The Way of the Sea.. By Homan Duncan. London :
Hodder and Stoughton. f6s..]
but bow much it is all a literary pose ! The knowledge of the sea, like knowledge of deserts and high mountains, comes only to those who have taken the bitter with the sweet, and they are few in any generation who have gained it—certainly not the breezy novelist, with his casual technicalities and
stereotyped phrases of description. The sea to him has no more mystery than a County Council; it is merely a mice-en- scene for his narrative, and it is only a chance that he has not chosen Paris or Hampstead Heath instead. Stevenson had the true knowledge, as in a tale like " The Merry Men "
Mr. Kipling, both in prose and verse, has shown that he too has penetrated to the sanctuary ; while Mr. Bullen has made us free, not only of the ocean, but of those that swim and have their business in deep waters. But Mr. Conrad is our great example of one who in the realm of fiction has carried the artist's soul and eye through every form of peril and every mood of storm and calm, till he has realised the 'wonders of God in the deep, and has shown to the world some glimpses of that ancient mystery.
In Mr. Norman Duncan, whose name is new to us, he has a worthy colleague, who, if he is deficient in knowledge to Mr.
Conrad, seems to us to rival him in the mere art of story- telling. There is a greater skill in the selection of detail and more concentrated poignancy in the American author's work, though he is far inferior to Mr. Conrad• in range and philosophy. The subjects of the two writers are, indeed, very different. Mr. Conrad writes of the great ocean in its majesty and romance, running from the cold North to warm Southern seas and mazy tropical inlets, the ocean of history, of adven- turers and leaders of men, dark deeds and rich fortunes. Mr. Duncan tells of that sombre sea on the very brink of the Northern ice, and his people are poor fishermen stranded on a corner of Newfoundland coast, living a village life far removed from the world. If Mr. Conrad has greater variety, a fuller life, and more of the historic romance of the seas, the very glamour of the North, that uninhabitable land where man goes only to his death, is over Mr. Duncan's pages, and his drama is as much the conflict of elements as of human creatures. We have rarely read a book in which the reader received so vivid an impression of the fury and ruthlessness of Nature.
The keynote of the stories is the sense of the uncanny mystery of the Northern seas. In " The Chase of the Tide" we have the tale of two boys who speculate on the reason of the tide, and go out to look for the hole where the water runs away. When they discover the secret, it is only to be engulphed in the breakers at the Rock of the Three Poor Sisters. In " The Strength of Men" the seal-fishers are driven from their ship to the loose ice-pack, and there is a wonderful story of how Saul Nash fought the sea for two days on an ice-floe, and finally won to harbour. Finest, perhaps, of all is "The Breath of the North," in which two men sail their boat home on the eve of the winter storms, and, after incredible sufferings, succeed in cheating the North and reaching their cottage fire. The romance of the warm hearth and the savage out-of-doors has rarely been more convincingly portrayed. And in " A. Beat t' Harbour" we have the tale of the man who feared the sea, and yet fought with his cowardice, rising to be the skipper of a ship. Because he feared the sea, the sea found him at last, and he welcomes death gladly as the end to a life of torture. Part of the book deals with the incidents of village life, and after the dreary stuff which has profaned for some years the name of " idylls," it is refreshing to find genre painting done with so sure a touch, so swift a sense of drama, and so complete a sympathy. The tale of the girl who marries in the time of famine for a good meal; of the old man who fought a long battle against ill-luck only to be beaten at the end ; and of the other veteran who fancied that he was called by the Lord to heal diseases, and worked strange havoc in consequence in the countryside,—all are so admirable that it is hard to choose the best. Our favourite is, perhaps, the grim story called "In the Fear of the Lord," which tells of a certain Nazareth Lute who spent his whole life building a schooner with his own hands, and then, believing that the Lord demanded a sacrifice, scuttled her before he ever sailed her. Religion is the dominant motive with these strange people, a fierce creed which fits their stern life and wild dwelling-place:-
"InRagged . Harbour some men have fashioned a god of rock and tempest and the sea's rage—a gigantic, frowning shape, throned in a mist, wherennder black waters curl and hiss, and are cold and without end ; and in the right hand of the shape is a flaming rod of chastisement, and on either side of the throne sit grim angels, with inkpots and pens, who jot down the sins of men, relentlessly spying out their innermost hearts ; and behind the mist, far back in the night, the flames of pain, which are forked and writhing and lurid, light up the clouds and form an aureole for the shape and provide him with his halo."
There is one tale, however, which should never have been written. " Concerning Billy Luff " tells how a small boy found some trashy old child's book, and tried to model his life on Master Goodchild. The whole thing is conceived in a spirit of grave irony, but a child's deathbed is too painful a motive for art, and though Mr. Duncan is far, indeed, from the ordinary purveyors of cheap emotion, we feel that in this case he has come too near their methods.
If this is, as we suppose, the work of a young man, it is a very remarkable achievement. Mr. Duncan has something to learn. He is a little too fond of fine writing; and though his purple patches are real purple, they sometimes detract from the strong and simple effect of a tale. But his merits far outbalance his defects. He has imagination, a strong sense of the dramatic, an austere literary conscience, and, what is rarer still, a sense of natural magic and a power of reproducing the brooding mystery of the sea. It is a pleasure to know that there is another writer in the world from whom we may hope for great things.
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