by Hugh Walpole
When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the boy Stevie take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because he is, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.” But Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later credulity — he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries. Sometimes, as in The Return, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are “a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique — it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled blankets that lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat.... Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
And this room is set in the very heart of the forests— “the forests unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven — and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic — the lyrical pulse beating through realistic detail and transforming it. I will, however, select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about Nostromo may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
The theme of Nostromo is the domination of the silver of the Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the white head of Higuerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad, then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their evening meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias ... and above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and princesses passing — but the detail of it is built with careful realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns for us.
Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson’s chart in Treasure Island. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s treasure. If any attentive reader of Nostromo were put down in Sulaco tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a high official of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and staffed, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s-length, through an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse — a strong-hearted but persevering black brute, with a hammer head — you would have seen in the street dozing moti
onless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of the side-walk!”
How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation of some reader: “Yes — those orange-trees! It was just like that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”! — and can we not sniff something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume!
He is able, therefore, upon this foundation of a minute and scrupulous realism to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in Nostromo at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet, working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the heart of his work from the first line of Almayer’s Folly to the last line of Victory. Nostromo is not simply the history of certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It is that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for its interpretation....
When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain limitations.
III
As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men.
It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they — from his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat. Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain — as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to whom human achievements are nothing — lust of treasure.
McWhirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap — the victim is always in his power.
It comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of brain — Marlowe, Decoud, Stein — are melancholy and ironic: “If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea captains.
This then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, for an instant, hamper his interest — that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of specimens — but at the end of it all, as with his own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave ...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies.”
Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles — Robert Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning’s interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual case — he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in Sordello the most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is not this exactly what we may say of Nostromo? Mr Chesterton has written of Browning: “He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in The Secret Agent, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both
investigate these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, McWhirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
Finally, The Ring and the Book, with its multiplied witnesses, its statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of that superb building — here we can see the highest pinnacle of that temple that has Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo amongst its other turrets, buttresses and towers.