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Title: Joseph Conrad
Author: Hugh Walpole
Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
Last Updated: November 20, 2016
Language: English
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*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive
JOSEPH CONRAD
By Hugh Walpole
New York: Henry Holt And Company
1916
TO
SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
CONTENTS
I—BIOGRAPHY
II—THE NOVELIST
III—THE POET
IV—ROMANCE AND REALISM
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S
PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
I—BIOGRAPHY
I
TO any7 reader of the
books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate
experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making
of his art. It may happen often enough that an author’s artistic life is
of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a
personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of Joseph Conrad
the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer
deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with
the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters.
With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with
the three backgrounds against whose form and colour 8his art has been placed we have some
compulsory connection.
Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th December
1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of Poland. In 1862
his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish rebellion, was
banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother and father there until
his mother died, when he was sent back to the Ukraine. In 1870 his lather
died.
Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until 1874,
when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. In the
month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew at that
time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the
Duke of Sutherland as ordinary seaman. He became a Master in the
English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. In
1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years:
he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various
periods during 9his
sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin. With that publisher’s acceptance of Almayer’s
Folly the third period of his life began. Since then his history has
been the history of his books.
Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
relationship of these three backgrounds—Poland, the Sea, the inner
security and tradition of an English country-side—one can realise
what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed
through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may
be enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
impulses 10those
were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of
a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. He
sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an
ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men
when to them also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never
afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse
from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered
the Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He
thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so
honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only
personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He found in
her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the
contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over
the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. 11He found, too, in her service, the type of
man who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who realised
so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their
master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about
it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of
freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in
nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his
companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision had
driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
despair of 12any
possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where
freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise;
the two sides of the shield were revealed to him.
Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments of
opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and
diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence
in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations,
will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if Almayer’s Folly
had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well
believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and
surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world.
Almayer’s Folly, however, was not rejected; its publication caused
The Spectator to remark: “The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but
it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay
Archipelago.”He13had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind
from the beginning. He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that
day in 1897 when Henley accepted The Nigger of the Narcissus for The
New Review as a more important date in his new career. That date may
serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure.
The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This has
been their history.
II
His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
period, beginning with Almayer’s Folly in 1895, ended with Lord
Jim in 1900. The second contains 14the two volumes of Youth and Typhoon,
the novel Romance that he wrote in collaboration with Ford Madox
Hueffer, and ends with Nostromo, published in 1903. The third
period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with The Secret Agent,
and receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of Chance in
1914, and Victory (1915).
His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
view of the “schools,” to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves upon
him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild beasts
behind iron bars. Almayer’s Folly and The Outcast of the Islands
(the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in the
freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their world
had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of his own
individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and a new
vigour. In the 15character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Bahalatchi
and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of great things.
Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were
clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style a sense of rhetoric
and lack of ease. His vision of his background was pulled out beyond its
natural intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so
obvious as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out
of malicious perversity, anything else.
These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, Tales of
Unrest, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad’s difficulties. One study
in this book, The Return, with its redundancies and overemphasis,
is the crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume
succeeds. It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung
himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, The Nigger of the
Narcissus. This 16was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a ship
from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the human
souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death, an influence
ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always tender and
humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other vessels, the Narcissus.
Never again, except perhaps in The Mirror of the Sea, was he to be
so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. The book is a gallery of
remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in
perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant,
abandoned. It is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence.
Of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period
of his work, Lord Jim. This was to remain, until the publication of
Chance, his most popular novel. It is the story of a young
Englishman’s loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious
recovery. The first half of the book is a finely sustained development of
a 17vividly
remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea
pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. Here
then in 1900 Conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the
jungle and was able to choose his path. His choice was still dictated by
the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of
observation his creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim,
Marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a
new birth.
