II

Invention he has to a plentiful degree, notwithstanding his giving it

second place in comparison with imagination. His novels are the novels

of ideas dear to Balzac, though tinged with romance--a Stendhal of the

sea. Gustave Kahn called him un puissant reveur, and might have added,

a wonderful spinner of yarns. Such yarns--for men and women and

children! At times yarning seemingly for the sake of yarning--true

art-for-art, though not in the "precious" sense. From the brilliant

melochromatic glare of the East to the drab of London's mean streets,

from the cool, darkened interiors of Malayan warehouses to the

snow-covered allees of the Russian capital, or the green parks on the

Lake of Geneva, he carries us on his magical carpet, and the key is

always in true pitch. He never saves up for another book as Henry

James once said of some author, and for him, as for Mr. James, every

good story is "both a picture and an idea"; he seeks to interpret "the

uncomposed, unrounded look of life with its accidents, its broken

rhythms." He gets atmosphere in a phrase; a verbal nuance lifts the

cover of some iniquitous or gentle soul. He contrives the illusion of

time, and his characters are never at rest; even within the narrow

compass of the short story they develop; they grow in evil or wisdom,

are always transformed; they think in "character," and ideality unites

his vision with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the

moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a

prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the

tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call

Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer--a book which

has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further

than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor

interior analysis in The Return.

What I once wrote of Henry James might be said of Joseph Conrad: "He

is exquisitely aware of the presence of others." And this awareness is

illustrated in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo--the latter that

astonishing rehabilitation of the humming life on a South American

seaboard. For Nostromo nothing is lost save honour; he goes to his

death loving insensately; for Razumov his honour endures till the

pressure put upon it by his love for Haldin's sister cracks it, and

cracks, too, his reason. For once the novelist seems cruel to the

pathological point--I mean in the punishment of Razumov by the hideous

spy. I hope this does not betray parvitude of view-point. I am not

thin-skinned, and Under Western Eyes is my favourite novel, but the

closing section is lacerating music for the nerves. And what a

chapter!--that thunder-storm driving down the valley of the Rhone, the

haggard, haunted face of the Russian student forced, despite his

convictions, to become an informer and a supposed anarchist (curious

students will find the first hint of the leitmotiv of this monumental

book in An Anarchist--A Set of Six; as Gaspar Ruiz may be looked on as

a pendant to Nostromo). Under Western Eyes is a masterpiece of irony,

observation, and pity. I once described it as being as powerful as

Dostoievsky and as well written as Turgenieff. The truth is that it

is Conrad at his best, although I know that I may seem to slight the

Eastern tales. It has the colour and shape and gait of the marvellous

stories of Dostoievsky and Turgenieff--with an absolutely original

motive, and more modern. A magical canvas!

Its type of narrative is in the later style of the writer. The events

are related by an English teacher of languages in Geneva, based on the

diary of Razumov. It is a favourite device of Conrad's which might be

described as, structurally progressing from the homogeneous to the

heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his

intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story

relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes

as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and

elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character and

is swift and secular. If Flaubert in Sentimental Education originated

a novel structure in fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his

edifice, in its contrapuntal presentation of character and chapter

suspensions, is new, tantalisingly, bewilderingly, refreshingly, new.

The colour is toned down, is more sober than the prose of the Eastern

stories. Sometimes he employs the personal pronoun, and with what

piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This

contains three tales, the first, which gives the title-key, has been

called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to

discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh

supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and

blood-lust) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic--a

pathos which recalls Balzac's Pere Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of

the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding--than The End of the

Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among the immortals.

That he must have had a "long foreground" we find after studying the

man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something

with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be

understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or

humoured, as in The Brute--that monstrous personification of the

treacherous sea's victim. Like all true artists, Conrad never

preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read. We

recognise his emotional calibre, which is of a dramatic intensity,

though never over-emphasising the morbid. Of his intellectual grasp

there is no question. He possesses pathos, passion, sincerity, and

humour. Wide knowledge of mankind and nature he has, and in the field

of moral power we need but ask if he is a Yes-Sayer or a No-Sayer, as

the Nietzschians have it. He says Yes! to the universe and of the

eternal verities he is cognisant. For him there is no "other side of

good and evil." No writers of fiction, save the very greatest,

Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the

soul of man under the stress of sorrow, passion, anger, or as

swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a

fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea--they

are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also

recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and

sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen

to him unless what happens to all--failure and death." His heroes are

failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their

failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism of

the Slavic temperament must be reckoned with. But this pessimism is

implied, and life has its large as well as its "little ironies." In

Chance, which describes the hypertrophy of a dolorous soul, he writes:

"It was one of those dewy, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,

crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness,

of the hopeless, obscure magnificence of our globe lost in the

splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.... Daylight is

friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy,

soft nights are more kindly to our littleness."

To match that one must go to Thomas Hardy, to the eloquent passage

describing the terrors of infinite space in Two on a Tower. However,

Conrad is not often given to such Hamlet-like moods. The shock and

recoil of circumstances, the fatalities of chance, and the vagaries of

human conduct intrigue his intention more than the night side of the

soul. Yet, how well he has observed the paralysis of will caused by

fear. In An Outpost of Progress is the following: "Fear always

remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate

and belief, and even doubt; but as he clings to life he cannot destroy

fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible that pervades his

being, that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle

of his last breath...."