14 
LAND & WATER 
Joseph Conrad 
By Arthur Symons 
November i, 1917 
CONRAD'S inexplicable mind has created for itself 
a secret world to li\'e in, some corner stealthily 
liiddn away from \'ie\v. among impenetrable 
foi fsts, on the banks ot untra veiled rivers. 1-rom 
that corner, like a spider in his web, he throws out tentacles 
into the daikness ; he gathers in liis spoils, he collects them 
like a miser, stripping from tliem their di earns and visions 
to decorate his web magnificently. He chooses among them, 
and sends out into the woild shadowy nn'ssengeis, for the 
troubling of the peace of man, sell-satisliid in his ignorance 
of the in\'isible. At the centie of his web sits an eli mental 
sarcasm discussing hunun affairs with a calm and cynical 
ferocity ; " that particular field whose mission is to ]og the 
memories of men, lest they shquld foigc^ Ihe meaning of 
life." Hehind that sarcasm crouches sorte ghastly influence, . 
outside humanitv, some powerful devil, invisible, poisonous,, 
irresistible, spaw'ning evil for his delight, ihey guard this 
secret corner of the world with mists and delusions, so that 
very few of those to whom the shadowy messengers have" 
revealed themselves can come nearer than the outer edge 
of it. 
Beyond and below tliis obscure realm, beyond arid below 
human nature itself, Conrad is seen througli the veil of the 
prsons of his diama, Uving a liidden, exasperated life. And 
it is by his sympathy with these unpermitted things, the 
" aggravated witch-dance " in his brain, that Conrad is severed 
from all material associations, as if stupendously uncivilised, 
consumed by a continual protest, an insatiable thirst, un- 
atisfied to be condemned as the mere exercise of a prodigious 
genius. 
Conrad's depth of wisdom must trouble and terrify those 
who read him for entertainment. There are few secrets in 
tho mind of men or in the pitiless heart of nature that he has 
not captured and made his plaything. He calls up all the 
dreams and illusions by which men liave been destroyed and 
sa\-ed, and lays them mockingly naked. He is the master of 
dreams, the interpreter of illusions, the clironicler of memory. 
He shows the bare side of every vutue, the hidden heroism 
of every vice or crime. He calls up before him all the injustices 
that have come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. He 
allows how failure is success, and success failure, and that 
the sinner can be saved. His meanest creatures have in them 
a touch of honour, of honesty, or of heroism ; his heroes 
have always some error, weakness, a mistake, some sin or 
crime to redeem. And in all this there is no judgment, 
only an implacable comprehension, as of ofie outside nature to 
whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civiliza- 
tion, are equal and inditierent. 
Reality, to Conrad, is non-existent ; he sees through it 
into a realm of illusion of the unknown : a world that is com- 
forting and bewildering, filled with ghosts and devils, a world 
of holy terror. " There was a hot dance of thoughts in his 
head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts — a whirl of aw- 
ful cripples." Tnat is how, in one glimpse, he sees tlirough a 
mans soul. " He was not speaking to me, he was only speak- 
ing before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, 
antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence — 
another possessor of his soul." Always is there some suggestion 
of a dark region, within and around one ; the consciousness 
that " they made a whole that had features, shades of ex- 
pression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by 
the eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a 
directing spirit of perdition that dwells within, like a malevo- 
lent soul in a detestable body." 
" This awful activity of mind " is seen at work on every 
page, torturing famihar w ords into strange meanings, clutching 
at cobwebs, in a continual despair before the unknown. Some- 
thing must be found, in the most unlikely quarter ; a word, 
a hint, something unsaid but guessed at in a gesture, a change 
of face. " He turned upon me his eyes suddenly amazed and 
full of pain, with a bewildered, startled face, as though he had 
tuinbled down from a star." There is a mental crisis in that 
look : the unknow-n has suddenly opc-ned. 
Memory, that inner voice, stealthy, an inveterate follower ; 
memory, Conrad has found out, is the great secret, tlie ecstasy 
and despair wliich weave the te.xture of life. Lord Jim is the 
soul's tragedy, ending after a long dim suffusion in clouds, in 
a great sunset, sudden and final glory. No man lives wholly 
in his day ; every hour of these suspensiv'e days and nights 
is a part of the past or of the future. Even in a splendid 
moment, a crisis, like the love scene of Nina and Dain in the 
woods, there is no forgetfulness. 
