The inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and more
ingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the world
commends him, and this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad's
case.
We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that he
has possessed himself of the secret of the sea more completely than
any who write in English except Shakespeare and Swinburne.
We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he has
sounded the ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, the
heart of the white man exiled from his kind in the darkness of
tropical solitudes.
These things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad's
genius lies behind and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am not
mistaken, in a region where he has hardly a single rival.
This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of our
minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and
where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild
marsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks.
Conrad's genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to
what is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever and
the simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed in
something much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection of
any striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery or
jungle solitude.
The margin of the mind! Margin, mid-way between the known and
the unknown! Do not the obscure images, called up by the feelings
such words suggest, indicate far more intimately than any
description of tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritual
atmosphere in which he darkly gives us many strange clues?
I seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme "bank
and shoal" of our human consciousness, as a place like that across
which Childe Roland moved when he came to the "dark tower."
I seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of waving reeds
and deep black pools. I seem to see it as a place where patches of
dead grass whistle in a melancholy wind, and where half-buried
trunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms.
Others may image it in a different way, perhaps with happier
symbols; but the region I have in my mind, crossed by the obscure
shapes of dimly beckoning memories, is common to us all.
You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty
intimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new
psychology. As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely approach it
with any clairvoyant intelligence. And the reason of that is, it is
much further removed from the material reactions of the nerves and
the senses than the favourite soil of these people's explorations.
So thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelings
which flit to and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression,
that it almost seems as though this subconscious borderland were in
contact with some animistic inner world--not exactly a supernatural
world, but a world removed several stages back from the material
one wherein our nerves and our senses function; a world wherein we
might be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling,
archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent "souls"
of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a plane of
existence beyond our rational apprehension.
It is certain that there are many moments in the most naive people's
experience when, as they walk in solitude along some common
highway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or
the indescribable melancholy of a certain road-side pool, or the way
the light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particular
manner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself from
the bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the mind of
which I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings.
It is as though something in the material thing before us--some
inexplicable "soul" of the inanimate--rushed forth to meet our soul,
as if it had been _waiting_ for us for long, long years.
I am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad,
through a vague and obscure twilight. It is not easy to express these
things; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy of
mystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, or
series of experiences, in the "great valley" of the mind.
When Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly at a
floating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in "Chance"
who is relating the story watches the mud of the road outside the
hotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral are making their
desperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious
"expectancy" which is part of this strange phenomenon, and that
curious sudden thrill, "I have been here before! I have seen and
heard all this before!" which gives to so many scenes in Conrad that
undertone of unfathomable mystery which is so true an aspect of life.
So often are we conscious of it as we read him! We are conscious of
it--to give another instance--when Heyst and Lena are talking
together in the loneliness of their island of escape, before the unseen
enemies descend on them.
The same insight in him and the same extraordinary power of
making words malleable to his purpose in dealing with these hidden
things may be remarked in all those scenes in his books where men
and women are drawn together by love.
Conrad takes no interest in social problems. His interest is only
stirred by what is permanent and undying in the relations between
men and women. These extraordinary scenes, where Gould and his
wife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem and
Aissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and Anthony,
Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet and peer into the
secret depths of one another's beings, are all scenes possessing that
universal human element which no change or reform or revolution
or improvement can touch or alter.
Without any theory about their "emancipation," Conrad has
achieved for women, in these stories of his, an extraordinary
triumph. Well does he name his latest book "Victory." The victory
of women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over brutality, is
one of the main threads running through all his work.
And what women they are! I do not recall any that resemble them in
all literature.
Less passionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less sentimental
than the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of de
Maupassant, Conrad's women have a quality entirely their own, a
quality which holds us spell-bound. It is much easier to feel this
quality than to describe it. Something of the same element--and it is
a thing the positivity of which we have to search out among many
crafty negations--may be discerned in some of the women of
Shakespeare and, in a lesser degree, in one or two of the young girls
in the stories of Turgenief.
I think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise and
self-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicated
in their moments of withdrawn and reserved silence.
They seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of their
femininity, into the depths of some strange sex-secret of which they
are themselves only dreamily conscious.
They seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from their
own drama, from their own personality, and to lie back upon life,
upon the universal mystery of life and womanhood. This they do
without, it might seem, knowing what they are doing.
They all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon
their intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm
--expectant, consecrated, and holy--which the early painters have
caught the shadow of in their pictures of the Annunciation.
There is something about them which makes us vaguely dream of
the far-distant youth of the world; something that recalls the
symbolic and poetic figures of Biblical and Mythological legend.
They tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with the
magical and evasive depths of the feminine secret in them. They
make us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the corn-field; of
Andromache on the walls of Troy and of Calypso, Brunhilda,
Gwenevere, Iphigeneia, Medea, Salome, Lilith.
And all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the most
simple means. It is brought about partly by an art of description
which is unique among English novelists, an art of description
which by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodily
appearance indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunning
insertion of long, treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal in
some occult indirect manner the very integral quality of the soul thus
betrayed.
The more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while they
are expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur and
confuse the mysterious depths of their sex-life than to reveal it.
Conrad's women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence,
in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something more
than the tragic emotion of one person. They have the power of
revealing what might be called the subliminal sex-consciousness of
the race itself. They have the power of merging the individuality of
the particular speaker into something deeper and larger and wider,
into something universal.
Reserve is the grand device by means of which this subconscious
element is made evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically.
When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed. A look, a
gesture, a sigh, a whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of the
ocean-deep mysteries of the soul than pages of eloquent psychology.
The deepest psychology--that is what one comes at last to feel--can
only be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures,
symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words revealing
it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.
For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest
things in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind must
be alert to receive them, but they must not be snatched at in any
direct attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, or
softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turn
away our faces. They will only come if we treat them with the
reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates,
calling them "The Eumenides"; or the ultimate secret of the universe,
calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask of
superstition.
The reason why Conrad holds us all--old and young, subtle and
simple--with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant
intuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of all
our human days--the things which cause us those moments of sharp
sweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings.
His style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats the
language he uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence.
The mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems to
have intensified this quality; as though the hardness and steepness of
its challenge forced the latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibres
to encounter it.
When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of
technical terms. He undertakes the much more human and the much
more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague
and delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to the
vessels that carry them.
His fine imaginative mind--loving with a large receptive wisdom all
the quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people--naturally
turns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships.
That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical
achievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a
trans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad.
Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimate
object to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is
necessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to have
become intimately associated with the hopes and fears, the fancies
and terrors, of many generations.
It is simply and solely their newness to human experience which
makes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, however
striking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of
intrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does.
And it is not only--as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad--that
these old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carrying
one back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves. They
diffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the lives
of those who are connected with them. They bring the mystery and
terror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into every
port.
No great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the
feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants
disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness,
with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners
and trawlers put in; and real sailors--sailors who _sail_ their
ships--enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the narrow
streets.
The shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar superficial
minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are
only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size
for dignity, and brutal energy for noble strength.
Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce
these startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotional
insignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition. What one
thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works is
always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the
very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional,
idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with
an integral soul.
One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a _figure-head;_ and is it
possible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd
steamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment? Liners
are things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart by
their paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of
financiers who monopolise them.
"Floating hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which the
awed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders.
Well! In Conrad's books we are not teased with "floating hotels." If
a certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from
thinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea,
let it be remembered that the sea has its _poetic_ revenge upon them
by absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the real
magic of its secret.
No one knows the sea--that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite
clear--who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel.
Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written--one hopes that
for many years each new Spring will bring a new work from his
pen--my own favourites are "Chance" and "Lord Jim," and, after
those two, "Victory."
I think the figure of Flora de Barral in "Chance" is one of the most
arresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind.
Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeks
and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation,
her shadowy and abysmal reserve--haunt me like a figure seen and
loved in some previous incarnation.
I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and
Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by
means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange
revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the
intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person's
first love.
