JOSEPH CONRAD.*
Mn. CIIRLE'S study of Mr. Conrad is in one respect hard to review, in that he spikes the guns of his critics by his disarming admissions. Books of this sort, when inspired by strong enthusiasm, are too often apt to degenerate into lauds of the living, and Mr. Carle candidly owns that the practice is generally ridiculous and stupid. Again, his pages bristle with comparisons, some of them extremely pointed and effective, some highly unjust. Thus Mr. Curie, while acknow- ledging Mr. Kipling to be a writer of genius, contrasts his view of the East with Mr. Conrad's in a passage which concludes with the words : "Conrad has his eye upon destiny, whereas Kipling has his eye on Simla society "—a comment which shows either complete ignorance or misunderstanding of Kim and The Jungle Books. But in the very next sentence he observes : "Of course there is a good deal of unfairness in this comparison—as there is in all such comparisons.... On certain formulas one can demonstrate that almost any one is either great or negligible. Fortunately unbacked ex parte statements do not carry conviction." Mr. Curie is not uncritical, but unjudicial. There is too much irrelevant, though often well. deserved, obloquy aimed at other authors, popular or notorious. And he is unnecessarily annoyed with those who admire Mr. Conrad in the wrong way, or what he thinks is the wrong way. But, none the less, he makes good his statement that he can recognize Mr. Conrad's defects as well as other people's merits. He is an enthusiast, but not an idolater, and in claiming for his author greatness and uniqueness he writes with an eloquence, a conviction, and a felicity of illustration which, if they must inevitably fail to convert the disciples of Mr. Shaw on the one hand or Miss Corelli on the other, will appeal powerfully to those who have yielded to the sombre fascination of Mr. Conrad's stories. We may add that in one important respect Mr. Curie shows an altogether admirable restraint. The brief biographical sketch is con- fined to the barest outlines, and is entirely free from irrelevant personalities. It gives us a few dates, a few facts about Mr. Conrad's parentage and education, a brief account of his life as a deep-water sailor, and a list of the ships—thirteen in all—on which he served either as an officer or in command from 1880 to 1894, when he finally left: • Joseph Conrad : a Study. By Richard Curls. Loudon Segazi Paul and Co. [7s. 641. not.) tie sea. The salient points in this record are that he went to- sea in 1874, that when he landed on English soil for the first
time at Lowestoft in 1878 at the age of twenty-one he did not know a word of English, that he passed for second mate in 1879, and' became a Master in the English merchant service in the year of his naturalization in 1884. Mr. Curie is within the mark when he comments on the extraordinary series of events that led a Polish boy to enter the British merchant service, and a master mariner to become a novelist. The mass of experience accumulated in a hard and roving life supplied him with an immense fund of raw material, but the real wonder is that one who learned English after he was a grown man should in another twenty years have become one of our greatest living prose writers. Whatever view may be taken of Mr. Conrad's title to abiding fame, no other writer that we can think of has belied his antecedents or asserted his genius in a more unexpected, paradoxical, or triumphant fashion.
For an explanation of such a magnificent freak we are obliged to fall back on the view that the emer- gence of genius has always been mysterious and inscrut- able, and that Mr. Conrad has genius is not easily to be controverted. Mr. Curie claims for him not only greatness, but greatness of a peculiar quality. "He is on a different plane" from nearly all his contemporaries, and, as Mr. Carle truly points out, this aloofness inevitably militates against his popularity. To begin with, his books are not easy reading, and his oblique method of narration, often at a
second remove, is a stumbling-block to the plain person. His atmosphere is predominantly morne—like that of Turgenieff,
the author whom of all others he most resembles; his stories generally end sadly, andthey are neither homely nor comforting, but steeped in unrest and pervaded by sardonic irony. Then, though eminently clean, he is not didactic, or given to moralizing, or concerned with sex problems, or a believer in art for art's sake. There are few people of rank or fashion
among his dramatis personae, but his standpoint is none the less aristocratic and fastidious. He has a sovereign dis- regard for cheap passports to approval, though once, and once only, he wrote an article in a well-known halfpenny daily. When to this list is added his preference for exotic themes, and his somewhat exotic treatment of English life, it is easy to understand why his audience has been, and always must remain, limited. Mr. Conrad's disabilities ennoble rather than discredit his reputation. But on the positive side his qualities are even more commanding. Foremost among them Mr. Curie rightly places his mastery of atmosphere and his sub-
ordination of character, no matter how interesting, to the unity of the novel. No living writer has interpreted with greater intensity of insight the glamour of the East and the wizardry of the sea. In his earlier books his prose, though eloquent and sonorous, suffered from a certain tropical luxuriance. But in his Later stories it has become at once more supple and more restrained, while retaining its old melody and enchantment—witness the _beautiful passage quoted by Mr. Curie on p. 184 :—
" She dropped her head, and as if her earn had been opened to the voices of the world, she heard beyond the rampart of sea wall the swell of yesterday's gale breaking on the beach with monotonous and solemn vibrations, as if all the earth had been a tolling bell."
Mr. Curie rightly insists on the core of sanity and the belief in human goodness which underlie Mr. Conrad's disillusion- ment and pessimism. He is a great believer in Duty; his heroes are chivalrous, merciful, and unselfish, and his finest women are good women. Mr. Curie also notes his delightful knack of detecting romance, heroism, or even great- ness underneath prosaic or even dull exteriors, his sympathy with ordinary people, his wonderfully effective blending of symbolism and realism, and the remarkable way in which, while maintaining a self-effacement as complete as that of Turgenieff, he blends his own personality wills that of his characters. Mr. Curie has omitted, however, to mention the curious illustration of Mr. Conrad's fastidiousness to be found in the fact that his books are practically void of quotations or
literary allusions. There is an exception in a passage quoted by Mr. Curie, where he applies the phrase odi et amo to man's
preference shown by officers in the merchant service for the
novels of Bulwer Lytton. In the chapter on Mr. Corn-ad's Methuen and Co. [124. 6d. net.] atmosphere Mr. Curie notes his astonishing achievement in evolving the wonderful panorama of Costaguana in Nodromo from the descriptions in an old book of his childhood and front two flying visits to South American ports. "It is the great example of Conrad's vast capacity for building up the very illusion of reality out of practically nothing?' Perhaps the best comment on this clairvoyance is to be found in a passage in Chance in which _Marlow, Mr. Conrad's alter ego, expounds his theory of knowledge. Marlow held that "to understand everything was not good for the intellect," and that while "a well-stocked intelligence weakens the impulse to action, an overstocked one leads gently to idiocy." With him a glimpse, and no more, was the proper way of seeing an individuality. To form a correct judgment of a man a few materials are quite enough : the merest starting-point becomes a coign of vantage, "and thus by a series of logically deduced verisimili- tudes one arrives at truth, or as near as any circumstantial evidence can do." He never went out consciously to collect information—" information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, nnvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge comes to one—a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality."
We opened Mr. Curie's book with some misgivings, but they have been dispelled by its perusal. He Las performed a difficult task with real ability; his praise is never effusive ; his enthusiasm is generous and sincere ; he has, in short' earned the gratitude of all who recognize in Mr. Conrad the most romantic of living British novelists.
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