There appeared now in Youth, Heart of Darkness and Typhoon
three of the finest short stories in the English language, work of
reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and
flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now
to be abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in Youth and its
evocation of the East, in The Heart of Darkness and its evocation
of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in Typhoon and its
evocation of the sea. He was never, after 18these tales, to write again of the sea as
though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
This second period closed with the production of a work that was
deliberately created rather than reminiscent, Nostromo. Conrad may
have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
anything for their creation. There is much to be said about Nostromo,
in many ways the greatest of all Conrad’s works, but, for the moment, one
would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical
births, in a journal—T.P.‘s Weekly—and astonished and
bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its
critics did not understand it, and its author’s own admirers were puzzled
by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
Nostromo was followed by a pause—one 19can easily imagine that its production
did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When, however, in 1907
appeared The Secret Agent, a new attitude was most plainly visible.
He was suddenly detached, writing now of “cases” that interested him as an
investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning
participation of experience. He is tender towards Winnie Verloc and her
old mother, the two women in The Secret Agent, but he studies them
quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim so radiantly, that
fierce contempt that in An Outcast of the Islands accompanied
Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer artist, but we
have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. The Secret
Agent is a tale of secret service in London; it contains the
wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
Conrad’s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 Under Western Eyes
spoke strongly of a Russian influence 20Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had too markedly
their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in
Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
A volume of short stories, A Set of Six, illustrating still more
emphatically Conrad’s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars—The
Duel—a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained
note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, ‘Twixt Land and Sea, to
unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method.
A Smile, of Fortune and The Secret Sharer are amazing in the
beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the
reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as
something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken
from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress.
Nevertheless The Secret Sharer is a most marvellous story,
marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the
21contrast
between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of
its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared Chance, by no means the
finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of The
Nigger of the Narcissus, of Lord Jim, of Nostromo. With
the popular success of Chance the first period of his work is
closed. On the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the
artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
prophecy.
III
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 22they 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 23the 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 24discovery 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: 25"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 26arise 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
AutobiographyorMy 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 27art,
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, 28Overdue 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 29cruelties, 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 30lyrical
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 31to
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 32lines, 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. 33As 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 34events, 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, 35the 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.
II—THE NOVELIST
I
IN36discussing the
art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three
special questions that we may ask—as to the Theme, as to the Form,
as to the creation of Character.
It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel,
as, for instance, The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh
bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are
vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
position as novelist 37and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most
truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in
this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist—that is, as a
narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to
those histories.
Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but
slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to
make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect.
Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite
unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned
themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which
forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A
new period began at the end of the fifties; 38but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel
called Evan Harrington was of any special importance; it made no
more stir than did Almayer’s Folly in the early nineties, although
the wonderful Richard Feverel had already preceded it.
With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel,
springing straight from the shores of France, where Madame Bovary
and Une Vie showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into
a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how
important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much
to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything
that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling
showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the
beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that
things were done. The Yellow Book sprang into a bright existence,
flamed, and died. “Art for Art’s sake” was slain by the trial of Oscar
Wilde in 1895.
39Mr
Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop
assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made
socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the
Boer War completed an old one.
Of the whole question of Conrad’s place in the history of the English
novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I
would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French
influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its
destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of
The Yellow Book, passing through all the realistic reaction that
followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed away
by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new
stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the
work that he had to do.
II
40The form
in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which
must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the
question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently
attacked.
His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
between two seamen. One has “knifed” the other, and the quarrel has been
watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us
the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, oratio
recta, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the
spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the
girl are. He 41describes
the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he
discovers about the man. Seen standing in his doorway he is the most
ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a
strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing
fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. That leads
one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the
bibulous old man, and for a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous
old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This
old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her
own. Once she was...
And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
witness to Conrad’s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says:
“It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a 42votary of the way to do a thing that shall
make it undergo most doing,” and his amazement at Conrad’s patient pursuit
of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that
in What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age he has practised
almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside the intricate but
masterly form of The Awkward Age the duplicate narration of Chance
seems child’s play. Mr Henry James makes the mistake of speaking as though
Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most
difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the
truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought
straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration
used by the Ancient Mariner and all the seamen before and alter him.
Conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which
stories in the past had generally come to him. He wishes to deny the
effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so
attractive to 43him.
