Such were the characters of the early books – Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Youth; and these books, in spite of the changes and fashions, are surely secure of their place among our classics. But they reach this height by means of qualities which the simple story of adventure, as Marryat told it, or Fenimore Cooper, has no claim to possess. For it is clear that to admire and celebrate such men and such deeds, romantically, wholeheartedly and with the fervour of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at once inside and out. To praise their silence one must possess a voice. To appreciate their endurance one must be sensitive to fatigue. One must be able to live on equal terms with the Whalleys and the Singletons and yet hide from their suspicious eyes the very qualities which enable one to understand them. Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow. ‘A most discreet understanding man’, he said of Marlow.
Marlow was one of those born observers who are happiest in retirement. Marlow liked nothing better than to sit on deck, in some obscure creek of the Thames, smoking and recollecting; smoking and speculating; sending after his smoke beautiful rings of words until all the summer’s night became a little clouded with tobacco smoke. Marlow, too, had a profound respect for the men with whom he had sailed; but he saw the humour of them. He nosed out and described in masterly fashion those livid creatures who prey successfully upon the clumsy veterans. He had a flair for human deformity; his humour was sardonic. Nor did Marlow live entirely wreathed in the smoke of his own cigars. He had a habit of opening his eyes suddenly and looking – at a rubbish heap, at a port, at a shop counter – and then complete in its burning ring of light that thing is flashed upon the mysterious background. Introspective and analytical, Marlow was aware of this peculiarity. He said the power came to him suddenly. He might, for instance, overhear a French officer murmur ‘Mon Dieu, how the time passes!’
Nothing [he comments] could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for me with a moment of vision. It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts … Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening, when we see, hear, understand, ever so much – everything – in a flash, before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before.
Picture after picture he painted thus upon that dark background; ships first and foremost, ships at anchor, ships flying before the storm, ships in harbour; he painted sunsets and dawns; he painted the night; he painted the sea in every aspect; he painted the gaudy brilliancy of Eastern ports, and men and women, their houses and their attitudes. He was an accurate and unflinching observer, schooled to that ‘absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations’, which, Conrad wrote, ‘an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation’. And very quietly and compassionately Marlow sometimes lets fall a few words of epitaph which remind us, with all that beauty and brilliancy before our eyes, of the darkness of the background.
Thus a rough and ready distinction would make us say that it is Marlow who comments, Conrad who creates. It would lead us, aware that we are on dangerous ground, to account for that change which, Conrad tells us, took place when he had finished the last story in the Typhoon volume – ‘a subtle change in the nature of the inspiration’ – by some alteration in the relationship of the two old friends. ‘… it seemed somehow that there was nothing more in the world to write about.’ It was Conrad, let us suppose, Conrad the creator, who said that, looking back with sorrowful satisfaction upon the stories he had told; feeling as he well might that he could never better the storm in The Nigger of the Narcissus, or render more faithful tribute to the qualities of British seamen than he had done already in Youth and Lord Jim. It was then that Marlow the commentator reminded him how, in the course of nature, one must grow old, sit smoking on deck, and give up seafaring. But, he reminded him, those strenuous years had deposited their memories; and he even went so far perhaps as to hint that, though the last word might have been said about Captain Whalley and his relation to the universe, there remained on shore a number of men and women whose relationships, though of a more personal kind, might be worth looking into. If we further suppose that there was a volume of Henry James on board and that Marlow gave his friend the book to take to bed with him, we may seek support in the fact that it was in 1905 that Conrad wrote a very fine essay upon that master.
For some years then it was Marlow who was the dominant partner. Nostromo, Chance, The Arrow of Gold represent that stage of the alliance which some will continue to find the richest of all. The human heart is more intricate than the forest, they will say; it has its storms; it has its creatures of the night; and if as novelist you wish to test man in all his relationships, the proper antagonist is man; his ordeal is in society, not solitude. For them there will always be a peculiar fascination in the books where the light of those brilliant eyes falls not only upon the waste of waters but upon the heart in its perplexity. But it must be admitted that, if Marlow thus advised Conrad to shift his angle of vision, the advice was bold. For the vision of a novelist is both complex and specialized; complex because behind his characters and apart from them must stand something stable to which he relates them; specialized because since he is a single person with one sensibility the aspects of life in which he can believe with conviction are strictly limited. So delicate a balance is easily disturbed. After the middle period Conrad never again was able to bring his figures into perfect relation with their background. He never believed in his later and more highly sophisticated characters as he had believed in his early seamen; because when he had to indicate their relation to that other unseen world of the novelists, the world of values and convictions, he was far less sure what those values were. Then, over and over again, a single phrase, ‘He steered with care’, coming at the end of a storm, carried in it a whole morality. But in this more crowded and complicated world such terse phrases became less and less appropriate. Complex men and women of many interests and relations would not submit to so summary a judgment; or, if they did, much that was important in them escaped the verdict. And yet it was very necessary to Conrad’s genius, with its luxuriant and romantic power, to have some law by which its creations could be tried. Essentially – such remained his creed – this world of civilized and self-conscious people is based upon ‘a few very simple ideas’; but where, in the world of thoughts and personal relations, are we to find them? There are no masts in drawing rooms; the typhoon does not test the worth of politicians and business men. Seeking and not finding such supports, the world of Conrad’s later period has about it an involuntary obscurity, an inconclusiveness, almost a disillusionment which baffles and fatigues. We lay hold in the dusk only of the old nobilities and sonorities: fidelity, compassion, honour, service – beautiful always, but now a little wearily reiterated, as if times had changed. Perhaps it was Marlow who was at fault. His habit of mind was a trifle sedentary. He had sat upon deck too long; splendid in soliloquy, he was less apt in the give and take of conversation; and those ‘moments of vision’, flashing and fading, do not serve as well as steady lamplight to illumine the ripple of life and its long, gradual years. Above all, perhaps he did not take into account how, if Conrad was to create, it was essential first that he should believe.
