CONRAD

"_The Earth is a Temple where there is going on a Mystery Play, childish

and poignant, ridiculous and awful enough in all conscience._"

I

Conrad's inexplicable mind has created for itself a secret world to live

in, some corner stealthily hidden away from view, among impenetrable

forests, on the banks of untraveled rivers. From that corner, like a

spider in his web, he throws out tentacles into the darkness; he gathers

in his spoils, he collects them like a miser, stripping from them their

dreams and visions to decorate his web magnificently. He chooses among

them, and sends out into the world shadowy messengers, for the troubling

of the peace of man, self-satisfied in his ignorance of the invisible.

At the center of his web sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human

affairs with a calm and cynical ferocity; "that particular field whose

mission is to jog the memories of men, lest they should forget the

meaning of life." Behind that sarcasm crouches some ghastly influence,

outside humanity, some powerful devil, invisible, poisonous,

irresistible, spawning evil for his delight. They guard this secret

corner of the world with mists and delusions, so that very few of those

to whom the shadowy messengers have revealed themselves can come nearer

than the outer edge of it.

Beyond and below this obscure realm, beyond and below human nature

itself, Conrad is seen through the veil of the persons of his drama,

living a hidden, exasperated life. And it is by his sympathy with these

unpermitted things, the "aggravated witch-dance" in his brain, that

Conrad is severed from all material associations, as if stupendously

uncivilized, consumed by a continual protest, an insatiable thirst,

unsatisfied to be condemned to the mere exercise of a prodigious genius.

Conrad's depth of wisdom must trouble and terrify those who read him for

entertainment. There are few secrets in the mind of men or in the

pitiless heart of nature that he has not captured and made his

plaything. He calls up all the dreams and illusions by which men have

been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly naked. He is the

master of dreams, the interpreter of illusions, the chronicler of

memory. He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of

every vice or crime. He calls up before him all the injustices that have

come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. He shows how failure is

success, and success failure, and that the sinner can be saved. His

meanest creatures have in them a touch of honor, of honesty, or of

heroism; his heroes have always some error, weakness, a mistake, some

sin or crime, to redeem. And in all this there is no judgment, only an

implacable comprehension, as of one outside nature, to whom joy and

sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civilization, are equal and

indifferent.

Reality, to Conrad, is non-existent; he sees through it into a realm of

illusion of the unknown: a world that is comforting and bewildering,

filled with ghosts and devils, a world of holy terror. Always is there

some suggestion of a dark region, within and around one; the

consciousness that "They made a whole that had features, shades of

expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye,

and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of

perdition that dwells within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable

body."

"This awful activity of mind" is seen at work on every page, torturing

familiar words into strange meanings, clutching at cobwebs, in a

continual despair before the unknown. Something must be found, in the

most unlikely quarter; a word, a hint, something unsaid but guessed at

in a gesture, a change of face. "He turned upon me his eyes suddenly

amazed and full of pain, with a bewildered, startled face, as though he

had tumbled down from a star." There is a mental crisis in that look:

the unknown has suddenly opened.

Memory, that inner voice, stealthy, an inveterate follower; memory,

Conrad has found out, is the great secret, the ecstasy and despair which

weave the texture of life. A motto from Amiel in one of his books

faintly suggests it: "_Qui de nous n'a eu sa terre promise, son jour

d'extase et sa fin en exil?_" And the book, _Almayer's Folly_, his

first, a rare and significant book, is just that. _An Outcast of the

Islands_ has the despairing motto from Calderon, that better is it for a

man had he never been born. _Lord Jim_ is the soul's tragedy, ending

after a long dim suffusion in clouds, in a great sunset, sudden and

final glory. No man lives wholly in his day; every hour of these

suspensive and foreboding days and nights is a part of the past or of

the future. Even in a splendid moment, a crisis, like the love scene of

Nina and Dain in the woods, there is no forgetfulness. "In the sublime

vanity of her kind she was thinking already of moulding a god out of the

clay at her feet. ... He spoke of his forefathers." Lord Jim, as he

dies, remembers why he is letting himself be killed, and in that

remembrance tastes heaven. How is it that no one except Conrad has got

to this hidden depth, where the soul really lives and dies, where, in an

almost perpetual concealment, it works out its plan, its own fate?

Tolstoy, Hawthorne, know something of it; but the one turns aside into

moral tracts, and the other to shadows and things spiritual. Conrad

gives us the soul's own dream of itself, as if a novelist of adventure

had turned Neo-Platonist.

A woman once spoke to me in a phrase I have never forgotten, of Conrad's

sullen subjective vision. Sullen is a fine word for the aspect under

which he sees land and sea; sullen clouds, a sullen sea. And some of

that quality has come to form part of his mind, which is protesting,

supremely conscious. He is never indifferent to his people, rarely kind.

He sees them for the most part as they reveal themselves in suffering.

