Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy's Wessex map is the most fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson's chart in Treasure Island. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver's treasure. If any attentive reader of Nostromo were put down in Sulaco tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that "extended to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's length, through an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse—a strong-hearted but persevering black brute, with a hammer bead—you would have seen in the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curbstone of the side-walk!"
How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation of some reader "Yes—those orange-trees! It was just like that when I was there!" How convinced we are of Conrad's unimpeachable veracity! How like him are those remembered details, "the nailed doors," "the fine stone hands," "at arm's-length"!—and can we not sniff something of the author's impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that "hammer-headed horse" of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume!
He is able, therefore, upon this foundation of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in Nostromo at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
Here, then, is the secret of Conrad's atmosphere. He is the poet, working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the heart of his work from the first line of Almayer s Folly to the last line of Victory. Nostromo is not simply the history of certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It is that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for its interpretation....
When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain limitations.
III
As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men.
It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they—from his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and it is, surely, Conrad's harshest limitation that he should never be free from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat. Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: "And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct." Conrad's ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim's endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain—as vain as Stein's butterflies.
And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart's desire it is that his merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to whom human achievements are nothing—lust of treasure.
M'Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous of God's splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap—the victim is always in his power. It comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of brain—Marlowe, Decoud, Stein—are melancholy and ironic: "If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is." The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea captains. This then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant, hamper his interest—that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of any collector of specimens—but at the end of it all, as with his own Stein: "He says of him that he is 'preparing to leave all this: preparing to leave…' while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies."
Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles—Robert Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning's interest in life was derived, on the novelist's side of him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet's side, in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning's clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual case—he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
Browning's realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in Sordello the most romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is not this exactly what we may say of Nostromo? Mr Chesterton has written of Browning: "He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the 'blue spirt of a lighted match' for the monotony of the evening star." Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his mistress' window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are precisely Conrad's characters. Is not Waring Conrad's man?
And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in The Secret Agent, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart, it is also that the worlds of these two poets are the same. How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, M'Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee's wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed's Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
Finally, The Ring and the Book, with its multiplied witnesses, its statement as a "case" of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of that superb building—here we can see the highest pinnacle of that temple that has Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo amongst its other turrets, buttresses and towers.
Conrad is his own master—he has imitated no one, he has created, as I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning carried Romantic-Realism showed the author of Almayer's Folly the signs of the road that he was to follow.
If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as novelist?
IV—ROMANCE AND REALISM
I
THE terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of Robert Louis Stevenson, said: "Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;… if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade finished his vociferous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!"
We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his estimate of Stevenson's present and future literary value without denying that the date of the publication of St Ives was also the date of the death of the purely romantic novel.
But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term "Romantic" is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term "Realism" has, recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: "I like romances," we hear the modern reader say, "because they take me away from real life, which I desire to forget." In the same way Realism is defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant pessimist. "I like realism," admirers of a certain order of novel exclaim, "because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day—I know where I am."
Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an ambition—I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence—Romance is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and recorded–it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary divorce from reality, nor does Realism imply a detailed and dusty preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as The Brothers Karamazov, such a play as The Cherry Orchard are there before us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that Karamazov has, in the England of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by Madame Bovary....