University of Virginia Library

1. I. HIS METHODS

It is worth while before passing on to examine more specifically the qualities of Conrad's fiction, to take up for a moment a couple of special articles of comparatively recent date, that of Mr. John A. Macy in the Atlantic Monthly and of John Galsworthy in the Contemporary Review. These articles are singled out from a number of others because, while fairly representative in tone, they were put forth with the semblance of special authority and finality. Mr. Macy, while questioning the greatness of modern writers in general, somewhat dubiously suggests Mr. Conrad as the one possible claimant. He extols Mr. Conrad's lofty ideals, and then, on the ground that a writer of such lofty standards must be judged with exceptional rigidity, proceeds to devote a large part of his article to picking flaws in the construction of his author's several stories, as measured by the pocket rule of cut-and-dried technique. The sum and substance of what he has to say is to blame Conrad for not having done as other and lesser writers were contented to do before him—instead of seeking to discover how and why he has succeeded in being splendidly and triumphantly himself.

Mr. Galsworthy's article deserves a brief word for quite a different reason. Here we have a cordial appreciation by a fellow-craftsman who already occupies as dignified a position in his own generation as Mr. Conrad does in his. That Mr. Galsworthy's lack of critical balance is equal to his possession of creative power becomes apparent long before we reach the following paragraph, so extravagant that it largely discounts its own value:

The technical side of Joseph Conrad's work does not especially interest Mr. Galsworthy. He is mainly concerned with the attempt to sum up the essential spirit of Conrad in some epigrammatic, easily portable form, in finding some catch-phrase that sounds like an explanation, and which really is as futile as an attempt to reduce a myriad-sided solid to a plane surface. The Universe, in the words of Mr. Galsworthy, "is always saying: The little part called man is always smaller than the whole!"—the writer who recognises the truth of this possesses, according to him, the cosmic spirit. Mr. Conrad's claim to recognition rests upon the fact that he is unique among novelists in possessing this spirit:

Now, if this were literally true, if Mr. Conrad really believed that a rainbow or a water-spout were of more importance to mankind than man himself: then, instead of proving his claim to greatness by pointing out this fact, Mr. Galsworthy would simply have knocked the idol from his pedestal and proved him to be stuffed with straw. It is all very well to have enough of the cosmic spirit to recognise that in the ultimate scheme of things the part is always smaller than the whole, and that, as a rudimentary principle of physics, a mountain contains more molecules than a man. But Mr. Conrad is not writing for an audience of mountains, but for his fellow-men—and no really good work can be done by any living creature, man, beast or bird, whose chief concern is not with his own species. A member of a beehive would make a pretty poor bee if he were not convinced of the supreme importance of bees.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Conrad's books leave no such impression on the mind of the average reader as they seem to have left upon Mr. Galsworthy. It is almost incredible that any one could read them without feeling, above all else, their vital and tremendous human interest. It is perfectly true that he deals by preference with titanic forces: the unbridled rage of the ocean, the invincible sweep of a wind-driven storm, the unmeasured and impenetrable depths of a tropic forest. But everywhere and always his unit of measurement is man; man measuring his puny strength against the universe, and foredoomed to defeat; yet in his defeat remaining always the focal point of interest.

In order to understand how Mr. Conrad has formed his style and built up his literary creed, it is necessary to keep in mind just a few biographical details. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski—to give him his full original name—was born in the Ukraine in about the year 1857. He comes of an old and illustrious family, distinguished for many services in peace and in war. His father was a poet and critic, and a translator of many English books. When he was still a little lad, he shared the exile of his father and mother, following upon the political disturbances of the early sixties—and it was a result of this exile that his mother lost her life, through the callous refusal of the Russian authorities to allow her time to recover from a dangerous illness. The last thing on earth that his family dreamed of for Conrad was a sea career, and his choice, when announced, aroused much astonishment and some characteristically mild opposition. He has recorded the happenings of a certain day spent with his tutor in the Alps, as being one of the great turning points in his life. "He had long been trying to crush my will," he relates in substance, "and I felt that before we reached the summit of that pass he would succeed." But this was not to be; a chance meeting with others on the way and a sudden turn which the careless talk assumed, touched a certain chord in Conrad; and when they reached the summit, the tutor said to him kindly, "Go your way, I am beaten; you have too much of Don Quixote in you for me to help you." For twenty years, Conrad sailed the waters of the globe, working his way upward in the English merchant-marine service, through all the grades, until he won his Master's certificate and took chief command. There is every reason to believe

that he was as painstaking and admirable a seaman in those days as he now is an author. But he was unique among seamen for his love of reading—for his choice of books and his understanding grasp of them. No one can study Conrad profitably without keeping these all-important formative years in mind; years spent in the unconscious amassing of infinite and priceless material, in the slow absorption of strange and alien personages, exotic and picturesque cities and harbours, fierce and undisciplined regions on the edge of the world; all the stage-settings and raw materials for human drama in the bulk. And all the while that he was unconsciously assimilating his material, Conrad was, with equal unconsciousness, learning how best to use it, by his tireless and voracious reading,—reading of books which some inborn instinct led him to choose with wonderful wisdom. The French writers were his favourites, and he learned his respect of the mot juste from Flaubert, and something of construction from Maupassant. In English, his tastes were similarly healthy. Dickens naturally appealed to him in a mild degree, for he shares with Dickens the love of drawing straight from life odd, grotesque, oftentimes misshapen oddities of humanity, and slightly caricatures them in doing so. But Trollope is an author whose name crops up more frequently in Conrad's autobiographical pages,—and another whose influence is even more potent is Henry James,—Henry James, who, with all his mannerisms, has done more, than any other living master of fiction, to teach those who read him understandingly, the sheer craft of story writing.

