Joseph Conrad

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.

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 have 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 predecessors; 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 his 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 Sisters or The 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, beginning 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, we 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 long 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, fluffy 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, M'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 we 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 placed 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 a 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 genius 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 cab 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 work, 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.