SEA STORIES.

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 223, 9 December 1927, Page 14

SEA STORIES.

[Written for The Sun.j

»OOD book?” y “Good? It’s by Conrad!” The railway passenger turns back, burying himself nose-deep in adventure. Jones the gentlemanly stalks across the pages, so suavely realistic that not at all would the reader be surprised if a well-dressed skeleton boarded the train at the next station and paid the guard with a rusty Spanish doubloon. Or "Typhoon” thrills the reader’s emotions as it thrilled the rigging of ships caught on Conrad’s sea that night. Or a gentle-

There is so much to b-e said, ana so much has been said, in praise of Conrad’s sea-stories that a word of critical dispraise may sound to many as shocking as a heresy. If it is heresy, it is at least interesting —heresy nearly always is; and the orthodox are free to grip their stoutest cudgel.

man with a face like a pussy-cat materialises from behind a newspaper, leans forward, and announces in a throaty whisper that he isn’t one of the tame ones ... The train draws into a lonely little sea-station —white sand, white sunlight, and pink sea-daisies. People come there on Sundays, allegedly for the air. The Conrad addict settles himself comfortably behind a sanddune and goes on finding new and exciting things about life as she is lived —in Conrad. Miles and miles of blue water shimmers away to the end of the world, and the blue is reflected on the seagulls’ underwings. But the reader behind the sand-dune does not see. Why doesn’t somebody really write a story about the sea, in place of all these homespun yarns on the paper covers of which appear graphic presentations of young men fondly clasp- • ing steering-wheels, while goldenhatred maidens struggle in the clutches of blue-chinned ruffians in the background? True Conrad wasn’t

quite as romantic as all that. He wrote sea-stories with "a love interest,” and saved them from being called love stories with a sea-interest either by killing off the heroine, or by marrying her, poor girl, to somebody she quite disliked —a modern and successful trick.

But Conrad, in common with smaller fry, regarded his sea not as a drama in itself, but as a well-appointed and commodious stage. Pirates had to swagger across it, heroes had to grapple with the shrieking demons of storms, fair maidens had to be drenched to the very skin, before a Conrad story was complete in all its ingredients. When he turned to look at the sea itself he treated it always as the great enemy, a power which men and ships might master for a few breathless moments, to be mastered by it in the end. always, siren sometimes; but never sweetheart. That was Conrad’s sea. He was wonderful here, in his description of fights with the sea. He knew exactly how the engines of a ship purr on a fine day, and pant and throb and gasp when the air is stifling with thunder. He knew the unnameable fear which catches those far down in the ship when the water swings in toward them like a wall of thick green glass. And he knew the wonderful night-perfume of a ship, which is one part tar, one part salt, and one part just romance. But his seascapes were all foreground, so cluttered up with desert or near-desert islands, strange parts, and rascally crafts that he had really no time nor space for a background at all. Once the water had closed over his ship, and the echo of the last chanty had died away, his story was finished. He had no knowledge of the greater story, in which white sails and black flags were the scenic effects, storms and sunsets the actors. After ail, too, it is foolish to treat the sea as an enemy, to draw perpetual attention to cockle-shell craft and waves mountains high. If one looks at the sea long enough it is quite impossible to dislike or fear it, because these and all other emotions are simply swallowed up in the green depths. The sea is the beginning and the end —that is all. If every ship was to be swept away from it, and every island as silent as it was before light, it would still be the biggest story in the world. Miss Julia Dodd, heroine of "Hard Cash,” has something to say about sea-stories. Somebody proffers her a novel with the statement that it is “a good book to read at the sea." She denounces this with flashing eyes and heaving breast, after the manner of spirited and earnest Victorian ladies. "Oh, Mamma! I thought, what a book this must be, if one can read it by the glorious, the majestic, the abounding sea!” And the work of some nineteenth-century Conrad finds its last long home in the wastepaper basket. The lady, though perhaps a little violent, was fundamentally right. The sea makes its own music and writes its own literature, and a really good sea-story can be nothing but a faithful dramatisation of what the sea has already said. The simple people of the earth, a Greek fisherman, an Irish peasant collecting seaweed, a Norse iilor, are your born translators; and their mermaids and tritons, made from the gleam of a great fish-fin or a yellow swirl of seaweed like a woman's hair, are the real people of the sea. Conrad’s scoundrels and Iseroaa are test naturalised citizens.

Just one of two writers have caught a little of the rainbow in the foam and held it fast. Old Roman Tacitus in his account of voyages to Britain tells of seas so thick “that the oars of our rowers moved sluggishly through them; and the pearls there were darker than pearls of other s*as.‘” Somehow, reading that, one can just see a sunset like a knifealong the sky, and an unfcn/»»* v '«i milky-coloured like an and the naked wet bodies of

the divers glistening, the sea-water running down them and making little pools on the deck of the trireme, soon soaked up by the thirsty wood. Kipling's “vast and contemptuous surges” are real sea, as everything that Kipling touches is real. But Walter de la Mare, greatest of our little poets or littlest of our great ones, tells the last quiet secret of the sea as it comes to Alexander: * Voices of seamaids singing Wandered across the deep; The sailors, labouring on their oars, Rowed as in sleep. Like a bold boy sat their captain, His glamour withered and gone, Tn the souls of the brooding mariners While the song pined on. . . . Come the calm infinite night/ Who then will hear Aught save the singing Of the sea-maids clear? No pirates, no ship fidgeting at anchor, no Joseph Conrad: just the waves washing against the rocks and a song borne across the waters. ROBIN HYDE.