These facts: twenty years face to face with hardship and heroism; twenty years of leisure and isolation in which to grow up slowly to a knowledge of precisely how he could make the best use of his material; twenty years to drill himself in a language to which he was a total stranger up to his twentieth year, are a sufficient answer to those critics who were at one time too ready to dismiss Conrad's work lightly, as that of a man who had not learned his craft. The simple truth is that he had learned it with a thoroughness such as is hard to duplicate; that he knows his own reason for every episode, every paragraph, every separate word; that if he makes a mistake, if there are better ways for doing any one particular thing, his fault is at least committed with his eyes open, and in an honest belief that, for him at least, it is the one and only way.

Accordingly, it is well to take up the two reproaches most frequently made against him, and to consider to what extent they are justified. As a matter of fact, it would be easy to take up a hundred apparent faults instead of two, because there is hardly any known rule of technique that Mr. Conrad does not deliberately break when he chooses,—for of what good are rules based on the practice of the older writers save to be broken by the new writer who happens to be big and strong enough to justify his iconoclasm? But the two reproaches in question are: first, that he follows no logical development of a story, but goes zigzagging back and forth, from east to west, from past to future, apparently quite without purpose or orientation. And, secondly, that he has no sense of proportion, that some parts of his stories are inordinately long, and others absurdly short; that he will squander a full length plot on a short story, and amplify a mere episode into four hundred pages. Both these charges are true,—a fact that does not matter in itself, but that does vitally matter if he fails to prove that for his specific purpose his way is the one and only way to get the best result.

Did you ever watch a common garden spider preparing to spin its web? From some apparently irrelevant point on a leaf or branch, it suddenly drops a number of inches to some other equally irrelevant point; then it proceeds at a tangent to a new point of departure, hesitates, retraces its steps, picks up some lost thread, crosses and recrosses its path, pausing to tie a knot here and there,—and all of a sudden this apparently aimless zigzagging takes on a definite design, of perfect and marvelous symmetry. Now, it may be cheerfully granted that this would not be the approved method of knitting stockings or weaving calico; there are some purposes, and worthy ones, where the conventional, straight-ahead method is

praiseworthy. But there are certain types of genius that must work according to their inborn nature: and it happens that Mr. Conrad shares with the spider the genius of the zigzag method, and by the help of it spins fabrics quite as marvellous and inimitable. He cannot help himself; his mind works in that way. When, in Almayer's Folly, he tells us the story of the degeneration of a white man exiled in the heart of the Malay Peninsula, and of his crushing disappointment at the marriage of his half-caste daughter with a native, it is characteristic of him that the story should open when the end is already in sight, and that a majority of the chapters should be concerned with filling in the missing links; still more characteristic that a subsequent volume, The Outcast of the Island, announced as a sequel, should go back to the earlier days of Almayer's prosperity and his daughter's infancy. A still more convincing proof that this is the way in which Mr. Conrad sees a story is that he adopts the same identical method for telling his own biography. A Personal Record is an exceptionally frank and self-revealing document covering Mr. Conrad's entire life, from his earliest recollections down to the present day; but the first of its eight chapters opens during the winter in the early nineties, when he was icebound in the river harbour of Rouen, when he was engaged in writing the tenth chapter of Almayer's Folly,—and no two chapters and scarcely two pages are consecutive in point of time. And the reason for this is so palpable that even a dunce could hardly miss it. The greatest adventure that Mr. Conrad's soul ever underwent was his first experiment in fiction: and accordingly his biography is built up with the deliberate intent of making the genesis of Almayer's Folly, from its inception to its final publication, the one triumphant leitmotiv of his whole life history.

In precisely the same way we may explain the indirect and zigzag progress of his other writings. Your cut-and-dried critic, who insists on measuring a mountain with a footrule and quarrels with it for daring to be out of line, insists also on labelling a certain character hero and another heroine. And, naturally, when this critic notes that his so-called hero drops out of sight for a considerable number of chapters, and, it may be, the heroine vanishes altogether in mid-channel, he feels himself aggrieved and says that the author does not know how to construct. The truth about Mr. Conrad is simply this: he is more likely than not to take some force of nature as his protagonist; in Typhoon, the leading part is taken, not by Captain MacWhirr, nor his under-officer, nor by any one of the two hundred coolies between decks, but by the typhoon itself. And, similarly, in The Nigger of the Narcissus, the leading part is not taken by any one of the officers or crew,—not even by the Nigger of the title,—indeed, like Vanity Fair, it might be called A Novel Without a Hero, and with only one heroine, the treacherous, implacable sea.

