I
In discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or
essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the
Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although
the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the
novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_
bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are
vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover
many of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply
in his position as novelist and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad
is, in his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his
work will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a
novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human
beings, with his attitude to those histories.
Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves
but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able
to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any
respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was
quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously
abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a
fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time
forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties; but
no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_ was of
any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer's Folly_
in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_ had
already preceded it.
With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the
novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame
Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble,
grew into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson
showed how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had
not very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say
about everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and
Rudyard Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they
were. At the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied
over the way that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a
bright existence, flamed, and died. "Art for Art's sake" was slain by
the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic
romances, wrote stories about shop assistants and knew something about
biology. The Fabian Society made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard
Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the Boer War completed an old one.
Of the whole question of Conrad's place in the history of the English
novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter.
I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the
French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief
agents in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did
in the time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic
reaction that followed the collapse of æstheticism, seeing the old
period washed away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially
prepared for him, a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the
season were ideal for the work that he had to do.