THE STEALTHY NEMESIS
While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more
artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame.
The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone
sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and
after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of
Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books
to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret
resentment--he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him
up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he
deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these
inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones.
Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the
“romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he
knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and
characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were
not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met
these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as
street-car traffic to us.
One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon--that he was the perfect
type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of
purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as
grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium.
Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of
one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he
stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten
his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and
the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a
venomous fury.
The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was
born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in
the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of
twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain,
and was nearly forty before his first novel was published.
This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely
silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it.
But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native
countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for
the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he
accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches
the congregations implore:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have
shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe
there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words:
“a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol,
and unites in one blending the terror of four different races--Greek,
Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men,
and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and
destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly
and weak.
Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what
shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and
so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody
his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone
lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are
“thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same
way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the
creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s
day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident,
any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so,
while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad,
you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school.
Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of
this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against
the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of
behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will
be instinctive--for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis
will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision,
or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of
physical or moral disease.
What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant
service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable
piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative
heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is
the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is
the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study
turns out to be Capitalism.
The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous
autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes
that the naval officer is the most complete and instinctive snob in the
world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the
self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has
to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty
and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet--but assuredly not by
chance!--a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species;
he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get
the heads of all thinking women upon one neck--and then wring the neck!
In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of
politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a
Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous
tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means
who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of
social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where
the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and
prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the
White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction
which has made Poland the curse of Europe.
But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just
as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry
takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist
ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in
the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as
organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance.
Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative
feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old
tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One
after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and
what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the
end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the
stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again.
When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we
know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we
come back to it, and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to
be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic
than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes
old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not
trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But
finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by
sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out
until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by
capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder
to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.”
There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of
a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres
Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic
idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about
them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and
reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics
and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an
evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that
ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits!
The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take,
for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who
became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted
his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in
these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a
bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain
line--the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted
it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course
they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare;
they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and
they passed his bill--a most admirable form of compromise for a
reformer!
For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands
of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the
stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served
these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity,
the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the
Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar,
the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the
Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and
Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout
all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners
a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they
paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their
henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now
those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to
the stealthy Nemesis!
And Joseph Conrad--what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea,
he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most
cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon
those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual
text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking:
“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded
ship--leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old
gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay
and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be
drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the
owner--he said. Nearly cried over them--he did; and he had a square
mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too--all proper. So they
chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in
winter--depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through
the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three
days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks--coss the ship warn’t
overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t.
There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears
that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind
people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t
see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the
boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in
Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We
kept a good look out, too--but he topped his boom directly he was
outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”
The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place
of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks,
with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and
are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and
hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the
newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their
correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us
photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of
these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain
against the stealthy Nemesis.
What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here
consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego
makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners,
the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few
miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional
distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets
of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it
means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid
to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that
several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!
So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous
in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies
to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and
everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points,
and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To
me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great
imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt.
But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on
the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and
operate the steamship lines!
Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature,
and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private
ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely
a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the
Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up
and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he
feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a
bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” a
whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as
a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of
“agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this
creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad
has with them! Such lofty sarcasm:
Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a
discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a
gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their
unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines
they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship
would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed
crew of satisfied skippers.
In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic
who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in
the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who
finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful
resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great
Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday
school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you
commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for
a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s
empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or
assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word
Mutiny--and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!”