JOSEPH
CONRAD
THE inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and more
ingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the world commends him, and
this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad's case.
We
have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that he has possessed
himself of the secret of the sea more completely than any who write in English
except Shakespeare and Swinburne.
We
have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he has sounded the
ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, the heart of the white man
exiled from his kind in the darkness of tropical solitudes.
These
things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad's genius lies behind
and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am not mistaken, in a region where he has
hardly a single rival.
This
region is nothing more nor less than that strange
margin of our minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and
where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild marsh-birds
upon desolate sea-banks.
Conrad's
genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to what is common and
universal in us, to what unites the clever and the simple, the experienced and
the inexperienced, is revealed in something much less accidental and arbitrary
than the selection of any striking background, however significant, of
ocean-mystery or jungle solitude.
The
margin of the mind! Margin, midway
between the known and the unknown! Do
not the obscure images, called up by the feelings such words suggest, indicate far more intimately than any description of
tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritual atmosphere in which he
darkly gives us many strange clues?
I
seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme "bank and
shoal" of our human consciousness, as a place like that across which
Childe Roland moved when he came to the "dark tower".
I
seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of wavering reeds and
deep black pools. I seem to see it as a
place where patches of dead grass whistle in a melancholy wind, and where
half-buried trunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms.
Others
may imagine it in a different way, perhaps with happier symbols; but the reason
I have in my mind, crossed by the obscure shapes of dimly beckoning memories,
is common to us all.
You
can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty intimations the
proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely
approach it with any clairvoyant intelligence.
And the reason for that is, it is much further
removed from the material reactions of the nerves and the senses than the
favourite soil of these people's explorations.
So
thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelings which flit to
and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression, that it almost seems
as though this subconscious borderland were in contact with some animistic
inner world - not exactly a supernatural world, but a world removed several
stages back from the material one wherein our nerves and our senses function; a
world wherein we might be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling,
archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent
"souls" of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a
plane of existence beyond our rational apprehension.
It
is certain that there are many moments in the most naïve people's experience
when, as they walk in solitude along some common highway, the shape of a
certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or the indescribable melancholy of
a certain roadside pool, or the way the light happens to fall upon a heap of
dead leaves, or the particular manner in which some knotted and twisted root
protrudes itself from the bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the
mind of which I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings.
It
is as though something in the material thing before us - some inexplicable
"soul" of the inanimate - rushed forth to meet our soul, as if it had
been waiting for us for long, long years.
I
am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad, through a vague
and obscure twilight. It is not easy to
express these things; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy
of mystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, or series of
experiences, in the "great valley" of the mind.
When
Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly
at a floating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in
"Chance" who is relating the story watches the mud of the road
outside the hotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral
are making their desperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious
"expectancy" which is part of this strange phenomenon, and that
curious sudden thrill, "I have been here before! I have seen and heard all this before!"
which gives to so many scenes in Conrad that undertone of unfathomable mystery
which is so true an aspect of life.
So
often are we conscious of it as we read him!
We are conscious of it - to give another instance - when Heyst and
The
same insight in him and the same extraordinary power of making words malleable
to his purpose in dealing with these hidden things may be remarked in all these
scenes in his books where men and women are drawn together by love.
Conrad
takes no interest in social problems.
His interest in only stirred by what is permanent and undying in the
relations between men and women. These
extraordinary scenes, where Gould and his wife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem and Aissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and
Anthony, Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet
and peer into the secret depths of one another's beings, are all scenes
possessing that universal human element which no change or reform or revolution
or improvement can touch or alter.
Without
any theory about their "emancipation", Conrad has achieved for women,
in these stories of his, an extraordinary triumph. Well does he name his latest book
"Victory".
The victory of women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over
brutality, is one of the main threads running through all his work.
And
what women they are! I do not recall any
that resemble them in all literature.
Less
passionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less
sentimental than the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of de
Maupassant, Conrad's women have a quality entirely their own, a quality which
holds us spellbound. It is much easier
to feel this quality than to describe it.
Something of the same element - and it is a thing the positivity of which we have to search out among many crafty
negations - may be discerned in some of the women of Shakespeare and, in a
lesser degree, in one or two of the young girls in the stories of Turgenev.
I
think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise and
self-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicated in their
moments of withdrawn and reserved silence.
They
seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of their femininity, into
the depths of some strange sex-secret of which they are themselves only
dreamily conscious.
They
seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from their own drama, from
their own personality, and to lie back upon life, upon the universal mystery of
life and womanhood. This they do
without, it might seem, knowing what they are doing.