Now and then he gives them the full price, the glory, but rarely in this

life, or for more than a moment. How can those who live in suspense,

between memory and foreboding, ever be happy, except for some little

permitted while? The world for those who live in it, is a damp forest,

where savagery and civilization meet, and in vain try to mingle. Only

the sea, when they are out of sight of land, sometimes gives them

freedom.

It is strange but true that Conrad's men are more subtly comprehended

and more magnificent than his women. There are few men who are seen full

length, and many of them are nameless shadows. Aissa and Nina in the

earliest books have the fierce charm of the unknown. In _Lord Jim_ there

is only one glimpse of the painful mystery of a woman's ignorant heart.

In _Nostromo_ the women are secondary, hardly alive; there is no woman

in _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, nor in _Typhoon_, nor in _Youth._

There are some women, slightly seen, in Tales of Unrest, and only one of

them, the woman of _The Return_, is actually characterized.

Is there not something of an achievement in this stern rejection of the

obvious love-story, the material of almost every novel? Not in a single

tale, even when a man dies of regret for a woman, is the woman prominent

in the action. Almayer, and not Nina, is the center of the book named

after him. And yet Nina is strange, mysterious, enchanting, as no other

woman is to be. Afterward they are thrust back out of the story; they

come and go like spinners of Destiny, unconscious, ignorant, turning

idle wheels, like the two women knitting black wool in the waiting room

of the Trading Company's office, "guarding the door of Darkness."

Now, can we conjecture why a woman has never been the center of any of

these stories? Conrad chooses his tools and his materials; he realizes

that men are the best materials for his tools. It is only men who can be

represented heroically upon the stage of life; who can be seen

adventuring doggedly, irresistibly, by sheer will and purpose; it is

only given to men to attain a visible glory of achievement. He sees

woman as a parasite or an idol, one of the illusions of men. He asks

wonderingly how the world can look at them. He shows men fearing them,

hating them, captivated, helpless, cruel, conquering. He rarely

indicates a great passion between man and woman; his men are passionate

after fame, power, success; they embrace the sea in a love-wrestle; they

wander down unsounded rivers and succumb to "the spell of the

wilderness;" they are gigantic in failure and triumph; they are the

children of the mightiness of the earth; but their love is the love of

the impossible. What room is there, in this unlimited world, for women?

"Oh, she is out of it--completely. They--the women I mean--are out of

it--should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful

world of their own, lets ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it."

There is Karain, "clothed in the vision of unavoidable success," flying

before a shadow, comforting himself with the certainty of a charm. There

is Kurtz, who returns to barbarism, and Tuan Jim with his sacrifice of

life to honor, and even the dying nigger steersman who, shot through by

a spear, looks once on his master, "and the intimate profundity of that

look which he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in

my memory--like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme

moment." It is with this agonizing clearness, this pitiless mercy, that

Conrad shows us human beings. He loves them for their discontent, for

their revolt against reality, for their failure, their atonement, their

triumphs. And he loves them best because their love is the love of the

impossible; he loves them because they are part of the unknown.

And so, it is _Lord Jim_ in which his genius has attained its zenith

with _Karain_ and _Heart of Darkness_ close after it. Consider the

marvelous art, the suspense, the evasion of definite statement, the

overpowering profundity of it. To begin with, there is the trick, one of

Conrad's inextricable tricks of art, by which suspense is scarcely

concerned with action, but with a gradually revealed knowledge of what

might have happened in the making of a man. Take an instance in

_Nostromo._ There is Doctor Monyngham who comes in at the beginning of

the book comes and goes briefly up to the three hundredth page; and then

suddenly, _à propos_ of nothing, the whole history of his troubles, the

whole explanation of what has seemed mysterious to him, is given in four

pages; whereupon the last sentence, four pages back, is caught up and

continued with the words: "That is why he hobbled in distress in the

Casa Gould on that morning." Now why is there this kind of hesitation?

Why is a disguise kept up so long and thrown off for no apparent reason?

It is merely one of his secrets, which is entirely his own; but another

of them he has learned from Balzac: the method of doubling or trebling

the interest by setting action within action, as a picture is set within

a frame. In _Youth_ the man who is telling the story to more or less

indifferent hearers, times his narrative with a kind of refrain. ...

"Pass the bottle," he says whenever a pause seems to be necessary; and,

as the tale is ending, the final harmony is struck by an unexpected and

satisfying chord: "He drank.... He drank again."

To find a greater novel than _Lord Jim_, we might have to go back to

_Don Quixote._ Like that immortal masterpiece, it is more than a novel;

it is life itself, and it is a criticism of life. Like Don Quixote, Lord

Jim, in his followings of a dream, encounters many rough handlings. He

has the same egoism, isolation, and conviction; the same interrupting

world about him, the same contempt of reality, the same unconsciousness

of the nature of windmills. In Marlow, he has quite a modern Sancho

Panza, disillusioned, but following his master. Certainly this narrator

of Jim's failures and successes represents them under the obscure

guidance of "a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved

half-unconsciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be

visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly." He is a soul "drunk

with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in himself." That

illusion is suddenly put to the test; he fails, he goes into the cloud,

emerges out of it, is struck gloriously dead.

