I
To any reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain
that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone very
directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that an
author's artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that his
dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
creation of his characters.
With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour his art has
been placed we have some compulsory connection.
Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeniowski) was born on 6th
December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
Ukraine. In 1870 his father died.
Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to
sea. In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he
knew at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of
1878 joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
writing at various periods during his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
With that publisher's acceptance of _Almayer's Folly_ the third period
of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
books.
Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise
what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed
through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood,
may be enough to give life and vigour to any poet's temperament. The
romantic melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might
well plant deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible
freedom.
Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by
unlawful tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one
unlimited monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to
realise what impulses those were that drove him, he may have felt
that space and size and the force of a power stronger than man were
the only conditions of possible liberty. He sought those conditions,
found them and clung to them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men
who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men when to them
also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never afterwards
lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse from
that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered the
Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He
thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time,
so honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the
only personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He
found in her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed
in the contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she
would, over the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood.
He found, too, in her service, the type of man who, most strongly,
appealed to him. He had known a world composed of threats, fugitive
rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient struggles against
tyranny. He was in the company now of those who realised so completely
the relationship of themselves and their duty to their master and their
service that there was simply nothing to be said about it. England
had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of freedom, and
now on an English ship he realised the practice and performance of
that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest possible words.
Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must have been
pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by sheer
lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in
nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by
his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself
a despair of any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
him.
Then, towards the end of his twenty years' service of the sea, the
creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray
moments of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for
his pleasure and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all
that lack of confidence in posts and publishers that every author,
who cares for his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He
has said that if _Almayer's Folly_ had been refused he would never
have written again, but we may well believe that, let the fate of
that book be what it might, the energy and surprise of his discovery
of the sea must have been declared to the world. _Almayer's Folly_,
however, was not rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to
remark: "The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as
if he might become the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago." He had,
therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind from the beginning.
He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when
Henley accepted _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as
a more important date in his new career. That date may serve for the
commencement of the third period of his adventure.
The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a
country behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the
whole "case" of his earlier life. It was as a "case" that he saw it, a
"case" that was to produce all those other "cases" that were his books.
This has been their history.