As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
men.
It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
{098}ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the
horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he
can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the
very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but
his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free
from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound
is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove
his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He
passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to
celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
{099}Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the
history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit
has been vain--as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his
merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
M’Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has
witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley,
watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that
nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
leap--the victim is always in his power. {100}It comes from this
philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most
definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of
brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are melancholy and ironic: “If you see
far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way
to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is
tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he
chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he
has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of
the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For
Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond
words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women
of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for
them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty
of his own sea captains. {101}This then is quite simply his philosophy.
It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters
to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is
stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant,
hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of
any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his
own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all
this: preparing to leave...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his
butterflies.”
Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication,
save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in
their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many
ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation
of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here.
Browning’s {102}interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of
him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of
men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual
and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s
clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual
philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately
enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has
exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be
seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the most
romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did.
Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo?_ Mr Chesterton has
written of {103}Browning: “He substituted the street with the green
blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted
match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for
the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged,
faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a
fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
heart, it is also that the worlds of these {104}two poets are the same.
How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
de Barrel, M’Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s
wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though
he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
buttresses and towers.
Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as
I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
carried Romantic-Realism showed {105}the author of _Almayer’s Folly_ the
signs of the road that he was to follow.
If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
novelist?