The Crow's Nest — Part 33

We have fought our way up from being wild, houseless lemurs, or lower, and little by little we have built up our curious structure--of learning, of art, of discovery--a wonderful structure: at least for us monkey-men. It has been a long struggle. We can guess, looking backward, what our ancestors had to contend with--how the cavemen fought mammoths, and their tough sons and daughters fought barbarism. But we want to forget it. We wish every one now to be genial. We pretend that this isn't the same earth that our ancestors lived on, but quite a different planet, where roughness is kept within bounds and where persons wear gloves and have neat wooden doors they can lock.

But it's the very same earth that old Grandpa Caveman once wrestled with, and where old Grandma Cavewoman ran for her life twice a week.

But it's still wild and strange just beneath.

In a book called "The War in the Air," by H. G. Wells (1907) he pictures the world swimming along quietly, when bang! a war starts! And it spreads, and takes in East and West, smashes cities, stops everything. And one of the young men in the story looks around rather dazed, and says in a low voice: "I've always thought life was a lark. It isn't. This sort of thing has always been happening, I suppose--these things, wars and earthquakes, that sweep across all the decency of life. It's just as though I had woke up to it all for the first time.... And it's always been so--it's the way of life."

So that's what we need to get used to, that it's _that_ kind of a ship. We ought to have a sense of the adventure on which we're all bound.

It's not only war--not by a long shot--that gives men that sense. Great scientists have it. Great sailors. You can sort out the statesmen around you, the writers, the poets, according to whether or not they ever have been up on deck.

Theodore Dreiser has, for instance; Arnold Bennett has not. Charles Dickens did not, and that's why he is ranked below Thackeray. Compare James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" with George Moore's "Confessions," and if you apply this criterion, Moore takes a back seat.

There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad. Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon him too suddenly, or his boyhood sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through the immense forces surrounding the world. "There they are," one of them says, as he stands at the rail, "stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which man seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed."