Old and New Masters

by Robert Lynd

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one who had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it is true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand tragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. In The End of the Tether, in Freya of the Seven Isles, in Victory, it is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the ruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as in Samson Agonistes, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us utterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness; Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage never to submit or yield." Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living rivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line—are not all these fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories is always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not been so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As it is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not until he published Chance that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober," and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety—"asceticism of sentiment," he calls it—in his literary work as at sea. He has been compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of Dostoevsky—an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky did for strange demons and goblins—that population of grotesque characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature. That is why one reads the volume called Youth for the third and fourth time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.

2. Tales of Mystery

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure. There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light—a little light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that. With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana" which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master—his master, at least, in the art of the long novel—Henry James. I do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like Chance, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a ghost story, however—and The Turn of the Screw is one of the great ghost stories of literature—he remains supremely master of his materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart and compass.

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's Under Western Eyes, for instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive. To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets—often from the depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in Heart of Darkness is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel—the daughter of the defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine of Chance—he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"—so the narrator of Chance begins one of his sentences; and it is not in the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny—when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories Typhoon and The Secret Sharer, the latter of which appeared in the volume called 'Twixt Land and Sea. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house in Kidnapped. In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. Typhoon was, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—let us not shrink from praise—one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.