Joseph Conrad

by Hugh Walpole

It comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of brain—Marlowe, Decoud, Stein—are melancholy and ironic: "If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is." The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea captains.

This then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, for an instant, hamper his interest—that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of specimens—but at the end of it all, as with his own Stein: "He says of him that he is 'preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave ...' while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies."

Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles—Robert Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning's interest in life was derived, on the novelist's side of him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet's side, in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning's clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual case—he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.

Browning's realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in Sordello the most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is not this exactly what we may say of Nostromo? Mr Chesterton has written of Browning: "He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the 'blue spirt of a lighted match' for the monotony of the evening star." Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his mistress' window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.

The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are precisely Conrad's characters. Is not Waring Conrad's man?

And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in The Secret Agent, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, McWhirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee's wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed's Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these discoveries!

Finally, The Ring and the Book, with its multiplied witnesses, its statement as a "case" of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of that superb building—here we can see the highest pinnacle of that temple that has Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo amongst its other turrets, buttresses and towers.

Conrad is his own master—he has imitated no one, he has created, as I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning carried Romantic-Realism showed the author of Almayer's Folly the signs of the road that he was to follow.