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Joseph Conrad

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<h4>II</h4> 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[Pg 14] 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[Pg 15] character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Babalatchi 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 their 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 cruelest 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 Nigger of the Narcissus. This[Pg 16] 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[Pg 17] 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[Pg 18] 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 Gould, 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[Pg 19] 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.[Pg 20] 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[Pg 21] 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 Nigger 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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