They
all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon their intent
and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm - expectant,
consecrated, and holy - which the early painters have caught the shadow of in
their pictures of the Annunciation.
There
is something about them which makes us vaguely dream of the far-distant youth
of the world; something that recalls the symbolic and poetic figures of Biblical
and Mythological legend.
They
tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with the magical and
evasive depths of the feminine secret in them.
They make us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the cornfield; of Andromache on the walls of
And
all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the most simple means. It is brought about partly by an art of
description which is unique among English novelists, an art of description
which by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodily appearance
indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunning insertion of long,
treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal in some occult indirect manner the
very integral quality of the soul thus betrayed.
The
more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while they are expressing
their most violent emotions, rather to blur and confuse the mysterious depths
of their sex-life than to reveal it.
Conrad's women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence, in a
significant silence, have the power of revealing something more than the tragic
emotion of one person. They have the
power of revealing what might be called the subliminal sex-consciousness of the
race itself. They have the power of
merging the individuality of the particular speaker into something deeper and
larger and wider, into something universal.
Reserve
is the grand device by means of which this subconscious element is made
evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically. When everything is expressed, nothing is
expressed. A look, a gesture, a sigh, a
whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of the ocean-deep mysteries of the soul
than pages of eloquent psychology.
The
deepest psychology - that is what one comes at last to feel - can only be
expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures, symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words
revealing it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.
For
it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest things in
nature; their ways must be prepared for them, the mind must be alert to receive
them, but they must not be snatched at in any direct attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply,
crushingly, or softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we
treat them with the reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious
fates, calling them "The Eumenides"; or the
ultimate secret of the universe, calling it Demogorgon;
with the reverence which wears the mask of superstition.
The
reason why Conrad holds us all - old and young, subtle and simple - with so
irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant intuition for the things
which make up the hidden substratum of all our human days - the things which
cause us those moments of sharp sweet happiness which come and go on sudden
mysterious wings.
His
style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats the language he
uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence.
The
mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems to have intensified
this quality; as though the hardness and steepness of its challenge forced the
latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibres to encounter it.
When
he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of technical
terms. He undertakes the much more human
and the much more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague
and delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to the vessels that
carry them.
His
fine imaginative mind - loving with a large receptive wisdom all the quaint
idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people - naturally turns with a certain
scornful contempt from modern steamships.
That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical achievements,
which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a trans-Atlantic liner, is
waved aside contemptuously by Conrad.
Like
all great imaginative spirits, he realises that for any inanimate object to
wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is necessary for it to have
existed in the world long enough to have become intimately associated with the
hopes and fears, the fancies and terrors, of many generations.
It
is simply and solely their newness to human experience which makes it
impossible for any of these modern inventions, however striking and
sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of intrinsic beauty in
the way a sailing-ship does.
And
it is not only - as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad - that these
old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carrying one back over
the centuries, are beautiful in themselves.
They diffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the
lives of those who are connected with them.
They bring the mystery and terror of the sea into every harbour where
they anchor and into every port.
No
great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of
fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic
and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where
brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors - sailors who sail
their ships - enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the
narrow streets.
The
shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar
superficial minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are
only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size for dignity,
and brutal energy for noble strength.
Conrad
has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce these startling
modern inventions to their proper place of emotional insignificance compared
with the true seafaring tradition. What
one thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works is always a
sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the very beginning there
is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with an integral soul.
One
always feels that a ship in Conrad has a figurehead; and is it possible
to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd steamer, with such an
honourable and beautiful adornment?
Liners are things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart by their paint,
their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of financiers who monopolise
them.
"Floating
hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which the awed journalistic
mind contemplates these wonders.
Well! In Conrad's books we are not teased with
"floating hotels". If a
certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from thinking how
wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea, let it be remembered that
the sea has its poetic revenge upon them by absolutely concealing from
those who travel in this way the real magic of its secret.
No-one
knows the sea - that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite clear - who has not
voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel.
Of
the books which Mr Conrad has so far written - one hopes that for many years
each new Spring will bring a new work from his pen - my own favourites are
"Chance" and "Lord Jim", and, after these two,
"Victory".
I
think the figure of Flora de Barral in
"Chance" is one of the most arresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind. Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted
blue eyes, her white cheeks and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her
deep humiliation, her shadowy and abysmal reserve - haunt me like a figure seen
and loved in some previous incarnation.
I
like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and Nina and
Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by
means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in
the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the
sweetness and mystery of such a person's first love.
I
believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are thus
reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the sensual from
the evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual; of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about love we
have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again, as opposed to this vulgar
sentimentality, with its false idealisation of women, we have the realistic
sensuality of the younger cleverer writers playing upon every kind of neurotic
obsession. I think the greatness of
Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to sacrifice the mysterious truth
of passion either to sentiment or to sensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural
human feeling free from both these turbid and morbid streams.
A
very curious psychological blunder made by many of our younger writers is the
attributing to women of the particular kind of sex emotion which belongs
essentially to men, an emotion penetrated by lust and darkened by feverish
restlessness. From this blunder Conrad
is most strangely free. His women love
like women, not like vicious boys with the faces of women. They love like women and they hate like
women; and they are most especially and most entirely woman-like in the extreme
difficulty they evidently always experience in the defining with any clearness
- even to themselves - of their own emotions.
It
is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions which renders
women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the mere presence of something
in them which refuses definition is a proof that they are beyond both sentiment
and sensuality. For sentiment and
sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact and logical
analysis. Sensualists love nothing
better than the epicurean pleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as
they are once assured of a discreet and sympathetic listener. The same is doubly true of
sentimentalists. The women of Conrad -
like the women of Shakespeare - while they may be garrulous enough and witty
enough on other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb
when their great emotions call for overt expression.
It
seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others, has
caught the mystery of ships should be the writer who, of all moderns, has
caught the mystery of women. Women are
very like ships: ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselves know
nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds - thoughts wandering from
island to island of remote enchantment - settle for a moment and then fly off
forever; ships that can ride the maddest and most tragical
storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock, unmarked on any earthly chart,
may sink to the bottom without warning and without mercy!
Conrad
reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest love of women suffers
from - the kind of storm which shakes it and troubles it - is not sensuality of
any sort but a species of blind and fatal fury, hardly conscious of any
definite cause, but directed desperately and passionately against the very
object of this love itself. Conrad seems
to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad, wild, desperate fury with
which women hurl themselves against what they love best in a blind desire to
hurt it, is nothing less than a savage protest against that deep and inviolable
gulf which isolates every human being from every other human being.
Such
a gulf men - in a measure - pass, or dream they pass, on the swift torrent of
animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant in these things, and their love
being more diffused, and, in a sense, more spiritual, is not so easily
satisfied by mere physical possession.
They
want to possess more. They want to
possess body, soul and spirit. They want
to share every thought of their beloved, every instinct, every wish, every
ambition, every vision, every remotest dream.
That
they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature
excites their savage fury, and they blinding wreak their anger upon the
innocent cause of their bewildered unhappiness.
It
is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and absolute
possession of the object of their love.
The maternal instinct is always - as Conrad makes quite clear - at the
bottom of the love-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal
instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy every
vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual, in the person it
pursues.
Conrad
shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in women, resulting in
this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable anger, is invariably driven to
cover its tracks by every kind of cunning subterfuge.
This
loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousand quite trivial
causes. It may take the form of
jealousy; but it is in reality much deeper than jealousy. It may take the form of protest against man's
stupidity, man's greed, man's vanity, man's lust, man's thick-skinned
selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the law of nature which
makes it impossible for a woman to share this stupidity, this vanity, this
lust, this greed, and which holds her so cruelly confined to a selfishness
which is her own and quite different from the selfishness of man.
One
would only have to carry the psychological imagination of Conrad a very little
further to recognise the fact that while man is inherently and completely
satisfied with the difference between man and woman; satisfied with it and
deriving his most thrilling pleasure from it; woman is always feverishly and
frantically endeavouring to overcome and overreach this difference,
endeavouring, in fact, to feel her way into every nerve and fibre of man's
sensibility, so that he shall have nothing left that is a secret from her. That he should have any such secrets - that
such secrets should be an inalienable and inevitable part of his essential
difference from herself - excites in her unmitigated fury; and this is the
hidden cause of those mysterious outbursts of apparently quite irrational anger
which have fallen upon all lovers of women since the beginning of the world.
Man
wishes woman to remain different from himself. It interests him that she should be
different. He loves her for being
different. His sensuality and his
sentiment feed upon this difference and delight to accentuate it. Women seem in some subtle way to resent the
division of the race into two sexes and to be always endeavouring to get rid of
this division by possessing themselves of every thought and feeling and mood
and gesture of the man they love. And
when confronted by the impassable gulf, which love itself is incapable of
bridging, a blind mad anger, like the anger of a creative deity balked of his
purpose, possesses them body and soul.