Therefore, though we shall make expeditions into the later books and bring back wonderful trophies, large tracts of them will remain by most of us untrodden. It is the earlier books – Youth, Lord Jim, Typhoon, The Nigger of the Narcissus – that we shall read in their entirety. For when the question is asked, what of Conrad will survive and where in the ranks of novelists we are to place him, these books, with their air of telling us something very old and perfectly true which had lain hidden but is now
revealed, will come to mind and make such questions and comparisons seem a little futile. Complete and still, very chaste and very beautiful, they rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way first one star comes out and then another.
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
There are, it must be admitted, some highly formidable tracts in English literature: and chief among them that jungle, forest, and wilderness which is the Elizabethan drama. For many reasons, not here to be examined, Shakespeare stands out: Shakespeare, who has had the light on him from his day to ours; Shakespeare, who towers highest when looked at from the level of his own contemporaries. But the plays of the lesser Elizabethans – Greene, Dekker, Peele, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher – to adventure into that wilderness is for the ordinary reader an ordeal, an upsetting experience which plies him with questions, harries him with doubts, alternately delights and vexes him with pleasures and pains. For we are apt to forget, reading, as we tend to do, only the masterpieces of a bygone age, how great a power the body of a literature possesses to impose itself: how it will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and rends us; flouts our preconceptions, questions principles which we had got into the habit of taking for granted, and in fact splits us into two parts as we read, making us, even as we enjoy, yield our ground or stick to our guns.
At the outset in reading an Elizabethan play we are overcome by the extraordinary discrepancy between the Elizabethan view of reality and our own. The reality to which we have grown accustomed is, speaking roughly, based upon the life and death of some knight called Smith, who succeeded his father in the family business of pitwood importers, timber merchants and coal exporters, was well known in political, temperance, and Church circles, did much for the poor of Liverpool, and died last Wednesday of pneumonia while on a visit to his son at Muswell Hill. That is the world we know. That is the reality which our poets and novelists have to expound and illuminate. Then we open the first Elizabethan play that comes to hand and read how
I once did see
In my young travels through Armenia
An angry unicorn in his full career
Charge with too swift a foot a jeweller
That watch’d him for the treasure of his brow
And ere he could get shelter of a tree
Nail him with his rich antlers to the earth.
Where is Smith, we ask; where is Liverpool? And the groves of Elizabethan drama echo ‘Where?’ Exquisite is the delight, sublime the relief, of being set free to wander in the land of the unicorn and the jeweller, among dukes and grandees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women, as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering, as they fall, imprecations of superb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. But soon the low, the relentless, voice which, if we wish to identify it, we must suppose typical of a reader fed on modern English literature, and French and Russian, asks why, then, with all this to stimulate and enchant, these old plays are for long stretches of time so intolerably dull? Is it not that literature, if it is to keep us on the alert through five acts or thirty-two chapters, must somehow be based on Smith, have one toe touching Liverpool, take off into whatever heights it pleases from reality? We are not so purblind as to suppose that a man, because his name is Smith and he lives at Liverpool, is therefore ‘real’. We know indeed that this reality is a chameleon quality: the fantastic becoming as we grow used to it often the closest to the truth, the sober the farthest from it, and nothing proving a writer’s greatness more than his capacity to consolidate his scene by the use of what, until he touched them, seemed wisps of cloud and threads of gossamer. Our contention merely is that there is a station, somewhere in mid air, whence Smith and Liverpool can be seen to the best advantage; that the great artist is the man who knows where to place himself above the shifting scenery; that, while he never loses sight of Liverpool, he never sees it in the wrong perspective. The Elizabethans bore us, then, because their Smiths are all changed to dukes, their Liverpools to fabulous islands and palaces in Genoa. Instead of keeping a proper poise above life, they soar miles into the empyrean, where nothing is visible for long hours at a time but clouds at their revelry; and a cloud landscape is not ultimately satisfactory to human eyes. The Elizabethans bore us because they suffocate our imaginations rather than set them to work.
