by Hugh Walpole
The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources — the majesty, power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is the life of the sea.
Conrad’s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism, her deceits, her cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this:
“The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown ... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.”
Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave, and he is that because he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right, and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never again, not even in Typhoon and Youth, to write with such free and spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
The Mirror of the Sea forms then the best possible introduction to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later analysis of Conrad’s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from “poor Captain B —— , who used to suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was approaching a coast,” to the dramatic Dominic (“from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had never smiled in his life”), are silent and thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast. Captain B —— dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in the quiet room, “his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea”— “poor P — ,” with “his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in Punch, his little oddities — like his strange passion for borrowing looking-glasses, for instance” — that captain who “did everything with an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations, but the result somehow was always on stereotyped lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart” — that other captain in whom “through a touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament” — here are little sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well, Marlowe, Captain McWhirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects, such “cases” that it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the Sea — that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and his picture.
Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship that The Mirror of the Sea, ultimately, has most to do.
As other men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their crime in speaking of “casting” an anchor when the true technicality is “brought up”— “to an anchor” understood. In the chapter on “Yachts” he provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences— “the art of handling ships is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.”... “A ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to mark.”
Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from her birth, in no ordered sequence of events, but admitting us ever more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy, new, in the dock, “her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her.”... “She looked modest to me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men.”
Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he salutes her grace and spirit — he echoes, with all the implied irony of contrast, his companion’s “Ships are all right....”
He explains the many kinds of ships that there are — the rogues, the wickedly malicious, the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be severe before such a world of fine spirits.
Finally, in the episode of the Tremolino and her tragic end (an end that has in it a suggestion of that later story, Freya of the Seven Islands), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Cæsar, he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this material. He gives us the soul of the Tremolino, the soul of Dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his house of romance.
This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
II. THE NOVELIST
I
In discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask — as to the Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel, as, for instance, The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain, but these thre
e divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his position as novelist and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist — that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to those histories.
Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties; but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called Evan Harrington was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did Almayer’s Folly in the early nineties, although the wonderful Richard Feverel had already preceded it.
With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where Madame Bovary and Une Vie showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that things were done. The Yellow Book sprang into a bright existence, flamed, and died. “Art for Art’s sake” was slain by the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the Boer War completed an old one.
Of the whole question of Conrad’s place in the history of the English novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of The Yellow Book, passing through all the realistic reaction that followed the collapse of æstheticism, seeing the old period washed away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the work that he had to do.
II
The form in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently attacked.
His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an instant, an imaginary case. He has seen in some foreign port a quarrel between two seamen. One has “knifed” the other, and the quarrel has been watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, oratio recta, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the girl are. He describes the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. Seen standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. That leads one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for a witness of that we must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. Once she was ...
And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of the most difficult of methods, this manner of narration, as a poignant witness to Conrad’s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says: “It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,” and his amazement at Conrad’s patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that in What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside the intricate but masterly form of The Awkward Age the duplicate narration of Chance seems child’s-play. Mr Henry James makes the mistake of speaking as though Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the Ancient Mariner and all the seamen before and after him. Conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had generally come to him. He wishes to deny the effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to him. He must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth of it then must he have two or three.
Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: Lord Jim, Nostromo and Chance. It is possible that Lord Jim was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence. Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the Patna, or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation of these four men Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the Patna: “He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too — got up in a soiled sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody’s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.” There are also two other “no-account chaps with him” — a sallow-faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and, with these three, Jim, “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.” Here are these four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist’s thrill. We watch our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go? We are thrilled with the suspense.
Conrad, having discovered his subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. “I was not there myself,” he tells us, “but I can show you someone who was.” He introduces us to a first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. “Now tell your story.” He has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone’s disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself go. He is bothered now by no quest
ion but the thorough investigation of his discovery. What had Jim done that he should be in such a case? We must have the story of the loss of the Patna, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and Jim’s fine, chivalrous soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. At present, so absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. The illusion is perfect. We come to the inquiry. One of the judges is Captain Brierley. “What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah! but I must tell you! Most extraordinary thing!”
The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the Patna, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author’s hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the trouble is that we are no longer assured now of the truth and reality of his story. He saw — we cannot for an instant doubt it — that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on — that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe — and at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, habits and histories. That then is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled. Marlowe has certainly been compelled to face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.