He must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he
himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the
truth of it then must he have two or three.
Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: Lord
Jim, Nostromo and Chance. It is possible that Lord Jim
was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains
with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the Patna,
or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions waiting outside
for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation of these four men
Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the Patna: “He made
me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was
extravagantly gorgeous too—got up in a. soiled sleeping-suit, bright
green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw
slippers 44on
his bare feet, and somebody’s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes
too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big
head.” There are also two other “no-account chaps with him”—a sallow
faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a
blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with
drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty
imbecility, and, with these three, Jim, “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm
on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.” Here are these
four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That
boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has
fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities
and discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist’s thrill. We watch
our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go? We
are thrilled with the suspense. 45Conrad, having discovered his subject,
must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply
cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. “I was not there myself,”
he tells us, “but I can show you someone who was.” He introduces us to a
first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. “Now tell your story.” He has at
once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience
clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone’s disposal, whiskies and
cigars without stint, he lets himself go. He is bothered now by no
question but the thorough investigation of his discovery. What had Jim
done that he should be in such a case? We must have the story of the loss
of the Patna, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the
world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and Jim’s fine, chivalrous
soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so much to say and so many fine
words in which to say it. At present, so absorbed are we, so successful is
he, that we are completely held. The illusion is perfect. We come to the
inquiry. 46One
of the judges is Captain Brierley. “What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah!
but I must tell you! Most extraordinary thing!”
The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the Patna,
Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich
that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author’s
hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the
episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the
Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe
even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe
into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method
is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with
him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the
trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth and 47reality of his
story. He saw—we cannot for an instant doubt it—that group on
the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly,
awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic
sequel. He must go on—that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe—and
at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his
very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding
something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The
author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his
narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts,
contrasts, halts and histories. That then is the peril of the method.
Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver
for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any
other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at
once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe
has certainly been compelled to 48face, at moments in his career, an angry,
irritated audience.
Nostromo is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in
the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to
deny that Nostromo is extremely contused in places, but it is a
confusion that arises rather from Conrad’s confidence in the reader’s
fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
narrations are sometimes complicated—old Captain Mitchell does not
always achieve authenticity—but on the whole, the reader may be said
to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
little about others.
But this assurance of the author’s that we must have already learnt the
main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. “Of course,” he
says to us, “you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that revolution
that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be there myself. I
know all 49the
people concerned, and the central figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor
Monyngham—no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic
was told a syllable. I knew the man well.... He.. and there we all are.”
The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which
we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all,
but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our
conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of Nostromo,
can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of
Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola,
Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola’s wife, of the
expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of
Hirsch’s torture, of Captain Mitchell’s watch—here are characters
the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other
hands, be fantastic 50melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely
supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the
first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author’s word.... Here
the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.
Not so with the third example, Chance. Here, as with Lord Jim,
we may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the Patna
waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over Chance
reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their
comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her
horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate
flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain
Anthony’s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too
double-faced for him gives the book’s theme, and never in all the stories
that preceded Flora’s has Conrad been so 51eager to afford us first-hand witnesses.
We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine
phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once
served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there
surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the
number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been
enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself
as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it
positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de
Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden—as the author names them—are
retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate
their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young
Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it
should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not
here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of
52Lord
Jim and the whole of Nostromo. We believe most emphatically in
that first narration of young Powell’s about his first chance. We believe
in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like
this: “I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and
lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power
which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.” We
believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in
Marlowe’s interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony’s room.
We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that
we resent, a little, Marlowe’s intimacy which prevents, with patronising
complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed.
Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
But when the second half of the book 53arrives we can be confident no longer.
Here, as in Lord Jim, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having
surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to
continue it. The true thing in Lord Jim is the affair of the Patna;
the true thing in Chance is Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora after
her disaster. But whereas in Lord Jim the sequel to Jim’s cowardice
has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to
Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a
pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in Chance
entitled A Moonless Night is, in the first half of it, surely the
worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story,
The Return. The conclusion of Chance and certain tales in
his volume, Within the Tides, make one wonder whether that alliance
between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained
is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these
two qualities.