In _Lord Jim_ Conrad has revealed, more finally than elsewhere, his

ideal: the ideal of an applauded heroism, the necessity of adding to

one's own conviction the world's acceptance and acclamation. In this

stupendous work, what secret of humanity is left untold? Only told, is

too definite a word. Here is Conrad's creed, his statement of things as

they are:

It is when we try to grapple with another man's need that we perceive

how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with

us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if

loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope

of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the

outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable,

and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.

"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," says some one in the

book, one of the many types and illustrations of men who have fallen

into a dream, all with some original sin to proclaim or conceal or

justify, men of honor, tottering phantoms clinging to a foul existence,

one crowding on another, disappearing, unrealized. All have their place,

literally or symbolically, in the slow working-out of the salvation of

Tuan Jim. Amazing they may be, but Jim "approaching greatness as genuine

as any man ever achieved," with the shame of his "jump" from a sinking

ship and his last fearless jump "into the unknown," his last

"extraordinary success," when, in one proud and unflinching glance, he

beholds "the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had

come veiled to his side": amazing he may be, but a masterpiece, proved,

authentic, justifying Man.

Next after this triumph, Karain is the greatest. It is mysterious, a

thing that haunts one by its extreme fascination; and in this, as in all

Conrad, there is the trial of life: first the trial, then the failure,

finally (but not quite always) the redemption. "As to Karain, nothing

could happen to him unless what happens to all--failure and death; but

his quality was to appear clothed in the illusion of unavoidable

success." And on what a gorgeous and barbaric and changing stage is this

obscure tragedy of the soul enacted! There is in it grave splendor. In

Conrad's imagination three villages on a narrow plain become a great

empire and their ruler a monarch.

To read Conrad is to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent

darkness. _Karain_ is full of mystery, _Heart of Darkness_ of an unholy

magic. "The fascination of the abomination--you know," the teller of the

story says for him, and "droll thing life is." The whole narrative is an

evocation of that "stillness of an implacable brooding over an

incalculable intention," and of the monstrous Kurtz who has been

bewitched by the "heavy mute spell of the wilderness that seems to draw

him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal

instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions; and this

alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted

aspiration." And it all ends with the cry: "The horror! The horror!"

called out in his last despair by a dying man. Gloomy, tremendous, this

has a deeper, because more inexplicable, agony than the tragedy of

_Karain._ Here, the darkness is unbroken; there is no remedy; body and

soul are drawn slowly and inevitably down under the yielding and

pestilent swamp. The failure seems irretrievable. We see nature casting

out one who had gone beyond nature. We see "the meanness, the torment,

the tempestuous anguish of a soul" that, in its last moment of earthly

existence, had peeped over the edge of the gulf, with a stare "that

could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace

the whole universe."

With _Nostromo_ we get a new manner and new scenery. The scene is laid

in Colombia, the Nuevo Granada of the Spaniards, and the silver mine is

its center, and around that fatal treasure-house the whole action moves.

The Spanish streets, glittering with heat, with their cool patios,

peopled by the Indians, the "whites," a cross between Spanish and

native, the Italians, the English, the Indian girls with long dark hair,

the Mozenitas with golden combs, are seen under strong sunlight with a

vivid actuality more accentuated than in any other of Conrad's scenes. A

sinister masquerade is going on in the streets, very unreal and very

real. There is the lingering death of Decoud on a deserted island ("he

died from solitude, the enemy known to few on this earth, and whom only

the simplest of us are fit to withstand"); the horrible agonies of

Hirsch; the vile survival of Doctor Monyngham. It is by profound and

futile seriousness that these persons and events take on an air of

irony, and are so comic as they endure the pains of tragedy.

This strange novel is oddly constructed. It is a narrative in which

episode follows episode with little apparent connection. The first half

is a lengthy explanation of what the second part is to put into action.

It drags and seems endless, and might be defined by a sentence out of

the book, where some one "recognized a wearisome impressiveness in the

pompous manner of his narrative." Suddenly, with Nostromo's first

actualized adventure the story begins, the interest awakens, and it is

only now that Nostromo himself becomes actual. He has been suggested by

hints, indicated in faint outline. We have been told of his power and

influence, we see the admiration which surrounds him, but the man walks

veiled. His vanity, evident at the first, becomes colossal: "The man

remained astonishingly simple in the jealous greatness of his conceit."

Then, as he awakens one morning under the sky, he rises "as natural and

free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and unconscious

wild beast." The figure greatens in his allegiance to the shining

spectre of the treasure, which makes him afraid because "he belonged

body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity." His death is

accidental, but, in Conrad's merciful last words, he has, after his

death, the "greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of his

successes. 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 Capataz de Caegadores dominated the dark gulf

containing his conquests of treasure and love."