planning. The town survives, a sleepy little place, near Chinon; and the memory of the palace is preserved by a few fragments of masonry. Mr Blomfield is of opinion that all was well with the course of French architecture after once the Neo-Classic style was fairly launched, and that it gained strength with every generation, showing itself ready for the fulfilment of any task that might be demanded of it. It has been already noted that he can see little merit in the undisciplined structure of the early chateaus ; he seems to find nothing repellent in the cold and dreary monotony which to the unlearned eye not unfrequently characterises later fabrics, even those designed with 'all subtleties of proportion and the vital qualities of scale.' It is right, no doubt, that he should view things thus; with the artist the claims of his art are paramount; but it must be remembered that the charm of a building depends on many considerations other than the harmonious manipulation of the orders. The succession of eminent men, whose leader Mr Blomfield finds in François Mansart, prosecuted their art from stage to stage, envisaging beauty as the latest outcome of some fresh combination of lines and masses; but they seemed sometimes to forget that, the further these emanations of their drawingboards were removed from the spontaneity or capriciousness of the Revival, the more completely they lost the alluring charm which, like that of unfettered graceful youth, hangs about the earlier buildings of the sixteenth century. Their paramount aim was unity of effect, an aim often attained with triumphant success; but in the course of time continuous repetition staled the combination of details, and the efforts towards development on legitimate lines too often resulted in nothing better than an accession of monotony, accompanied by loss of proportion and degradation of decorative ornament. The year 1665 lies just beyond Mr Blomfield's purview. To Englishmen a special interest attaches to it as the year in which Christopher Wren made his momentous journey to Paris and wrote how 'Mons. Abbé Charles introduced me to the acquaintance of Bernini, who showed me his design for the Louvre. . . . Bernini's design for the Louvre I would have given my skin for; but the old reserved Italian gave me but a few minutes' view.' (Parentalia,' p. 261) Wren must have seen the façade of the Jesuit church of St Paul and St Louis and the domes of the Sorbonne and of Val de Grace. These were the first domes he could have seen; and later, when he designed his own mighty work at St Paul's, he doubtless drew upon the experience he had gathered in Paris. If he had not gone thither as a disciple he would not have written (ib. 262): 'I have busied myself in surveying the most esteemed Fabricks of Paris and the Country round. The Louvre for a while was my daily object, where no less than a thousand hands are constantly employ'd in the Works, some in laying mighty Foundations, some in raising the Stories, Columns, Entablements, etc., with vast stones by great and useful Engines; others in Carving, Inlaying of Marbles, Plaistering, Painting, Gilding, etc., which altogether made a school of architecture the best, probably, of this day in Europe.' After Wren's departure the Rococo spirit began to prevail; and its excess had provoked a reaction even before the Revolution broke out and cast everything into the melting-pot. Timoleon as well as Brutus came in for a share of recognition as a patron of liberty; and Greek emblems were mixed with those of Rome in designs drawn during the Directoire and the early Empire. The Madeleine, the Panthéon and St Sulpice were begun before 1789, and were finished by Napoleon, who erected the Bourse, the most important building of the period. But Greek detail found no permanent place in French architecture; in decoration it was readily adopted, together with Etruscan and Pompeian; and Egyptian was added after Napoleon's attempt to establish French power on the Nile. Canova's influence is also to be recognised; and whatever may be the failings of the Empire style, it was a vast improvement on the Rococo which it superseded. W. G. WATERS. Art. 8.-JOSEPH CONRAD AND SEA FICTION. Works by Joseph Conrad. Almayer's Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Tales of Unrest (1898); Fisher Unwin. The Nigger of the Narcissus' (1897), Typhoon and other Stories (1903); Heinemann. Lord Jim (1900), Youth and other Stories (1902); Blackwood. Nostromo (1904); Harper. The Mirror of the Sea (1906), The Secret Agent (1907), A Set of Six (1911), Under Western Eyes (1911); Methuen. Some Reminiscences (1912); Nash. IN families which possess what is called a strong family feeling, when Miss Jones has married young Brown, and indisputably is Mrs Brown, she still remains in the Browns' eyes a Jones. Let her fail to toe the Brown family line, let her show in any way a mind or will of her own, and instantly we are reminded: Ah, but she's a Jones, you know-a regular Jones! That's just like the Joneses.' She is never admitted to be a real Brown until, poor thing, she is dead and buried in the Brown family vault. Yet she lives with the Browns; she adopts their life and interests; she bears children who are Browns; her blood, in the next generation, is Brown blood; and for all essential purposes she is a Brown. From the point of view of the future, she is more a Brown than the Browns who die without issue. At times she may even dare to be her own self; and then it is, curiously enough, that the Browns are most apt to dub her a Jones. Quite on all fours with the Browns' attitude towards young Mrs Brown, born Jones, is the line of criticism which seizes on Joseph Conrad's foreign birth, and proceeds, on that ground, to account for the outstanding qualities of his work. Grant that he is of Polish parentage, not unliterary nor unacquainted with English, for his father translated a good deal of Shakespeare into the Polish language. Grant that his early recollections are of the wide Black Lands, of Russian domination, and of exile ; hence, no doubt, his bitterly ironic treatment of Russia, her revolutionaries as well as her bureaucrats, and of political police in general. Grant that he thinks in two or three languages, as who does not after living in two or three countries? Grant that he has never mastered the pronunciation of English, though he has mastered its resources and its idiom and has even written wonderful new tunes for the old fiddle. By all those facts of origin his work is of course tinged, but it is not thereby accounted for or explained. It is not Polish work, laboriously done in English. A much better, though still not an adequate explanation of it might be found in Conrad's seamanship. Behind his psychological windings and subtleties, behind his brooding impressionism and keen realism, one comes almost always upon the strong working ideal that belongs to British seafaring tradition. When he judges his characters, that is his final test-the seaman's. All his heroic men are seamen or connected with the sea; his landsmen he is apt to treat with a sailor's curiosity and a sailor's slight contempt, as if they may be good or bad, just as happens, but in any case are not seamen. A Pole by birth, a naturalised Englishman, an author, and various other things, Conrad is most of all and at heart a seaman, a master mariner, of the British Merchant Service. And not unnaturally so. The Merchant Service had him young. At sea in his teens, first of all in French vessels, but soon afterwards in English, he worked his way from the forecastle to his master's ticket and command of his ship. After 'Almayer's Folly' had been welcomed by critics as something new in fiction, it was still touch-and-go—a matter of coming to terms over the purchase of a ship-as to whether he would not return to the sea, taking his wife with him in the old sailing-ship fashion, when skippers with their families went to sea to live on it. In English ships he learnt the spoken language; in English ships he learnt life; and in them he stayed till his outlook became what it is. As a creative artist, it is to England that he has borne works of art. In some respects, indeed, and notably in his vivid expression of characteristically English sentiments, he is almost more English than Englishmen. In The Nigger of the "Narcissus "' there occurs a splendid description of the ship's run up-Channel before a hard sou'wester: 'At night the headlands retreated, the bays advanced into one unbroken line of gloom. The lights of the earth mingled with the lights of heaven; and above the tossing lanterns of a trawling fleet a great lighthouse shone steadily, such as an enormous riding light burning above a vessel of fabulous dimensions. Below its steady glow, the coast, stretching away straight and black, resembled the high side of an indestructible craft riding motionless upon the immortal and unresting sea. The dark land lay alone in the midst of the waters, like a mighty ship bestarred with vigilant lights-a ship carrying the burden of millions of lives-a ship freighted with dross and with jewels, with gold and with steel. She towered up immense and strong, guarding priceless traditions and untold suffering, sheltering glorious memories and base forgetfulness, ignoble virtues and splendid transgressions. A great ship! For ages had the ocean battered in vain her enduring sides; she was there when the world was vaster and darker, when the sea was great and mysterious, and ready to surrender the prize of fame to audacious men. A ship mother of fleets and nations! The great flagship of the race; stronger than the storms, and anchored in the open sea' (p. 242). Such a description cannot be vamped up or written to order, as an exercise of the literary imagination. Its patriotism is not the dubious thing which too often goes by that name; nor is it lip-service or cant, but sheer love of a country for its own imperfect and homely and glorious self-a love existing deep down in numberless hearts, yet never spoken better than in that passage where Conrad, with unerring instinct, has expressed it in terms of the pride and affection that a seaman feels for his ship, be she clipper, or ocean greyhound, or a water-thumping old tub. I can call to mind nothing in English like it, except the two up-Channel verses of Spanish Ladies,' a song moulded into its present form by generations of sailors who have known what it is to long for England.* 'Then we hove our ship to, with the wind at sou'west, boys, We hove our ship to, for to strike soundings clear; We got soundings in ninety-five fathoms, and boldly The first land we made it was called the Deadman, Next, Ram Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland, and Wight, We passed by Beachy, by Fairleigh and Dungeness, And hove our ship to off the South Foreland light.' * In 'Sea Songs and Ballads,' Selected by Christopher Stone (Clarendon Press, 1906), there is an excellent version, p. 183. |