If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad's attention we shall
see that in almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal
combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human
souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness
that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account that gives
occasion for his irony.
He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see at once that the odds are
too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings
and they will not quail." They command his pity, his reverence, his
tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of
his shoulders, he says: "You see. I told you so. He may even think he
has won. We know better, you and I."
The theme of _Almayer's Folly_ is a struggle of a weak man against
nature, of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple
men against the presence of death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle
of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel,
at the cost of truth). _Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature
by the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate
victory, from the very first. _Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely
simple and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he
does not understand. _Typhoon_, the very epitome of Conrad's themes,
is the struggle of McWhirr against the storm (here again it is McWhirr
who apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the
book, the storm's confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In _Heart
of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest. In _The End of the Tether_
Captain Whalley, one of Conrad's finest figures, is beaten by the very
loftiness of his character. The three tales in _'Twixt Land and Sea_
are all themes of this kind--the struggle of simple, unimaginative
men against forces too strong for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie
Verloc, another simple character, finds life too much for her and
commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_ Razumov, the dreamer, is
destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains and struggles of
insignificant individuals.
Of Conrad's philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives
them and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
Whatever Conrad's books are or are not, it may safely be said that
they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
affection. His art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent
brooding over the inequality of life's battle. His humour, often of a
very fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
light-heartedness.
Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would have found Marlowe, Jim and
Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
meeting a number of Conrad's characters is that they have existences
and histories entirely independent of their introducer's kind offices.
Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
histories.
One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little
of the robust vitality of their predecessors; the figures in the novel
of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells
before an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before
a creeping wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr
Galsworthy before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of
Mrs Wharton before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr
Hardy before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of
his inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background;
it may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author's own
determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
contemporaries--namely, the assurance that his characters have their
lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that he
is describing to us.
The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
speculating deeply upon "what happened afterwards" to Gayef or Barbara,
to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad's sea captains as with Tchekov's
Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
from the author's eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for
him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
McWhirr that he wrote long letters home, beginning always with the
words, "My darling Wife," and relating in minute detail each successive
trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs McWhirr, we learn, was "a pretentious
person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly
lady-like and in the neighbourhood considered as 'quite superior.' The
only secret of her life was her abject terror of the time when her
husband would come home to stay for good." Also in _Typhoon_ there is
the second mate "who never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for
news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention West
Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection with
the extortionate charges of a boarding-house." How conscious we are of
Jim's English country parsonage, of Captain Anthony's loneliness, of
Marlowe's isolation. By this simple thread of connection between the
land and the ship the whole character stands, human and convincing,
before us. Of the sailors on board the _Narcissus_ there is not one
about whom, after his landing, we are not curious. There is the
skipper, whose wife comes on board, "A real lady, in a black dress and
with a parasol."... "Very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and
in a white shirt, went with her over the side. We didn't recognise him
at all...." And Mr Baker, the chief mate! Is not this little farewell
enough to make us his friends for life?
"No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister
married and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor
of a little town, and its leading politician, who did not think his
sailor brother-in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady,
quite a lady, he thought, sitting down for a moment's rest on the
quarter-hatch. Time enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and
a bed somewhere. He didn't like to part with a ship. No one to think
about then. The darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon
the deserted deck; and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the
successive ships to whom through many long years he had given the best
of a seaman's care. And never a command in sight. Not once!"
There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. "Donkin entered.
They discussed the account ... Captain Allistoun paid. 'I give you a
bad discharge,' he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: 'I don't want
your bloomin' discharge--keep it. I'm goin' ter 'ave a job hashore.' He
turned to us. 'No more bloomin' sea for me,' he said, aloud. All looked
at him. He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home
than any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
declaration."
In how many novels would Donkin's life have been limited by the part
that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus_? As
it is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--"As I came up I saw
a red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, fluffy
hair, fall on Charley's neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
him:--'Oh, my boy! my boy!'--'Leggo me,' said Charley, 'leggo,
mother!' I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head
of the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance
ironic, courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge
of life to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
good-naturedly:--'If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall 'ave a bob
for a drink out of my pay.'"
But one passes from these men of the sea--from McWhirr and Baker, from
Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with
his men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed.
About such men as McWhirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will
not believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they
will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those
little details, McWhirr's wife, Mr Baker's proud sister, Charley's
mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Kazumov, the sinister Nikita,
the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
perfect sympathy.
His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
_idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to
you. But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling
the probing finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to
hand because they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for
instance--Decoud, the imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating
with his ironic mind upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently
cynical and reserved, the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He
has yielded enough to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes
us. With Verloc again we have a quite masterly presentation of the man
as Conrad sees him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in
its reality and its significance. "His eyes were naturally heavy, he
had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed."
With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories,
we have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists' lives
beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
things.
Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée
fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
upon which he has placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of an
_idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
tribute to the author's reserve power that we feel, at the book's
close, that we should have been told so much more.
Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are
with Captain Whalley or Mr Bates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture,
the most romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since
Scott, with the single exception of Thackeray's Beatrix--and here I am
not forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our
own immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and
so unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: "... his hat, a gay
sombrero with a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
Mexican serape twisted on the cantle, the enormous silver buttons
on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons
down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with
embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle ..." to
that last moment when--"... in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled
his head slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the
weird figure perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking
scorn. Then his head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capatos
of the Cargadores died without a word or moan after an hour of
immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to the most atrocious
sufferings"--we are conscious of his superb figure; and after his
death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the book assure
us--"In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to ring aloud
from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon,
overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver,
the genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores dominated the
dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love." His genius
dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture standing
as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not given
us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us. Why
is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes might
tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
not met him.
Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem
the basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so
various, so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our
eyes, with the daily life of Sulaco, or the Verloc family (the most
poignant scene in the whole of Conrad's art--the drive in the cab
of old Mrs Verloc, Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our
gratitude) or that strange gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara,
Madame de S----, Peter Ivanovitch, Razumov, at Geneva, or the
highly coloured figures in _Romance_ (a book fine in some places,
astonishingly second-rate in others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and
his daughter, Jasper and his lover, all these and so many, many more,
what can we do but embrace the world that is offered to us, accept it
as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will be near to
us, some more distant? It is, finally, a world that Conrad offers us,
not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or three
figures returning to us--old friends with new faces and new names--but
a planet that we know, even as we know the Meredith planet, the Hardy
planet, the James planet.
Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid
hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wildernesses.
Although each work, from the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely perfect
_Secret Sharer_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the
swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.