No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: “a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, and unites in one blending the terror of four different races—Greek, Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly and weak.
Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are “thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school.
Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will be instinctive—for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of physical or moral disease.
What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism.
The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes that the naval officer is the most complete and instinctive snob in the world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet—but assuredly not by chance!—a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get the heads of all thinking women upon one neck—and then wring the neck!
In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction which has made Poland the curse of Europe.
But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance.
Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again.
When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we come back to it, and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.”
There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits!