Part 1 (1/2)

Ivory Apes and Peac.o.c.ks.

by James Huneker.

I

THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD

I

In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums; when the insistent drums of the Great G.o.d Reclame are bruising human tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid the clamour of the market-place a book of his is a sea-sh.e.l.l which pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the sea; always the sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea--and that is his chief claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an Elizabethan adventurer and the s.p.a.ciousness of those times. Imagine a Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked country who ”midway in his mortal life” began writing for the first time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions should translate character--imagine these paradoxes and you have partly imagined Joseph Conrad, who has so finely said that ”imagination, and not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

He has taken the sea-romance of Smollett, Marryat, Melville, Dana, Clark Russell, Stevenson, Becke, Kipling, and for its well-worn situations has subst.i.tuted not only many novel nuances, but invaded new territory, revealed obscure atavisms and the psychology lurking behind the mask of the savage, the transpositions of dark souls, and shown us a world of ”kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes, giraffes, cabinet ministers, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists, Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in itself.” In his Reminiscences Mr. Conrad has told us, with the surface frankness of a Pole, the genesis of his literary debut of Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fas.h.i.+on throws fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character--reminding me in the juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers, Conrad has only given us a tantalising peep into his mental workshop.

We rise after finis.h.i.+ng the Reminiscences realising that we have read once more romance, in whose half-lights and modest evasions we catch fleeting glimpses of reality. Reticence is a distinctive quality of this author; after all, isn't truth an idea that traverses a temperament?

That many of his stories were in the best sense ”lived” there can be no doubt--he has at odd times confessed it, confessions painfully wrung from him, as he is no friend of the interviewer. The white-hot sharpness of the impressions which he has projected upon paper recalls Taine's dictum: ”les sensations sont des hallucinations vraies.”

Veritable hallucinations are the seascapes and landscapes in the South Sea stories, veritable hallucinations are the quotidian gestures and speech of his anarchists and souls sailing on the winds of n.o.ble and sinister pa.s.sions. For Conrad is on one side an implacable realist....

Unforgetable are his delineations of sudden little rivers never charted and their shallow, turbid waters, the sombre flux of immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste, smell. What a gulf of incert.i.tudes for white men is evoked for us in vivid, concrete terms. Unforgetable, too, the hallucinated actions of the student Razumov the night Victor Haldin, after launching the fatal bomb, seeks his room, his a.s.sistance, in that masterpiece, Under Western Eyes. But realist as Conrad is, he is also a poet who knows, as he says himself, that ”the power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.” (Reason is a poor halter with which to lead mankind to drink at the well of truth.) He woos the ear with his singing prose as he ravishes the eye with his pictures. In his little-known study of Henry James he wrote: ”All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar, and surprising,” and finally, ”Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.” Often a writer tells us more of himself in criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal aesthetic p.r.o.nunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the keelson of his workaday philosophy: ”All adventure, all love, every success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation. It is the utmost limit of our power.” No wonder his tutor, half in anger, half in sorrow, exclaimed: ”You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote.”

I suppose a long list might be made of foreigners who have mastered the English language and written it with ease and elegance, yet I cannot recall one who has so completely absorbed native idioms, who has made for himself an English mind (without losing his profound and supersubtle Slavic soul), as has Joseph Conrad. He is unique as stylist. He first read English literature in Polish translations, then in the original; he read not only the Bible and Shakespeare, but d.i.c.kens, Fenimore Cooper, and Thackeray; above all, d.i.c.kens. He followed no regular course, just as he belongs to no school in art, except the school of humanity; for him there are no types, only humans. (He detests formulae and movements.) His sensibility, all Slavic, was stimulated by d.i.c.kens, who was a powerful stimulant of the so-called ”Russian pity,” which fairly honeycombs the works of Dostoevsky. There is no mistaking the influence of the English Bible on Conrad's prose style. He is saturated with its puissant, elemental rhythms, and his prose has its surge and undertow. That is why his is never a ”painted s.h.i.+p on a painted ocean”; by the miracle of his art his water is billowy and undulating, his air quivers in the torrid suns.h.i.+ne, and across his skies--skies broken into new, strange patterns--the cloud-ma.s.ses either float or else drive like a typhoon.

