To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author’s work,
because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer’s
Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
very essence of Conrad’s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
unfortunate author: “Ah! yes. I’m interesting, of course, but don’t you
remember...?”
The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B-------- of the
_Nonsuch_ who... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the
year ‘88 when...
In the course of his thrilling voyage of {024}discovery we are, by a
kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of
the author’s own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship’s officer (this the merest
glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle’s house in Poland.
So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at
them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed
those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been,
by us, only partially realised.
Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
breathless, and, by the virtue of its author’s style, solemn, we do
obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical,
often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of
vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells
us: {025} “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the
temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they
must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the
idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
revolutionary in my writings.” (Page 20.)
Or again:
“All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
from which a philosophical mind should be free.” (Page 21.)
Or again:
“Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
can be rendered without shame.” (Page 194.)
This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
implication of the colour of the work that will {026}arise from them;
and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and
vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that
he was to do.
It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
to be most grievously disappointed.
If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all
their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad’s
faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its
honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there
is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that
supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any
work of {027}art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged,
incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent
reminiscence poured into a friend’s ear in a moment of sudden
confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
enlightening introduction to its author.
With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
already said, this is Conrad’s happiest book--indeed, with the possible
exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his
dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself
the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that
enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
variance with the distrust of his later novels.
The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, {028}_Overdue
and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_.
No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a
strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to
him, mto the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she
really is, he has been made free of a great order.
The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of
the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that
sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life
and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in
exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power
both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is
the life of the sea.
Conrad’s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
realism, her deceits, her {029}cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
of her like this:
“The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of
manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever
been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much
adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has
remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of
his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable
cruelty.”
Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right,
and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In
this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself
a {030}lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never
again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such free and
spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the
characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in
his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to
be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later
analysis of Conrad’s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some
mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions
that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to
be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from “poor Captain
B--------, who used {031}to suffer from sick headaches, in his young
days, every time he was approaching a coast,” to the dramatic Dominic
(“from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man
you would think he had never smiled in his life”), are silent and
thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful,
half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast.
Captain B------- dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women
sitting beside him in the quiet room, “his eyes resting fondly upon the
faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar
objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed
often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea”--“poor
P--------,” with “his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
_Punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
looking-glasses, for instance”--that captain who “did everything with an
air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
but the result somehow was always on stereotyped {032}lines,
unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart”--that
other captain in whom “through a touch of self-seeking that modest
artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament”--here are little
sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well,
Marlowe, Captain M’Whirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many
others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere
enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such
themes, such subjects, such “cases” that it is hard, almost beyond
discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has
obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious
muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the
Sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and
his picture.
Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
that _The Mirror of The Sea_, ultimately, has most to do. {033}As other
men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his
ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated
to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance,
but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a
technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and
letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
crime in speaking of “casting” an anchor when the true technicality is
“brought up”--“to an anchor” understood. In the chapter on “Yachts” he
provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand
and then suddenly there come these sentences--“the art of handling
slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.”... “A ship is a
creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to
keep us up to mark.”
Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
her birth, in no ordered sequence of {034}events, but admitting us ever
more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
new, in the dock, “her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
seamen who were to share their life with her.”... “She looked modest to
me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already
familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
men.”
Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
contrast, his companion’s “Ships are all right....”
He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the
wickedly malicious, {035}the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has
indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be
severe before such a world of fine spirits.
Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
Inlands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar, he
shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of Dominic,
the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting
the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his
house of romance.
This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly
of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.