If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad’s attention we shall
see that {055}in almost every case his subjects are concerned with
unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to
the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the
blindness that renders men’s honesty and heroism of so little account
that gives occasion for his irony.
He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
whom he can admire. “If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
thing up,” we can hear him say. “He can see at once that the odds are
too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven’s bolts and lightnings
and they will not quail.” They command his pity, his reverence, his
tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his
shoulders, he says: “You see. I told you so. He may even think he has
won. We know better, you and I.” {056}The theme of _Almayer’s Folly_
is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of
death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against
nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth).
_Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which
stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first.
_Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against
the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the
very epitome of Conrad’s themes, is the struggle of M’Whirr against the
storm (here again it is M’Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear,
in the very last line of the book, the storm’s confident chuckle of
ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest.
In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad’s finest
figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three
tales in _‘Twixt Land, and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the
struggle of simple, {057}unimaginative men against forces too strong
for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character,
finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_
Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains
and struggles of insignificant individuals.
Of Conrad’s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them
and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
Whatever Conrad’s books are or are not, it may safely be said that
they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
affection, his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding
over the inequality of life’s battle. His humour, often of a very
fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
light-heartedness.
Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would {058}have found Marlowe, Jim and
Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
meeting a number of Conrad’s characters is that they have existences
and histories entirely independent of their introducer’s kind offices.
Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
histories.
One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
the robust vitality of their {059}predecessors; the figures in the novel
of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before
an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy
before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton
before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy
before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his
inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it
may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author’s own
determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
contemporaries--namely, the assurance that {060}his characters have
their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that
he is describing to us.
The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
speculating deeply upon “what happened afterwards” to Gayef or Barbara,
to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad’s sea captains as with Tchekov’s
Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
from the author’s eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for
him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
M’Whirr that he wrote long letters home, {061}beginning always with the
words, “My darling Wife,” and relating in minute detail each successive
trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs M’Whirr, we learn, was “a pretentious person
with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in
the neighbourhood considered as ‘quite superior.’ The only secret of her
life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
to stay for good.” Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate “who never
wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and
though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with
extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges
of a boarding-house.” How conscious we are of Jim’s English country
parsonage, of Captain Anthony’s loneliness, of Marlowe’s isolation. By
this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole
character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on
board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing,
{062}we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on
board, “A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol.”... “Very soon
the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her
over the side. We didn’t recognise him at all....” And Mr Baker, the
chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends
for life?
“No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady,
he thought, sitting down for a moment’s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere.
He didn’t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The
darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck;
and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom
through many {063}long years he had given the best of a seaman’s care.
And never a command in sight. Not once!”
There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. “Donkin entered.
They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. ‘I give you a bad
discharge,’ he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: ‘I don’t want your
bloomin’ discharge--keep it. I’m goin’ ter ‘ave a job hashore.’ He turned
to us. ‘No more bloomin’ sea for me,’ he said, aloud. All looked at him.
He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any
of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
declaration.”
In how many novels would Donkin’s life have been limited by the part
that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus?_ As it
is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--“As I came up I saw a
red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, {064}fluffy
hair, fall on Charley’s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
him:--‘Oh, my boy! my boy!’--‘Leggo me,’ said Charley, ‘leggo,
mother!’ I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of
the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic,
courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life
to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
good-naturedly:--‘If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall ‘ave a bob for
a drink out of my pay.’”
But one passes from these men of the sea--from M’Whirr and Baker,
from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About
such men as M’Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not
believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will,
we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little
details, {065}M’Whirr’s wife, Mr Baker’s proud sister, Charley’s
mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister Nikita,
the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
perfect sympathy.
His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
_idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you.
But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing
finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because
they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the
imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind
upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved,
the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough
to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again
{066}we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees
him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality
and its significance. “His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of
having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.”
With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we
have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists’ lives
beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
things.
Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée
fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
upon which he has {067}placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of
an _idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book’s close,
that we should have been told so much more.
Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott,
with the single exception of Thackeray’s Beatrix--and here I am not
forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own
immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so
unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: “... his hat, a gay
sombrero with {068}a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the
embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam
of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the
silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when--...
in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside
a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his
eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or
moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to
the most atrocious sufferings”--we are conscious of his superb figure;
and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the
book assure us--“In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to
ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of
the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of
solid silver, the {069}genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores
dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
His genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture
standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not
given us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us.
Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of
the Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes
might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
not met him.
Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in
the whole of Conrad’s art--the drive in the {070}cab of old Mrs Verloc,
Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange
gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S------, Peter
Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in
_Romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in
others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his
lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the
world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of
all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is,
finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose
pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends
with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know
the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its
sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness
s. Although each {071}work, from, the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely
perfect _Secret Share_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart,
the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.