Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is
that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He
has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure.
There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the
same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who
breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows,
every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is
for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light--a little
light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that.
With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people
and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling
communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad
communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so
doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us
puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the
presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain
as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana"
which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is
unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but
of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited
every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His
function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his
work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a
kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an
old sense of the word, possessed.
One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master--his
master, at least, in the art of the long novel--Henry James. I do not
mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely
original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories
than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of
discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the
school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in
everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be
questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from
Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like
_Chance_, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something
of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad
never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the
microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be
one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in
speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with
his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a
ghost story, however--and _The Turn of the Screw_ is one of the great
ghost stories of literature--he remains supremely master of his
materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the
vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into
discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart
and compass.
One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in
the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_, for
instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry
James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive.
To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while
Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens,
Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets--often from the
depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in
_Heart of Darkness_ is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on
and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next
bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his
especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the
unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is
portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel--the daughter of the
defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine
of _Chance_--he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of
persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing
heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder
in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by
suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a
shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human
beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality
rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you
like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my
Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their
environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the
strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an
effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"--so
the narrator of _Chance_ begins one of his sentences; and it is not in
the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a
sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad
wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not
doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons
tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted
scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however,
when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny--when,
bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or
is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.
Some of his best work is contained in the two stories _Typhoon_ and
_The Secret Sharer_, the latter of which appeared in the volume called
_'Twixt Land and Sea_. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious
quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad
irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that
while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept
off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories,
complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is
radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the
giants or of the defence of the round-house in _Kidnapped_. In each of
them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it
risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. _Typhoon_ was, I fancy,
not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the
soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is
eternally true as such a dramatization that it is--let us not shrink
from praise--one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in
literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of
an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels
and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and
time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an
affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on,
watching the agonies of the steamer.
Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to
and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had
given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded
before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to
her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the
ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep
her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was
handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a
living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly,
struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.
It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning
terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic
of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.
He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his
commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in
an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."
And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with
a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of
noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the
black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail
and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of
thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice
is done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from
very, very far: "All right."
Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature
of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils
of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the
night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a
cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in _The Secret Sharer_
in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the
looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a
chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the
"tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than in _Typhoon_. It is
a study in eccentric human relations--the relations between the captain
and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one
tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's
cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal--an ironic fable
of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we
lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our
hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship
in order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all
romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of
time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant
soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in _Freya of the Seven Isles_ and elsewhere,
is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin--tragic ruin against which
no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than
otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often
maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy of
the high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider till
the bitter end. His _Youth_ is just such a comedy of the peacockry of
adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.
All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated the
flesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not want
to give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manly
men as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us the
complete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality.
His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering
characters in them. In reading such a book as _Under Western Eyes_ we
feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it
has not been used to spell a magnificent man.
Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out as
awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He
pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he
is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody
discovered it. In _Chance_ and _Lord Jim_ he is not content to tell us a
straightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by which
it was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us the
feeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas and
harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of
reconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired of
the thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That is
why some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They are
books of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is by
the way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramatic
writing, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of an
epic of description.
Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most people
in believing, in three of his volumes of short stories--in _Typhoon,
Youth_, and _'Twixt Land and Sea_. His fame will, I imagine, rest
chiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests on
their shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance--written in
terms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has written
little epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which are
unique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature.