It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
hold that same position.
Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is
to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for
him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts,
sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently
realistic, when it is merely {111}recorded and perceived by any
observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without
for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it,
giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the
whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used
by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a
little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the
required ground.
Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
of all honest men. {112}In that intention he has absolutely succeeded;
he has not abated one jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart
of Darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our
literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is
falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him
in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his
clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define,
but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by
Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and Punishment,
The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are romantic realism
at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is
ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince
Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, {113}Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to
us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from
us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s
love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it,
with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical
as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony,
Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the
limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves
on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity,
tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes,
never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of
the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his
pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--Conrad finds
humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
Nevertheless he has been influenced by {114}the Russian writer
continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under
Western Eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason,
perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as
though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of
him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they
find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they
may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
{115}because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than
they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because
characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr,
demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing
that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the zest of
creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their
art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life.
That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the
work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows
exhaustion and sterility {116}means nothing; the stream will soon ran
full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel,
in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip
of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that
cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for
form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws
or the paradise of free love.