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A Note On Joseph Conrad

Ever since the news of the death of Joseph Conrad was cabled out sentences have been running in my head, sentences which knelled the passing of a great man of a very different kind. They are from among the moving words in which Mr. Morley, in May, 1873, recorded the death of his friend John Stuart Mill. "The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn, for one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficial purpose. . ." The slightly Victorian turn of expression makes it seem odder; for, indeed, what is there in common between the clear flow of Mill's intellect, the teacher and social philosopher born, and the subtle currents and sombre convolutions of the mind of the greatest romantic since Scott? I do not know; it may be but a fancy of my own, a mere association of words written under the stress of emotion. Yet a great artist is surely also "one of the greater among the servants of humanity."He follows no unworthy purpose, he sets his hand to no small work. His accomplishment is permanent, part of the eternal warp and woof of things, as is the life, the achievement or the failure, of the saint or the reformer. He may consciously serve no ethical end, but his creation, if it be beautiful and significant, will supersede our small morals, and sum up and transcend all the variety of our aspirations. So with Joseph Conrad—he has created with toil and labour (as who knows who has read his Personal Record), and his creation, now that he is dead, stands strong, beautiful, and transcendent. I do not use transcendent in any extravagant sense, but as it must be used of all great artists; consider Conrad's work as a whole and it cannot be denied that he is of these. Sift from the rolling flood of the English novel, from its eighteenth century source to the shoreless sea into which it has in our days poured itself, those truly valuable infrequent specimens of gold; is it not certain that some at least of Conrad's will be among the elect, chosen and treasured and made of great regard?

There are great ideas lying at the root of all his work; ideas which underlie the nature of man. He calls them by their Latin names—sagacity, integrity, fidelity, compassion. One does not need his own statement for this, nor for the recognition of his essential sanity, tolerance, lack of both an "absolute optimism" (in which he sees fanaticism and intolerance) and an immoderate pessimism. And yet he is profoundly tragic. "Those who read me," he says, "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, among others, on the idea of Fidelity." The tragedy arises from the conflict of these ideas with circumstance; the impact of the world on the qualities which sustain it. He is thoroughly, organically romantic in his conceptions and his style; but fate takes charge of his books as it takes charge of a Greek drama. His work indeed as a whole forms an epic of fate—a fate never convenient, never dragged in by the scruff of the neck to relieve an impossible situation, to provide a spectacular denouement or a happy ending, never petty, never merely God feeling irritable; but the strong unseen implacable force, brooding apart from the action but of it, felt and feared by his reader. It is part of the pro page 20 found irony of his later work—it is a fate and an irony shared, I suppose, by Hardy alone. But it is different from that of Hardy. The difference is hard to define; in Hardy it seems there is something of mockery; in Conrad, mockery never.

This irony, this defeat of men by fate, recurs again and again in his books; it is in Lord Jim, in Victory, in Under Western Eyes, in Nostromo, in The Rescue. It is, of course, the fault of the men—ultimately. There has been some little wavering in the primal loyalty; or perhaps a conflict of loyalties. It is their fault, but we cannot blame them. And the defeat, in the last analysis, is almost always also a victory. In Victory, indeed, this is emphasised by the very name of the book—irony become obvious without losing its point. It is rarely so marked; but there is this final overcoming of circumstance, even while circumstance triumphs, in the end of Lord Jim, at the close of that masterpiece of wonderful prose and wonderful incident (however the critics may wrangle over its form); in the way in which Razumov faces the revolutionists in Laspara's house; in those tremendous words with which on the last page of The Rescue Lingard sums up the cumulative effect of those four hundred pages of strife—and in so doing sums up his destiny and his renunciation—" 'Steer north,' he said."Lingard," that simple soul . . . possessed by the greatness of the idea," with his "tenderness expressed violently; a tenderness that could only be satisfied by backing human beings against their own destiny"; Lingard, whose "headlong fierceness of purpose invested his obscure design of conquest with the proportions of a great enterprise "—Lingard and Lord Jim, who," on his side, had that faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer "—these are perhaps the typical Conrad figures. And yet to leave out Marlow would be ridiculous. Marlow the sane, Marlow the philosophical, Marlow the narrator, with his understanding of motive, his comprehension of visions, slowly unwinding his tales beneath the infinite stars on Schomberg's verandah, or in the gathering dusk up some silent reach of the Thames, is part of the immortal company. Marlow, one imagines, sees man's life, and we see the lives of all the great figures of his creator, as ultimately a gesture—a superb gesture of disdain, of unconquered integrity or recovered fidelity, in the face of the implacable infinite. Fate; fate intolerable and inevitable; yet fate defeated—calamity, but heroic calamity—that is the thesis. Ever the idea is the greater: "In the destructive element immerse! ... To follow the dream and again to follow the dream—and so—always-usque ad finem ..."