Mr
Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad,
written in a manner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one reads
it one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, could not possibly
have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad's complicated and elaborate
manner of building up his stories.
Mr
Follet points out, for instance, how in
"Chance" we have one layer of personal receptivity after another;
each one, as in a sort of rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the
material under our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more
underscored and overscored with interesting personal
values.
This
is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of all
attention.
But
for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the art of Conrad
at those moments when the narrative becomes quite direct and when there is no
waylaying medium, however interesting, between our magnetised minds and the
clear straightforward story.
I
like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts
and Lenas, are brought face to face in clear
uncomplicated visualisation. I think he
is always at his best when two passionate and troubled natures - not
necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a man and a man, like Lingard and Willem - are brought together in direct and
tragic conflict. At such moments as
these we get that true authentic thrill of immemorial romance - romance as old
as the first stories ever told or sung - of the encounter of protagonist and
antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and terrible and
strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.
But
though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated passionate scenes, I
am quite at one with Mr Wilson Follet in treasuring
up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all those elaborate
by-issues and thickly woven implications which give to the main threads of his
dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a background.
Except
for a few insignificant passages when that sly old mariner Marlowe, of whom
Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his pipe and passes the beer and
utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I can enjoy with unmitigated delight all
the convolutions and overlappings of his inverted
method of narration - of those rambling "advances", as Mr Follet calls them, to already consummated
"conclusions". In the few
occasional passages where Marlowe assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing
and strenuous, I fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular,
healthy-minded, worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to
the Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully and
pathetically English.
With
these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to his curious and intricate
method. I love the way he pours his main
narrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve of one quaint
person's mind and then of another; each one adding some new flavour, some new
vein of body or bouquet or taste, to the original stream, until it becomes
thick with all the juices of all the living fermentations in the world.
I
think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact that while
he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome monotonous sedentary
life of ordinary civilised people, he does so without assuming that banal and
bullying air of the adventurous swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without
letting his intellectual interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these wanderings into savage regions.
Most
of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiet haunts of
unadventurous people and set off for remote continents, leave behind them, when
they embark, all the fineness and subtlety of their intelligence, and become
drastic and crude and journalistic and vulgar.
They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and they assume a sort
of man-of-the-wide-world "knowingness" which is extremely unpleasant.
Conrad
may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark hart of his Malay jungles, but
he never forgets to carry with him his sensitiveness, his metaphysical
subtlety, his delicate and elaborate art.
What
gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the fact that while he is
writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers, of ivory-traffickers and
marooned seafarers, he never forgets that he is a philosopher and a
psychologist.
This
is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for years and years; a
writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictions of civilised life, a
writer who can initiate us into all the magical mysteries of dark continents
and secret southern islands, without teasing us with the harsh sterilities of a
brain devoid of all finer feelings.
This
is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear; a writer capable
of describing sheer physical beauty and savage elemental strength while
remaining a subtle European philosopher.
I suppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood to attain
such a distinction - to be as crafty as a Henry James, moving on velvety feline
paws through the drawing-rooms of London and the gardens of Paris; and yet to
be leading us through the shadows of primordial forests, cheek by jowl with
monstrous idolatries and heathen passions.
But
what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich in human value is not
only that he can remain a philosopher in the deserted outposts of South-Pacific
Islands, but that he can remain a tender and mellow lover of the innumerable
little things, little stray memories and associations, which bind every
wanderer from Europe, however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has
left behind in the land of his birth.
Here
he is a true Slav, a true continental European.
Here he is rather Russian - or French, shall I say - than an adopted
child of
Conrad
has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginative feeling for the little
casual associations of a person's birthplace in town or country, which seems to
be a peculiar inheritance of the Slavonic and Latin races, and which for all
their sentimental play with the word "home" is not really natural tot
he tougher-minded Englishman or Scotchman.
One
is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderer in forlorn
places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look of the fields and the
actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streets and the warm interiors of
little friendly taverns by wharfside and by
harbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these people were born.
No
modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr Hardy, has the power
which Conrad has, of conveying to the mind that close indescribably intimacy
between humanity's passions and the little inanimate things which have
surrounded us from childhood.
Conrad
can convey this "home-feeling", this warm secure turning of the human
animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even into the heart of the
tempestuous ocean. He can give us that
curious half-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony with
our material surroundings, even in the little cabin of some weather-battered
captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not a sailor, in his books, and
not a single ship in which his sailors voyage, but has a sort of dim background
of long rests from toil in ancient harbour backwaters where the cobblestones on
the wharf-edge are thick with weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats
mistily and greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and the lamplit streets.