I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are
thus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the
_sensual_ from these evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual;
of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about love
we have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again,
as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation of
women, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger cleverer
writers playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession. I think the
greatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to
sacrifice the mysterious truth of passion either to sentiment or to
sensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural human feeling
free from both these turbid and morbid streams.
A very curious psychological blunder made by many of our younger
writers is the attributing to women of the particular kind of sex
emotion which belongs essentially to men, an emotion penetrated by
lust and darkened by feverish restlessness. From this blunder Conrad
is most strangely free. His women love like women, not like vicious
boys with the faces of women. They love like women and they hate
like women; and they are most especially and most entirely
womanlike in the extreme difficulty they evidently always
experience in the defining with any clearness--even to themselves
--of their own emotions.
It is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions which
renders women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the mere
presence of something in them which refuses definition is a proof
that they are beyond both sentiment and sensuality. For sentiment
and sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact and
logical analysis. Sensualists love nothing better than the epicurean
pleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as they are once
assured of a discreet and sympathetic listener. The same is doubly
true of sentimentalists. The women of Conrad--like the women of
Shakespeare--while they may be garrulous enough and witty enough
on other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb when their great
emotions call for overt expression.
It seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others,
has caught the mystery of ships should be the writer who, of all
moderns, has caught the mystery of women. Women are very like
ships: ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselves
know nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds--thoughts
wandering from island to island of remote enchantment--settle for a
moment and then fly off forever; ships that can ride the maddest and
most tragical storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock,
unmarked on any earthly chart, may sink to the bottom without
warning and without mercy!
Conrad reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest love
of women suffers from--the kind of storm which shakes it and
troubles it--is not sensuality of any sort but a species of blind and
fatal fury, hardly conscious of any definite cause, but directed
desperately and passionately against the very object of this love
itself. Conrad seems to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad,
wild, desperate fury with which women hurl themselves against
what they love best in a blind desire to hurt it, is nothing less than a
savage protest against that deep and inviolable gulf which isolates
every human being from every other human being.
Such a gulf men--in a measure--pass, or dream they pass, on the
swift torrent of animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant in
these things, and their love being more diffused, and, in a sense,
more spiritual, is not so easily satisfied by mere physical possession.
They want to possess more. They want to possess body, soul and
spirit. They want to share every thought of their beloved, every
instinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotest
dream.
That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law
of nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak their
anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness.
It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and
absolute possession of the object of their love. The maternal instinct
is always--as Conrad makes quite clear--at the bottom of the
love-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal
instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy
every vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual,
in the person it pursues.
Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in
women, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable
anger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind of
cunning subterfuge.
This loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousand
quite trivial causes. It may take the form of jealousy; but it is in
reality much deeper than jealousy. It may take the form of protest
against man's stupidity, man's greed, man's vanity, man's lust, man's
thick-skinned selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the law
of nature which makes it impossible for a woman to share this
stupidity, this vanity, this lust, this greed, and which holds her so
cruelly confined to a selfishness which is her own and quite different
from the selfishness of man.
One would only have to carry the psychological imagination of
Conrad a very little further to recognise the fact that while man is
inherently and completely satisfied with the difference between man
and woman; satisfied with it and deriving his most thrilling pleasure
from it; woman is always feverishly and frantically endeavouring to
overcome and overreach this difference, endeavouring, in fact, to
feel her way into every nerve and fibre of man's sensibility, so that
he shall have nothing left that is a secret from her. That he should
have any such secrets--that such secrets should be an inalienable and
inevitable part of his essential difference from herself--excites in her
unmitigated fury; and this is the hidden cause of those mysterious
outbursts of apparently quite irrational anger which have fallen upon
all lovers of women since the beginning of the world.
Man wishes woman to remain different from himself. It interests
him that she should be different. He loves her for being different.
His sensuality and his sentiment feed upon this difference and
delight to accentuate it. Women seem in some subtle way to resent
the division of the race into two sexes and to be always
endeavouring to get rid of this division by possessing themselves of
every thought and feeling and mood and gesture of the man they
love. And when confronted by the impassable gulf, which love itself
is incapable of bridging, a blind mad anger, like the anger of a
creative deity balked of his purpose, possesses them body and soul.
Mr. Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad, written in a
manner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one reads
it one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, could
not possibly have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad's
complicated and elaborate manner of building up his stories.
Mr. Follet points out, for instance, how in "Chance" we have one
layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of
rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under
our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more
underscored and overscored with interesting personal values.
This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of
all attention.
But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the
art of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quite
direct and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting,
between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story.
I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his
Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Lenas,
are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation. I think
he is always at his best when two passionate and troubled
natures--not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a
man and man, like Lingard and Willem--are brought together in
direct and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that true
authentic thrill of immemorial romance--romance as old as the first
stories ever told or sung--of the encounter of protagonist and
antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and
terrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.
But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated
passionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet in
treasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all
those elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which give
to the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a
background.
Except for a few insignificant passages when that sly old mariner
Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his
pipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I
can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and
overlappings of his inverted method of narration--of those rambling
"advances," as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated
"conclusions." In the few occasional passages where Marlowe
assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I
fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded,
worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to the
Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully and
pathetically English.
With these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to his
curious and intricate method. I love the way he pours his main
narrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve of
one quaint person's mind and then of another; each one adding some
new flavour, some new vein of body or bouquet or taste, to the
original stream, until it becomes thick with all the juices of all the
living fermentations in the world.
I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact
that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome
monotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does so
without assuming that banal and bullying air of the adventurous
swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectual
interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these
wanderings into savage regions.
Most of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiet
haunts of unadventurous people and set off for remote continents,
leave behind them, when they embark, all the fineness and subtlety
of their intelligence, and become drastic and crude and journalistic
and vulgar. They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and they
assume a sort of man-of-the-wide-world "knowingness" which is
extremely unpleasant.
Conrad may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark heart of his
Malay jungles, but he never forgets to carry with him his
sensitiveness, his metaphysical subtlety, his delicate and elaborate
art.
What gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the fact
that while he is writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers,
of ivory-traffickers and marooned seafarers, he never forgets that
he is a philosopher and a psychologist.
This is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for years
and years; a writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictions
of civilised life, a writer who can initiate us into all the magical
mysteries of dark continents and secret southern islands, without
teasing us with the harsh sterilities of a brain devoid of all finer
feelings.
This is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear;
a writer capable of describing sheer physical beauty and savage
elemental strength while remaining a subtle European philosopher. I
suppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood to
attain such a distinction--to be as crafty as a Henry James, moving
on velvety feline paws through the drawing-rooms of London and
the gardens of Paris; and yet to be leading us through the shadows of
primordial forests, cheek by jowl with monstrous idolatries and
heathen passions.
But what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich in
human value is not only that he can remain a philosopher in the
deserted outposts of South-Pacific Islands, but that he can remain a
tender and mellow lover of the innumerable little things, little stray
memories and associations, which bind every wanderer from Europe,
however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has left behind
in the land of his birth.
Here he is a true Slav, a true continental European. Here he is rather
Russian--or French, shall I say--than an adopted child of Britain; for
the colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimental
devotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with the
passionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of the
other races.
Conrad has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginative
feeling for the little casual associations of a person's birthplace in
town or country, which seems to be a peculiar inheritance of the
Slavonic and Latin races, and which for all their sentimental play
with the word "home" is not really natural to the tougher-minded
Englishman or Scotchman.
One is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderers
in forlorn places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look of
the fields and the actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streets
and the warm interiors of little friendly taverns by wharfside and by
harbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these people
were born.
No modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr.
Hardy, has the power which Conrad has, of conveying to the mind
that close indescribable intimacy between humanity's passions and
the little inanimate things which have surrounded us from childhood.
Conrad can convey this "home-feeling," this warm secure turning of
the human animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even into
the heart of the tempestuous ocean. He can give us that curious
half-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony with
our material surroundings, even in the little cabin of some
weather-battered captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not a
sailor, in his books, and not a single ship in which his sailors voyage,
but has a sort of dim background of long rests from toil in ancient
harbourback-waters where the cobblestones on the wharf-edge are thick
with weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats mistily
and greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and the
lamplit streets.
