I
In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to
various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove
something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums;
when the insistent drums of the Great God Reclame are bruising human
tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English
novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid
the clamour of the market-place a book of his is a sea-shell which
pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the sea; always the
sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering
symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a
psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea--and that is his chief
claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its
every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an
Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a
Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his
head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in
rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked
country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the first
time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of
description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not
after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but
following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions
should translate character--imagine these paradoxes and you have
partly imagined Joseph Conrad, who has so finely said that
"imagination, and not invention, is the supreme master of art as of
life."
He has taken the sea-romance of Smollett, Marryat, Melville, Dana,
Clark Russell, Stevenson, Becke, Kipling, and for its well-worn
situations has substituted not only many novel nuances, but invaded
new territory, revealed obscure atavisms and the psychology lurking
behind the mask of the savage, the transpositions of dark souls, and
shown us a world of "kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes,
giraffes, cabinet ministers, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and
constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
itself." In his Reminiscences Mr. Conrad has told us, with the
surface frankness of a Pole, the genesis of his literary debut of
Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fashion throws
fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character--reminding me in the
juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old
tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed
Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers,
Conrad has only given us a tantalising peep into his mental workshop.
We rise after finishing the Reminiscences realising that we have read
once more romance, in whose half-lights and modest evasions we catch
fleeting glimpses of reality. Reticence is a distinctive quality of
this author; after all, isn't truth an idea that traverses a
temperament?
That many of his stories were in the best sense "lived" there can be
no doubt--he has at odd times confessed it, confessions painfully
wrung from him, as he is no friend of the interviewer. The white-hot
sharpness of the impressions which he has projected upon paper recalls
Taine's dictum: "les sensations sont des hallucinations vraies."
Veritable hallucinations are the seascapes and landscapes in the South
Sea stories, veritable hallucinations are the quotidian gestures and
speech of his anarchists and souls sailing on the winds of noble and
sinister passions. For Conrad is on one side an implacable realist....
Unforgetable are his delineations of sudden little rivers never
charted and their shallow, turbid waters, the sombre flux of
immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth
overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of
clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic
mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious
drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste,
smell. What a gulf of incertitudes for white men is evoked for us in
vivid, concrete terms. Unforgetable, too, the hallucinated actions of
the student Razumov the night Victor Haldin, after launching the fatal
bomb, seeks his room, his assistance, in that masterpiece, Under
Western Eyes. But realist as Conrad is, he is also a poet who knows,
as he says himself, that "the power of sound has always been greater
than the power of sense." (Reason is a poor halter with which to lead
mankind to drink at the well of truth.) He woos the ear with his
singing prose as he ravishes the eye with his pictures. In his
little-known study of Henry James he wrote: "All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar, and surprising," and finally, "Fiction is history, human
history, or it is nothing." Often a writer tells us more of himself in
criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal aesthetic
pronunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad
in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the
keelson of his workaday philosophy: "All adventure, all love, every
success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation. It is the
utmost limit of our power." No wonder his tutor, half in anger, half
in sorrow, exclaimed: "You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote."
I suppose a long list might be made of foreigners who have mastered
the English language and written it with ease and elegance, yet I
cannot recall one who has so completely absorbed native idioms, who
has made for himself an English mind (without losing his profound and
supersubtle Slavic soul), as has Joseph Conrad. He is unique as
stylist. He first read English literature in Polish translations, then
in the original; he read not only the Bible and Shakespeare, but
Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, and Thackeray; above all, Dickens. He
followed no regular course, just as he belongs to no school in art,
except the school of humanity; for him there are no types, only
humans. (He detests formulae and movements.) His sensibility, all
Slavic, was stimulated by Dickens, who was a powerful stimulant of the
so-called "Russian pity," which fairly honeycombs the works of
Dostoievsky. There is no mistaking the influence of the English Bible
on Conrad's prose style. He is saturated with its puissant, elemental
rhythms, and his prose has its surge and undertow. That is why his is
never a "painted ship on a painted ocean"; by the miracle of his art
his water is billowy and undulating, his air quivers in the torrid
sunshine, and across his skies--skies broken into new, strange
patterns--the cloud-masses either float or else drive like a typhoon.
His rhythmic sense is akin to Flaubert's, of whom Arthur Symons wrote:
"He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with
every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed
prose tune." Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges,
as does Theophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in
modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences. A typical
paragraph of his shows what might be called the sonata form: an
allegro, andante, and presto. For example, the opening pages of Karain
(one of his best stories, by the way) in Tales of Unrest:
"Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs [he is
writing of the newspaper accounts of various native risings in the
Eastern Archipelago]--sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange
name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere
of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of
land-breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights; a
signal-fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff;
great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful
and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf
thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and
green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level
of a polished sea like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel."
There is no mistaking the _coda_ of this paragraph--selected at
random--beginning at "and"; it suggests the author of Salammbo, and it
also contains within its fluid walls evocations of sound, odour, bulk,
tactile values, the colour of life, the wet of the waves, and the
whisper of the wind. Or, as a contrast, recall the rank ugliness of
the night when Razumov visits the hideous tenement, expecting to find
there the driver who would carry to freedom the political assassin,
Haldin. Scattered throughout the books are descriptive passages with
few parallels in our language. Indeed, Conrad often abuses his gift,
forgetting that his readers do not possess his tremendously developed
faculty of attention.