures that no doubt a subtler mean

one answered that it was far from him to be able to sound the depths of all of Valéry's meaning, even when it was only a matter of lake water, but that the great man might have meant almost anything. For example, he might have meant that after his fine walk in the starry fields of crystal thought, which he had just been reviewing in his mind during the silence at dinner, the material world in which we are immersed offered too cold a reception to give him pleasure on his return, and he therefore begged his friends to refrain from further conversation, so as not to chill the ardor of his mental excursion. Or he may have meant that at the end of his walk through the starry fields of crystal thought, he came to a great lake

good people anticipated the difficulty that foreigners must have had in understanding the lectures of a man who is so great he is understood only with difficulty by his own countrymen speaking his own language. When asked by them how he had been received in Germany, he replied that he had been acclaimed everywhere as cordially as he is acclaimed in France, which led him to believe that the Germans understood him quite as well as did the French.

Thus Valéry takes a walk, and his words of wisdom reach even America, because a French university student makes fun of a great man who has for his own motto, Je me moque du Monde.'

other party tends to hold back. This situation has been observed several times since 1918, and it is this situation, and it alone, that offers a weapon to those who are opposed to the dangerous idea of Austro-German union.

BESIDES, so long as every

one knows that even if worst came to worst we are still far from the actual accomplishment of the union, so long as everyone admits that choruses and fanfares cannot be construed as diplomatic moves, it will be difficult to interpret very exactly the speeches and actions of the principal Austrian statesmen. Often it has seemed that they tried to turn every development to their own advantage, and have even descended to intimidation. Again and again the Western Powers have decided to 'help' Austria in order to prevent her from falling into the arms of the Pan-Germanists. Manoeuvering, tacking with the wind, is a good policy for the weak, and since the Allies were responsible for setting up a weak Austria, they now can hardly object to her taking advantage of her weakness.

indulged in sentimental remarks from which absolutely no conclusion could be drawn.

On the other hand, Herr Seitz, the influential Socialist Mayor of Vienna, had already clearly indicated last July his approval of the Anschluss in a manner which would have been highly improper a year earlier. As an Austrian Socialist, he was able to do so because the recent German elections greatly strengthened the Socialist Party in the German Reichstag. One of the first official acts of the German Socialist Prime Minister, Herr Hermann Müller, was to telegraph the Austrian Chancellor proposing increasingly close coop

eration between the two nations. The German Socialist Party and the Social Democracy which rules Vienna are naturally closely allied. Evidently, when the Social Democrats held power both in Germany and in Austria, such a parallelism would be one more logical argument in favor of Austro-German union.

Human affairs, however, are never so simple as that. The Social Democrats may rule Vienna, but they do not rule Austria. Because Germany is Socialist, Herr Seitz favors the inclusion of Austria in a great Socialist Pan-Germany. For exactly the same reason, the Austrian Conservatives are fearful of the idea of combining their country with a Germany in which more or less radical ideas would hold sway. Just as soon as one of the great Austrian parties feels that it is justified in working for the union, the

But today it is clear that Austria is far from being the disinherited country that she has been pictured. Given a normal government, she can be selfsufficient and can live happily, provided that she accepts her new destiny and ceases to glance back over her shoulder at the past. The thirst for power, however, is ingrained in the human heart; its influence is stubborn, if unconscious. No

doubt fate seems hard to those who recall the vanished grandeur of a day when Vienna was the dazzling center of a great empire; no doubt it is hard to resign oneself to complete impotence; resign oneself to complete impotence; and it is precisely this feeling that the Pan-Germanists, by every possible means, are forever stimulating. Austria, by joining Germany, can become overnight a part of a tremendous whole. Left to herself, disarmed, and with only Left to herself, disarmed, and with only seven million inhabitants, she is without prestige and incapable even of protecting her enslaved brothers in the South Tyrol. But after the Anschluss, when she would form a part of a great block of seventy million Germans with their southern capital at Vienna, all of PanGermany's hopes would be hers, and she would belong to a group which could speak in accents of power.

It is therefore natural that such an idea, kept constantly before Austrian eyes and made to seem as attractive as only the Germans can make it, should have become for the confused Austrians a sort of myth, a dream which is unusually pleasant because it relieves them of the necessity of any immediate effort. Most Austrians feel that Austro-German union is implicit in the logic of events; it does not exist, but it may come into existence because the forces which oppose it may some day be broken down by unpredictable events. When it comes, everything will be changed and a new life will begin. Meanwhile, for the present, one may live at half pressure.

All the Austrian political parties, including the Christian-Socialists, have at one time or another approved the Anschluss in their platforms, and all the important public men of Austria have backed it. Monseignor Seipel in an interview once said that if the Treaty of Versailles did not forbid it, the union would already have been accomplished.' Then he added: 'I have always followed a policy whose aim is to get the League of Nations itself to bring about the union.' And on another occasion, he admitted that if a plebiscite were taken, ninety per cent of the voters would favor the Anschluss.

Considered thus abstractly, as a sort of phenomenon which is anticipated and which seems especially splendid because the disturbances which it will bring with it are long postponed, the idea of the Anschluss tickles the imagination of many Austrians. But when they reflect upon the financial arrangements and the economic consequences involved, all kinds of difficulties appear, and many an expression grows pensive.

THE old culture of the Viennese has

made them sufficiently intelligent to realize that they are laboring under an illusion; and though they continue to do so, they are growing alarmed. They are like an aged spinster of noble birth on the eve of marrying a rich parvenu with barrel chest and muscular hands. At the same time that she gloats over the wealth of her crude Croesus, and dreams of the future, she is dismayed at the idea of soon having to renounce the glory of her name and the traditions of her family. Once she has said yes, she must give up her whole personality, her moral independence, her chastity. So, while she is pleased at the idea of her future wealth, she foresees the vexations which the dominance of her lord and master will bring her, sees them so clearly that she even considers the idea of not going through with the marriage at all.