Joseph Conrad — A Master of Ships and of Story

The Extraordinary Career of a Pole Who Became a Great English Novelist

PHILIP GUEDALLA

ONE would have said at the first blush that Polish sea-captain was improbable. Maritime traditions are rarely strong in those countries in which it is not possible to take the children to the seaside, although there was once a Servian Navy which ran to a couple of gunboats on the Danube, and the descendants of William Tell fly the Swiss ensign at the main (or is it the peak?) of a revenue-cutter on Lake Maggiore. But the vivacious countrymen of M. Paderewski belong essentially to terra Jirma; and even if, in rare instances, they take to the water, you would expect to find them in the Illyrian coasting service rather than the more drab surroundings of a British merchantman. So Mr. Conrad has been unlikely from the beginning of the chapter.

But the oddity of his first career pales into commonplace beside the singular quality of his second. It was strange enough for a young man from Poland to graduate in the Narrow Seas and then to beat up and down the world in British sailing-ships. The Partition of Poland has rarely taken its victims so far afield as Singapore, and Dutch officials in Sourabaya hardly expect their callers to display any degree of familiarity with the Confederation of Radom and the architecture of Cracow. But when that remarkable shipmaster took to writing novels in his cabin, one might reasonably have felt that he was endangering his Board of Trade certificate. The Merchant Shipping Act contained no express prohibition of literary pursuits, although, doubtless, it has since been amended in view of Mr. Conrad's grave example. But his proceedings were, to say the least, highly unusual; and when he aggravated the rash experiment by writing with rare distinction in a foreign language, the whole affair began to look positively queer.

Conrad's Strangest Romance

IT is an odd story, odder by far than any that A Mr. Conrad has written; and it would require all the slow' march of his gradual narrative method to make it credible. But it is quite true; and as one writes, his strange example may be encouraging Czech cabin boys and Croatian boatswains to read their Ollendorf and (by a natural sequence) to buy pens, ink and paper, and become English authors. We can only hope, if Mr. Conrad is a fair sample of the bulk, that they will succeed. There is a sinister rumor that the vested interests of the Authors Society have petitioned the Board of Trade to schedule the British novel as a key industry for protection under the Safeguarding of Industries Act. But, given the almost total illiteracy of our masters, the intrigue will probably fail. Mr. Conrad, at any rate, is a shining demonstration of the blessings of literarv Free Trade.

There is a queer diffidence in his earlier work which seems to mark the slow steps of a conscious beginner. You will find that in almost every story down to a date^vell on in his career he has chosen to place the narrative in the mouth of some casual raconteur. He seems to avoid coming on the stage himself to say his piece, as the indomitable Captain Marlow waves a slow cigar and does the author's work for him in a long, unfolding story. One would like some Conrad Society to give a public reading of, say, Lord Jim, if only in order to settle the vexed question of how long it really was that Marlow's friends sat round on that veranda whilst he talked the slow tale. But one feels that there is more than that in Mr. Conrad's indirect method. His imitators (and in some of his later work he has almost become one of his own imitators) love to employ it as a piece of subtlety. There is an ingenious fascination about straining a thin trickle of narrative through the minds of two or three intermediate narrators. It is a problem after the heart of Mr. Henry James; and he seems to find a mild delight in fiddling with the magiclantern and bewildering his public by interposing fresh characters, like colored slides, between the simple story and its simpler reader.

His Art of Cautions Subtlety BUT it is cynical to conclude that Mr. Conrad set simply out to subtilize schoolboy stories of tropical adventure, to play at pirates with the air of a philosopher, to disguise a hero of Mr. R. M. Ballantyne as a victim of Mr. Henry James. Young men with adolescent tongues in beardless cheeks do things like that in Chelsea. But a Master in the Merchant Service writing in the privacy of his cabin does not play such tricks. One conjectures that Captain Marlow and the whole shadowy host of his successors, who give to Mr. Conrad's work its peculiar indirect flavor, were invented because the author feared to trust his knowledge of a strange language to the adventure of direct description. He knew that he could converse well enough in English; and he cautiously resolved, as one seems to see his design, that his stories should be told in conversation.

