July 26, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
15 
Life and Letters 
By J. C. Squire 
Mr. Conrad's 
Masterpiece 
MR. JOSEPH CONR.\D is now admitted to be 
one of the greatest living writers in our language. 
It took him a long time to get his due from any 
but a small public. It is with something of a 
shock that one reads that Lord Jim, of which Messrs. Dent 
have just published a new six shilling edition, was written 
over seventeen years ago, and appeared in book form in 1901. 
What) were the masterpieces which, in that \ear, overshadowed 
it } Whv was not Mr. Conrad at that sta^je recognised as the 
equal of" Hardy and Meredith, whose names, bracketed 
together, used to appear in the reviews ad nauseam? I 
speak with the freedom of one who at that period was not a 
professional critic. 
* « « « * 
Lord Jim is the storv of a man's successful endeavour to 
rehabilitate himself, the book opens with his failure. 
With a few other wliite mt •' he is taking a crowded pilgrim 
ship, the Palna, across the Indian Ocean. On a perfectly 
still moonlit night she strikes a derelict and her forward 
compartment, screened only by a rusty old bulkhead, is 
flooded. Only the officers know. All over the deck the half- 
naked pilgrims sleep, sighing and moaning in the heat. The 
German captain and three companions hurry off in a boat : 
at the last moment Jim, undeliberately. automatically, 
jumps in after them. The ship, as it happens, does not go 
down ; there is an inc^uiry, and the deserters have their 
certificates taken away. But to Jim the important thing 
is not this ; it is the knowledge that he has failed to live up 
to the code : the loss of honour in other men's eyes and still 
more in his own ; his unworthiness of his native civilisation 
and of the service. Wherever he goes, taking odd jobs in 
Asiatic ports, his story follows him ; and once it has turned 
up, even* though men are ready enough to palliate it, he 
vanishes. He goes always Eastwfird, always hankering for a 
chance of confirming his conviction that he .is equal to the 
greatest calls that can be made upon him. And in the end, 
among savage Malays in the interior of an East Indian 
island, he gets satisfaction. He lives to know what it is to 
be absolutely trusted by men and dies celebrating a "pitiless 
wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct." 
Ik * « ^ * 
There is no need in a review to disclose the details of this 
story. But those who think Lord Jim Mr. Conrad's greatest 
book will at least meet with no objection Irom the author, 
and Mr. Conrad's best is equal to the best of any other living 
man. As an achievement in construction, it is in the fii-st 
rank. Mr. Conrad's method is, as usual, bizarre. The story 
is begun by the author ; then taken up by his favourite 
narrator Marlow, who, on an Eastern hotel verandah, tells 
what he has seen of Jim, and what he has picked up from 
others, to a chance grouo of men lying on cane chairs in the 
darkness, smoking and drinking ; and it ends with docu- 
ments, written bj- Marlow and Jim, received by one of those 
listening men years afterwards, in a London flat. Each 
subsidiary contributor to the story is clearly described in his 
special digression, and there are constant side-stories. • Yet 
the impression with which one finishes is one of unity, har- 
mony, perfect proportion. There are otie or two minor 
flaws, but they are so insignificant as to be hardly 
worth mentioning. The digressions are not too long ; 
the pains taken with characters only slightly connected 
with Jim are not wasted, as they always contribute to the 
picture of the background against which he Hve^l and the 
world which played upon his feelings and thoughts. 
• * « ■ * 4t 
The book contains a large, if floating, population of por- 
traits. No figure, save Jim's, goes the whole way through. 
The others come and go under the rays of the lamp which 
follows him from Aden to India, from Hongkong to the 
Moluccas : smart captains, drunken outcasts, ships'-chandlers, 
merchants, hotel-keepers ; " Gentleman Brown," the pirate ; 
Egstrom and Blake, the quarrelsome partners ; Stein, the 
tall and studious old German trader, with his quiet house, 
his great tropical garden and his collection of butterflies ; 
and the notaijilities of Patusan, the cringing Rajah, the mean 
half-breed Cni neHus, massive old Doramin, with his ponclcrous 
elbows held up by servants, the mysterious and pathetic 
girl whom Jim marries, and Dain Waris. who reminds one of 
the noble young Malay in Altmyer's Folly. Jim, himself. 
