Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He has
called himself "the most unliterary of writers." He did not even begin
to write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like to
be more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt as
to the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his brief
critical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December,
1857; the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says 1856; Mr. Conrad himself
declares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old or
thereabouts" in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer
1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up without
any impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse in
his teens. Before he began to write _Almayer's Folly_ he "had written
nothing but letters and not very many of these." "I never," he declares,
"made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life.
The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those precious
imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and
immobility of a daydream."
At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage or
pedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a
man of letters. Mr. Conrad tells us that his own acquaintance with
English literature began at the age of eight with _The Two Gentlemen of
Verona_, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us a
picture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a white
border in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's study
chair, "with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over
the pile of loose pages." While he was still a boy he read Hugo and _Don
Quixote_ and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel.
He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even in
his childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every human
being, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No passage in
his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly
as that in which he writes: "It was in 1868, when nine years old or
thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and
putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved
mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and
an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I
grow up I shall go _there_.'" Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness of
his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but
the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he
would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the
soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret
rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder
and monstrous fear? Many people regard _Heart of Darkness_ as his
greatest story. _Heart of Darkness_ surely began to be written on the
day on which the boy of nine "or thereabouts" put his finger on the
blank space of the map of Africa and prophesied.
He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny. Mr. Conrad has
never been in a hurry, even in telling a story. He has waited on fate
rather than run to meet it. "I was never," he declares, "one of those
wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a washtub for the sake of the
fun." On the other hand, he seems always to have followed in his own
determined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals and
saints do. Alexander or Napoleon could not have seized the future with a
more splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad, when, though he
did not yet know six words of English, he came to the resolve: "If a
seaman, then an English seaman." He has always been obedient to a star.
He likes to picture himself as a lazy creature, but he is really one of
the most dogged day-labourers who have ever served literature. In
_Typhoon_ and _Youth_ he has written of the triumph of the spirit of man
over tempest and fire. We may see in these stories not only the record
of Mr. Conrad's twenty years' toil as a seaman, but the image of his
desperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue. "Line by
line," he writes, "rather than page by page, was the growth of
_Almayer's Folly_." He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow. He
speaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginative
writer even more than of the manual labourer. "I have," he adds,
"carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship's
deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the evening (with an
hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know." He declares,
indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative
writing is "something for which a material parallel can only be found in
the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape
Horn." This is to make the profession of literature a branch of the
heroic life. And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as a
Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.
It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one
who had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it is
true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand
tragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the
mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the
noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. In
_The End of the Tether_, in _Freya of the Seven Isles_, in _Victory_, it
is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the
ruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as in _Samson
Agonistes_, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the
curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us
utterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness;
Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage never
to submit or yield." Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a
degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living
rivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. _Youth,
Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line_--are not all
these fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories is
always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.
Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any
liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate
moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of
man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not been
so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As it
is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations
and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation
as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.
Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that
Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but
an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion
of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our
everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a
new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the
Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That,
I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant
to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to
express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a
man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the
shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in
his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted
world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the
darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who
exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a
very spendthrift of treasure--treasure of recollection, observation,
imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not
until he published _Chance_ that the world in general began to recognize
how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was
partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever
got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober,"
and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety--"asceticism of
sentiment," he calls it--in his literary work as at sea. He has been
compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of
Dostoevsky--an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At
the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky
did for strange demons and goblins--that population of grotesque
characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His
tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold
heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature.
That is why one reads the volume called _Youth_ for the third and fourth
time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.