Joseph Conrad (1924)
Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our
phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or
ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to
take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of
mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable
appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the
country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that
for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors
with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host
that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke
English with a strong foreign accent.
Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our
memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially,
and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later
years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in
England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by
some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people
of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen,
driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed
him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in
process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and
there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously
upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement
is, of course, to be found, where men have at all times found it, in his
beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she
looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could
never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been
gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a
strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather
than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or
insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little
somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then
how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and
majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit
and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this
incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his
critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the
habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of
English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they
complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the
voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as
difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when _Figaro_ is
played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of
sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they
conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of
scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That
beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince
them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and
to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the
bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not
hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride,
its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad,
how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is
concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill
work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little
saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their
power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a
constant quality of Conrad’s prose.
For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a
leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young
people. Until _Nostromo_ was written his characters, as the young were
quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle
the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers,
used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at
peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth
honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in
sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and
austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested
characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in
their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose
praises he was never tired of celebrating:
They had been strong as those are strong who know neither doubts nor
hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, turbulent and devoted,
unruly and faithful. Well-meaning people had tried to represent these
men as whining over every mouthful of their food, as going about their
work in fear of their lives. But in truth they had been men who knew
toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew not fear, and had no
desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to manage, but easy to
inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to scorn in their hearts the
sentimental voices that bewailed the hardness of their fate. It was a
fate unique and their own; the capacity to bear it appeared to them the
privilege of the chosen! Their generation lived inarticulate and
indispensable, without knowing the sweetness of affections or the refuge
of a home—and died free from the dark menace of a narrow grave. They
were the everlasting children of the mysterious sea.
Such were the characters of the early books—_Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Youth_; and these books, in spite of the
changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among our
classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which the
simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore Cooper, has
no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such
men and such deeds, romantically, wholeheartedly and with the fervour
of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at
once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice.
To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must
be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and
yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very qualities which enable one
to understand them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for
Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that
subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. “A most
discreet, understanding man”, he said of Marlow.
Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in retirement.
Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek
of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and speculating;
sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until all the summer’s
night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a
profound respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he saw the
humour of them. He nosed out and described in masterly fashion those
livid creatures who prey successfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a
flair for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor did Marlow live
entirely wreathed in the smoke of his own cigars. He had a habit of
opening his eyes suddenly and looking—at a rubbish heap, at a port, at
a shop counter—and then complete in its burning ring of light that
thing is flashed bright upon the mysterious background. Introspective
and analytical, Marlow was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power
came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer
murmur “Mon Dieu, how the time passes!”
Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this remark;
but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s
extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull
ears, with dormant thoughts. . . . Nevertheless, there can be but few of
us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we
see, hear, understand, ever so much—everything—in a flash, before we
fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he
spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.
Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background; ships
first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the storm,
ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night; he
painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy brilliancy of
Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and their attitudes. He
was an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that “absolute
loyalty towards his feelings and sensations”, which, Conrad wrote, “an
author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation”. And
very quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words
of epitaph which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before
our eyes, of the darkness of the background.
Thus a rough-and-ready distinction would make us say that it is Marlow
who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on
dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad tells us,
took place when he had finished the last story in the _Typhoon_
volume—“a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration”—by some
alteration in the relationship of the two old friends. “. . . it seemed
somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.” It was
Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the creator, who said that, looking back
with sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told; feeling as he
well might that he could never better the storm in _The Nigger of the
“Narcissus_”, or render more faithful tribute to the qualities of
British seamen than he had done already in _Youth_ and _Lord Jim_. It
was then that Marlow, the commentator, reminded him how, in the course
of nature, one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up
sea-faring. But, he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited
their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though
the last word might have been said about Captain Whalley and his
relation to the universe, there remained on shore a number of men and
women whose relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be
worth looking into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of
Henry James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to
bed with him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that
Conrad wrote a very fine essay upon that master.
For some years, then, it was Marlow who was the dominant partner.
_Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold_ represent that stage of the
alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The human
heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has its
storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you wish
to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is man; his
ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will always be a
peculiar fascination in the books where the light of those brilliant
eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon the heart in its
perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Conrad
to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold. For the vision of a
novelist is both complex and specialised; complex, because behind his
characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he
relates them; specialised because since he is a single person with one
sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction
are strictly limited. So delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After
the middle period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into
perfect relation with their background. He never believed in his later
and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early
seamen. When he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen
world of novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far less
sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single phrase,
“He steered with care”, coming at the end of a storm, carried in it a
whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated world such
terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex men and women of
many interests and relations would not submit to so summary a judgement;
or, if they did, much that was important in them escaped the verdict.
And yet it was very necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and
romantic power, to have some law by which its creations could be tried.
Essentially—such remained his creed—this world of civilised and
self-conscious people is based upon “a few very simple ideas”; but
where, in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are we to find
them? There are no masts in drawing-rooms; the typhoon does not test the
worth of politicians and business men. Seeking and not finding such
supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has about it an involuntary
obscurity, an inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles
and fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and
sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service—beautiful always, but
now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps it was
Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He
had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in
the give and take of conversation; and those “moments of vision”
flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to
illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above all,
perhaps, he did not take into account how, if Conrad was to create, it
was essential first that he should believe.
Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books and
bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most
of us untrodden. It is the earlier books—_Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The
Nigger of the “Narcissus”_—that we shall read in their entirety. For
when the question is asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the
ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books, with their air of
telling us something very old and perfectly true, which had lain hidden
but is now revealed, will come to mind and make such questions and
comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and still, very chaste and
very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights,
in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another.
[Footnote 14: August, 1924.]