Joseph Conrad

I

IN discussing 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 and 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; but 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.

Mr 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

The 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 describes 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 votary 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 him. 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 on 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. Conrad, 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. One 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 reality 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 face, 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 the 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 melodrama, 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 eager 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 Lord 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 arrives 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.

It 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 in almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats—unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his irony.

He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see at once that the odds are too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings and they will not quail." They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: "You see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and I." The theme of Almayer's Folly is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of The Nigger of the Narcissus the struggle of many simple men against the presence of death, of Lord Jim, again, the struggle of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth). Nostromo, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first. Chance, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. Typhoon, the very epitome of Conrad's themes, is the struggle of M'Whirr against the storm (here again it is M'Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the storm's confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In Heart of Darkness the victory is to the forest. In The End of the Tether Captain Whalley, one of Conrad's finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three tales in 'Twixt Land, and Sea are all themes of this kind—the struggle of simple, unimaginative men against forces too strong for them. In The Secret Agent Winnie Verloc, another simple character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In Under Western Eyes Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals.