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THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD

CORNELIUS WEYGANDT

Professor of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania

IT is an old lament that the men who have seen the wonders of

the world have seldom written well of them. That they have not is less often due to their inability to write than to their inability to see that wonders are wonders. Even when the men daily in the presence of wonders have been writers their imaginations have failed them and they have written about other things than these before their eyes or they have jotted down the strangest experiences as if they were keeping a ship's log or making an entry in a child's diary. How is it that Sir Walter Raleigh could leave so dull a record of his travels in Guiana or Lodge do a romance so artificial as Rosalynde on the Spanish Main? That it was part of the Elizabethan convention to seek an escape from reality in such a farrago as Euphuism may explain, or half-explain, Rosalynde. Why Raleigh was content with so bare an account of his pushings toward Perú, an Eldorado to his day, is harder guessing. You may say that the picturesque, the unusual, the strange, were so constant accompaniments of his journey that they lost significance to him; but your guess only partly clears the puzzle.

If it had been only wonders of landscape that had been neglected by writers who had the luck to visit new worlds we should not be surprised, for the beauty of wild places was not recognized generally until the eighteenth century. What surprises is that in the early English Travels and in the English picaresque novels of travel so like them, there is so little made of the customs and habits of people in places oversea, and so little description of the ideals of alien civilizations.

The old notion of the traveler that all customs and ideals that differ from those of his homeland are barbarian is perhaps at the root of the matter. Wonders were made little of by writers of

travels and of stories of travel because they were not held to be wonders, but only queer ways of inferior peoples that were to be despised, or, if not to be despised, to be ignored. Perhaps, often, what might have been seen by understanding eyes as wonders were not noticed at all.

And yet, back at the beginnings of literature, were the Odyssey and Herodotus! How could they be neglected as standard from the moment of their resurrection by the Renaissance? Yet neglected they were, and, in England, even in late Elizabethan and Jacobean times, there were no better travel stories than the Jack Wilton (1594) of Nash and no better book of travel than Coryatt's Crudities (1611), works in no way comparable to the great works of the Greeks. Similar books of the succeeding centuries were little finer in quality. Despite Sandys and Evelyn, Bruce and Kinglake, despite Mrs. Behn and Defoe, Smollett and Melville, English literature had to wait until late Victorian days for a really great book of travels and a really great travel story. Doughty gave us Arabia Deserta in 1888 and Conrad Almayer's Folly in 1895.

It is strange that the first writer of first power in English to see as wonders what he experienced as man of action in daily routine overseas should not be English by birth. Or, maybe, from another point of view, it is not strange. Maybe if Conrad had been an English sailor instead of a Pole turned English sailor by a yearning for both sea and England unparalleled in history, he would not have written his novels. Your typical English man of action feels that he should not make much of his exploits and that writing about what he has done may lead him into self-aggrandizement. His attitude is at once fine and foolish and discreet. Such a man can seldom write well enough to escape the many pitfalls that beset autobiography. He is apt to lack the patience to learn to write exactly and to lack the temperament to express himself with tact. He feels these limitations and can see no alternative to silence and what may sound like boasting. Writing, too, is always difficult, a sweating of blood. Taking all things into consideration, why not be wise and avoid the difficulties by not writing at all about his adventures?

To turn his experiences as man of action into a story, to base a story on such experiences would, of course, avoid the dangers of direct autobiography, but your man of action is less likely to have the creative power of the novelist than the ability to write a simple

case.

chronological record of his own life. Marryat is a very exceptional Your typical man of action, too, is suspicious of all writing. It is an art, a thing less stable than sport or trade or adventure, and artists are apt to be "a rum lot."

There is, too, the natural hesitation every human has to own that he is attempting something out of the ordinary that he is not sure he can master. Dunsany has told us that when he began to write he did not dare allow his fellow officers to know that he was busy with anything artistic. Conrad himself concealed from the young mate of the Adowa that his scribbling was an attempt at a novel. Stevenson felt his writing to be now a childish playing with paper and now a something much worse, a prostitution of himself, a selling of his soul for the pleasure of readers. The refuge that Scott sought in anonymity has been noted again and again.

Conrad cannot explain what set him writing. He was about thirty-two when, in 1889, he began Almayer's Folly. He had then spoken English for only a little more than ten years and he had written nothing more ambitious than letters. He had been a great reader from youngest childhood and he had seen his father busied with writing, translations into Polish of Shakespeare and Hugo. There was a great deal of leisure on sailing ships, especially on the long trips to India, Malaya and Australia. Reading could not fill all the spare time, or thinking, or talking things over. He must have come to realize, too, that his experience in Malaya was unique among cultivated men. First on the steamship Vidar and later on the bark Otago he visited many out of the way places in Borneo and Celebes, in Sumatra and Java, and farther east, even to Australia. Up a Bornean river he met the man who became the original of Almayer. That man, he tells us in A Personal Record (1912), haunted him, and it seems there was no way to lay his ghost but by putting him into a book. For five years in a desultory fashion he worked upon it but perhaps had never finished it had not an illness contracted on the Congo in 1892 made him consider leaving the sea. He was in the sailing ship Torrens in these last years, 1893 and 1894. In the latter year Almayer's Folly was finished, sent to the publisher and accepted. It appeared in 1895 and though its success was but one of estimation, and not of great sales, Conrad was encouraged to give up his sea life and to settle down to that of a man of letters.

There was a new quality in Almayer's Folly. It was the revela

tion of a new personality, a personality that almost miraculously got itself expressed in its possessor's first attempt at writing. This personality colored the descriptions of the clearing on the Bornean river that is the scene of the story, and all its menacing environment. It colored, too, the telling of the story and the presentation of character. There is no writing anywhere more thoroughly saturated with the personality of the writer than Conrad's. No matter how objective a story may appear to be Conrad is always there controlling its development and inhibiting the action of its people. This control and this inhibition are not directly revealed, for he creates a world of their own for the characters to inhabit, and having created that world for them he does not interfere with them. The control and inhibition are in the world he creates for them. In the Malayan stories this world is made out of an East that breaks the spirit of white men; that holds them down; that prevents them from rising superior to failure; that breeds fatalism in them and submission and resignation.

There is so much talk about "the new psychology" of Conrad that one must for the truth's sake stress the fact that the writings that made him famous are first and foremost and most largely the outgrowth of the environment of Malaya, a section of the East seen through a temperament. They are, too, studies in the psychology of strange people, done in a discipleship to Henry James, as well as in subjection to Conrad's own Slavic detachment and sense of illusion. The appeal of these Eastern stories, early and late, is basically the appeal of strange places at the world's end. Let them one after another rise before your mind's eye: Almayer's Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), "Karain" (1898), "The Lagoon" (1898), Lord Jim (1900), Youth (1902), "The End of the Tether" (1902), Typhoon (1903), Falk (1903), "The Secret Sharer" (1912), "Freya of the Seven Isles" (1912), Victory (1915), "Because of the Dollars" (1916), The Shadow Line (1917), The Rescue (1920). There is vivid reality in each one of them, but the tranced abandon with which you read them arises from the romance of strange places in which they are steeped.

There is brooding back of them as well as romance about them. All but always there is a sense of disaster to come. There can be such an assertion of the power of young manhood over all difficulties as that of Youth, and such a triumph of faithfulness and courage over wild tempest as that of Typhoon. Yet the brooding in almost

all the other stories is of the nature of a menace. This Malaya is not God's country to white men, no matter what its lure for them; it has always something sinister, malign and threatening about it. It breaks, as I have said, the men of the stories, or it completes the ruin of those who have sought its backwaters as a refuge in their weakness or their criminality. Almayer and Willems, of the two earliest stories, are broken men; Lord Jim is another, whose final triumph is but that of death; broken, too, are Jasper Allen of "Freya of the Seven Isles," and Heyst of Victory, and Davidson of "Because of the Dollars"; and in the end, too, even Rajah Tom of The Rescue goes down to defeat.

The constant elements, then, in all these stories of the East, are the triumph of the East over the white men; the spell of the lustrous and serene waters of shallow seas under sunlit or starlit skies; the jungle hours so breathless, or so terrible in storm; the brown men so quiet in the background, so faithful and so faithless, so inscrutable always. As you recall Conrad's East you forget sudden blows and thunderstorms, the noise of waves and wind, the cries of angered men, the shots and rushes of the murders and the fighting. A strange hush is over all, a hush broken only by whispering sounds of wind and human speech, a hush and, often too, a darkness,-the darkness of approaching storm or of night.

The stories that reveal these broken men, that chronicle their vehemence and their resignation, are full of incidents. Thieving and robbery and malignant feuds; murder attempted or done for passion's sake or out of jealousy or greed; shipwreck and piracy and petty wars all have place in them. Yet so indirect, often, are their methods of presentation, so involved the telling of the stories, so much more interested their author in the effect of incident on character and personality and temperament than in incident itself, that the tragedy is often veiled, rendered remote, held in the background, minimized.

As you read Conrad this subjection of incident, this aloofness of presentation of character, this avoidance of poignancy, seem deliberate on his part, the result of a studied detachment like that of Greek tragedy.

And yet, from his writing about his art, they would not seem deliberate or studied. The purpose of his art, Conrad tells us in the "Author's Note" to The Nigger of the Narcissus (The New Review,

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