It is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, brooding
so carefully over the intimate and sacred relations between our frail
mortality and its material surroundings, that makes it possible for
him to treat with such delicate reverence the ways and customs, the
usages and legendary pieties, of the various half-savage tribes
among whom his exiled Europeans wander.
I am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid in Conrad's
books upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure in
reading him. What is the cause of this mania for violence? It surely
detracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, from
any psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of it
lies. I do not feel that the thing is an erotic perversion. There is a
downright brutality in it which militates against any subtly
voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely
appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his
Anglo-Saxon readers? No--that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely
must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an
abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by
a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a
physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer
has to pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?
No; that does not seem to me quite to cover the case. It is an obscure
matter, and I think, in our search for the true solution, we may easily
stumble upon very interesting and deeply hidden aspects, not only of
Conrad's temperament, but of the temperament of a great many
artists and scholars. In all artistic work there is so much that goes on
in the darkness, so much secret exploitation of the hidden forces of
one's nature, that it is extremely difficult to put one's finger upon the
real cause of any particular flaming outbreak.
I have observed this sudden and tempestuous "obsession of
violence" in the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitely
wrought-upon women; and it is possible that the heavy, dull, thick,
self-complacent brutality of Nature and average human nature is
itself so hurting and rending a thing to the poignant susceptibilities
of a noble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate revenge upon it, it
goes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-Tamberlaines
Tamberlaine in bloody massacre.
What, however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not the
melodramatic violence of these tempestuous scenes, but the remote
psychological impulses at work behind them.
Where, in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from his
world-deep revelations of direct human feeling, is in his imaginative
fusion of some particular spiritual or material motif through the whole
fabric of a story.
Thus the desolate "hope against hope" of poor Almayer becomes a
thing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up,
fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness of
his surroundings, out of the débris and litter of his half-ruined
dwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out of
the stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mud
of his melancholy river.
Thus the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst's father--that
fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity--overshadows, like a
ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill
twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so
ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic
son. It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the final
issue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter of small significance
whether the scene of a writer's choice be the uplands of Wessex or
the jungles of the tropics, as long as that ironic and passionate
consciousness of the astounding drama--of men and women being
the baffled and broken things they are--rises into unmitigated
relief and holds us spell-bound. And beyond and above this
overshadowing in his stories of man's fate by some particular burden
of symbolic implication, Conrad flings the passionate flame of his
imagination into the words of every single sentence.
That is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction. That is
why it has such sudden surprises for us, such sharp revelations, such
rare undertones. That is why after reading Conrad it is difficult to
return to the younger English writers of the realistic school.
One enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishing
thrill in the mere look of the words, as we see them so carefully, so
scrupulously laid side by side, each with its own burden of
intellectual perfume, like precious vases full of incense on the steps
of a marble altar. To write as delicately, as laboriously, as
exquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murder
and suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; to
write as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wild
secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-bestial
savages, is great mastery. And it is more than mastery. It is a
spiritual triumph. It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting the
worst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning all
things into grist for its mill.
For Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless and
purposeless chance in the ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendid
tenacity of courage in resisting any desperate betrayal of human joy.
Like that amazing character in "Lord Jim," who collects butterflies
and keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedy
upon tragedy, he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woeful
stories, that since there is no help in heaven or earth for the
persecuted child of man, it is the more necessary that in defiance of
the elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself,
man should sink into his own soul and find in the strength of his
own isolated and exiled spirit a courage equal to all that can be laid
upon it. Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we found
when we sank down thus into ourselves were courage, and courage
only. What one comes to feel from the reading of Conrad is that
there is nothing in the world which has enduring value--nothing in
the world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind of
dignity or beauty--except only love. And love like this, which is the
forlorn hope of the race, is as far from lust as it is far from sentiment
or indolent pity. It is the "high old Roman virtue." It is the spirit of
comradeship defiant still, under the tottering pillars of a shaken earth.
"Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither.
Ripeness is all."
. . . . .
"Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense."