Hugh Walpole - Joseph Conrad

TO any reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that an author's artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters.

With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour his art has been placed we have some compulsory connection.

Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.

Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until 1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the Duke of Sutherland as ordinary seaman. He became a Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various periods during his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin. With that publisher's acceptance of Almayer's Folly the third period of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his books.

Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical relationship of these three backgrounds—Poland, the Sea, the inner security and tradition of an English country-side—one can realise what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be enough to give life and vigour to any poet's temperament. The romantic melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.

Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what impulses those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. He found, too, in her service, the type of man who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a despair of any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to him.

Then, towards the end of his twenty years' service of the sea, the creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if Almayer's Folly had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world. Almayer's Folly , however, was not rejected; its publication caused The Spectator to remark: "The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago." He had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted The Nigger of the Narcissus for The New Review as a more important date in his new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure.

The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final, almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole "case" of his earlier life. It was as a "case" that he saw it, a "case" that was to produce all those other "cases" that were his books. This has been their history.

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 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 character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Bahalatchi 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 then 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.