This short article set out merely to note this sense of fate which looms over some of the greatest of Conrad's work, which is at once partly background, partly protagonist. Nor is it necessary to discuss at length the other attributes of the man as a writer. A reading of his books will show how beautiful and sure, how truly masterly, is his handling of that perfect instrument, his prose; how shaped to his will, how clear, how vivid, even in its subtlest and most far-flung coils. The dark and vivid beauty of his language, like his pervading romanticism, is, indeed, innate and organic.^* It page 21 would have been hard for him to write a sentence that in its place would seem commonplace, undistinguished, without significance There are in his earlier work infrequently gaucheries, an imperfectly appreciated idiom, more often a foreign idiom brought over bodily into English; but nothing merely banal, nothing of the wearisome flatness of the hack. As if his contact with the sea and its vast experience, its peculiar joys and mysterious tribulations, had given him an unfailing method of approach to the new medium in which he was to work. And perhaps it was but natural that he should pay back the debt; it is well paid, as witness the setting of half his books, witness the Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, the lucid beauty of the Mirror of the Sea.

He has a sense, too, of the purpose and significance of his art. You will find most of what he has to say in the meditative, humorous, somewhat wandering pages of his Personal Record; but you will find its classic utterance in the suppressed Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus. And the philosophy of his art is the philosophy of his life. The man is consistent. The fidelity, the sagacity, the integrity of the master-mariner, the voyager on strange seas of human thought and imagination and passion, are in him. Like every great traveller, he is an observer—the observer of genius, who transmutes what he sees into a new creation. He even at times makes observation his philosophy—"And the unwearied self-forgetful attention to every phase of the living universe reflected in our consciousness may be our appointed task on this earth—a task in which fate has perhaps engaged nothing of us except our conscience, gifted with a voice in order to bear true testimony to the visible wonder, the haunting terror, the infinite passion, and the illimitable serenity; to the supreme law and the abiding mystery of the sublime spectacle."

Someone recently said in the London Mercury—was it the ineffable Shanks?—that Conrad had not yet produced his masterpiece, and now at his age it was perhaps hopeless to expect it. A curious judgment, and a curious reflection on our English critics if this one were typical. In the absence of Mr. Shanks' authentic masterpiece, the now forever lost paragon of perfection, we must perforce content ourselves with some of the second-rate. Which ones they must be in a winnowing-out it is hard to say. Nor is it necessary. Of all that our generation hands down to the rest of the century, we may be sure that there are figures of Conrad's that will persist. They are of the novels, they are of the short stories, they are of the memories, they are in us and of our being, for a good many years at least—James Wait, Almayer, Lingard, Heyst, Dominic, Dona Rita, Mrs. Travers, Schomberg, the deathly Mr. Jones, Captain Whalley, Captain Mac Whirr, Captain Anthony, Nina, Miss Haldin, Peter Ivanovitch, Mrs. Gould, Dr. Monygham, the great Capataz de Cargadores, Hassim, Immada, Jaffir, Cornelius, Jim, Marlow—these and as many more; they are a portion of our living brain. So it is with a peculiar personal sadness that one sighs one's "ave atque vale" after the irrevocable loss of their creator, this master-mariner, this mysterious foreigner who is so much of us; the strangest figure perhaps of all our long literary history, the most profoundly romantic, not the least great. And let the words with which we remember him be those from his own Suppressed Preface, among the most significant which even he wrote. They are on the purposes of art:—

"To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of page 22 the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished—behold! all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile—and the return to an eternal rest."

Who will say that he, the laborious workman of art, shaping his thought to those high purposes did not accomplish more than once that task which he had set himself?

J.C.B.