Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his idée fixe—namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground upon which he has placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of an idée fixe, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life, other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book’s close, that we should have been told so much more.
Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott, with the single exception of Thackeray’s Beatrix—and here I am not forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so unjustly obscure fiction, The Shadow of a Titan. As a picture, Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: “... his hat, a gay sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when—... in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings”—we are conscious of his superb figure; and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the book assure us—“In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.” His genius dominates, yes—but it is the genius of a magnificent picture standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not given us—Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us. Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in The Nigger of the Narcissus gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him—we have not met him.
Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various, so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in the whole of Conrad’s art—the drive in the cab of old Mrs Verloc, Winnie and Stevie—compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S———, Peter Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in Romance (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is, finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us—old friends with new faces and new names—but a planet that we know, even as we know the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness s. Although each work, from, the vast Nostromo to the minutely perfect Secret Share, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this, surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.
III—THE POET
THE poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, or such short stories as The Informer, or Il Conde, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the novelist deserve consideration—style, atmosphere and philosophy. In the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from Conrad’s second novel, An Outcast of the Islands:
“He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering stars.”
And from his latest novel, Chance:
“The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe.”
It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied, something of the “purple patch.” We feel that the prose is too dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly affected by the author’s determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in Almayer’s Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim,—prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale called The Return, there is the following passage:—
“He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted, ‘Come back,’ and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe—like a grave.”
The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words—“moral annihilation,” “devouring nowhere,” “peaceful desperation,” “last chance of life,” “terrible,” “like a grave.” That he shouted gives a final touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
Often, in the earlier books, Conrad’s style has the awkward over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked effect of two influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of the author of Madame Bovary. When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert’s effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert’s: “Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l’envanouissaiont sous la poésie du rôle qui l’envahissait; et entrainée vers l’homme par l’illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide...” and this a sentence of Conrad’s: “Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard’s shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if to her—to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature—had been revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting.”
Conrad’s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is probable, however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater importance—the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we think in many pages of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Island, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first rapture.
He was under the influence of these powers also in that, at that time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him—often the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from Typhoon with that earlier one from The Outcast of the Islands that I quoted above:
“He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes’ head a few stars shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.”
That is poet’s work, and poet’s work at its finest. Instead of impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made the very most of a rather thin moment—feels, indeed, himself that it is thin—we are here under the influence of something that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest material—and yet it remains, through all its discipline, spontaneous.
These three tales, Typhoon, Youth and Heart of Darkness, stand by themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We may remember such characters as M’Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures as the old seneschal in The Eve of St Agnes or the Ancient Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman’s When Lilac first on the Door yard bloomed or Keats’ Nightingale. Their author was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older—he must look back now on the colours of Youth with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, in such a volume of stories as A Set of Six, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned—we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from Chance quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of An Outcast of the Islands, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there, but—“Young Powell felt it.” In that magical storm that was Typhoon God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
II.
The question of style devolves here directly into the question of atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it and does produce it in thick slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that reaction—and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own day, Mr Arnold Bennett’s Brighton background in Hilda Lessways or Mrs Wharton’s New York background in The House of Mirth offer most successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the contemplation of some scene and is thence extended to the whole vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in Fathers and Children, the searching of Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, the scene at the theatre in The Ring and the Book, the London meeting between Beauchamp and René in Beauchamp’s Career. It is not only that these scenes are “done” to the full extent of their “doing,” it is also that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless Victorian Age in Literature, has named this element Glamour. In writing of the novels by George Eliot he says: “Indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a certain indescribable thing called Glamour, which was the whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray, when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of Castlewood.” Now’ this matter of Glamour is not all, because Dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit’s escape after the murder do not put us into touch with other worlds—but we may say, at any rate, that when, in a novel atmosphere is potential it is certain also to have glamour.