His rhythmic sense is akin to Flaubert's, of whom Arthur Symons wrote: ”He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed prose tune.” Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges, as does Theophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences. A typical paragraph of his shows what might be called the sonata form: an allegro, andante, and presto. For example, the opening pages of Karain (one of his best stories, by the way) in Tales of Unrest:

”Suns.h.i.+ne gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs [he is writing of the newspaper accounts of various native risings in the Eastern Archipelago]--suns.h.i.+ne and the glitter of the sea. A strange name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of land-breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights; a signal-fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff; great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level of a polished sea like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel.”

There is no mistaking the _coda_ of this paragraph--selected at random--beginning at ”and”; it suggests the author of Salammbo, and it also contains within its fluid walls evocations of sound, odour, bulk, tactile values, the colour of life, the wet of the waves, and the whisper of the wind. Or, as a contrast, recall the rank ugliness of the night when Razumov visits the hideous tenement, expecting to find there the driver who would carry to freedom the political a.s.sa.s.sin, Haldin. Scattered throughout the books are descriptive pa.s.sages with few parallels in our language. Indeed, Conrad often abuses his gift, forgetting that his readers do not possess his tremendously developed faculty of attention.

II

Invention he has to a plentiful degree, notwithstanding his giving it second place in comparison with imagination. His novels are the novels of ideas dear to Balzac, though tinged with romance--a Stendhal of the sea. Gustave Kahn called him un puissant reveur, and might have added, a wonderful spinner of yarns. Such yarns--for men and women and children! At times yarning seemingly for the sake of yarning--true art-for-art, though not in the ”precious” sense. From the brilliant melochromatic glare of the East to the drab of London's mean streets, from the cool, darkened interiors of Malayan warehouses to the snow-covered allees of the Russian capital, or the green parks on the Lake of Geneva, he carries us on his magical carpet, and the key is always in true pitch. He never saves up for another book as Henry James once said of some author, and for him, as for Mr. James, every good story is ”both a picture and an idea”; he seeks to interpret ”the uncomposed, unrounded look of life with its accidents, its broken rhythms.” He gets atmosphere in a phrase; a verbal nuance lifts the cover of some iniquitous or gentle soul. He contrives the illusion of time, and his characters are never at rest; even within the narrow compa.s.s of the short story they develop; they grow in evil or wisdom, are always transformed; they think in ”character,” and ideality unites his vision with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer--a book which has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further than in The n.i.g.g.e.r of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor interior a.n.a.lysis in The Return.

What I once wrote of Henry James might be said of Joseph Conrad: ”He is exquisitely aware of the presence of others.” And this awareness is ill.u.s.trated in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo--the latter that astonis.h.i.+ng rehabilitation of the humming life on a South American seaboard. For Nostromo nothing is lost save honour; he goes to his death loving insensately; for Razumov his honour endures till the pressure put upon it by his love for Haldin's sister cracks it, and cracks, too, his reason. For once the novelist seems cruel to the pathological point--I mean in the punishment of Razumov by the hideous spy. I hope this does not betray parvitude of view-point. I am not thin-skinned, and Under Western Eyes is my favourite novel, but the closing section is lacerating music for the nerves. And what a chapter!--that thunder-storm driving down the valley of the Rhone, the haggard, haunted face of the Russian student forced, despite his convictions, to become an informer and a supposed anarchist (curious students will find the first hint of the leitmotiv of this monumental book in An Anarchist--A Set of Six; as Gaspar Ruiz may be looked on as a pendant to Nostromo). Under Western Eyes is a masterpiece of irony, observation, and pity. I once described it as being as powerful as Dostoevsky and as well written as Turgenieff. The truth is that it is Conrad at his best, although I know that I may seem to slight the Eastern tales. It has the colour and shape and gait of the marvellous stories of Dostoevsky and Turgenieff--with an absolutely original motive, and more modern. A magical canvas!

Its type of narrative is in the later style of the writer. The events are related by an English teacher of languages in Geneva, based on the diary of Razumov. It is a favourite device of Conrad's which might be described as, structurally progressing from the h.o.m.ogeneous to the heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character and is swift and secular. If Flaubert in Sentimental Education originated a novel structure in fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his edifice, in its contrapuntal presentation of character and chapter suspensions, is new, tantalisingly, bewilderingly, refres.h.i.+ngly, new.

The colour is toned down, is more sober than the prose of the Eastern stories. Sometimes he employs the personal p.r.o.noun, and with what piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This contains three tales, the first, which gives the t.i.tle-key, has been called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and blood-l.u.s.t) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic--a pathos which recalls Balzac's Pere Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding--than The End of the Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among the immortals.