" In the sublime vanity of her kind she was thinking already 
of moulding a god out of the clay at her feet .... He spoke of 
his forefathers." Lord Jim, as he dies, remembers why he 
is letting himself be killed, and in that remembrance tastes 
heaven. How is it that no one except Conrad has got to this 
hidden depth, where the soul really lives and dies, where, 
in an almost per^Xitual concealment, it works out its plan, its 
own fate ? 
A woman Once spoke to me in a phrase I have' never for- 
gotten, of Conrad's "sullen subjective vision." Sullen is a fine 
word for the aspect under which he sees land and sea ; sullen 
clouds, a sullen sea. Some of that quality has come to 
foi m part of his mind, which is protesting, supremely conscious. 
He is never indiuerent to his people, rarely kind. He sees 
them for the most part as they reveal themselves in suffering. 
Now and then he gives them the full price, the glory, but rarely 
in this lifq, or fur more than a moment. How can those who 
live in suspense, between memory and foreboding, ever be 
happy, except for some little permitted while ? The world 
for those who live in it is a damp forest, where savagery and 
civilisation meet, and in vain try to mingle. Only the sea, 
out of sight of land, sometimes gi\'cs them freedom. 
It is strange but true that Conrad s men are more subtly 
comprehended and more magnificent than his women. There 
are few men who are seen full length, and many of them are 
nameless shadows. Aissa and Nina in the earliest books have 
the fierce charm of the un'cnown. In Lord Jim there is only 
one glimpse of the painful mystery of a woman's ignorant 
heart. In Nostromo the women are secondary, hardly alive ; 
there is no woman in The Nigger of the Narcissus, nor in 
Typhoon, nor in Youth. There are some women slightly seen 
in Tales of Unrest, and only one of them, the woman of The 
Return, is actually characterised. 
Is there not something of an achievement in this stern 
rejection of the obvious love-story, the material of almost 
every novel ? Not in a single tale, even when a man dies of 
regret for a woman, is the woman prominent in the action. 
Almayer, and not Nina, is the centre of the book named after 
him. And yet Nina is strange, mysterious, enchanting, as no 
other woman is to be. Afterwards they are thrust back out of 
the story ; they come and go like spinners of Destiny, uncon- 
scious, Ignorant, turning idle wheels, Uke the two women 
knitting black wool in the waiting-room of the Trading Com- 
pany's office, " guarding the door of Darkness." 
To Conrad there is an unbounded depth in a man's soul ; 
a woman is a definite creature, easily indicated ; and in the 
splendid To-morrow (which, turned into a one-act play, be- 
wildered an audience into inanition by the stark immensity 
of its dramatic power), it is the "hopeful madness of the 
world " uttered through the voice of an old man " shouting 
of his trust in an everlasting to-morrow," and not the rapid 
incident of the man and girl, that contains its meaning. 
Now, can we conjecture why a woman has never been the 
centre of any of these stories ? Conrad chooses his tools 
and his materials ; he realises that men are the best materials 
for his tools. It is only men who can be represented heroically 
upon the stage of life ; who can be seen adventuring doggedly, 
irresistibly, by sheer will and purpose ; it is only given to men 
to attain a visible glory of achievement. He sees woman as a 
parasite or an idol, one of the illusions of men. He asks 
wonderingly how the world can look at them. He shows men 
fearing them, hating them, captivated, helpless, cruel, con- 
quering. He rarely indicates a great passion between man 
and woman ; his men are passionate after fame, power, success; 
they embrace the sea in a love-wiestle ; they wander down 
unsounded rivers and succumb to "the spell of the wilderness ;" 
they are gigantic in failure^nd triumph ; they are the children 
of the mightiness of the earth ; but their love is the love of the 
impossible. UTiat room is there, in this unlimited world, 
for women ? " Oh, she is out of it — completely. They^ 
the women, I mean — are out of it — should be out of it. We 
must help them to stav in that beautiful world of their own, 
lest ours gets worse. Oh, she had to be out of it." 
II. 
Conrad's novels have no plots, and they do not need them. 
They are a series of studies in temperaments, deduced from 
slight incidents ; studies in emotion, with hardly a rag to hold 
together the one or two scraps of action out of which they are 
woven. A spider hanging by one leg to his web, or sitting 
motionless outside it ; that is "the image of some of these tales, 
which are made to terrify, bewilder, and grip you. No plot 
ever made a thing so vital as Lord Jim, where there is no plot ; 
merely episodes, explanations, two or three events only signi- 
ficant for the inner meaning by which they are darkened or 
illuminated. I would call this invention creation ; the 
evasion of what is needless in the plots of most novels. But 
Conrad has said, of course, the right thing, in a parenthesis • 
I 