always remains a little vague. Mr. Conrad's preoccupation 
with his hero's dominant idea, as deduced from his actions 
by other people, had resulted in Jim being inadequately 
disclosed. But the more rapid portraits are all perfect.. And in 
no book of Mr. Conrad's is a greater variety of scenes so surely 
sketched. There is little elaborate set description. Theaccouiit 
of the pilgrim ship's voyage under the sun and moon across the 
flat ocean, " evenly ahead, without a sway of her bare masts, 
cleaving continuously the great calm of the waters under the 
inaccessible serenity of the sky," is magnificently, almost in- 
tolerably vivid. But when the narrative comes nominally 
from Marlow, the descriptions must be kept within bounds, 
lest the stretched illusion of speech should snap. Even so 
on alrnost every page some beautiful— and usually terribly 
beautiful— scene is bitten into one's mind, and the whole 
region of Patusan, the town on piles, the interminable 
gloomy forest, the moon rising between a chasm in the hills, 
the muddy waters, the marshes, the stagnant air, and the 
immeyise blue sea round the river's last bend, is pieced 
gradually together so that one remembers it as though oneself 
had been there. And it is all done in English of a grave 
music which, from one to whom our language is not native, 
is miraculous. 
I think, however, that the book's greatest quality is a moral 
one. Like the late Henry James, Mr. Conrad .scarcely ever 
preaches, yet is in the best sense a didactic writer. He is 
capable of speculation about conduct : there is an immense 
amount of it behind this story. But he brings something 
else than curiosity and agihty of intellect to the discussion. 
" Hang ideas ! " exclaims Marlow, in a half-seriotis aside, 
" They are tramps, vagabonds knocking at the back-door of 
your mind, each taking a little of yoiu" substance, each carry- 
ing away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions 
you must cling to if you want to die decently and would like 
to live easy." It is rather too stark a statement : but it is 
at least a half-truth. Take Jim's act of cowardice, for 
example. A good many of our modern morahsts, with their 
mania for destrojang the things by which men have lived 
\well for countless generations, would probably argue that he 
I did right in jumping into the boat. The others had gorie ; 
the ship, as far as he knqw, would infallibly sink ; there was 
no earthly chance of his saving the panic-stricken passengers 
if he stayed ; and in any case a man is not responsible for an 
automatic impulse. Other and darker men would even argue 
that, as the representative of a higher civilisation, a strong 
and enlightened man, Jim was even doing his duty to the 
world by escaping instead of sacrificing himself for the sake 
of a lot of besotted and dirty Moslems oh their way to Mecca. 
Such arguments, though not until our own time have 
philosophies been constructed out of them, are not new. 
They are familiar to every man in the shape of, inner prompt- 
ings. We have all lapsed ; we all remember things we are 
ashamed of, cowardices which we cannot forget ; and we are 
familiar enough with the voices which say, " What does it 
matter ? " " To yourself you are the most important thing," 
"iForget it," " Why bother, since nobody knows," and, very 
subtly, " It is a man's first duty to be prudent." Circum- 
stances made of Lord Jim, Especially at the end, an extreme 
case. But all the same he was typical. A man's self-respect 
can only be restored in one way : by doing the second time 
what he has failed to do the first. A civilisation in which 
men should spend their time promiscuously undermining 
traditional loves and loyalties by imperfect syllogisms would 
rot to pieces. If you believe that, even at the risk of en- 
countering the last and supposedly worst charge of being a ,■ 
sentimentalist, you take the romantic view of life : and you ' 
will have Mr. Conrad on your side. His books, in spite of all 
the blood and thunder, both metaphorical and literal, that 
there is in them, in spite of the black skies behind their 
lightnings, and the brooding sense of evil that pervades his 
meditations, are an incitement to decent living. I do not 
know what his nominal religion is, or if he professes any ; 
he is obviously perplexed and oppressed by the cruelty and 
pain of things. But if he sees behind the world a pit " black 
as the night from pole to pole," he finds consolation not in 
the insane and pathetic assertion that he is master of his own 
Fate, but " in a few simple notions vou must chng to." 
which the race, after some thousands of years of expejience, 
has discovered to be more effective. 
