It has been said that women do not read him, but according to my
limited experience I believe the contrary. (Where, indeed, would any
novelist be if it were not for women?) He has said of Woman: "She is
the active partner in the great adventure of humanity on earth and
feels an interest in all its episodes." He does not idealise the sex,
like George Meredith, nor yet does he describe the baseness of the
Eternal Simpleton, as do so many French novelists. He is not always
complimentary: witness the portrait of Mrs. Fyne in Chance, or the
mosaic of anti-feminist opinions to be found in that story. That he
succeeded better with his men is a commonplace of all masculine
writers, not that women always succeed with their sex, but to many
masters of imaginative literature woman is usually a poet's evocation,
not the creature of flesh and blood and bones, of sense and sentiment,
that she is in real life. Conrad opens no new windows in her soul, but
he has painted some full-length portraits and made many lifelike
sketches, which are inevitable. From the shining presence of his
mother, the assemblage of a few traits in his Reminiscences, to Flora
de Barral in Chance, with her self-tortured temperament, you
experience that "emotion of recognition" described by Mr. James. You
know they live, that some of them go on marching in your memory after
the book has been closed. Their actions always end by resembling their
ideas. And their ideas are variegated.
In Under Western Eyes we encounter the lovely Natalie Haldin, a sister
in spirit to Helena, to Lisa, to any one of the Turgenieff heroines.
Charm is hers, and a valiant spirit. Her creator has not, thus far,
succeeded in bettering her. Only once does he sound a false note. I
find her speech a trifle rhetorical after she learns the facts in the
case of Razumov (p. 354). Two lines are superfluous at the close of
this heart-breaking chapter, and in all the length of the book that is
the only flaw I can offer to hungry criticism. The revolutionary group
at Geneva--the mysterious and vile Madame de S----, the unhappy slave,
Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist,
surely a portrait sur le vif, Sophia Antonovna, are testimonies of the
writer's skill and profound divination of the human heart. (He has
confessed that for him woman is "a human being, very much like
myself.") The dialogue between Razumov, the spiritual bankrupt, and
Sophia in the park is one of those character-revealing episodes that
are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and
undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their
memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate
lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is
arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal
attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature.
Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present
purpose, which is chiefly exposition, though I feel that Captain
Anthony is not tenderly treated. But "there is a Nemesis which
overtakes generosity, too, like all the other imprudences of men who
dare to be lawless and proud...." And this sailor, the son of the
selfish poet, Carleon Anthony, himself sensitive, but unselfish, paid
for his considerate treatment of his wife Flora. Only Hardy could have
treated the sex question with the same tact as Conrad (he has done so
in Jude the Obscure).
In his sea tales Conrad is a belated romanticist; and in Chance, while
the sea is never far off, it is the soul of an unhappy girl that is
shown us; not dissected with the impersonal cruelty of surgeon
psychologists, but revealed by a sympathetic interpreter who knows the
weakness and folly and tragedy of humanity.
The truth is, Conrad is always an analyst; that sets him apart from
other writers of sea stories. Chance is different in theme, but not as
different in treatment as in construction. His pattern of narration
has always been of an evasive character; here the method is carried to
the pitch of polyphonic intricacy. The richness of interest, the
startling variety, and the philosophic largeness of view--the tale is
simple enough otherwise for a child's enjoyment--are a few of its
qualities. Coventry Patmore is said to be the poet alluded to as
Carleon Anthony, and there are distinct judgments on feminism and the
new woman, some wholesome truths uttered at a time when man has
seemingly shrivelled up in the glorified feminine vision of mundane
things. The moral is to be found on page 447. "Of all the forms
offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realise it
fully which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of
mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist
the necessity, fail in understanding, and stop voluntarily short ...
they are committing a sin against life."
The Duel (published in America under the title of A Point of Honor) is
a tour de force in story-telling that would have made envious Balzac.
Then there is Winnie Verloc in the Secret Agent, and her cockney
sentiment and rancours. She is remarkably "realised," and is a pitiful
apparition at the close. The detective Verloc, her husband, wavers as
a portrait between reality and melodrama. The minor female characters,
her mother and the titled lady patron of the apostle Michaelis, are no
mere supernumeraries.
The husband and wife in The Return are nameless but unforgetable. It
is a profound parable, this tale. The man discovered in his judgment
of his foolish wife that "morality is not a method of happiness." The
image in the mirrors in this tale produces a ghastly effect. I enjoyed
the amateur anarchist, the English girl playing with bombs in The
Informer; she is an admirable foil for the brooding bitterness of the
ruined Royalist's daughter in that stirring South American tale,
Gaspar Ruiz. Conrad knows this continent of half-baked civilisations;
life grows there like rank vegetations. Nostromo is the most elaborate
and dramatic study of the sort, and a wildly adventurous romance into
the bargain. The two women, fascinating Mrs. Gould and the proud,
beautiful Antonia Avellanos, are finely contrasted. And what a mob of
cutthroats, politicians, and visionaries! "In real revolutions the
best characters do not come to the front," which statement holds as
good in Paris as in Petrograd, in New York, or in Mexico. The Nigger
of the Narcissus and Nostromo give us the "emotion of multitude."
