Joseph Conrad. Hugh Walpole
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Never again, except perhaps in The Mirror of the Sea, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period of his work, Lord Jim. This was to remain, until the publication of Chance, his most popular novel. It is the story of a young Englishman's loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely sustained development of a vividly remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
There appeared now in Youth, Heart of Darkness and Typhoon three of the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in Youth and its evocation of the East, in The Heart of Darkness and its evocation of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in Typhoon and its evocation of the sea. He was never, after these tales, to write again of the sea as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
This second period closed with the production of a work that was deliberately created rather than reminiscent, Nostromo. Conrad may have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man anything for their creation. There is much to be said about Nostromo, in many ways the greatest of all Conrad's works, but, for the moment, one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical births, in a journal—T.P.'s Weekly—and astonished and bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its critics did not understand it, and its author's own admirers were puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
Nostromo was followed by a pause—one can easily imagine that its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When, however, in 1907 appeared The Secret Agent, a new attitude was most plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of "cases" that interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in The Secret Agent, but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in An Outcast of the Islands accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. The Secret Agent is a tale of secret service in London; it contains the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full, Conrad's hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 Under Western Eyes spoke strongly of a Russian influence Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
A volume of short stories, A Set of Six, illustrating still more emphatically Conrad's new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars—The Duel—a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, 'Twixt Land and Sea, to unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. A Smile, of Fortune and The Secret Sharer are amazing in the beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless The Secret Sharer is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the contrast between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared Chance, by no means the finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of The Nigger of the Narcissus, of Lord Jim, of Nostromo. With the popular success of Chance the first period of his work is closed. On the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no prophecy.
III
To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad, no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. Some Reminiscences and The Mirror of the Sea demand consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author's work, because they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels. Some Reminiscences has only Tristram Shandy for its rival in the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. The Mirror of the Sea has no rival at all.
We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, Almayer's Folly, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of Some Reminiscences, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of Almayer has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of the clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the very essence of Conrad's art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: "Ah! yes. I'm interesting, of course, but don't you remember…?"
The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident, not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B– of the Nonsuch who… or there is the window just behind the writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the year '88 when…
In the course of his thrilling voyage of discovery we are, by a kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the author's own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship's officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle's house in Poland.
So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us, only partially realised.
Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both breathless, and, by the virtue of its author's style, solemn, we do obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells us: "Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract