It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
hold that same position.
Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That
is to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough
for him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those
facts, sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer's degradation
sufficiently realistic, when it is merely recorded and perceived by
any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad's imagination,
without for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying,
ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it into
relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of
life and death.
As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used,
very often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the
creation of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir
Walter Scott, who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but
it was so used by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little
adventure, a little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards
covering the required ground.
Conrad had, from the first, a poet's--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
of all honest men.
In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not abated one
jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness_ are amongst
the most romantic things in all our literature--but the last charge
that any critic can make against him is falsification, whether of
facts, of inference or of consequences.
The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist
him in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him
with his clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult
to define, but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little
and by Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and
Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are
romantic realism at the most astonishing heights that this development
of the novel is ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes
of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, Nicolas Stavrogin build, men
so real to us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can
take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of
Dostoievsky's love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world,
as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of creating
figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad.
Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do
they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation
as "cases" involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity.
He feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of
his sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built
on his scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing;
as relentless in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert,
he found humanity, as he investigated it, beautiful because of its
humanity--Conrad finds humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
Nevertheless he has been influenced by the Russian writer continuously
and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under Western Eyes_,
the influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that
novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though
Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of him,
and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
his love of beauty, his poet's cry for colour, but their realism they
find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they
may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than they.
They have, both of them, created characters simply because characters
demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was dragged,
painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her determination,
out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the Karamazovs, and,
in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, McWhirr, demanded that they
should be flung upon the page.
Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives
that, through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great
thing that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the
zest of creation back into it; the French novelists used life to
perfect their art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their
passion for life. That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that
zest, that the work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky,
Andreiev, shows exhaustion and sterility means nothing; the stream
will soon run full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more
what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to
be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of romance nor
ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a means of
proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many adjectives, the
virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.