Henry James, you will say, was even more patient. Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essentially are. Henry James refines but seldom repeats. Conrad, in such a story as "Gaspar Ruiz" for example, or in "Chance," gives the impression of not caring to understand if only he can fully picture the mind that his brooding imagination draws further and further from its sheath. It is incredible, to one who has not counted, how many times he raises the same situation to the light—the Garibaldean and Nostromo, Mrs. Travers marveling at her knowledge of Lingard's heart—turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back while he broods on. Here is the explanation of Conrad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the reader's interest. As we read Conrad we also brood; we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. Turns of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, or the faces of women, have their chance. And, of course, the excellence, the charm of Conrad's style is that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brooding mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of images that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, in a fathomless pool.
This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time. In time, he may be Slav or English, but certainly is modern of the moderns. The tribute of admiration and imitation from the youth of his own period alone might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imagination afield into the margins of the world, where life still escapes standardization and there are fresh aspects of beauty, is to fail to differentiate him from Kipling or Masefield. To say that he strikes below the act and the will into realms of the sub- conscious, and studies the mechanism as well as the results of emotion, is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among the many writers who have learned of Henry James or moved in parallels beside him.
To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential modernity I should like to propose a more cogent comparison, and a more illuminating contrast, with a man whose achievements were in Conrad's own province, who challenges and rewards comparison, Herman Melville.
It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside the works of Conrad. Some one must have done it, so illuminating in both directions is the result. Here are two dreamers who write of the sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes, transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and description unsurpassed:
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched hideousness of his jaw.
Melville, writer of vivid descriptions of the South Seas, "Typee," "Omoo," which were perfect of their kind, but still only superlative travel books, distinguished in style but seldom lifting beyond autobiography, began another reminiscent narrative in "Moby Dick." In spite of his profound intellectual growth away from the cool and humorous youth who paddled the Marquesan lake with primitive beauties beside him, he seems to have meant in "The White Whale" to go back to his earlier manner, to write an accurate though highly personal account of the whaler's life, and to that end had assembled a mass of information upon the sperm whale to add to his own memories. Very literally the story begins as an autobiography; even the elemental figure of the cannibal, Queequeg, with his incongruous idol and harpoon in a New Bedford lodging house, does not warn of what is to come. But even before the Pequod leaves sane Nantucket an undercurrent begins to sweep through the narrative. This brooding captain, Ahab (for Melville also broods, though with characteristic difference), and his ivory leg, those warning voices in the mist, the strange crew of all races and temperaments—the civilized, the barbarous, and the savage—in their ship, which is a microcosm, hints that creep in of the white whale whose nature is inimical to man and arouses passions deeper than gain or revenge—all this prepares the reader for something more than incident. From the mood of Defoe one passes, by jerks and reversions, to the atmosphere of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Manfred."
When Conrad could not manage his story he laid it aside, sometimes for twenty years, as with "The Rescue." But Melville was a wilder soul, a greater man, and probably a greater artist, but a lesser craftsman. He lost control of his book. He loaded his whaling story with casks of natural history, deck loaded it with essays on the moral nature of man, lashed to its sides dramatic dialogues on the soul, built up a superstructure of symbolism and allegory, until the tale foundered and went down, like the Pequod. And then it emerged again a dream ship searching for a dream whale, manned by fantastic and terrible dreams; and every now and then, as dreams will, it takes on an appearance of reality more vivid than anything in life, more real than anything in Conrad— the meeting with the Rachel and her captain seeking his drowned son, the rising of Moby Dick with the dead Parsee bound to his terrible flank, the grim dialogues of Ahab….
In this bursting of bounds, in these epic grandeurs in the midst of confusion, and vivid realities mingled with untrammeled speculation, lies the secret of Melville's purpose, and, by contrast, the explanation of Conrad's modern effect beside him. Melville, friend of Hawthorne and transcendentalist philosopher on his own account, sees nature as greater and more terrible than man. He sees the will of man trying to control the universe, but failing; crushed if uncowed by the unmeasured power of an evil nature, which his little spirit, once it loses touch with the will of God, vainly encounters. Give man eyes only in the top of his head, looking heavenward, says Ahab, urging the blacksmith, who makes him a new leg buckle, to forge a new creature complete. He writes of man at the beginning of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as Ahab, the Pequod, and all her crew went down before the lashings and charges of the white whale.
"Oh, Life," says Ahab, "here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead [the carpenter] for a bone to stand on!… I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with." And yet as they approach the final waters "the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met like the lips of a vise; the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like overladen brooks; in his very sleep his ringing cry ran through the vaulted hull: 'Stern all! The white whale spouts thick blood!'"
Conrad comes at the height of the age of science. The seas for him are full of dark mysteries, but these mysteries are only the reflections of man. Man dominates the earth and sea, man conquers the typhoon, intelligent man subdues the savage wills of the barbarians of the shallows, man has learned to master all but his own heart. The center of gravity shifts from without to within. The philosopher, reasoning of God and of nature, gives place to the psychologist brooding over an organism that is seat of God and master of the elements. Melville is centrifugal, Conrad centripetal. Melville's theme is too great for him; it breaks his story, but the fragments are magnificent. Conrad's task is easier because it is more limited; his theme is always in control. He broods over man in a world where nature has been conquered, although the mind still remains inexplicable. The emphasis shifts from external symbols of the immensities of good and evil to the behavior of personality under stress. Melville is a moral philosopher, Conrad a speculative psychologist.