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CHAPTER # 5
CHAPTER # 5
Conrad's
Pessimism
An Elizabethan
Gentleman
"An Elizabethan
gentleman" is of the Ford Madox Ford's descriptions of a friend, and
Conrad's novels do indeed suggest, more than any of our time, the tragedies of
Shakespeare, He had the Elizabethan fondness for exciting indecent and exotic
setting, violent conflict and gorgeous pageantry. His herons are not of noble
rank, they are typical of large dimensions-in their own world imposing
statuesque figures. Like Shakespeare's heroes they grapple with external forces
often objectified in the shape of villains; like them too they are still
lustrous in defeat and death. His tragedy has in general much he same pomp and
stir, passion and glow. Conrad recaptured the glamour that many sober
contemporaries believe to have permanently departed English literature, or at
the most to survive only in the popular romance.
Dark Powers
With these sober
contemporaries, Conrad has nevertheless strong blood ties. His tragedy docs do not
provide simply a glorious romantic spree. However dark and deadly, the world of
Shakespeare appears to be governed by moral order, or at least has a
definitely moral complexion. Conrad's world is utterly soulless, unintelligible
from any rational point of view. All ho could make out was a "mysterious arrangement
of merciless logic for a futile purpose." Even his many villains do not
imply a disturbance of the natural order. Ordinarily, they are simply
'grotesque, like so much else in Conrad's primitive society : but when, like the
spectral M. Jones of Victory or the vicious Brown of Lord Jim, they become the
concentrated essence of malevolence, they appear to be, in Conrad's own words,
blind accomplices of Dark Powers. From first to last he carried with him a
conviction of the "immense indifference of things"-an indifference so
callous that it often seems, as in Hardy, downright malignancy, "The sea
and the earth are unfaithful to their children: a truth, a faith, a generation
of men goes-and is forgotten, and it does not matter." Noble and ignoble
are destroyed with fine impartiality. Alm Ayer, Willem, ani Verloc are miserably
weak and ineffectual; Captain Whalley is ruined because of his very nobility.
This vision of life is
not a philosophy. Conrad had no genuine philosophical interests. Unlike Hard,
he never systematized his prejudices. In his letters, he occasionally liked to
call life a machine, and as he played with this figure he indeed suggests The
Dynasts; "And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has
made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without
foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident......" He
adds, characteristically, "and nothing matters." Such statements,
however, are only expressions of a fancy or mood. They present not a philosophy
but a feeling.
Yet it is well-defined,
impersonal feeling that colours almost every page Conrad wrote. His heroes are
always engaged in hopelessly unequal conflicts with the Dark Powers; if they
escape absolute destruction, it is only to carry away an indelible memory of
the uncompassionate masters of their destiny. Still worse, the powers appear to
be grim practical jokers. "It is to be remarked." says Marlow,
"that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting
them on this earth." From these people Conrad chooses his heroes; he is
forever thrusting them into impossible situations that by nature and training
they are ludicrously unprepared to meet. Such, as Conrad sees them, are
workings of Providence.
Withering Sense
of Solitariness
It is a tribute to the
subtlety and intensity of Conrad's art that irony so insistent as this
rarely seems laboured and arbitrary. Like the irony of Hardy, it is a prejudice,
a violent wrenching of common experience; but where Hardy badly states, Conrad
evokes and suggests. Also pervasive and still more fundamental in Conrad's art,
however, is a withering sense of solitariness. "We live as we
dream-alone", says Marlow; and Conrad is obsessed with this inescapable,
desolating condition of experience. Lord Jim, Emilia Gould, Nostromo, Lingard,
Verloc, Captain Whalley, Heyst and Lena-all are alone in their struggles, all
feel the "tremendous fact of our isolation, of the indestructible a loneliness that surrounds, envelops, clothes every human soul from the cradle
to the grave, and, perhaps, beyond." even he sees as through a veil,
dimly.
One explanation of this
obsession is Conrad's untiring search for the secret inner truth that explains
all surface phenomena, his endless concern with the strange, private,
mysterious essence of the individual's soul that distinguishes and also
isolates it from every other soul. Few writers, in fact, have managed to convey
so deep a sense of the strangeness underlying the familiarity of the world of
ordinary appearance. But in The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, Gustay Morf
suggests another explanation: Conrad was simply projecting his own fate as an
expatriate. Actually, he remained very much a Pole-an alien at heart to the end
of his days. Certainly he was not rooted, like Hardy, in the English soil, nor.
like Gals worthy in English society. Almost all his heroes are like himself
outcasts, melancholy and aloof.
It does not
Matter
It would seem, then,
that Conrad's world i a and comfortless one, Sambre, sinister, inscrutable,
unfathomable, inexorable-these are among his favourite adjectives, and he is
lavish in his use of them. And this obsession indubitably narrows his art. His
heroes are characteristically serious-minded men who rarely smile and never
laugh. He almost never descends to the level of ordinary human life, with its
blessed trivialities and absurdities; he seems blind to the ordinary man's
acceptance of life as toilsome, perhaps wearisome and perplexing, but not
necessarily desperate business. And occasionally he writes a story like
"Freya of the Seven Isles," in which suffering is so outrageously
unjust and evil so completely dominant that "the tragedy is merely painful.
Many readers are accordingly repelled by what
they deem the unmitigated cheerlessness of Conrad's world. He seems to watch
his men go down to defeat with as much concern as the gods them- selves: his
own comment would appear to be, "It does not matter. Some of his remarks
to be sure, are inconsistent. "Ah, Davidson, woe to the person whose heart
has not learned whereas young to hope, to love -and to put its trust in life
!"-these are the last words of Heyst and plainly they are Conrad's own
commentary on the story of Victory. But, why Heyst and Lena-not to mention the
long list of his disenchanted heroes? And why, then, does Conrad himself remain
so aloof?
Although his
treatment of Lord Jim and some of his sea captains is obviously tender, he was
too consistently detached and ironic to display openly much love of man. Yet
Conrad was far less unconcerned than at times he liked to think. We have his
own words in the familiar Preface to A Personal Record. He was resigned,
yes----
But
resignation is not indifference. I would not prefer to be left standing as a
mere spectator on the bank of the good stream carrying onward such a lot of
lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of much insight as can be
expressed in a voice of so sympathy and compassion.
Faith in
Solidarity
Even in his
bitterest visions he was heartened by an "invincible conviction of
solidarity." He remained "always faithful to that sobriety where
there is power and truth and peace." Underneath his sobriety the
discerning reader will perceive a genuine sympathy. Unlike Hardy, he not only
accepted a destiny "of not the slightest consequence, come to
suspect," he wrote in A Personal Record, "that the aim of creation
cannot be ethical at all. I would lovingly believe that its object is solely
spectacular: a spectacle for awe, love adoration, or hate, if you like, but in
this view-and in this view alone-never for but delighted in life simply as a
spectacle. "I have despair i" His whole attitude is summed up in his
attitude towards the sea. He wrote: "The ocean has no compassion, no
faith, no law, no memory...nothing can touch the bitterness of his heart."
Strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to measure
by its grace - to die by its can.
In the
introduction to Chance, in which the controlling powers seem most wanton and
soulless, he sings his testament: "The history of man on this earth since
the beginnings of ages may be resumed in one phrase of infinite poignancy: They
were born, they suffered, they died....Yet it is a great tale A great tale
-this poet's cry echoes up and down the novels...." Even when his heroes
are contemptible he gives their tragedy glamour by getting into it the sense of
the immense, the mysterious, the awful-the sublime. He takes the reader to a
world that, however terrible, is never mean.
His characters
are seldom familiar types with whom we can readily identify ourselves. They are
instead highly original figures, involved in strange actions, dwelling in a
shadowy world peculiarly their own. But Conrad is able to make us feel 'at home
in this world.
No other
modern novelist has created so many large, vital characters who can powerfully
stir and capture the imagination. Facing a massive indifference, they are never
themselves indifferent marching to a certain destruction, they are not merely
resigned. In defeat they lose none of their force and stature. However futile
their struggles are not meaningless, for in death they still affirm an idealism
that is the triumph of life.
In short, his
emphasis is finally less upon the implacable might of the Dark Powers than upon
the integrity, gallantry, and fortitude of man that make him a worthy
antagonist, and his defeat no occasion for abject despair.