And, secondly, as regards the question of sheer material length in story writing. It is a deep-rooted fallacy that there are some themes suitable for a full length novel and others fit only for a short story. As a matter of fact, such a distinction is disastrously misleading. There are some minds who see in a battlefield a long volume epic, a Peace and War, a Débâcle; there are others who, like Browning, see only an "Incident of the French Camp," material at most for a dozen lines of verse. The difference does not lie in the theme, but in the temperament of the individual, the fashion in which he looks upon life in general and upon some specific story in particular. In the whole range of contemporary fiction it would be difficult to find this truth better exemplified than it is in the work of Conrad. In all of his writings he has set his own pace, fallen into his own particular stride, so to speak, ignoring all precedents regarding a conventional proportion between subject and space, crumpling up a world-wide theme into the narrow limits of a few pages, and stretching out some transitory incident into the bulk of a portly volume,—and yet the very last objection which a critic, who has learned to read understandingly and recognises genius in unfamiliar garb, would dream of making, is that certain of his stories are too short and certain others too long. Take, for

instance, his Nigger of the Narcissus—one of the many English stories whose titles have suffered an unfortunate sea-change during their passage into an American edition. Let any other writer submit the synopsis of the plot to his publisher, and if that publisher knows his business, he will tell the author frankly that there is barely enough plot in it for a Sunday special, to say nothing of a book. Yet Mr. Conrad wove out of it a magic volume, full of the life and breadth and infinite variety of the sea; and, in the centre of the picture, the inert figure of a sickly, malingering negro stands out as clear-cut as an ebony idol against a background of ivory, mysterious, foreboding, the embodiment of fate. Or again, take The Heart of Darkness, one of the shortest stories Mr. Conrad has written, and at the same time containing one of the biggest, most suggestive of his themes. It is nothing less than a presentment of the clashing of two continents, a symbolic picture of the inborn antagonism of two races, the white and the black. It pictures

Joseph Conrad

[Description: Black and white sketch of Joseph Conrad. From a drawing by Will Rothenstein. ]

the subtle disintegration of a white man's moral stamina and the stress of the darkness, the isolation, the immensity of the African jungle, the loss of dignity and courage and self-respect through daily contact with the native man and the native woman. The whole thing is a matter of a few score pages, and yet, such is its strength coupled with a certain indescribable trick of verbal foreshortening, that it gives the impression of measureless time and distance. We feel that we have spent years in his company, roaming through the murky atmosphere of physical and moral darkness—and still beyond stretch unexplored vistas, measureless, forbidding, unspeakable.

It must be conceded that Mr. Conrad's style, unique and finished as it is, does not make easy reading. It resembles nothing so much as the depth, the mystery, the riotous luxuriance of those tropical forests wherein so many of his earlier stories were laid. There are whole pages and chapters where you are forced to move forward gropingly, with the caution of a pioneer, peering ahead at the vague forms of thought that you see suggested; and then, suddenly, there comes an open spot, illuminated with the sunshine of perfectly clear mental pictures, crowding tumultuously upon you; a flash and flare of rainbow colouring seems to streak the page with scarlet and purple and gold. That, in brief, is an epitome of Conrad's art; to keep you at one time groping in the dark, shrinking from unguessed horrors, dimly seen through the fog and mist; and the next moment to blind you with the unexpected flood of mental light. And back of his method lies a vein of unguessed richness, an inexhaustible mine of untold stories. He gives you the impression that, instead of pouring out all that he knows of strange lands and alien races, he is holding himself severely in check,—sketching in here and there one face and form out of the hundreds that elbow themselves forward in his memory; condensing these sketches down to the fewest possible, strong, impressionistic strokes, so as to leave space on his crowded canvas for other importunate memories constantly clamouring for recognition. Other writers before Conrad have possessed the art of painting crowds, jostling throngs in the street, armies of men on the march and in the heat of action; but they have produced their effects by a flood of detail poured out upon the page with the reckless lavishness of one who paints with a palette knife. Conrad's distinction lies in the power of suggestion, the ability to make you feel that, however much he shows you of life, there is vastly more that he leaves untold.

To produce these effects, it is not enough merely to will to do so. It is necessary above all to be a consummate master of words, and at the same time to have a profound reverence for them. It is not too much to say that Mr. Conrad is in this respect the peer of Rudyard Kipling,—with this difference: that being an alien by birth, he does, in a deliberate and highly sophisticated way, what the author of Kim does by instinct. In this connection, it is profitable to take two extracts from Conrad's own avowal, the first dating back to the beginning of his career as an artist, in about 1897; the second representing his latest utterance. The first appeared in a most interesting personal foot-note in the New Review:

The second will be found in "A Familiar Preface," which forms the introduction to A Personal Record: