by Hugh Walpole
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 author’s 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 Bates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the most 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 serape twisted on the cantle, 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 Sulaco, 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, Razumov, 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 these 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 wildernesses. Although each work, from the vast Nostromo to the minutely perfect Secret Sharer, 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
I
The poet 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 Conrad’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 glance 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’s determination 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 fact, 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 like 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 less 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 two 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’envanouissaient 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 fell 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, however, 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 also 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 books, 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 himself 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 the 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 Heart of Darkness, stand by themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We may remember such characters as McWhirr, 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’s When 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 Youth 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 daily 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 extended to the whole vista of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as confined 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 unites them with all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgéniev, 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.
In 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 Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid 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 Dedlocks 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 is potential, it is certain also to have glamour.
The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very strongest gifts and, if 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 of 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.