That he must have had a ”long foreground” we find after studying the man. Sailing a s.h.i.+p is no sinecure, and for Conrad a s.h.i.+p is something with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or humoured, as in The Brute--that monstrous personification of the treacherous sea's victim. Like all true artists, Conrad never preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read. We recognise his emotional calibre, which is of a dramatic intensity, though never over-emphasising the morbid. Of his intellectual grasp there is no question. He possesses pathos, pa.s.sion, sincerity, and humour. Wide knowledge of mankind and nature he has, and in the field of moral power we need but ask if he is a Yes-Sayer or a No-Sayer, as the Nietzschians have it. He says Yes! to the universe and of the eternal verities he is cognisant. For him there is no ”other side of good and evil.” No writers of fiction, save the very greatest, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the soul of man under the stress of sorrow, pa.s.sion, anger, or as swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea--they are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: ”Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all--failure and death.” His heroes are failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their failure is recorded with m.u.f.fled irony. The fundamental pessimism of the Slavic temperament must be reckoned with. But this pessimism is implied, and life has its large as well as its ”little ironies.” In Chance, which describes the hypertrophy of a dolorous soul, he writes:

”It was one of those dewy, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crus.h.i.+ng our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless, obscure magnificence of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.... Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy, soft nights are more kindly to our littleness.”

To match that one must go to Thomas Hardy, to the eloquent pa.s.sage describing the terrors of infinite s.p.a.ce in Two on a Tower. However, Conrad is not often given to such Hamlet-like moods. The shock and recoil of circ.u.mstances, the fatalities of chance, and the vagaries of human conduct intrigue his intention more than the night side of the soul. Yet, how well he has observed the paralysis of will caused by fear. In An Outpost of Progress is the following: ”Fear always remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate and belief, and even doubt; but as he clings to life he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible that pervades his being, that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath....”

III

It has been said that women do not read him, but according to my limited experience I believe the contrary. (Where, indeed, would any novelist be if it were not for women?) He has said of Woman: ”She is the active partner in the great adventure of humanity on earth and feels an interest in all its episodes.” He does not idealise the s.e.x, like George Meredith, nor yet does he describe the baseness of the Eternal Simpleton, as do so many French novelists. He is not always complimentary: witness the portrait of Mrs. Fyne in Chance, or the mosaic of anti-feminist opinions to be found in that story. That he succeeded better with his men is a commonplace of all masculine writers, not that women always succeed with their s.e.x, but to many masters of imaginative literature woman is usually a poet's evocation, not the creature of flesh and blood and bones, of sense and sentiment, that she is in real life. Conrad opens no new windows in her soul, but he has painted some full-length portraits and made many lifelike sketches, which are inevitable. From the s.h.i.+ning presence of his mother, the a.s.semblage of a few traits in his Reminiscences, to Flora de Barral in Chance, with her self-tortured temperament, you experience that ”emotion of recognition” described by Mr. James. You know they live, that some of them go on marching in your memory after the book has been closed. Their actions always end by resembling their ideas. And their ideas are variegated.

In Under Western Eyes we encounter the lovely Natalie Haldin, a sister in spirit to Helena, to Lisa, to any one of the Turgenieff heroines.

Charm is hers, and a valiant spirit. Her creator has not, thus far, succeeded in bettering her. Only once does he sound a false note. I find her speech a trifle rhetorical after she learns the facts in the case of Razumov (p. 354). Two lines are superfluous at the close of this heart-breaking chapter, and in all the length of the book that is the only flaw I can offer to hungry criticism. The revolutionary group at Geneva--the mysterious and vile Madame de S----, the unhappy slave, Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist, surely a portrait sur le vif, Sophia Antonovna, are testimonies of the writer's skill and profound divination of the human heart. (He has confessed that for him woman is ”a human being, very much like myself.”) The dialogue between Razumov, the spiritual bankrupt, and Sophia in the park is one of those character-revealing episodes that are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature.

Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present purpose, which is chiefly exposition, though I feel that Captain Anthony is not tenderly treated. But ”there is a Nemesis which overtakes generosity, too, like all the other imprudences of men who dare to be lawless and proud....” And this sailor, the son of the selfish poet, Carleon Anthony, himself sensitive, but unselfish, paid for his considerate treatment of his wife Flora. Only Hardy could have treated the s.e.x question with the same tact as Conrad (he has done so in Jude the Obscure).