INTROSPECTION
Chance, by Joseph Conrad. [Doubleday, Page & Company, New York.]
Did you ever take supper in the apartments of a dear bachelor friend, on a night when the wind howled outside the window, and the rain beat against the pane? And after the satisfying meal, whose perfect appointment made you forget all save the luxury of living, did you retire to the spacious living room, and after accepting an aromatic Havana, stretch your feet out to the crackling log fire, and as the smoke from your cigar crawled upward listen to the philosophical analyses of your cultured host on that marvelously simple and profoundly complex servant and master of man, the human mind? Of such an evening is the atmosphere of Chance. Not academically deep, but deep from the standpoint of a full life and an active intelligence.
Everyone loves to analyze his fellow creatures. Some do it well, some do it badly, but we all do it. Conrad does it masterfully. There doesn’t seem to be a type which holds a mystery for him. The village pillar; the frail, ill-fated maid; the buxsom housewife; the silent captain ashore and afloat; the opinionated, retired old gentleman; the cynical, good-natured man of thirty-five; the flat, tintless fraud. Into the mental realm of all these he makes expeditions long and short. His characters live. They mingle good and bad, and, as strong characters should, weave for themselves a charming story of love, adventure, trial, and victory, never trite, and always surprising. It is a tale built of character studies and garnished with odd conjective philosophy.
Our new acquaintance paused, then added meditatively:
“Queer man. As if it made any difference. Queer man.”
“It’s certainly unwise to admit any sort of responsibility for our actions, whose consequences we are never able to foresee,” remarked Marlow by way of assent.
“The consequence of his action was that I got a ship,” said the other. “That could not do much harm,” he added with a laugh which argued a probably unconscious contempt of general ideas.
But Marlow was not put off. He was patient and reflective. He had been at sea many years and I verily believe he liked sea-life because upon the whole it is favourable to reflection. I am speaking of the now nearly vanished sea-life under sail. To those who may be surprised at the statement I will point out that this life secured for the mind of him who embraced it the inestimable advantages of solitude and silence. Marlow had the habit of pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between jest and earnest.
“Oh, I wouldn’t suggest,” he said, “that your namesake, Mr. Powell, the Shipping Master, had done you much harm. Such was hardly his intention. And even if it had been he would not have had the power. He was but a man, and the incapacity to achieve anything distinctly good or evil is inherent in our earthly condition. Mediocrity is our mark. And perhaps it’s just as well, since, for the most part, we cannot be certain of the effect of our actions.”
“I don’t know about the effect,” the other stood up to Marlow manfully. “What effect did you expect anyhow? I tell you he did something uncommonly kind.”
“He did what he could,” Marlow retorted gently, “and on his own showing that was not a very great deal. I cannot help thinking that there was some malice in the way he seized the opportunity to serve you. He managed to make you uncomfortable. You wanted to go to sea, but he jumped on the chance of accommodating your desire with a vengeance. I am inclined to think your cheek alarmed him. And this was an excellent occasion to suppress you altogether. For if you accepted he was relieved of you with every appearance of humanity, and if you made objections (after requesting his assistance, mind you) it was open to him to drop you as a sort of impostor. You might have had to decline that berth for some very valid reason. From sheer necessity, perhaps. The notice was too uncommonly short. But under the circumstances you’d have covered yourself with ignominy.”
Our new friend knocked the ashes out of his pipe.
There is something about Conrad which gives a warm feeling about the heart. A certain fineness of humor, a certain fullness of sympathy. He never mixes his similes; they always take the same tone and the same color. For instance:
I took a piece of cake and went out to bribe the Fyne dog into some sort of self-control. His sharp, comical yapping was unbearable, like stabs through one’s brain, and Fyne’s deeply modulated remonstrances abashed the vivacious animal no more than the deep, patient murmur of the sea abashes a nigger minstrel on a popular beach. Fyne was beginning to swear at him in low, sepulchral tones when I appeared. The dog became at once wildly demonstrative, half-strangling himself in his collar, his eyes and tongue hanging out in the excess of his uncomprehensible affection for me. This was before he caught sight of the cake in my hand. A series of vertical springs high up in the air followed, and then, when he got the cake, he instantly lost his interest in everything else.
No, this illustration is not of Conrad’s finest, but in a homely way it illustrates a deep sympathy with life, which this strong worker and writer gives in such bountiful measure in all his literature; and, to quote an eminent writer, “Literature and Conrad are interchangeable terms.”
—Henry Blackman Sell.