54It
remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must
before the end of Chance, the form of narration in Oratio Recta
is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in
Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are
the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in.
It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered
a charlatan.
I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are
developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by
the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell
us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his
presence be not true...
III
If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad’s attention we shall
see that 55in
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.” 56The
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, 57unimaginative 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 58have 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 59predecessors; 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 60his 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 SistersorThe 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, 61beginning 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, 62we 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 63long
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, 64fluffy 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, 65M’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 66we 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 67placed 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 68a 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 69genius 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 70cab 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
71work,
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.
III—THE POET
THE72poet in Conrad
is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain
of his works, as, for example, The Secret Agent, and Under
Western Eyes, or such short stories as The Informer, or Il
Conde, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument
of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the
novelist deserve consideration—style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works
and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from 73Conrad’s second novel, An Outcast of
the Islands:
“He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each
other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the
forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the
life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that
crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed
to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading
his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in
the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful
compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen
this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering
stars.”
And from his latest novel, Chance:
“The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in
the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all
passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick 74glance he
threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring
limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the
clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space
made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in
the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his
first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost
undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before
that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening
universe.”
It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of
Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the
two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first
piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied,
something of the “purple patch.” We feel that the prose is too dependent
upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly
affected by the author’s75determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it,
however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the
picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual
tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the
inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture.
Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the
earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in Almayer’s Folly, Tales of
Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness,
Lord Jim,—prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving
adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern
invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not
believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements
and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale
called The Return, there is the following passage:—
“He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed.
There was 76less
than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very
edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere.
Then almost simultaneously he shouted, ‘Come back,’ and she let go the
handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who
has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the
room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe—like a grave.”
The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words—“moral
annihilation,” “devouring nowhere,” “peaceful desperation,” “last chance
of life,” “terrible,” “like a grave.” That he shouted gives a final touch
of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
Often, in the earlier books, Conrad’s style has the awkward over-emphasis
of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a
foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand
him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked
effect of 77two
influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of
the author of Madame Bovary. When we recollect that Conrad
hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in
French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert’s
effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of
Flaubert’s: “Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l’envanouissaiont sous la
poésie du rôle qui l’envahissait; et entrainée vers l’homme par l’illusion
du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante,
extraordinaire, splendide...” and this a sentence of Conrad’s: “Her hands
slipped slowly off Lingard’s shoulders and her arms tell by her side,
listless, discouraged, as if to her—to her, the savage, violent and
ignorant creature—had been revealed clearly in that moment the
tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and
transparent, elusive and everlasting.”
Conrad’s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is
probable, 78however,
that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily
exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply
into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the
arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of
his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
importance—the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his
remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full
strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the
sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we
think in many pages of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the
Island, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
rapture.
He was under the influence of these powers 79also in that, at that time, they were too
strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder
and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style,
in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man
who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him—often
the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with
sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of
Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, this lyrical
impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously,
with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will
and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from Typhoon with
that earlier one from The Outcast of the Islands that I quoted
above:
“He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene
of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved
slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane 80the excess of
her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of
the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea
impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still
air moaned. Above Jakes’ head a few stars shone into the pit of black
vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the
patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as
if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem
on a lowering brow.”
That is poet’s work, and poet’s work at its finest. Instead of impressing
us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made
the very most of a rather thin moment—feels, indeed, himself that it
is thin—we are here under the influence of something that can have
no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though
it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest
material—and yet it remains, through all its discipline,
spontaneous.
These three tales, Typhoon, Youth and 81Heart of Darkness, stand by
themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We may
remember such characters as M’Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures
as the old seneschal in The Eve of St Agnes or the Ancient Mariner
himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and
finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman’sWhen Lilac first on
the Door yard bloomed or Keats’ Nightingale. Their author was
never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his
enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the
things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose
business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is
conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and
high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them
that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older—he
must look back now on the colours of 82Youth with an indulgent smile. And
when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as The Secret Agent and Under
Western Eyes, in such a volume of stories as A Set of Six, the
lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned—we are led forward by
sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city
policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from Chance quoted at the
beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined
enthusiasm of An Outcast of the Islands, the lyrical impulse still
remains. Yes, it is there, but—“Young Powell felt it.” In that
magical storm that was Typhoon God alone can share our terror and
demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
II.
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 83daily 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 84extended 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. 85In 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 ispotential 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 86of 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. 87When 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 88Conrad 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 89that 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 90lay
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 91of 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 92evening
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 93built
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 94finished, 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, 95ascending 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 96of 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 97line
of Victory. Nostromo is not simply the history of certain lives
that were concerned in a South American revolution. It isthat
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.
III
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
98ambition
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.” 99Conrad’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. 100It
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. 101This
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’s102interest
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 103Browning:
“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 104two 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 105the 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?
IV—ROMANCE AND REALISM
I
THE106terms,
Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means
of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely
romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely
dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson,
said: “Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England,
created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if
it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious
virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The
art was jaded when Reade finished his vocifer107ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead.
And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his
estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without denying
that the date of the publication of St Ives was also the date of
the death of the purely romantic novel.
But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic” is
used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular
idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has, recently,
been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern
use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like romances,” we
hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away from real life,
which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is defined by its
enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant
pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain order of novel 108exclaim,
“because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day—I
know where I am.”
Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of
Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an
ambition—I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life
with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence—Romance
is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that
Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always
upon truth perceived and recorded—-it is the essence ol observation.
In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in
its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often
upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any
rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply
a necessary divorce from reality, nor does 109Realism imply a detailed and dusty
preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance
to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy
for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than
observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as
Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its
fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign
literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence
of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885
and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian
novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the
last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly
what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as The Brothers
Karamazov, such a play as The Cherry Orchard are there before
us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that Karamazov
has, in the England 110of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by
Madame Bovary....
II
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 111recorded
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. 112In 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, 113Nicolas
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 114the 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 115because 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 116means
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.
III
Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it
does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists—in
the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W.
L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr
Brett Young—this influence is to be detected. 117Even with such avowed realists as Mr
Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very
different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once
by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton’sOn the Staircase
with Mr Arnold Bennett’sSacred and Profane Love, or Mr
Galsworthy’sMan of Property—and Mr E. M. Forster is a
romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose Longest Journey
and Howard’s End may possibly provide the historian of English
literature with dates as important as the publication of Almayer’s
Folly in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to
this essay.
It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
realism can return. We have been shown in Nostromo something that
has the colour of Treasure Island and the reality of New Grub
Street. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English
novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is,
surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who
believe that at few periods in 118English literature has the novel shown
more signs of a thrilling and original future.
For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for
a moment at his last novel, Victory.
The conclusion of Chance and the last volume of short stories had
shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
ultimately, from reality. Victory, splendid tale though it is, does
not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost
helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy;
that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as
elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and
slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old
early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as
though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown,
finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that
eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe
is pre119vented
he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered
corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as
it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in
the whole of Conrad—the last conversation between Heyst and Lena—that
we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of
the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the
same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of
the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its
austerity and truth as ever it was.
Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline
and restraint that were once his law.
Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the
Almayer’s Folly of 1895 to the Victory of 1915, one 120realises that
it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that
brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to
the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of
character and high adventure.
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
[The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
Almayer’s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New editions.
(Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
edition, 1910.
Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer
(Heinemann). 1901.
Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith, Elder).
1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
New edition, 1914.
A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
New edition, 1915.
Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
(Dent). 1915.
Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
123Almayer’s
Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (Macmillan). 1895. New editions,
1912; (Doubleday). 1911.
An Outcast of the Islands (Appleton). 1896. New edition (Doubleday).
1914.
Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (Dodd, Mead). 1897.
New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: “The Nigger of the
‘Narcissus’” (Doubleday). 1914.
Tales of Unrest (Scribner). 1898.
Lord Jim (Doubleday) 1900. New edition, 1914.
The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (McClure Co.).
1901.
Typhoon (Putman). 1902. New edition (Doubleday). 1914.
Youth, and two Other Stories (McClure Co. Afterwards transferred to
Doubleday). 1903.
Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (McClure Co.). 1903. New
edition (Doubleday). 1914.
Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (McClure Co.
Afterwards transferred to Doubleday). 1904.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harper), 1904. 124The Mirror of
the Sea: Memories and Impressions (Harper). 1906.
The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Harper). 1907.
A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (McClure Co. Afterwards
transferred to Doubleday). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (Harper).
1911.
A Personal Retold (Harper). 1912.
‘Twist Land and Sea: Tales (Doran). 1912. New edition (Doubleday).
1911.
Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Doubleday). 1914.
A Set of Six [Tales: one, “The Duel.” previously issued as “A Point of
Honour”] (Doubleday). 1915.
Victory: An Island Tale (Doubleday). 1915.
Within the Tides: Tales (Doubleday). 1916.
INDEX
_Almayer’s Folly_, 9, 12, 13, 14, 22, 38, 75, 119
Bennett, Arnold, 39, 83
Beresford, J. D., 116
_Brothers Karamazov, The_, 109
Browning, 84, 101, 102, 103, 104
_Chance_, 14, 16, 21, 43, 33, 56, 119
_Cherry Orchard, The_, 60, 109
Chesterton, G. K., 84
Conrad, J., birth, 8, naturalised, 8
Curie, R., 99
Dickens, 85
Dostoievsky, 20, 84, 113, 114
Eliot, George, 85
_End of the Tether, The_, 56
_Evan Harrington_, 38
_Eve of St Agnes, The_, 81
Flaubert, 77, 114
Form, 40
Forster, E. M., 117
_Freya of the Seven Islands_, 35
Galsworthy, J., 59
George, W. L., 116
Hardy, 38, 59, 93
_Heart of Darkness_, 17, 56, 75, 79, 81
Hueffer, F. M., 14
Irony, 55
James, Henry, 38, 41, 42, 59, 110
Keats, 81
Kipling, R., 38, 110
_Lord Jim_, 13, 16, 43, 56, 73, 80
Lyrical impulse, 82
_Madame Bovary_, 38, 77,110
Meredith, 38, 84
Method in fiction, 41, 48, etc.
Mid-Victorian English novel, 58
_Mirror of the Sea, The_, 16, 21, 27, 30, 32
Nature, 78
_Nigger of the Narcissus_, The, 13, 15. 27, 56, 63, 75, 86
_Nostrcmo_, 14, 18, 43, 49, 56, 79, 90, 96, 97, 102
_Outcast of the Islands, An_, 14, 19, 73, 79, 82, 85
Philosophy, 57
Poland, 9, 24
Realism. 108, 110
_Return, The_, 75
_Richard Feverel,_ 38
_Romance_, 14, 70
Romance, 108. Russian influence, 109, 112
Sea, 8, 28
_Secret Agent, The_, 14, 19, 57, 72, 82, 103
_Secret Sharer, The_, 20
_Set of Six, A_, 20, 82
Shaw, Bernard. 39
Ships, 33
_Smile of Fortune, A_, 20
_Some Réminiscences_, 21, 22, 26
_Sordello_, 102
_Spectator, The_, 12
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 38, 93
Style, 82
Swinnerton, Frink, 106, 107, 116
_Tales of Unrest_, 15, 75
Tchekov, 60
Themes, 54
Tolstoi, 114
_T. P.‘s Weekly_, 18
_Trtmolino_, 35
Trollope, Anthony, 93
Turgeniev, 20, 84, 114
_'Twixt Land and Sea_, 20 56
_Typhoon_, 14, 17, 30, 56, 61, 75, 79, 80, 82
_Under Western Eyes_, 19, 57, 72, 82
_Une Vie_, 38
_Victory_, 14, 118
Wells, H. G., 39, 59, 110
Wharton, Mrs, 59, 83
Whitman, 81
_Yellow Book, The_, 38
_Youth_, 14, 17, 30, 73, 79, 80, 82
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