Chapter 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.

McWhirr, 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, for 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, McWhirr, 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?