Part 3

But when the second half of the book arrives we can be confident no longer. Here, as in _Lord Jim_, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to continue it. The true thing in _Lord Jim_ is the affair of the _Patna_; the true thing in _Chance_ is Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora after her disaster. But whereas in _Lord Jim_ the sequel to Jim's cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in _Chance_ entitled _A Moonless Night_ is, in the first half of it, surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story, _The Return_. The conclusion of _Chance_ and certain tales in his volume, _Within the Tides_, make one wonder whether that alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these two qualities.

It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must before the end of _Chance_, the form of narration in _Oratio Recta_ is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.

I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his presence be not true ...

III

If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad's attention we shall see that in almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his irony.

He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see at once that the odds are too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings and they will not quail." They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: "You see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and I."

The theme of _Almayer's Folly_ is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth). _Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first. _Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the very epitome of Conrad's themes, is the struggle of McWhirr against the storm (here again it is McWhirr who apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the storm's confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest. In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad's finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three tales in _'Twixt Land and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the struggle of simple, unimaginative men against forces too strong for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_ Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals.

Of Conrad's philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them and leave defeat or victory to the stars.

Whatever Conrad's books are or are not, it may safely be said that they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler affection. His art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding over the inequality of life's battle. His humour, often of a very fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids light-heartedness.

Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would have found Marlowe, Jim and Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that they might not have been something the better for a little of it.

I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in meeting a number of Conrad's characters is that they have existences and histories entirely independent of their introducer's kind offices. Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real histories.

One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of the robust vitality of their predecessors; the figures in the novel of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.

In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author's own determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.

This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries--namely, the assurance that his characters have their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us.

The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left speculating deeply upon "what happened afterwards" to Gayef or Barbara, to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad's sea captains as with Tchekov's Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly from the author's eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence, but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain McWhirr that he wrote long letters home, beginning always with the words, "My darling Wife," and relating in minute detail each successive trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs McWhirr, we learn, was "a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in the neighbourhood considered as 'quite superior.' The only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good." Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate "who never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house." How conscious we are of Jim's English country parsonage, of Captain Anthony's loneliness, of Marlowe's isolation. By this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing, we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on board, "A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol."... "Very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her over the side. We didn't recognise him at all...." And Mr Baker, the chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends for life?

"No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers, Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother-in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady, he thought, sitting down for a moment's rest on the quarter-hatch. Time enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere. He didn't like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck; and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom through many long years he had given the best of a seaman's care. And never a command in sight. Not once!"

There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. "Donkin entered. They discussed the account ... Captain Allistoun paid. 'I give you a bad discharge,' he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: 'I don't want your bloomin' discharge--keep it. I'm goin' ter 'ave a job hashore.' He turned to us. 'No more bloomin' sea for me,' he said, aloud. All looked at him. He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his declaration."

In how many novels would Donkin's life have been limited by the part that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus_? As it is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--"As I came up I saw a red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, fluffy hair, fall on Charley's neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over him:--'Oh, my boy! my boy!'--'Leggo me,' said Charley, 'leggo, mother!' I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic, courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again, good-naturedly:--'If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall 'ave a bob for a drink out of my pay.'"

But one passes from these men of the sea--from McWhirr and Baker, from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About such men as McWhirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little details, McWhirr's wife, Mr Baker's proud sister, Charley's mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Kazumov, the sinister Nikita, the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same perfect sympathy.

His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an _idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly, unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you. But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved, the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality and its significance. "His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed."

With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists' lives beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true things.

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 author's 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 Bates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the most 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 serape twisted on the cantle, 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 Sulaco, 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, Razumov, 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 these 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 wildernesses. Although each work, from the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely perfect _Secret Sharer_, 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

I

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 fact, 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 like 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.