A genuinely humorous woman is the German skipper's wife in Falk, and
the niece, the heroine who turns the head of the former cannibal of
Falk--this an echo, doubtless, from the anecdote of the dog-eating
granduncle B---- of the Reminiscences--is heroic in her way. Funniest
of all is the captain himself. Falk is almost a tragic figure. Amy
Foster--in the same volume--is pathetic, and Bessie Carvil, of
To-morrow, might have been signed by Hardy. In Youth the old sea-dog's
motherly wife is the only woman. As for the impure witch in The Heart
of Darkness, I can only say that she creates a new shudder. How she
appeals to the imagination! The soft-spoken lady, bereft of her hero
in this narrative, who lives in Brussels, is a specimen of Conrad's
ability to make reverberate in our memory an enchanting personality,
and with a few strokes of the brush. We cannot admire the daughter of
poor old Captain Whalley in The End of Tether, but she is the
propulsive force of his actions and final tragedy. For her we have
"that form of contempt which is called pity." That particular story
will rank with the best in the world's literature. Nina Almayer shows
the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while
Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way
on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief.
In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the
naive stammerings at the birth of their souls, Conrad is
unapproachable.
In the selection of his titles he is always happy; how happy, may be
noted in his new book, Victory. It is not a war book, though it
depicts in his most dramatic manner the warring of human instincts. It
was planned several years ago, but not finished until the writer's
enforced stay in his unhappy native land, Poland. Like Goethe or
Stendhal, Conrad can write in the midst of war's alarums about the
hair's-breadth 'scapes of his characters. But, then, the Polish is the
most remarkable race in Europe; from leading forlorn hopes to playing
Chopin the Poles are unequalled. Mr. Conrad has returned to his old
habitat in fiction. An ingenious map shows the reader precisely where
his tragic tale is enacted. It may not be his most artistic, but it is
an engrossing story. Compared with Chance, it seems a cast-back to
primitive souls; but as no man after writing such an extraordinary
book as Chance will ever escape its influence (after his Golden Bowl,
Mr. James was quite another James), so Joseph Conrad's firmer grasp on
the burin of psychology shows very plainly in Victory; that is, he
deals with elemental causes, but the effects are given in a subtle
series of reactions. He never drew a girl but once like Flora de
Barral; and, till now, never a man like the Swede, Axel Heyst, who
has been called, most appropriately, "a South Sea Hamlet." He has a
Hamletic soul, this attractive young man, born with a metaphysical
caul, which eventually strangles him. No one but Conrad would dare the
mingling of such two dissociated genres as the romantic and the
analytic, and if, here and there, the bleak rites of the one, and the
lush sentiment of the other, fail to modulate, it is because the
artistic undertaking is a well-nigh impossible one. Briefly, Victory
relates the adventures of a gentleman and scholar in the Antipodes. He
meets a girl, a fiddler in a "Ladies' Orchestra," falls in love, as do
men of lofty ideals and no sense of the practical, goes off with her
to a lonely island, there to fight for her possession and his own
life. The stage-setting is magnificent; even a volcano lights the
scene. But the clear, hard-blue sky is quite o'erspread by the black
bat Melancholia, and the silence is indeed "dazzling." The villains
are melodramatic enough in their behaviour, but, as portraits, they
are artfully different from the conventional bad men of fiction. The
thin chap, Mr. Jones, is truly sinister, and there is a horrid
implication in his woman-hating, which vaguely peeps out in the bloody
finale. The hairy servant might be a graduate from The Island of
Doctor Moreau of Mr. Wells--one of the beast folk; while the murderous
henchman, Ricardo, is unpleasantly put before us. I like the girl; it
would have been so easy to spoil her with moralising; but the Baron
is the magnet, and, as a counterfoil, the diabolical German hotel
keeper. There is too much arbitrary handling at the close for my
taste. Only in the opening chapters of Victory does Mr. Conrad pursue
his oblique method of taletelling; the pomp and circumstance of a
lordly narrative style roll to a triumphant conclusion. This Polish
writer easily heads the present school of English fiction.
His most buoyant and attractive girl is Freya Nelson (or Nielsen) in
the volume alluded to; she, however, is pure Caucasian, and perhaps
more American than European. Her beauty caresses the eye. The story is
a good one, though it ends unhappily--another cause for complaint on
the part of the sentimentalists who prefer molasses to meat. But this
is a tale which is also literature. Conrad will never be coerced into
offering his readers sugar-coated tittle-tattle. And at a period when
the distaff of fiction is too often in the hands of men the voice of
the romantic realist and poetic ironist, Joseph Conrad, sounds a
dynamic masculine bass amid the shriller choir. He is an aboriginal
force. Let us close with the hearty affirmation of Walt Whitman:
"Camerado! this is no book, who touches this, touches a man."