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The Genius Of Joseph Conrad

Death has loosed his shafts from a full quiver this winter, and one by one the greatest have gone from us. Parratt, Villiers, Stanford and Frederick Bridge, among the musicians, Alfred Marshall, the economist, W. H. Hudson, and now Joseph Conrad. It is impossible to hear the news of Conrad's death unmoved. Even now, with thirty years of his writing to engage us, we anticipated with eagerness his each new novel. The production never ceased to be a literary event, the more so as we knew that the prying critics seeking a sign of his waning powers would find his armour flawless and their eagerly sharpened arrows of no avail. Those men who had pounced upon Bennett's "Love Match" with shouts of joy, who are able triumphantly to remind Wells as he broadcasts each vision of a new Utopia that he is no longer the author of "Ann Veronica" and "Tono Bungay," had come to regard Conrad as inviolable. Conrad's latest novels were still part of his attitude, he had not changed since years ago in "Heart of Darkness" and "The End of the Tether" he gave us his complete philosophy; and even those who were irritated beyond measure by the Dona Rita of "The Arrow of Gold," and who complained that "The Rover" was really only an expanded short story, could not deny that there was yet the stuff of greatness in these books, and that "The Rescue" had given us the original Conrad in all his pristine glory.

Were it not for the manner in which Thomas Hardy determinedly clings to life at eighty-six, we should be able to mark the passing of Conrad as that of our greatest novelist. He is the greatest apostle of the cult of Chesterton, the most splendid of the romantics of his generation, perhaps of ours. An age of science has not destroyed "the possibilities of romantic experience or of romantic imagination."And Conrad was qualified for this from the first. What more romantic than the life of Josef Konrad Korzeniowski himself—born a Pole, learning his future language in a school, drifting to Marseilles, where he took his first ship, and exploring all the rich and glowing treasures of the East? He was that most romantic of things, the captain of a sailer in the last days before the triumph of steam. He was fated to spend the best years of his manhood in the most mysterious seas of the world. At the age of thirty-eight no printed book stood to his credit, though in his twenty years at sea he had read both French and English literatures widely, evidently with the thought of becoming an author. And his first volume, "Almayer's Folly," was begun at sea, carried in manuscript through long years, "nourished in imagination," and finally penned during a brief stay on shore. Yet that might have been delayed a decade had it not been for the fact that Conrad consulted a Cambridge man, whom he carried as passenger, on the merits of the unfinished work. Was it worth completing? he asked. "Distinctly," said the Englishman, with admirable economy of epithet. Conrad rounded off the book, and a most splendid literary career began.

"Almayer's Folly" was well received. In the chorus of praise it is amusing to find one critic in a deeply revered journal hedging himself with the qualification that the author might do for the Malay Archipelago what Kipling had done for India. The time, you will remember, was an age of new backgrounds. Novelists

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were going abroad (some of them, Kingsley fashion, to places which they had never seen and described very inaccurately) in their stories; an old England was discovering that life in young countries was full of colours high and garish, that "there as well . . . was drawn with the same elaboration of detail, coloured with the same tints. Only in the cruel serenity of the sky, under the merciless brilliance of the sun the dazzled eye misses the delicate detail, sees only the strong outlines, while the colours, in the steady light, seem crude and without shadow." This was what Conrad said in the preface to his first book. But with him the backgrounds never became the "local colour" of the imaginatively barren. Sometimes they were all-pervading, as in "An Outcast of the Islands," sometimes Nature herself was a protagonist as in "Typhoon." He has written of ships and the sea because he was a sailor and knew them, because he had a vivid sense of the wonder and beauty of both; but he has written also, and always, of the heart of man.

From his first book and its sequel (" An Outcast of the Islands") Conrad went on at once to produce his best work. "The nigger of the Narcissus" (1897), "Youth" (1902), "Typhoon" (1903), "Lord Jim" (1900), and "Nostromo" (1904) are a group which has no equal in any language. Everywhere one sees beauties, finds moments of amazement, witnesses that perfection of presentation which means great art. There have been many novels since then, eight or nine in all, and holding such fine work as is to be found in "Twixt Land and Sea," "Within the Tides," and "A Set of Six;" and in some cases Conrad has deserted the sea and journeyed to Russia (" Under Western Eyes"), or remained safely at home (" The Secret Agent"). And always the tale has been well told; the same strong style, possessed from the first, has explored the most complex situations, the most obscure corners of being, and has shone in pages of acute analysis or of sonorous beauty. But nothing could surpass those early works, the stark realities of "The Nigger of the Narcissus," the epic grandeur of "Nostromo," with its creation of a whole country's politics and finance and social life, and the gathering of all the threads together at the close; the blending vision of "Youth." "Heart of Darkness" and "The End of the Tether" we may add to the list. "The Rescue," also, may join its peers. But Conrad was Conrad then.

Much has been written of the Conrad manner; his changing point of view, his habit of narrating a story in the first person, and of calling on several persons to do the relating, of his continual harking back to earlier history, and of his diffuseness. Thus, in "Chance," we have "some person unspecified" relating what Marlowe told him about what Fyne told him about the early life of Flora de Barral, and in "Lord Jim" an opening in the third person and then a long zigzag narrative by a spectator of the hero's subsequent career. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" the story is told by an eye-witness, but the first person singular is never used until the last page is reached. Thus in "Nostromo" the author turns back to give us the early history of Giorgo Viola, who fought with Garibaldi, or the reason for the bitterness of old Doctor Monygham; and in "The End of the Tether" he inserts a parenthetical history of Captain Whalley.

But the point of view is always clear, the narration never confused. Even in "Chance" one always knows where one stands, and, his hundred page digression in "Nostromo" over, Conrad pro page 18 ceeds on his way naturally and inevitably. To the charge of excessive elaboration he has replied himself. Of "Chance" he says: "Captain Anthony's determination led him a long and roundabout course, and that is why this book is a long book. A critic has remarked that if I had selected another method of composition and taken a little more trouble the tale would have been told in about two hundred pages. I confess I do not perceive exactly the bearings of such criticism or even the use of such a remark. No doubt that by selecting a certain method and taking great pains the whole story might have been written out on a cigarette paper."

Underlying all Conrad's work is a unifying philosophy. Shanks declares that the novelist has retold the same story over and over again, that his attitude rests back upon a very few simple ideas, and, among them, by his own confession, the idea of fidelity. It may be so. Conrad has held to his belief. He has no illusions about life, and yet he has a fine idea of humanity. Knowing, as Anatole France does, that the world one day will grow cold, he has painted in his books what the economists call man's conflict with a reluctant environment. To Conrad it is a constant source of wonder that we are alive and on the world at all. Further than that, he is astonished at the facts that we retain our precarious foothold and that the scene of our struggle can be so remarkable. He has been called a pessimist, as any man who sees things steadily and whole is charged, some time or other, with being a pessimist. But his work is as much above pessimism as the stars in their courses. Seeking a comparison, one thinks of Flaubert and then of Dostoieffsky, and then realises almost with a shock that Conrad, too, had Russian blood in his veins.

C.Q.P.