They all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon their intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm --expectant, consecrated, and holy--which the early painters have caught the shadow of in their pictures of the Annunciation.
There is something about them which makes us vaguely dream of the far-distant youth of the world; something that recalls the symbolic and poetic figures of Biblical and Mythological legend.
They tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with the magical and evasive depths of the feminine secret in them. They make us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the corn-field; of Andromache on the walls of Troy and of Calypso, Brunhilda, Gwenevere, Iphigeneia, Medea, Salome, Lilith.
And all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the most simple means. It is brought about partly by an art of description which is unique among English novelists, an art of description which by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodily appearance indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunning insertion of long, treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal in some occult indirect manner the very integral quality of the soul thus betrayed.
The more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while they are expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur and confuse the mysterious depths of their s.e.x-life than to reveal it.
Conrad"s women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence, in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something more than the tragic emotion of one person. They have the power of revealing what might be called the subliminal s.e.x-consciousness of the race itself. They have the power of merging the individuality of the particular speaker into something deeper and larger and wider, into something universal.
Reserve is the grand device by means of which this subconscious element is made evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically.
When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed. A look, a gesture, a sigh, a whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of the ocean-deep mysteries of the soul than pages of eloquent psychology.
The deepest psychology--that is what one comes at last to feel--can only be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures, symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words revealing it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.
For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest things in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind must be alert to receive them, but they must not be s.n.a.t.c.hed at in any direct attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, or softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turn away our faces. They will only come if we treat them with the reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates, calling them "The Eumenides"; or the ultimate secret of the universe, calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask of superst.i.tion.
The reason why Conrad holds us all--old and young, subtle and simple--with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant intuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of all our human days--the things which cause us those moments of sharp sweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings.
His style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats the language he uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence.
The mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems to have intensified this quality; as though the hardness and steepness of its challenge forced the latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibres to encounter it.
When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of technical terms. He undertakes the much more human and the much more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague and delicate a.s.sociations which bind the souls of seafarers to the vessels that carry them.
His fine imaginative mind--loving with a large receptive wisdom all the quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people--naturally turns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships.
That b.a.s.t.a.r.d romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical achievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a trans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad.
Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimate object to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is necessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to have become intimately a.s.sociated with the hopes and fears, the fancies and terrors, of many generations.
It is simply and solely their newness to human experience which makes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, however striking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of intrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does.
And it is not only--as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad--that these old-fashioned ships, with their legendary a.s.sociations carrying one back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves. They diffuse the beauty of their ident.i.ty through every detail of the lives of those who are connected with them. They bring the mystery and terror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into every port.
No great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors--sailors who _sail_ their ships--enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the narrow streets.
The shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar superficial minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size for dignity, and brutal energy for n.o.ble strength.
Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce these startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotional insignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition. What one thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad"s works is always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with an integral soul.
One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a _figure-head;_ and is it possible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd steamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment? Liners are things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart by their paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of financiers who monopolise them.
"Floating hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which the awed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders.
Well! In Conrad"s books we are not teased with "floating hotels." If a certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from thinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea, let it be remembered that the sea has its _poetic_ revenge upon them by absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the real magic of its secret.
No one knows the sea--that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite clear--who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel.
Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written--one hopes that for many years each new Spring will bring a new work from his pen--my own favourites are "Chance" and "Lord Jim," and, after those two, "Victory."
I think the figure of Flora de Barral in "Chance" is one of the most arresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind.
Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeks and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation, her shadowy and abysmal reserve--haunt me like a figure seen and loved in some previous incarnation.
I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person"s first love.
I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are thus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the _sensual_ from these evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual; of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about love we have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again, as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation of women, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger cleverer writers playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession. I think the greatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to sacrifice the mysterious truth of pa.s.sion either to sentiment or to sensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural human feeling free from both these turbid and morbid streams.
A very curious psychological blunder made by many of our younger writers is the attributing to women of the particular kind of s.e.x emotion which belongs essentially to men, an emotion penetrated by l.u.s.t and darkened by feverish restlessness. From this blunder Conrad is most strangely free. His women love like women, not like vicious boys with the faces of women. They love like women and they hate like women; and they are most especially and most entirely womanlike in the extreme difficulty they evidently always experience in the defining with any clearness--even to themselves --of their own emotions.
