It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.
He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."
And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice—the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice is done—again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from very, very far: "All right."
Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature of confidence. It is the literature of great hearts braving the perils of the darkness. He is imaginatively never so much at home as in the night, but he is aware not only of the night, but of the stars. Like a cheer out of the dark comes that wonderful scene in The Secret Sharer in which, at infinite risk, the ship is sailed in close under the looming land in order that the captain may give the hidden manslayer a chance of escaping unnoticed to the land. This is a story in which the "tonalities of the affair" are much more subtle than in Typhoon. It is a study in eccentric human relations—the relations between the captain and the manslayer who comes naked out of the seas as if from nowhere one tropical night, and is huddled away with his secrets in the captain's cabin. It is for the most part a comedy of the abnormal—an ironic fable of splendid purposeless fears and risks. Towards the end, however, we lose our concern with nerves and relationships and such things, and our hearts pause as the moment approaches when the captain ventures his ship in order to save the interloper's life. That is a moment with all romance in it. As the ship swerves round into safety just in the nick of time, we have a story transfigured into the music of the triumphant soul. Mr. Conrad, as we see in Freya of the Seven Isles and elsewhere, is not blind to the commonness of tragic ruin—tragic ruin against which no high-heartedness seems to avail. He is, indeed, inclined rather than otherwise to represent fate as a monstrous spider, unaccountable, often maleficent, hard to run away from. But he loves the fantastic comedy of the high heart which persists in the heroic game against the spider till the bitter end. His Youth is just such a comedy of the peacockry of adventure amid the traps and disasters of fate.
All this being so, it may be thought that I have underestimated the flesh-and-blood qualities in Mr. Conrad's work. I certainly do not want to give the impression that his men are less than men. They are as manly men as ever breathed. But Mr. Conrad seldom attempts to give us the complete synthesis of a man. He deals rather in aspects of personality. His longer books would hold us better if there were some overmastering characters in them. In reading such a book as Under Western Eyes we feel as though we had here a precious alphabet of analysis, but that it has not been used to spell a magnificent man.
Worse than this, Mr. Conrad's long stories at times come out as awkwardly as an elephant being steered backwards through a gate. He pauses frequently to impress upon us not only the romance of the fact he is stating but the romance of the circumstances in which somebody discovered it. In Chance and Lord Jim he is not content to tell us a straightforward story: he must show us at length the processes by which it was pieced together. This method has its advantages. It gives us the feeling, as I have said, that we are voyaging into strange seas and harbours in search of mysterious clues. But the fatigue of reconstruction is apt to tell on us before the end. One gets tired of the thing just as one does of interviewing a host of strangers. That is why some people fail to get through Mr. Conrad's long novels. They are books of a thousand fascinations, but the best imagination in them is by the way. Besides this, they have little of the economy of dramatic writing, but are profusely descriptive, and most people are timid of an epic of description.
Mr. Conrad's best work, then, is to be found, I agree with most people in believing, in three of his volumes of short stories—in Typhoon, Youth, and 'Twixt Land and Sea. His fame will, I imagine, rest chiefly on these, just as the fame of Wordsworth and Keats rests on their shorter poems. Here is the pure gold of his romance—written in terms largely of the life of the old sailing-ship. Here he has written little epics of man's destiny, tragic, ironic, and heroic, which are unique in modern (and, it is safe to say, in all) literature.