As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
men.
It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able
to watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching
little cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes
them, as they advance with confidence, with determination, each with
his own sure ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can
see that the horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from
his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their
fortitude to the very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of
that faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable
end.
There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life,
and it is, surely, Conrad's harshest limitation that he should never
be free from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle.
So bound is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will
prove his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters
of his creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed
to defeat. Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: "And
that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart,
forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a
living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of
conduct."
Conrad's ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of
Jim's endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been
vain--as vain as Stein's butterflies.
And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart's desire it is that his
merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
McWhirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
tremendous of God's splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he
has witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain
Brierley, watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security
that nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
leap--the victim is always in his power.
It comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the
human soul that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and
obedience to duty. His men of brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are
melancholy and ironic: "If you see far enough you must see how hopeless
the struggle is." The only way to be honestly happy is to have no
imagination and, because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his
characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination.
Those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. The men of
the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore,
be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain Anthony, towards Captain
Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc, for Ossipon, for
old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For the Fynes
and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land, Winnie
Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but
they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea
captains.
This then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or
relief. He will not permit his characters to escape, he will not
himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His
ironic melancholy does not, for an instant, hamper his interest--that
is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of
specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his own Stein: "He says of
him that he is 'preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave ...'
while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies."
Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of
communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As
artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects,
they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the
thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space
than I can give it here. Browning's interest in life was derived,
on the novelist's side of him, from his absorption in the affairs,
spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet's side, in the
question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs.
Conrad has not Browning's clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of
discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual
case--he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming
melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit
of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and
honest realism.
Browning's realism was born of his excitement at the number and
interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the
most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that
there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his
excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as
much as he did. Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo_? Mr
Chesterton has written of Browning: "He substituted the street with
the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the 'blue spirt
of a lighted match' for the monotony of the evening star." Conrad has
substituted for the lover serenading his mistress' window the passion
of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of
the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea
captain.
The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
precisely Conrad's characters. Is not Waring Conrad's man?
And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. How
deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
de Barrel, McWhirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee's
wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
ordered his tomb at St Praxed's Church, with a strange wonder as though
he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
statement as a "case" of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
buttresses and towers.
Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as I
have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
carried Romantic-Realism showed the author of _Almayer's Folly_ the
signs of the road that he was to follow.
If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
novelist?