It
is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, brooding so carefully
over the intimate and sacred relations between our frail mortality and its
material surroundings, that makes it possible for him to treat with such
delicate reverence the ways and customs, the usages and legendary pieties, of
the various half-savage tribes among whom his exiled Europeans wander.
I
am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid
in Conrad's books upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure
in reading him. What is the cause of
this mania for violence? It surely
detracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, from any
psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of it lies. I do not feel that the thing is an erotic
perversion. There is a downright
brutality in it which militates against any subtly voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely
appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his Anglo-Saxon
readers? No - that, surely, were
unworthy of him. That surely must be
considered unthinkable! Is it that,
being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces
himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a
physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer has to
pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?
No;
that does not seem to me quite to cover the case. It is an obscure matter, and I think, in our
search for the true solution, we may easily stumble upon very interesting and
deeply hidden aspects, not only of Conrad's temperament, but of the temperament
of a great many artists and scholars. It
all artistic work there is so much that goes on in the darkness, so much secret
exploitation of the hidden forces of one's nature, that it is extremely
difficult to put one's finger upon the real cause of any particular flaming
outbreak.
I
have observed this sudden and tempestuous "obsession of violence" in
the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitely wrought-upon women; and it
is possible that the heavy, dull, thick, self-complacent brutality of Nature
and average human nature is itself so hurting and rending a thing to the
poignant susceptibilities of a noble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate
revenge upon it, it goes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-Tamberlaines Tamberlaine in
bloody massacre.
What,
however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not the melodramatic violence
of these tempestuous scenes, but the remote psychological impulses at work
behind them.
Where,
in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from his world-deep revelations of
direct human feeling, is in his imaginative fusion of some particular spiritual
or material motif through the whole fabric of a story.
Thus
the desolate "hope against hope" of poor Almayer
becomes a thing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up,
fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness of his
surroundings, out of the débris and litter of his
half-ruined dwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out
of the stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mud of his
melancholy river.
Thus
the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst's father -
that fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity - overshadows, like a
ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill twilight of soma
far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so
ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic son. It is this imaginative element in his work
which, in the final issue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter of small significance
whether the scene of a writer's choice be the uplands of Wessex or the jungles
of the tropics, as long as that ironic and passionate consciousness of the
astounding drama - of men and women being the baffled and broken things they
are - rises into unmitigated relief and holds us spellbound. And beyond and above this overshadowing in
his stories of man's fate by some particular burden of symbolic implication,
Conrad flings the passionate flame of his imagination into the words of every
single sentence.
That
is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction. That is why it has such sudden surprises for
us, such sharp revelations, such rare undertones. That is why after reading Conrad it is
difficult to return to the younger English writers of the realistic school.
One
enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishing thrill in the
mere look of the words, as we see them so carefully, so scrupulously laid side
by side, each with its own burden of intellectual perfume, like precious vases
full of incense on the steps of a marble altar.
To write as delicately, as laboriously, as exquisitely as this, upon the
stark, rough, raw materials of murder and suicide and madness and avarice and
terror and desperation; to write as elaborately and richly as this, when
dealing with the wild secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of
half-bestial savages, is great mastery.
And it is more than mastery. It
is a spiritual triumph. It is a proof
that the soul of man, confronting the worst terrors that can come upon it, is
still capable of turning all things into grist for its mill.
For
Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless and purposeless chance in the
ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendid tenacity of courage in resisting any
desperate betrayal of human joy.
Like
that amazing character in "Lord Jim", who collects butterflies and
keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedy upon tragedy,
he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woeful stories, that since there
is no help in heaven or earth for the persecuted child of man, it is the more
necessary that in defiance of the elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself, man should sink into his own
soul and find in the strength of his own isolated and exiled spirit a courage
equal to all that can be laid upon it.
Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we found when we sank
down thus into ourselves were courage, and courage only. What one comes to feel from the reading of
Conrad is that there is nothing in the world which has enduring value - nothing
in the world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind of dignity or
beauty - except only love. And love like
this, which is the forlorn hope of the race, is as far from lust as it is far
from sentiment or indolent pity. It is
the "high old Roman virtue".
It is the spirit of comradeship defiant still, under the tottering
pillars of a shaken earth.
"Man
must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. Ripeness is all."
. . . . . . . . . . .
"Upon
such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The
gods themselves throw incense."