It is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions which renders women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the mere presence of something in them which refuses definition is a proof that they are beyond both sentiment and sensuality. For sentiment and sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact and logical a.n.a.lysis. Sensualists love nothing better than the epicurean pleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as they are once a.s.sured of a discreet and sympathetic listener. The same is doubly true of sentimentalists. The women of Conrad--like the women of Shakespeare--while they may be garrulous enough and witty enough on other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb when their great emotions call for overt expression.
It seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others, has caught the mystery of ships should be the writer who, of all moderns, has caught the mystery of women. Women are very like ships: ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselves know nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds--thoughts wandering from island to island of remote enchantment--settle for a moment and then fly off forever; ships that can ride the maddest and most tragical storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock, unmarked on any earthly chart, may sink to the bottom without warning and without mercy!
Conrad reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest love of women suffers from--the kind of storm which shakes it and troubles it--is not sensuality of any sort but a species of blind and fatal fury, hardly conscious of any definite cause, but directed desperately and pa.s.sionately against the very object of this love itself. Conrad seems to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad, wild, desperate fury with which women hurl themselves against what they love best in a blind desire to hurt it, is nothing less than a savage protest against that deep and inviolable gulf which isolates every human being from every other human being.
Such a gulf men--in a measure--pa.s.s, or dream they pa.s.s, on the swift torrent of animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant in these things, and their love being more diffused, and, in a sense, more spiritual, is not so easily satisfied by mere physical possession.
They want to possess more. They want to possess body, soul and spirit. They want to share every thought of their beloved, every instinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotest dream.
That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak their anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness.
It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and absolute possession of the object of their love. The maternal instinct is always--as Conrad makes quite clear--at the bottom of the love-pa.s.sion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy every vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual, in the person it pursues.
Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in women, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable anger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind of cunning subterfuge.
This loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousand quite trivial causes. It may take the form of jealousy; but it is in reality much deeper than jealousy. It may take the form of protest against man"s stupidity, man"s greed, man"s vanity, man"s l.u.s.t, man"s thick-skinned selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the law of nature which makes it impossible for a woman to share this stupidity, this vanity, this l.u.s.t, this greed, and which holds her so cruelly confined to a selfishness which is her own and quite different from the selfishness of man.
One would only have to carry the psychological imagination of Conrad a very little further to recognise the fact that while man is inherently and completely satisfied with the difference between man and woman; satisfied with it and deriving his most thrilling pleasure from it; woman is always feverishly and frantically endeavouring to overcome and overreach this difference, endeavouring, in fact, to feel her way into every nerve and fibre of man"s sensibility, so that he shall have nothing left that is a secret from her. That he should have any such secrets--that such secrets should be an inalienable and inevitable part of his essential difference from herself--excites in her unmitigated fury; and this is the hidden cause of those mysterious outbursts of apparently quite irrational anger which have fallen upon all lovers of women since the beginning of the world.
Man wishes woman to remain different from himself. It interests him that she should be different. He loves her for being different.
His sensuality and his sentiment feed upon this difference and delight to accentuate it. Women seem in some subtle way to resent the division of the race into two s.e.xes and to be always endeavouring to get rid of this division by possessing themselves of every thought and feeling and mood and gesture of the man they love. And when confronted by the impa.s.sable gulf, which love itself is incapable of bridging, a blind mad anger, like the anger of a creative deity balked of his purpose, possesses them body and soul.
Mr. Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad, written in a manner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one reads it one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, could not possibly have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad"s complicated and elaborate manner of building up his stories.
Mr. Follet points out, for instance, how in "Chance" we have one layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more underscored and overscored with interesting personal values.
This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of all attention.
But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the art of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quite direct and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting, between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story.
I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Lenas, are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation. I think he is always at his best when two pa.s.sionate and troubled natures--not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a man and man, like Lingard and Willem--are brought together in direct and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that true authentic thrill of immemorial romance--romance as old as the first stories ever told or sung--of the encounter of protagonist and antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and terrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.
But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated pa.s.sionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet in treasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all those elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which give to the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a background.
Except for a few insignificant pa.s.sages when that sly old mariner Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his pipe and pa.s.ses the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and overlappings of his inverted method of narration--of those rambling "advances," as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated "conclusions." In the few occasional pa.s.sages where Marlowe a.s.sumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded, worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to the Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully and pathetically English.
With these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to his curious and intricate method. I love the way he pours his main narrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve of one quaint person"s mind and then of another; each one adding some new flavour, some new vein of body or bouquet or taste, to the original stream, until it becomes thick with all the juices of all the living fermentations in the world.