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JOSEPH CONRAD

By Hugh Walpole

New York

Henry Holt And Company

1916

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TO

SIR SIDNEY COLVIN




I--BIOGRAPHY


I


|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
an author’s artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
creation of his characters.

With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
has been placed we have some compulsory connection.

Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.

Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
With that publisher’s acceptance of _Almayer’s Folly_ the third period
of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
books.

Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.

Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
him.

Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
_Almayer’s Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
have been declared to the world. _Almayer’s Folly_, however, was not
rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: “The name of
Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The <DW65>
of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
of his adventure.

The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
 that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This
has been their history.

II

His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
period, beginning with _Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
Jim_ in 1900. The second contains {014}the two volumes of _Youth_ and
_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
and _Victory_ (1915).

His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
view of the “schools,” to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves
upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild
beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer’s Folly_ and _The Outcast of the
Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in
the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their
world had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of
his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and
a new vigour. In the {015}character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of
Bahalatchi and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of
great things. Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with
atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style
a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. His vision of his background was
pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make
it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a
determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else.

These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad’s difficulties. One study in
this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the
crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds.
It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung himself
free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The <DW65> of the
Narcissus_. This {015}was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of
a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon
the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was to
remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel. It
is the story of a young Englishman’s loss of honour in a moment of panic
and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely
sustained development of a {016}vividly remembered scene, the second
half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.

There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the forests
that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of the
sea. He was never, after {018}these tales, to write again of the sea
as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.

This second period closed with the production of a work that was
deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
in many ways the greatest of all Conrad’s works, but, for the moment,
one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.’s Weekly_--and astonished and
bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
its critics did not understand it, and its author’s own admirers were
puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.

_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one {019}can easily imagine that
its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of “cases” that
interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
Conrad’s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western Eyes_
spoke strongly of a Russian influence {020}Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had
too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan
circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.

A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
emphatically Conrad’s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars--_The
Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note.
In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _‘Twixt Land and Sea_, to unite
some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _A
Smile, of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of
retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The
sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something
that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him
something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless
_The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its
completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the {021}contrast
between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
_The <DW65> of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
prophecy.

III

To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author’s work,
because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.

In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.

We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer’s
Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
very essence of Conrad’s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
unfortunate author: “Ah! yes. I’m interesting, of course, but don’t you
remember...?”

The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his