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 comer stealthily 
hidd-.n away from \aew, among impenetrable 
forests, on the banks of untravelled rivers. From 
that corner, like a spider in his web, he tlirows out tentacles 
into the darkness ; he gathers in his spoils, he collects them 
like a miser, stripping from them their dreams and visions 
to decorate his web magnifictntly. He chooses among them, 
and sends out intfi the woild shadowy messengers, for the 
troubling of the peace of man, self-satishtd in his ignorance 
of the invisible. At the. centre of his web sits an ekmental 
sarcasm discussing human affairs with a calm and cynical 
ferocity ; " that particular field whose mission is to jog the 
memories of men, lest they should foiget the meaning of 
life." Behind that sarcasm crouches some ghastly influence, 
outside humanity, some powerful devil, invisible, poisfnous, 
irresistible, spawning evil for his delight. Ihey guard this 
secret comer 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 this obscure realm, beyond and below 
human nature itself, Conrad is seen through the veil of the 
persons of his drama, living a hidden, 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 
jenius. 
Conrad's depth of wisdom must trouble and terrify those 
tvho read him for entertainment. There are few secrets in 
the 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 have been destroyed and 
saved, and lays them mockingly naked. He is the master of 
dreams, the interpreter of illusions, the chronicler of memory. 
He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism 
of every vice or crime. He caHs up before him all the injustices 
that have come to birth out of ignorance and self-love. Hq 
shows 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 one outside nature to 
whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and civiliza- 
tion, are equal and indifferent. 
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. " Tliere was a hot dance of thoughts in his 
head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts — ^a whirl of aw- 
ful cripples." Tiiat is how, in one glimpse, he sees through a 
man's 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 familiar words 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 Irad 
tumbled down from a star." There is a mental crisis in that 
look : the unknown has suddenly opened. 
Memory, that inner voice, stealthy, an inveterate follower ; 
memory, Conrad has found out, is the great secret, the ecstasy 
and despair which 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 gloiy. No man lives wholly 
in his day ; every hour of these suspensive 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 perpetual 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 
form part of his mind, which is protesting, supiemely conscious. 
He is ne\-cr indiiierent 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 life, or for 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 gives 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 unknown. 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 promirrcnt 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, like 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 mer^ 
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-wrestle ; they wander down 
unsounded rivers and succumb to "the spell of the wilderness ;" 
they are gigantic in failure and triumph ; they are the children 
of the mightiness of the earth ; but their love is the love of the 
impossible. What 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 stay 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 
^ight 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 cburse, the riglit thing, in a parenthesis : 