The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. In The Outcast of the Islands, when Willems is exiled by Captain Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described—it has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the power of something stronger than ourselves. In Lord Jim the contrast of Jim with the officers of the Patna is a contrast not only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain’s gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil, degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In The Nigger of the Narcissus the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and intimates we have become—but that shadow that traps the feet of the negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than that single voyage of the Narcissus. When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.” But Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later credulity—he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries. Sometimes, as in The Return, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are “a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique—it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled blankets that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat.... Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
And this room is set in the very heart of the forests—“the forests unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven—and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic—the lyrical pulse beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however, select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about Nostromo may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
The theme of Nostromo is the domination of the silver of the Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad, then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their evening meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and princesses passing—but the detail of it is built with careful realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns for us.
Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson’s chart in Treasure Island. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s treasure. If any attentive reader of Nostromo were put down in Sulaco tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse—a strong-hearted but persevering black brute, with a hammer bead—you would have seen in the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of the side-walk!”
How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation of some reader “Yes—those orange-trees! It was just like that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!—and can we not sniff something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume!
He is able, therefore, upon this foundation of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in Nostromo at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet, working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the heart of his work from the first line of Almayer s Folly to the last line of Victory. Nostromo is not simply the history of certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It is that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for its interpretation....
When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain limitations.
III
As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men.
It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they—from his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat. Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain—as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to whom human achievements are nothing—lust of treasure.
M’Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap—the victim is always in his power. It comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of brain—Marlowe, Decoud, Stein—are melancholy and ironic: “If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea captains. This then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant, hamper his interest—that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of specimens—but at the end of it all, as with his own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies.”
Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles—Robert Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning’s interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual case—he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in Sordello the most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is not this exactly what we may say of Nostromo? Mr Chesterton has written of Browning: “He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in The Secret Agent, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, M’Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
Finally, The Ring and the Book, with its multiplied witnesses, its statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of that superb building—here we can see the highest pinnacle of that temple that has Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo amongst its other turrets, buttresses and towers.
Conrad is his own master—he has imitated no one, he has created, as I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning carried Romantic-Realism showed the author of Almayer’s Folly the signs of the road that he was to follow.
If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as novelist?
IV—ROMANCE AND REALISM
I
THE terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson, said: “Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without denying that the date of the publication of St Ives was also the date of the death of the purely romantic novel.
But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic” is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like romances,” we hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away from real life, which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain order of novel exclaim, “because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day—I know where I am.”
Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an ambition—I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence—Romance is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and recorded—-it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary divorce from reality, nor does Realism imply a detailed and dusty preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as The Brothers Karamazov, such a play as The Cherry Orchard are there before us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that Karamazov has, in the England of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by Madame Bovary....
II
It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same position.
Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently realistic, when it is merely recorded and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott, who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required ground.
Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s—that is to say, a romantic—mind, and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of all honest men. In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not abated one jot of his romance—Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature—but the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov are romantic realism at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity—Conrad finds humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
Nevertheless he has been influenced by the Russian writer continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, Under Western Eyes, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men—and they find it not as Flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel—simply they pursue their quest because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr, demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that, through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing that Conrad has done for the English novel—he has brought the zest of creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their art—the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows exhaustion and sterility means nothing; the stream will soon ran full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.
III
Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists—in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young—this influence is to be detected. Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton’s On the Staircase with Mr Arnold Bennett’s Sacred and Profane Love, or Mr Galsworthy’s Man of Property—and Mr E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose Longest Journey and Howard’s End may possibly provide the historian of English literature with dates as important as the publication of Almayer’s Folly in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to this essay.
It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old realism can return. We have been shown in Nostromo something that has the colour of Treasure Island and the reality of New Grub Street. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that at few periods in English literature has the novel shown more signs of a thrilling and original future.
For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for a moment at his last novel, Victory.
The conclusion of Chance and the last volume of short stories had shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him, ultimately, from reality. Victory, splendid tale though it is, does not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe is prevented he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the whole of Conrad—the last conversation between Heyst and Lena—that we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline and restraint that were once his law.
Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the Almayer’s Folly of 1895 to the Victory of 1915, one realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.