Still, though potent enough, the boredom of an Elizabethan play is of a different quality altogether from the boredom which a nineteenth-century play, a Tennyson or a Henry Taylor play, inflicts. The riot of images, the violent volubility of language, all that cloys and satiates in the Elizabethans, nevertheless appears to be drawn up with a roar, as a feeble fire is sucked up by a newspaper. There is, even in the worst, an intermittent bawling vigour which gives us the sense, in our quiet arm-chairs, of ostlers and orange girls catching up the lines, flinging them back, hissing or stamping applause. But the deliberate drama of the Victorian age is evidently written in a study. It has for audience ticking clocks and rows of classics bound in half morocco. There is no stamping, no applause. With all its faults – its patriotism, rhetoric and bombast – the Elizabethan audience leavened the mass with fire. The lines are flung and hurried into existence and reach the same impromptu felicities, have the same lip-moulded profusion and unexpectedness which speech sometimes achieves, but seldom, in our day, the deliberate, solitary pen. Indeed, half the work of dramatists, one feels, was done in the Elizabethan age by the public.
Against that, however, is to be set the fact that the influence of the public was in many respects detestable. To its door we must lay the greatest infliction that Elizabethan drama puts upon us – the plot; the incessant, improbable, almost unintelligible convolutions which presumably gratified the spirit of an excitable and unlettered public actually in the playhouse, but only confuse and fatigue a reader with the book before him. Undoubtedly something must happen; undoubtedly a play where nothing happens is an impossibility. But we have a right to demand (since the Greeks have proved that it is perfectly possible) that what happens shall have an end in view. It shall agitate great emotions, bring into existence memorable scenes, stir the actors to say what could not be said without this stimulus. Nobody can fail to remember the plot of the Antigone because what happens is so closely bound up with the emotions of the actors that we remember the people and the plot at one and the same time. But who can tell us what happens in The White Devil, or in The Maid’s Tragedy, except by remembering the story apart from the emotions which it has aroused? As for the lesser Elizabethans, like Greene and Kyd, the complexities of their plots are so great, and the violence which these plots demand so terrific, that the actors themselves are obliterated, and emotions which, according to our convention, deserve the most careful investigation, the most delicate analysis, are clean sponged off the slate. And the result is inevitable. Outside Shakespeare and perhaps Ben Jonson, there are no characters in Elizabethan drama; only violences whom we know so little that we can scarcely care what becomes of them. Take any hero or heroine in those early plays – Bellimperia in The Spanish Tragedy will serve as well as another – and can we honestly say that we care a jot for the unfortunate lady who runs the whole gamut of human misery to kill herself in the end? No more than for an animated broomstick, we must reply; and in a work dealing with men and women the prevalence of broomsticks is a drawback. But The Spanish Tragedy is admittedly a crude forerunner, chiefly valuable because such primitive efforts lay bare the formidable framework which greater dramatists could modify but had to use. Ford, it is claimed, is of the school of Stendhal and of Flaubert. Ford is a psychologist. Ford is an analyst. ‘This man’, says Mr. Havelock Ellis, ‘writes of women not as a dramatist nor as a lover but as one who has searched intimately and felt with instinctive sympathy the fibres of their hearts.’
The play – ’Tis Pity She’s a Who
re – upon which this judgment is chiefly based shows us the whole nature of Annabella spun from pole to pole in a series of tremendous vicissitudes. First her brother tells her that he loves her; next she confesses her love for him; next finds herself with child by him; next forces herself to marry Soranzo; next is discovered; next repents; finally is killed, and it is her lover and brother who kills her. To trace the trail of feelings which such crises and calamities might be expected to breed in a woman of ordinary sensibility might have filled volumes. A dramatist, of course, has no volumes to fill. He is forced to contract. Even so, he can illumine; he can reveal enough for us to guess the rest. But what is it that we know, without using microscopes and splitting hairs, about the character of Annabella? Gropingly we make out that she is a spirited girl, with her defiance of her husband when he abuses her, her snatches of Italian song, her ready wit, her simple glad love-making. But of character as we understand the word there is no trace. We do not know how she reaches her conclusions, only that she has reached them. Nobody describes her. She is always at the height of her passion, never at its approach. Compare her with Anna Karenina. The Russian woman is flesh and blood, nerves and temperament, has heart, brain, body, and mind, where the English girl is flat and crude as a face painted on a playing card; she is without depth, without range, without intricacy. But as we say this we know that we have missed something. We have let the meaning of the play slip through our hands. We have ignored the emotion which has been accumulating, because it has accumulated in places where we have not expected to find it. We have been comparing the play with prose, and the play, after all, is poetry.
The play is poetry, we say, and the novel prose. Let us attempt to obliterate detail, and place the two before us side by side, feeling, so far as we can, the angles and edges of each, recalling each, so far as we are able, as a whole. Then at once the prime differences emerge: the long, leisurely accumulated novel; the little contracted play: the emotion all split up, woven together slowly, and gradually massed into a whole in the novel; the emotion concentrated, generalized, heightened in the play. What moments of intensity, what phrases of astonishing beauty the play shot at us!
Genius and Ink Page 11
