II

The question of style devolves here directly into the question of

atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists

in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon

his daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a

perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play

the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway

station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters

immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick

slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background

react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that

reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with

other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one

of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own

day, Mr Arnold Bennett's Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or

Mrs Wharton's New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most

successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides

us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation

with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by

the contemplation of some scene and is thence extended to the whole

vista of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be

as remote or as confined as space can make it, its potential limits

are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities

of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and

Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the

scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting

between Beauchamp and René in _Beauchamp's Career_. It is not only that

these scenes are "done" to the full extent of their "doing," it is also

that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that unites them with

all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgéniev,

Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.

Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.

But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is

simply lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in

Literature_, has named this element Glamour.

In writing of the novels by George Eliot he says: "Indeed there is

almost every element of literature, except a certain indescribable

thing called _Glamour_, which was the whole stock-in-trade of the

Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid rotten wood

by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray, when Edmond wanders like

some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of Castlewood." Now this

matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens, for instance, is not

at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the house of the Dedlocks

or Jonas Chuzzlewit's escape after the murder do not put us into touch

with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate, that when, in a novel

atmosphere _is_ potential, it is certain also to have glamour.

The potential qualities of Conrad's atmosphere are amongst his very

strongest gifts and, if we investigate the matter, we see that it is

his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no

important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.

In _The Outcast of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain

Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the

actual terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically

described--it has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness,

desolation, the power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord

Jim_ the contrast of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast

not only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the

captain's gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits

of our ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and

evil, degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of

the Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects

the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and

intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the

negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of

the boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more

than that single voyage of the _Narcissus_.

When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the boy Stevie take their

journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us that the tears

of "that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk dress

festooned with dingy white cotton lace" should move us as though Mrs

Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous journey

remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful

and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite

indefinitely.

He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity

about significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because

he wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture,

but rather because he is, like a very small boy in a strange house,

pursuing the most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and

excitement only. We may hear, with many novelists, the click of

satisfaction with which they drive another nail into the framework that

supports their picture. "Now see how firmly it stands," they say. "That

last nail settled it." But Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his

readers' later credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing

discoveries. Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted

to him, it is as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his

strength so that no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment

at his failure. But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere

piles itself up, around and about him, how we follow at his heels,

penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage, finding ourselves

suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin's cave! If he is tracing the

tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its natural

background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending forests, he

sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply disciplined

realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping himself in

his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into

the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies

Lingard and Almayer, so that they are like men disheartened by some

tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a house

for Almayer's baby are "a dirty double pack" with which he used to play

Chinese bézique--it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it,

considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere

of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a room in

which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:

"Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant

and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre

covers of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of

their European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden

by a petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a

slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised

clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to

no wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some

remote place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the

tumbled blankets that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna

sat.... Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray

merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning

upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the

sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged

brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered

in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow

papers for many a day!"

And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--"the forests

unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars

of heaven--and as indifferent." Had I space I could multiply from

every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the

juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse

beating through realistic detail and transforming it. I will, however,

select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about

_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad's.

The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination of the silver of the Sulaco

mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it.

The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by "the

white head of Higuerota rising majestically upon the blue." Conrad,

then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,

the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure

and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,

romantic, even until that last vision of all of "the bright line of

the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of

solid silver." Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had

been there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, "great family

arks swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in

which the eyes looked intensely alive and black," the houses, "in the

early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue," or, after

dark, from Mrs Gould's balcony "towards the plaza end of the street the

glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their evening

meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without

a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted

triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to

a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman

walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each

lamp under the dark shape of the rider." Later there is that sinister

glimpse of the plaza, "where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round

without penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and

the strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias ...

and above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral

towers the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening

blue sky before the windows of the Intendencia." In its final created

beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,

many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm's princes and

princesses passing--but the detail of it is built with careful realism

demanded by the "architecture of Manchester or Birmingham." We wonder,

as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral, its

squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its

hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created

towns for us.

Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is

a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy's Wessex map is the most

fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of

Stevenson's chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,

gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast

that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver's

treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco

tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town.

The detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book

incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is

finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We

have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of

the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,

many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the

Aristocratic Club, that "extended to strangers the large hospitality

of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of

a house, once a residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The

two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be

described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio

concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned

in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came

upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained

effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the

indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on

his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black

hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your

ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first

sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don

Pépé moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's-length,

through an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but

persevering black brute, with a hammer head--you would have seen in the

street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost

touching the curbstone of the side-walk!"

How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the

exclamation of some reader: "Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like

that when I was there!" How convinced we are of Conrad's unimpeachable

veracity! How like him are those remembered details, "the nailed

doors," "the fine stone hands," "at arm's-length"!--and can we not

sniff something of the author's impatience to let himself go and tell

us more about that "hammer-headed horse" of whose adventures with Don

Pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume!

He is able, therefore, upon this foundation of a minute and scrupulous

realism to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of

denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate, choose to be

fantastic, but he _is_ romantic, and our final impression of the silver

mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both

as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with

the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been

shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of

the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We

remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red

flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death

and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest and most

sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.

Here, then, is the secret of Conrad's atmosphere. He is the poet,

working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention

is at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer's Folly_

to the last line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of

certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It

_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that

has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or

fable for its interpretation....

When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this

creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,

certain limitations.