JOSEPH CONRAD

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 3, 3 July 1926, Page 21

JOSEPH CONRAD

LAST ESSAYS,

"Last Essays." By Joseph Conrad. After the harvest the gleaner;. but, where the gleaning is in golden fields, the toil is seldom without honour or reward. Certainly it has both in the case of Richard Curie, who has gleaned with assiduity and judgment among the stubble-remainder of Joseph Conrad's genius. Here are twenty collected essays, sketches, and letters, some of them written in Conrad's closing years, one, the very last unfinished page that he ever wrote, and a few, including a rather disjointed Congo diary, dating from earlier days. ' They are, of course, of unequal value; but the best are very good indeed, and in even the least considerable there igleams here and there the lambent fancy of a penetrating phrase, or the swift glance of a roving personality. ~ For Conra'tl could never^keep himself out of anything that he might write. Some pestering editor would press him for a column of topical journalism; .but, before the, column was filled, reminiscence, insight, glowing individuality would have get its mark upon the argument. In one of the occasional essays hi the present volume Conrad distinguishes between the. things, that "just happen" upon the page —flashes of divine inspiration—and things that come by prayer and fasting, the deliberate fabric of workmanship. '"'I myself," he «ayg, "have written a varied lot of prose with a quite ridiculous scrupulosity and an absurd seriousness"; and there is plenty of such material in these last gleanings from his field. But ihere is much also of that rarer product, the Heaven-sent moment's intuition, when the artist's zeal for "self-expression in tho face of his belief in men and things" seems to fuse phrase and fancy into an unchallengeable jewel of. art. Conrad, like any other artist, had his level spaces, his tracts of honest workmanlike description; but he never laboured for long without lighting up some hidden fire of natural insight^ some gem-like flame of interpretation. He never did a piece of casual work in a casual spirit.' The occasion might indeed' be casual; but it was sure, sooner or later, to elicit the significant word. What he himself called "the. articulate appeal of humanity, so strangely constructed from inertia and restlessness," was perpetually hailing him across "the unappeasable ocoan of human life."

CONRAD'S STYLE,

In the March number of "The London Mercury" there appears a striking study of Conrad's prose-style. Tho author, Mr. E. E. Kellett, yields to no one in his admiration for the essential qualities that made of 'Conrad the artist that he was; but he confesses to being weary of the reiterated assertion of the critics that Conrad wrote English as though lie were an Englishman, and that it is impossible from his writings to detect his foreign birth. On the contrary, Mr. Kellett protests, his "stylo shows so many marks indicating that he thought in one language and wrote in another, as to make us wonder whether the critics in question can have read the books with any care." Whereupon Mr. Killett sub-. jects characteristic passages of Conrad's prose to keen critical analysis, emphasising his trick of placing the adverb in an awkwardly detached posi.tion, after the verb rather than before, his occasionally ambiguous arrangement of phrases, his use of cliches like "as it were,'' of the incorrect relativo cause, "and which," and so forth, the cumulative effect of which is, in Mr. Kellett's judgment, to make him "ono of the very hardest of writers to read. Almost every sentence requires close attention, if its true meaning is to be unravelled." The ■ criticism is first-hand and acute. There is an appreciable quantity of trailing, broken-backed sentences to bo found in Conrad, if one goes hunting for them. There is one

in the opening essay of the present volume.

"The fierce south-easter caught me up on its wings, and n< later than the ninth day I was outside the entrance of Torres Strait, named after the undaunted and reticent Spaniard who, in the seventeenth century, first sailed that way without knowing where he vas, without suspecting he had New Guinea on one sido of him and th« whole solid' Australian Continent on the other—he thought lie was passing through an archipelago—the strait whose existence for a century and a half had been doubted, argued about, squabbled over by geographers, and oven denied by the disreputable but skilful navigator, Abel Tasman, who thought it was a large bay, and whoso true contours were first laid down on the map by James Cook, the navigator, without fear and without reproach, the greatest in achievement and character of the later seamen fathers of militant geography.''

No doubt, that is an overcrowded, uncomfortable senteuce. No doubt also it is disfigured by confusion, for it would appear to imply that the contours which were depicted by James Cook were those of the redoubtable Tasman himself. No doubt, finally, Conrad did occasionally use the English odiom with difficulty, employing "a ridiculous scrupulosity" to an effect of self-consciousness and discomfort. But the fault, such as it is, was always with the idiom, never with the prevailing tone and quality of his style. As his critic generously proclaims, "his penetration, his descriptive gift, his power of suggesting atmosphere, his equally extraordinary power of -marshalling his episodes so as to lend decisive force to the final catastrophe, all these remain entirely unaffected by the fact that his writing is really translation." The essential Conrad, in fact, is a creature of spirit, fire, and dew; it is in the spirit, not the letter, that his genius manifests its range.

thje sea of humanity.

Give him a theme, a mere piece of task-work, and see how he will turn it into living literature. Invite him to contribute an introduction to a serial geography, and watch him interpreting the romance of travel to those "sedentary people who like to dream of arduous adventure in the manner of prisoners dreaming behind bars of all the hardships and hazards of liberty dear to the heart of man." With what a lively ardour he will array the procession of those who "went forth each according to his lights and with varied motives, laudable or sinful, but each bearing in his breast' a spark of the sacred fire"—Livingstone, "pacing wearily at the head of a few black followers along the recd-friuged lakes towards the dark native hut on the Congo head-waters in which he died"; or James Cook, taking his last backward look at the land of his discovery, from the little broken island at the mouth of the Torres Straits, "alone with his thoughts for a moment, while -in the ship's boat, lying off on her oars, the coxswain kept his eyes open for the slightest sign of the captain's hand." Wonderful cameos of the imagination! And Conrad's work is alive with them; they are the monomark of his personality. .

He describes the good ship Torreiis, of which he was chief officer in the 'nineties, and she becomes a phantom of delight, whose breaking-up is like an allegory of human fate. "I lovo to think," he says, "that her perfect form found a merciful end on the shores of the sunlit sea of my boyhood's dreams, and that her fine spirit has returned to dwell in the regions of the 'great winds, the inspirers and the companions of her swift, renowned, sea-tossed life, which I, too, have been permitted to share for a little while.'" Through all these memories there flits a vaguo nostalgia for the joys of the open sky, crossed and recrossed by the sailing man's irresistible contempt for the luxury that goes down to the sea in ships which resemble floating models of the Ritz Hotel. "The days of heroic travel are gone." In a little while "there will be no backyard left in the heart of Central Africa that has not been peeped into by some person more or less commissioned for the purpose." The immemorial haunts of solitude will be bristling with tramway poles, and squalid with "the great cloud of fatuous daily photographs and even more fatuous descriptive chatter, under whose shadow no traveller could live." It is a dreary prospect, but it will bring in its own revenges. For in the twilight of romance the great dreamers always come to life again.— Arthur Waugh in Sydney "Daily Telegraph,"