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 books, 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 himself 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 McWhirr, 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 confined 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 unites them with all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgéniev, 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 Brontës, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp clambers amid 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 Dedlocks 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.