The Life of Joseph Conrad THOSE who have read Conrad's
autobiographical essay, A Personal Record, will know the general outlines of his extra- ordinary career. It is a beautiful book, one of the most perfect,
I think, of all his works. There is not in the English language a better example of " emotion remembered in tranquillity," and of the crystallization of hope, fear, triumph, and tyranny into a cloudless jewel of literature. Who can forget the picture of his mother's return to exile and death after a brief reprieve ? When her husband was convicted as a political offender she had gone to share his exile in the East of Russia. The terrible climate, however, was too much for her southern :blood, and she fell ill with consumption. Finally, she obtained three months' leave to return home with little Conrad for a period of convalescence. As so often with this cruel disease, the change to better conditions seemed to feed rather than to check. it. As the three months drew to a close every effort was made to get an extension, the Police Captain himself pleading for her. But the Governor-General was a zealous servant of the State, and he ordered that unless she returned on the day ;When her leave expired she was to be escorted to the prison hospital in Kiev, " where she will be treated as her ease deserves." Here is Conrad's description of her departure. Could it be matched for poignancy, and that restraint which, like the " still,.small voice," annihilates injustice and the power of tyranny ?
" The elongated, bizarre, shabby travelling carriage with four post horses, standing before the long front of the house with its eight columns, four on each side of the broad flight of stairs. On the stems, groups of servants, a few relations, one or two friends from the nearest neighbourhood, a perfect silence, on all the faces an air of sober concentration ; my grandmother all in black gazing :stoically, my uncle giving his arm to my mother down to the carriage in which I had been placed already ; at the top of the flight my little cousin in a short skirt of a tartan pattern with a deal of red in it, and like a small princess attended by the women of her ownhousehold : the head gouvernanle, our dear corpulent friend Francesca (who had been for thirty years in the service of our family), the former nurse, now outdoor attendant, a handsome peasant face wearing a compassionate expression, and the good, ugly Mademoiselle Durand, the governess, with her bleak eyebrows meeting over a short thick nose, and a complexion' ike pale brown .paper. Of all the eyes turned towards the carriage, her good-natured eyes only were dropping tears, and it was her sobbing voice alone that broke the silence with an appeal to me : " N'onblie pas ton francais, mon Cheri." In three months, simply by playing with us, she had taught me not.only to speak French,..but to read it as well. She was indeed an excellent playmate. In the distance, halfway down to the great gates, a light, .open trap, harnessed with three horses in Russian fashion, stood drawn up on one side with the police captain of the district sitting in it, the visor of his flat cap with a red band pulled down over his eyes."
-We have to turn now from this treasure of art to a more scientific exposition of the same material. M. Jean Auhry's book is the product of a number of motives, all of them excellent influences in the making of a biography. He was a friend of Conrad ; and therefore the subject of his book was something more than an abstraction. Conrad lives in these pages as a man, complex, moody, selfish, generous, inspired, puerile. We get a thousand and one snapshots of him, and the effect in general is that of a very proud, austere, inwardly passionate being, tortured by a genius of sensitiveness that gave hint no rest, but ran in his blood, and so fired his powers of apprehension that past, present, and future were concurrent, a tripartite stream of eventuality too pregnant with suggestion. His ears were never free from its whisperings, or his nerves from its promptings. Waking and sleeping, its little waves called him, luring hint to solitude and a brooding discontent.
'In these pages we may discover some cities to the genesis of this disposition, and so learn to make allowance for those aspects of it which we find forbidding and repellent. M. Aubry throws much light on the details of Conrad's childhood. , We see his parents as contemporaries saw them, and learn with some surprise that his father, Apollo Nalecz Korzeniowski, Was a literary man of considerable fame, and a translator whose work is still standard. " Without profound culture, he pos- sessed quick intuition and a natural taste for good literature. At an early age he showed a poetic gift which, together with the studied elegance of his dress, made him remarkable among the squires with whom he lived." He was a well-born but Poor man of great charm, much sought after for his brilliant conversation, • and a good-natured maliciousness of tongue which flickered like summer lightning round the foibles and weaknesses of his friends and enemies. He was deeply religious ; and bound up with this passion was the Pole's mystical patriotism, a vague but energetic emotion that dies as soon as it is given opportunity for being anything other than an opposition. Apollo Korzeniowski sacrificed every- thing to it ; health., career, and even his beloved wife. She, however, " very beautiful, with an education superior to that of most women of her time, eager-minded and expecting much from life," - was more than content to share misfortunes acquired in so. quixotic a cause. In consequence, the little . Conrad, a delicate only child, spent his early years under the shadow-of-exile and tyranny, amongst a small colony of Poles nearly all of whom were suffering from scurvy and other
diseases brought" on by the severe climate. - We can imagine the effect of such an environment on the susceptible tempera-
ment of the boy. There exists a revealing souvenir of 'this time. It is a photograph of Conrad, aged five, on the back of
which he has written : " To my dear Grandmother, who helped me to send cakes to my poor father in prison—Pole, Catholic, gentleman." To quote M. Aubry
" Stich were the circumstances in which Conrad spent his child- hood. When one remembers that he inherited an ardent tempera- bleat and that as far as he could see, being a Pole, all doors were closed to him, it is not surprising that a boy of sixteen, who had caught from those nearest him a spirit of adventure and felt from his first years the oppressive weight of tyranny, should thus desire to escape, cost what it might, into a freer world. It was not so much the sea—he had only once caught a glimpse of it—that was drawing him ; it was life in the open that he longed for with all the eagerness of a youth who had hitherto been physically and spiritually cramped and suffocated."
In this review I have dealt with matter contained in the first twenty-seven out of some seven hundred pages. The dis- proportion is more apparent than real, for when we are con- sidering the life of Joseph Conrad, the one question which absorbs all others is the problem of the relationship of the fairy-foundling—the sea-maddened, introspective poet—to the little-scion of Polish nobility, an inheritor of ancient land- traditions and feudal customs.
When we realize that relationship we shall learn also that
the forces of tyranny and pitiless officialdom dealt a wound to the soul of the boy which could not be healed, though he spent his life wandering in quest of a salve. He came to the sea, and then to the English language, hoping that in these two broad, rhythmic forces he might find that freedom; that impersonal quality, that lack of inquisitive espionage, for want of which his early life had been warped. But all lie -found was a fuller recognition of the permanence of his injury, and how he had been deprived for ever of the power for intimacy and unrestrained companionship. His genius was the genius of a Vandcrdecken, and he sailed on his shadowy way through English literature, a spectral beauty as he passed, but leaving no wake. He is, with all his mastery of the English tongue, a foreigner here ; and all his music, tropical with rich forest-beauty, austere with sea-grief, is uttered with a foreign intonation. Fruitless, even impossible, for our native tongue to imitate it. His achievement is great ; but as part of its beauty there is an unsocial agony, a spirit of wandering isolation, strange to our temperament, suggesting to us a pain-generated pride which we can only dimly appre- ciate as something titanic, but alien to us, for ever irrecon- cilable to us, even though we have known King Lear. _ :This. exhaustive Life and Letters will help us to understand these things.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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