To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph
Conrad, no better advice could be offered than that he should begin
with the reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the
preceding list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_
demand consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author's
work, because they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor
form nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are
the novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its
rival in the business of getting everything done without moving a step
forward. _The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make a
good starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book,
_Almayer's Folly_; at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
maid-servant is still standing in the doorway, the hands of the clock
have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
very essence of Conrad's art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
unfortunate author: "Ah! yes. I'm interesting, of course, but don't you
remember...?"
The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B---- of the
_Nonsuch_ who ... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the year
'88 when ...
In the course of his thrilling voyage of discovery we are, by a kind
of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the
author's own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship's officer (this the merest
glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle's house in Poland.
So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch
at them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay;
indeed those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they
have been, by us, only partially realised.
Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time
both breathless, and, by the virtue of its author's style, solemn,
we do obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one
or two revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us
partly through our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always
ironical, often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing
impulse of vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances.
He tells us:
"Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be
as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of
Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some
way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
revolutionary in my writings." (Page 20.)
Or again:
"All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
from which a philosophical mind should be free." (Page 21.)
Or again:
"Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of
that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which
alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one
feels it, can be rendered without shame." (Page 194.)
This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
implication of the colour of the work that will arise from them; and
when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we
must have some true conception of the nature of the work that he was to
do.
It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
to be most grievously disappointed.
If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into
the very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality
all their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of
Conrad's faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by
reason of its honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a
work of art there is almost everything to be said against it, except
that it has that supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all
that we ask of any work of art, overwhelming vitality. But it is
formless, ragged, incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager,
vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured into a friend's ear in a moment
of sudden confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
enlightening introduction to its author.
With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
already said, this is Conrad's happiest book--indeed, with the possible
exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust,
his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting
himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind
that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
variance with the distrust of his later novels.
The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, _Overdue and
Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_. No reader
however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely
binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to him, into
the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she really
is, he has been made free of a great order.
The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives
of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships
that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the
whole life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three
elements in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique
value, its power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of
romance, which is the life of the sea.
Conrad's attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
realism, her deceits, her cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
of her like this:
"The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display
of manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has
ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The
ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by
much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance,
and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since
ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in
the face of his frown ... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its
unfathomable cruelty."
Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave, and he is that
because he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to
indulge this cruelty. She positively "brings it off," this assertion
of her right, and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute
obedience. In this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he
allows himself a lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He
was never again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such
free and spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the "West
Wind."
_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
to Conrad's work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of
the characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully
in his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics
to be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in
a later analysis of Conrad's creative power, but that nevertheless
demand some mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the
passions that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place,
to be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from "poor Captain
B----, who used to suffer from sick headaches, in his young days,
every time he was approaching a coast," to the dramatic Dominic ("from
the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would
think he had never smiled in his life"), are silent and thoughtful.
Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous
survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast. Captain B----
dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in
the quiet room, "his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room,
upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that
home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his
memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea"--"poor P---," with "his
cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in _Punch_, his little
oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing looking-glasses, for
instance"--that captain who "did everything with an air which put your
attention on the alert and raised your expectations, but the result
somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of
any lesson that one could lay to heart"--that other captain in whom
"through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit
became untrue to his temperament"--here are little sketches for those
portraits that afterwards we are to know so well, Marlowe, Captain
McWhirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many others. Here we may
fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little
oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects,
such "cases" that it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them.
Nevertheless they have to be left. He has obtained his broader contrast
by his juxtaposition of the curious muddled jumble of the human life
against the broad, august power of the Sea--that is all that his
present subject demands, that is his theme and his picture.
Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
that _The Mirror of the Sea_, ultimately, has most to do.
As other men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad
write of his ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially
dedicated to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of
romance, but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail
of a technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising
and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
crime in speaking of "casting" an anchor when the true technicality is
"brought up"--"to an anchor" understood. In the chapter on "Yachts"
he provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need
demand and then suddenly there come these sentences--"the art of
handling ships is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men."... "A
ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on
purpose to keep us up to mark."
Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
her birth, in no ordered sequence of events, but admitting us ever
more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
new, in the dock, "her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
seamen who were to share their life with her."... "She looked modest to
me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already
familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
men."
Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
contrast, his companion's "Ships are all right...."
He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues,
the wickedly malicious, the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he
has indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot
be severe before such a world of fine spirits.
Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
Islands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Cæsar,
he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all
this material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of
Dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever
deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises
upon it his house of romance.
This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of
all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.