University of Virginia Library

2. II. HIS WORKS

Mr. Conrad is not one of the authors whom it is profitable to study book by book. In spite of a few dissenting opinions, he has not greatly grown in the course of years. He is one of those rare Minervas of literature who issued in the first instance of full stature. Almayer's Folly, his first volume, the product of five years of intermittent and laborious, although loving work, has remained, there is reason to suspect, the favourite child of his brain. The theme already mentioned,—that of the disintegration of the European amid the debasing surroundings of Eastern barbarism, is one to which he reverts again and again, in his later works. But coming first, it had, not only the glamour of a maiden effort, but, what was infinitely more important to the author, the nostalgia of vanished days, the fascination of une chose vécue. The Nigger of the Narcissus is almost equally a personal document. It represents a composite picture of the types of officers and seamen grown familiar through a score of years. It is impossible to appreciate even remotely the personal element of this book without having read a volume which followed it a decade later, The Mirror of the Sea. In reading that storehouse of personal reminiscences, one guesses between the lines how much heart-ache, how much lost friendships, what a host of vanished memories went into the making of that wonderful verbal mosaic which American readers know under the name of Children of the Sea.

Close upon its heels followed a volume of short stories,—really short stories, in the accepted sense,—entitled Tales of Unrest. This is worth an additional emphasis, because it called forth the first big public recognition that Conrad received. Together with Hewlett's Forest Lovers and Sidney Lee's Life of William Shakespeare, it completed the trio of volumes which at that time the London Academy was in the habit of "crowning" each year and rewarding with a prize of fifty guineas. Most of the stories in this volume are wrought from his familiar material of Malays, half-castes, and degenerate Europeans; but there is just one story, "The Return," which is worth signalling, because it is his first, last, and only attempt to do the familiar French analytical story of married incompatibility. It is memorable because it comes so exasperatingly near being a tremendously big story,—and instead, speaking frankly, it is a failure. The scene is London, the chief actors are an average business man and his still more average wife. He thinks he understands her. As a matter of fact, they have through five years been imperceptibly drifting apart. One day he comes home as usual, to find awaiting him a letter from her telling him that she has eloped with another man. His surprise, his conventional dismay, his whole cut-and-dried attitude of mind are interpreted with a skill that baffles praise. But, because she is the hopelessly average woman, she lacks the courage of her revolt; she comes back. And here comes the part that spoils the story. Throughout a dialogue that drifts on endlessly, the woman remains a living, throbbing bundle of nerves, and the man becomes a stilted, unreal mouthpiece of Mr. Conrad's vain imaginings. Mr. Galsworthy was absolutely right when he said that the hero of this story was one of the few instances in which Conrad had

drawn a character that was hopelessly wooden.

As already suggested, there is no purpose in analysing one by one all of Conrad's stories. Because of his peculiar trick of foreshortening, many of his longest books may be summed up in a dozen words. Lord Jim, which many competent judges regard as his masterpiece, is simply the epic of a man's rehabilitation after being proved a coward. Typhoon is an allegory, half epic, half satiric, of the impotence of physical life before the blind, unchained forces of nature,—a fable told with all the forceful brevity of Le Chène et le Roseau of La Fontaine. Nostromo belongs to a different category. From whatever side you view it, it is too big, too complex, too full of dim, unfathomed places, to be easily or briefly epitomised. More than one critic has openly avowed his preference for this book, and the present writer owns his personal predilection for it. It has, probably, more actual story to it, of a dramatic sort, more of the greed and sordidness and knavery of human nature, than any of his previous books. Primarily, it is the story of a silver mine and a buried treasure, in a little South American republic, where the people, like the republic itself, are volcanic. It is a kaleidoscopic picture of a grasping, rapacious conflict between a government, on the one hand, ever tottering on the brink of revolution; and the private owners of the mine, on the other, for such mutual concessions and privileges as would convert that mine from the white elephant it has always been into a profitable investment. More specifically, it is the story of the life of an exceptional man. Nostromo, as he is called by his English employers, the officials of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company,—who coin the name out of the Italian words which they misunderstand and mispronounce,—is a Genoese sailor, who decides to remain at Sulaco, in the capacity of Capataz de Cargadores, captain of the company's lightermen and caretaker of the jetty. Now, the keynote of Nostromo's character is a curious sort of pride, a love of self-importance. By day and by night, sleepless, vigilant, alert, he is ever at the service of the entire population, native and foreign. Of infinite resource and magnetic temperament, he has worked his way into the confidence and esteem of Spanish officials, English agents, and the scum and rabble of the foreign quarters; and none in Sulaco is too low or too high to touch hat to him and exchange cordial words of greeting. Perhaps the nearest approach to a brief analysis of the complex web of this book is to say that it tells how this Nostromo, whose pride and joy, whose whole stock-in-trade in life is his integrity, his unblemished reputation, becomes a thief,—it is a study of the curse which may come from the secret knowledge of a buried treasure.

Next in importance to the two novels, Nostromo and Lord Jim, come a number of mid-length stories, including Heart of Darkness, already alluded to; and Typhoon, that unequalled picture of the titanic warfare between sea and sky, in which a vessel laden with human freight is made the colossal joke of the elements, and we are shown the inimitable sight of two hundred Chinese coolies, together with their sundered chests, hurtling back and forth between decks, clawing and snarling like so many cats, in their vain pursuit of an infinite number of fugitive silver dollars.

Two or three more of these middle-distance stories deserve mention. To-morrow pictures a father who has disinherited his son, driven him from home, and later repented of the act. Through long, lonely years he has comforted himself with the belief that the son will some day return, perhaps to-morrow—and he has brooded upon this hope until it has become a fixed idea, an obsession, that the son will come to-morrow. At last the son does come, but since things in this mtaerial, work-a-day world necessarily happen in the present, and not in the future, the father's clouded brain refuses to recognise him, because he has come to-day, when he should have come to-morrow,—the morrow which must always remain in the future. Equally simple is the structure of Amy Foster, the story, of a mute, inglorious tragedy. It pictures the fate of a young, slavonic emigrant, driven, together with hordes of his kind, on board an ocean liner, tossed for days in a watery prison, and

then cast by night upon the English coast, the sole survivor of a whole ship's company. Ignorant of his whereabouts, speaking an outlandish tongue, hounded, penniless and hungry, from door to door, a terror to women and children, who think him a madman, he dies at last in destitution, like a homeless dog, having awakened a passing compassion in just one heart, the Amy Foster of the title. In reducing these crowded, concentrated stories of Conrad's to a mere skeleton, it is so easy to over-reach one's self. It is only fair to say, by way of postscript, that there is a second interest in this story. Amy Foster, caught, like many another woman before her, by sheer novelty, marries the refugee, and then, strangely enough, and yet as the doctor says, not without parallel, after her child is born, she conceives growing dislike for him. There is, perhaps, in all of Mr. Conrad's writings, no single scene more poignant than that in which the dying Slav, delirious from fever, forgets his few words of English, and, in his frantic supplications for water, which might have saved his life, frightens out of the house the woman who has vowed to love, honour and obey, and who leaves him to die in agony.

But one of the finest and most characteristic stories that Mr. Conrad ever wrote is Falk. Curiously enough, it is drawn in a measure, from a memory of his childhood. There was a family legend of a great-uncle who served under Napoleon, and who, during the retreat from Moscow, owed his life to the capture and utilisation for culinary purposes, of a very old, very mangy, Lithuanian dog. In his childhood, Mr. Conrad underwent innumerable pleasurable shudders over the story of the cooking and consumption of that dog. He confesses that, in sober middle-age, he still can shudder over the memory of that story. He does not admit any connection between this incident and Falk. Nevertheless, it takes no special discernment to realise that without that childhood thrill, something would have been missing from the tale. On the surface, Falk gives promise of pure comedy,—a trick not without precedent in Mr. Conrad's method of work. It opens with a grotesque wooing of a Dutch girl, phlegmatic, florid, and opulent of physique, by a thin, taciturn Scandinavian pilot, on board her uncle's vessel in the harbour of a Chinese river port. But Falk is a man haunted by the memory of a revolting deed; he shows it in his face, sombre, taciturn, sinister, and in his manner, his trick of periodically covering his features with both hands, and then drawing them downwards with a slow, shuddering movement, as though to wipe away the vision of a waking nightmare. The truth is that, once under the dire stress of shipwreck and starvation it had become evident that human flesh alone stood between a whole ship's crew and death. In the face of this horror, they had not drawn lots, but had fallen upon one another like wild beasts, and Falk, in whom the lust for life had been strongest, was the sole survivor. For six years this memory has haunted him; and now his suffering is doubled, because he has at last found a woman "generous of form, Olympian and simple, indeed the siren to fascinate the dark navigator," and he is confronted with the question whether any woman could knowingly wed a man who has been guilty of cannibalism.

Of Mr. Conrad's more recent books it is not necessary to speak at this time and in this place. Whatever he does, whether alone or in collaboration, whether in the form of fiction or personal reminiscence, is all essentially imbued with the same spirit, and stamped with the same careful and deliberate workmanship, the same daring originality of style. But the true, the unadulterated soul of Conrad is in the books of his middle period, in the shorter stories, such as Typhoon and Heart of Darkness, in novels like Nostromo and Lord Jim. To spend time analysing his tales of anarchists, whether in London, as in The Secret Agent, or in Russia, as in Under Western Eyes, would be for the present purpose an anticlimax. It is true that Mr. Conrad is a sort of literary amphibian; he is almost as much at home when writing of the land as of the sea. None the less, the latter is his true abode, and his best pages are those that deal with ships and harbours, docks and quays, sluggish tropical rivers, swarming water fronts, and

all the motley crowds, the flaring colours, the babel of speech, the unnumbered and indistinguishable mixture of racial types and nationalities, to be found nowhere on earth save where land and sea touch shoulders. Yet, if one were making a prediction, it would be safest to say that Mr. Conrad will live longest in his pages of the life on ships in mid-ocean. In certain unforgettable pages in The Mirror of the Sea, he tells us of a first mate under whom he once sailed, and who, during the long weeks spent in an Australian port, habitually returned from shore intoxicated, in the mid watches of the night. And one night, when more unsteady than usual, the mate lingered on deck a moment, swaying heavily and supporting himself on his companion's arm, and voiced his wish that he were out at sea: "Ports are no good; ships rot, men go to the devil!" And that one sentence sums up the difference between Conrad's stories of the sea and of the harbour. They are equally good, equally poignant with truth; but on the one hand, they breathe freely of ozone and clean salt spray, and simple faith and bravery; and on the other, they are redolent of physical and moral decay: "Ships rot, men go to the devil." Throughout Conrad's stories, he shows us man fighting a losing fight; but at sea it is a physical fight, and on land it is a moral one. In either case, his workmanship remains, as it always has been, very nearly flawless.