The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists
in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his
{083}daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such
a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play
the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway
station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters
immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick
slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background
react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that
reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with
other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of
stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own
day, Mr Arnold Bennett’s Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or
Mrs Wharton’s New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most
successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us
with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation
with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the
contemplation of some scene and is thence {084}extended to the whole
vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be
as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits
are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities
of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and
Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the
scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting
between Beauchamp and René in _Beauchamp’s Career_. It is not only that
these scenes are “done” to the full extent of their “doing,” it is also
that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with
all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev,
Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.
Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in Literature_,
has named this element Glamour. {085}In writing of the novels by George
Eliot he says: “Indeed there is almost every element of literature,
except a certain indescribable thing called _Glamour_, which was the
whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
Castlewood.” Now’ this matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens,
for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the
house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit’s escape after the murder do
not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate,
that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential it is certain also to
have glamour.
The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very
strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is
his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.
In _The Outcast {086}of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain
Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it
has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord Jim_ the contrast
of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast not only
immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain’s
gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects
the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the
negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
that single voyage of the _Narcissus_. {087}When Winnie Verloc, her old
mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not
seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark,
dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton
lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend.
That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate
companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples
might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he
wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather
because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the
most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We
may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they
drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now
see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.”
But {088}Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later
credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries.
Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is
as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that
no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure.
But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around
and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness,
trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze
of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer,
a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy
splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the
austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba,
asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the
mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the
dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so
{089}that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the
cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are
“a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique--it
bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a
remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible
final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs
Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers
of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a
slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
blankets that {090}lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat....
Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and
crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in
the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the
big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot
brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some
dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--“the forests
unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of
heaven--and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from
every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the
juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse
beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however,
select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about
_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination {091}of the silver of the
Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near
it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the
white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad,
then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,
the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure
and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,
romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of
the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been
there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks
swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which
the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early
sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from
Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing
coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their {092}evening
meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without
a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to
a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp
under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse
of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without
penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the
strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and
above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers
the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue
sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created
beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,
many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and
princesses passing--but the detail of it is {093}built with careful
realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We
wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral,
its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its
hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns
for us.
Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is
a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most
fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of
Stevenson’s chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,
gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast
that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s
treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco
tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The
detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book
incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is
{094}finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We
have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of
the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,
many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the
Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality
of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a
house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The
two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio
concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in
from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon
the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a
broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and,
{095}ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very
stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his
long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old
Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black
brute, with a hammer bead--you would have seen in the street dozing
motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the
curbstone of the side-walk!”
How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the
exclamation of some reader “Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like
that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable
veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed
doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!--and can we not sniff
something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more
about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he
must remember enough to fill a volume!
He is able, therefore, upon this foundation {096}of a minute and
scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases
without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate,
choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression
of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is
of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or
Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the
life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little
tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the
unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons,
catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember
also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest
and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet,
working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is
at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to
the last {097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of
certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It
_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that
has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or
fable for its interpretation....
When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,
certain limitations.