That caution may well have been the origin of his method, of the rambling hearsay diction in which we get the shadow' pantomime of Lord Jim and Almayer and Mr. de Barral and his inscrutable daughter. But if he was nervous about his literary manner, there was no need for diffidence about the matter. The goods which he brought to market in 1895 were of precisely the right type. One can hardly realise in these days, when a novelist can make a name by depicting a typist in the Underworld, the rich, exotic tastes of the later Nineteenth Century. The subjects of Queen Victoria began to thirst, after the First Jubilee, for color. They turned wearily from the mild, domesticated fiction of the day, and thirsted, with Mr. Browning, for places and times

"When red and blue were indeed red and blue."

Even the Monarchy responded briskly to their demand, and offered them the flags and bright triumphal arches of the Second Jubilee, with lots and lots of colored gentlemen on horseback. And there was a corresponding dash of the exotic in almost all the literature which they consumed. Those were the days when Mr. Kipling's Indian skies were blue, and he painted towns and uniforms and maps a deep, deep red. Mr. G. W. Steevens described the sunshine at Omdurman; and even Mr. Stevenson was teaching his readers to forget the gray half-tones of Scotland in the bright light of Samoa.

Acceptance Reluctant but Just

SO Mr. Conrad was well in the latest vogue when he came upon London with a remarkable prose style and a vivid memory of the Dutch East Indies. Imperialism was slightly affronted by the revelation that the British flag had omitted to wave in a region where the sun so manifestly never set. But the brilliant oddity of the scene, the mild Malays, the bright blue sea, the deep green jungle, and the sinister Arab traders were a noble compensation; and a generation which was always fascinated by queer names (it fought for months for Buluwayo, and almost went to war for Fashoda) yielded to the exotic attractions of Samarang and Sourabaya and the slow waters of the Pantai.

Yet it was slow to discover Mr. Conrad. He had trailed his puppets up and down the Archipelago, and set them dancing on a narrow, sloping stage in South America, and even brought them home to see the Russian Revolution before it really found him. His mastery of English was perfect, and his indirect method had ceased to be a precaution of language and become a form of literature, when they all realised, on the appearance of Chance, that he was a man to be read. He had been talked about for years; but respectful allusions in cultivated conversation are a meager substitute for royalties, and before 1913 Mr. Conrad had enjoyed the limited, if distinguished, appreciation of caviare. Since then he has soared (or sunk) into popularity.

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One likes him best when he is least exotic. He seems to have an unfair advantage, to play with the dice loaded in his favor when he becalms a shin on a windless day in the shallow seas beyond Celebes with a mutter of thunder somewhere below the skyline and a faint line of breakers lying along a low horizon of coast, or when he sets the drums thudding behind a tall stockade as the war canoes flicker along a dark river between the great trees. You feel that someone else who had been there might give you something (though not quite all) of the same sensation. But when he lays aside ; the meretricious attractions of strange climates and queer names, when he is just the ironical observer of his figures at their little antics, he is at his best. The Tropics are good enough; but there is sunshine, one feels, in Mr. Kipling, and even Mr. IIichens has seen it from the nicest hotels in Southern Algeria. The best of Air. Conrad is the observant irony which wrote The Duel, and set two little figures jigging in a long and preposterous quarrel against the gaudy, shifting background of the Napoleonic Wars. It should have been illustrated by Caran d'Ache. It might almost have been written by M. Anatole France. And no amateur of irony (or First Empire uniforms) could find higher praise.

Mr. Conrad has a queer gift. Like Mr. Belloc, he writes English with the strange perfection of a man to whom the language is not native, with the detachment of a scholar polishing his Latin prose or his Greek iambics. One feels that he holds each sentence at arm's length before he puts it into place. And its place is always in a long study of fine shades in strange, outlandish places. Mr. Conrad has lived so long in queer company that he can give a touch of oddity to almost any scene. He has made the Upper Congo inexpressibly strange; yet (it is a greater triumph) he makes the Russian Embassy of The Secret Agent as queer as the jungle. But his gift is something more than queer. It is great; and one is mutely thankful that, out of the four or five languages which that strange sea captain knew, he selected English for his experiment in literature.