III—THE POET
I
THE poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, or such short stories as The Informer, or Il Conde, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the novelist deserve consideration—style, atmosphere and philosophy. In the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from Conrad's second novel, An Outcast of the Islands:
"He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering stars."
And from his latest novel, Chance:
"The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe."
It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied, something of the "purple patch." We feel that the prose is too dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly affected by the author's determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in Almayer's Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim,—prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale called The Return, there is the following passage:—
"He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed. There was less than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted, 'Come back,' and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe—like a grave."
The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words—"moral annihilation," "devouring nowhere," "peaceful desperation," "last chance of life," "terrible," "like a grave." That he shouted gives a final touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
Often, in the earlier books, Conrad's style has the awkward over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked effect of two influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of the author of Madame Bovary. When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert's effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert's: "Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l'envanouissaiont sous la poésie du rôle qui l'envahissait; et entrainée vers l'homme par l'illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide…" and this a sentence of Conrad's: "Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard's shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if to her—to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature—had been revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting."
Conrad's sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is probable, however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater importance—the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we think in many pages of Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Island, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first rapture.
He was under the influence of these powers also in that, at that time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him—often the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from Typhoon with that earlier one from The Outcast of the Islands that I quoted above:
"He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes' head a few stars shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow."
That is poet's work, and poet's work at its finest. Instead of impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made the very most of a rather thin moment—feels, indeed, himself that it is thin—we are here under the influence of something that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest material—and yet it remains, through all its discipline, spontaneous.
These three tales, Typhoon, Youth and Heart of Darkness, stand by themselves as the final expression of Conrad's lyrical gift. We may remember such characters as M'Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures as the old seneschal in The Eve of St Agnes or the Ancient Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman's When Lilac first on the Door yard bloomed or Keats' Nightingale. Their author was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older—he must look back now on the colours of Youth with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, in such a volume of stories as A Set of Six, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned—we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from Chance quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of An Outcast of the Islands, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there, but—"Young Powell felt it." In that magical storm that was Typhoon God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
II
The question of style devolves here directly into the question of atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it and does produce it in thick slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that reaction—and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own day, Mr Arnold Bennett's Brighton background in Hilda Lessways or Mrs Wharton's New York background in The House of Mirth offer most successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the contemplation of some scene and is thence extended to the whole vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in Fathers and Children, the searching of Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, the scene at the theatre in The Ring and the Book, the London meeting between Beauchamp and René in Beauchamp's Career. It is not only that these scenes are "done" to the full extent of their "doing," it is also that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev, Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless Victorian Age in Literature, has named this element Glamour. In writing of the novels by George Eliot he says: "Indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a certain indescribable thing called Glamour, which was the whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray, when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of Castlewood." Now' this matter of Glamour is not all, because Dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit's escape after the murder do not put us into touch with other worlds—but we may say, at any rate, that when, in a novel atmosphere is potential it is certain also to have glamour.
The potential qualities of Conrad's atmosphere are amongst his very strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. In The Outcast of the Islands, when Willems is exiled by Captain Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described—it has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the power of something stronger than ourselves. In Lord Jim the contrast of Jim with the officers of the Patna is a contrast not only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain's gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil, degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In The Nigger of the Narcissus the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and intimates we have become—but that shadow that traps the feet of the negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than that single voyage of the Narcissus. 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 s, 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 ami 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 Iliguerota 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.