Chapter I

In discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.

It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_ bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his position as novelist and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to those histories.

Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties; but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_ was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer's Folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_ had already preceded it.

With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a bright existence, flamed, and died. "Art for Art's sake" was slain by the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895. Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the Boer War completed an old one.

Of the whole question of Conrad's place in the history of the English novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic reaction that followed the collapse of æstheticism, seeing the old period washed away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the work that he had to do.