I
|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
an author’s artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
creation of his characters.
With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
has been placed we have some compulsory connection.
Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.
Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
With that publisher’s acceptance of _Almayer’s Folly_ the third period
of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
books.
Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
him.
Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
_Almayer’s Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
have been declared to the world. _Almayer’s Folly_, however, was not
rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: “The name of
Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The Nigger
of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
of his adventure.
The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This
has been their history.