Conrad's stories have no plots, and they do not need them. They are a
series of studies in temperaments, deduced from slight incidents;
studies in emotion, with hardly a rag to hold together the one or two
scraps of action, out of which they are woven. A spider hanging by one
leg to his web, or sitting motionless outside it: that is the image of
some of these tales, which are made to terrify, bewilder and grip you.
No plot ever made a thing so vital as _Lord Jim_, where there is no
plot; merely episodes, explanations, two or three events only
significant for the inner meaning by which they are darkened or
illuminated. I would call this invention, creation; the evasion of what
is needless in the plots of most novels. But Conrad has said, of course,
the right thing, in a parenthesis: "It had that mysterious, almost
miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of
detection, which is the last word of the highest art."
Conrad conceals his astonishing invention under many disguises. What has
seemed to some to be untidy in construction will be found to be a mere
matter of subtlety, a skilful arresting of the attention, a diverting of
it by a new interest thrust in sideways. _Lord Jim_ is a model of
intelligent disarray.
In the strict sense Conrad is not a novelist: he writes by instinct. And
his art is unlike the art of every other novelist. For instance,
Meredith or Stendhal make great things out of surface material; they
give us life through its accidents, one brilliantly, the other with
scrupulous care. Conrad uses detail as illustrations of his ideas, as
veils of life, not as any essential part of it. The allusion to him is
more real than the fact; and, when he deals with the low or trivial,
with Mr. Verloc's dubious shop in the backstreet, it is always a symbol.
Conrad, writing in English, does not always think in English. For, in
this man, who is pure Polish, there is a brooding mind, an exalted soul,
a fearless intelligence, a merciful judgment. And he has voyaged through
many seas of the soul, in which he finds that fascination, the
fascination of fear, splendor, and uncertainty, which the water that
surrounds the earth had to give him. And he has made for himself a style
which is personal, unique, naked English, and which brings into English
literature an audacious and profound English speech.
In his sarcasm Conrad is elemental. He is a fatalist, and might say with
Sidi Ali Ismayem, in the _Malay Annals_: "It is necessary that what has
been ordained should take place in all creatures." But in his fatalism
there is a furious revolt against all those evils that must be accepted,
those material and mental miseries that will never be removed. His
hatred of rule, measure, progress, civilization is unbounded. He sits
and laughs with an inhuman laughter, outside the crowd, in a chair of
wisdom; and his mockery, persuaded of the incurable horrors of
existence, can achieve monstrosity, both logical and ghastly.
In the "simple tale" of _The Secret Agent_, which is a story of horror,
in our London of to-day, the central motive is the same as that of the
other romances: memory as Nemesis. The man comes to his death because he
can not get a visible fear out of his eyes; and the woman kills him
because she can not get a more terrible, more actual thing, which she
has not seen, but which has been thrust into her brain, out of her eyes.
"That particular fiend" drives him into a cruel blunder and her into a
madness, a murder, a suicide, which combine into one chain, link after
link, inevitably.
The blood-thirstiness of Conrad's "simple story" of modern life, a
horror as profound as that of Poe, and manipulated with the same careful
and attentive skill, is no form of cruelty, but of cold observation.
What is common enough among the half-civilized population of that Malay
Peninsula, which forms so much of the material of the earlier novels,
has to be transported, by a choice of subject and the search for what is
horrible in it, when life comes to be studied in a modern city. The
interest is still in the almost less civilized savagery of the
Anarchists; and it is around the problem of blood-shedding that the
whole story revolves. The same lust of slaughter, brought from Asia to
Europe, seems cruder and less interesting as material. There the
atmosphere veiled what the gaslight of the disreputable shop and its
back-parlor do but make more visible. It is an experiment in realism
which comes dangerously near to being sensational, only just avoids it.
The whole question depends upon whether the material horror surpasses
that horror of the soul which is never absent from it; whether the
dreadful picture of the woman's hand holding the carving-knife, seen
reflected on the ceiling by the husband in the last conscious moment
before death, is more evident to us than the man's sluggish acquiescence
in his crime and the woman's slow intoxication by memory into a crime
more direct and perhaps more excusable. It seems, while you are reading
it, impossible that the intellect should overcome the pang given to the
senses; and yet, on reflection, there is the same mind seen at work,
more ruthlessly, more despairingly than ever, turning the soul inside
out, in the outwardly "respectable" couple who commit murder, because
they "refrained from going to the bottom of facts and motives." Conrad
has made a horrible, forgivable, admirable work of art out of a bright
tin can, a befouled shovel, and a stained carving knife. He has made of
these three domestic objects the symbols of that destroying element,
"red in tooth and claw," which turns the wheel on which the world is
broken.