CONRAD’S

CONRAD’S VICTORY AND THE ENGLISH TRADITIONL. R. LEAVIS AND DETLEF WAGENAARUniversity of Nijmegen, English Department,P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The NetherlandsAbstractThe article is divided into two complementary parts. The first one shows how Conrad in Victory not only creatively drew on material and concepts from diverse English writers such as H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens, but also that he was affected by a quintessentially English 19th century Romantic line of ‘emotional anti-materialism’that came from Wordsworth to influence the classic English novel of that century. The second part continues by examining the link between J. S. Mill’s Autobiography(a bi-product of this Wordsworthian influence), Hard Times, and Conrad’s novel, and by explaining how Conrad diagnosed and refuted Heyst Senior’s brand of Schopenhauer’s fatalistic philosophy.–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––1As with Under Western Eyes, Victory1started out as a short story (in this case bearing some relation to Conrad’s rather bald story ‘Because of the Dollars’) but turned into a novel. However, the transformation in relation to the original conception was of a different nature from the novel about Russia with its supremely tense, disruptively contrasting narrative sections. Conrad may have been following his habitual struc-tural method of narrative shifts producing a total, co-ordinated dramatic vision, but it is not for nothing that critics have compared the play-like art, setting and characterisation of Victory to The Tempest. And the writing can locally throw out the working of themes and motifs as con-ceptual elaborations that lack an inevitable connection to the central urgency of the drama. So (for instance) it is with justification that as thematic trappings in the novel the influence has been detected of the science-fictional allegory opposing ‘the human’ to ‘animal’ of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau(1896), especially with reference to the characters of the ‘brute beast’ Pedro ‘with the clumsiness of a creature caught in the woods and taught to walk on its hind legs’, and Ricardo with his suggestion of ‘a stealthy, deliberate wild-cat turned into a man’.Certainly far less external, and with a poignancy of emotional and intellectual concentration, is a suggestive effect in chapter 3 of part 3 that compares fascinatingly with key scenes between Angel and Tess inNeophilologus 87:487–499, 2003.2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.488L. R. Leavis and Detlef WagenaarHardy’s Tess. Here Hardian echoes (subtly transformed) surely linger in the delicate study of Heyst and Lena on the island just before the invasion of evil. The opening poetic allegory with its mood-painting of:But Heyst, once the Number One of this locality, while it was comparatively teeming with mankind, appreciated the prolongation of early coolness, the subdued, lingering half light, the faint ghost of the departed night, the fragrance of its dewy, dark soul captured for a moment longer between the great glow of the sky and the intense blaze of the uncovered sea . . .can be placed against Hardy’s preliminary setting of book 3, chapter 20:The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of the evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.Both passages introduce a loaded and intimate encounter between the two main personalities – Hardy’s centring on the biblical. And the particular stresses on the relativity of identities of both women are striking: we are told that Heyst has given the name of Lena to his girl, who in an appeal feels that the definition of her existence depends on him:‘Well, you were thinking of me, anyhow. I am glad of it. Do you know, it seems to me, somehow, that if you were to stop thinking of me I shouldn’t be in the world at all!’Besides an Alice through the Looking-Glass aspect (of Alice existing only in the Red K ing’s dream), there is an antithetical relation to the philosophy of Heyst’s father with his Schopenhauer fatalism, further emphasised by Heyst’s realisation:The rare timbre of her voice gave a special value to what she uttered. The indefinable emotion which certain intonations gave him, he was aware, was more physical than moral. Every time she spoke to him she seemed to abandon to him something of herself –something excessively subtle and inexpressible, to which he was infinitely sensible, which he would have missed horribly if she were to go away.One connects this both with Decoud’s (more selfish) awareness of Antonia Avellanos in Nostromo(part second, chapter 5) and with the opposed authorial discourse in Tess in the spirit of Heyst Senior –we know Hardy had read Schopenhauer, and unlike Conrad, is using him (in combination with Romantic individualism) to attack social convention:Conrad’s Victory and the English Tradition489She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. [. . .] Moreover, alone on a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? (book 2, chapter 14)The last sentence could have been especially suggestive for Conrad. Later in the lovers’ scene of book 3, chapter 20, Tess, asserting her indepen-dence of personality (against Angel’s conception of her), would demand to be called ‘Tess’ by Angel and not ‘Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names’. And in book 4, chapter 25 Hardy develops the idea to: Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.That Conrad was acquainted with Hardy’s novel (and he was to give a talk on Hardy in America) may be supported by internal evidence when considering Winnie Verloc of The Secret Agent as a revolutionary and creative adaptation of Tess’s character on Conrad’s part.2 Many leading writers of the pre-war period, including Henry James, H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, whether in modernising him or reacting against him, had been affected by Dickens. Conrad, as an outsider to the English literary scene, was always interested in finding out what things meant and were going on, or as Wells reported, asking the question ‘What is it all about?’ And from his childhood Conrad was familiar with Dickens, who in his mature novels became concerned with the definition of the value of the gentleman. The aristocratic Heyst in his Swedish courtly, refined, smiling way remains for better or worse (until the very end) always the exemplar of gentlemanly conduct. Conrad plays off the positive (as well as the limitations) inherent in his civilised qualities against the unscrupulous Mr Jones with his cynical bravado (backed by Ricardo) about being the ultimate gentleman who goes beyond empty social conventions, and who has been ‘hounded out of his sphere by people very much like that fellow [Heyst]’. When challenged, his bluster becomes more ruthless, or as Heyst reports to Lena (in part 4, chapter 5):“Having been ejected, he said, from his proper social sphere because he had refused to conform to certain usual conventions, he was a rebel now, and was coming and going up and down the earth. As I really did not want to listen to all this nonsense, I told him that I had heard that sort of story about somebody else before. His grin was really ghastly. He confessed that I was very far from the sort of man he expected to meet. Then he said:‘As to me, I am no blacker than the gentleman you are thinking of, and have neither more nor less determination.’”490L. R. Leavis and Detlef Wagenaar The idea is that his devilish nature starts losing its Byronic gloss as through confrontation with Heyst a melodramatic villainy emerges (‘I am an outcast, almost an outlaw’) – which reminds one of the assassin’s naked menace behind the theatrical pretence of gentility of a Blandois-Rigaud in Little Dorrit. There Dickens attained a vitality of poetic melodrama and an artistic coherence (linked to other powerful and varied areas of menace in the novel, as around Mrs Clennam, Henry Gowan, or Miss Wade) that seem lacking with Mr Jones.Both novelists, however, are essentially preoccupied with positive def-initions, though again this area is more specialised in the narrower scope of Victory. Heyst dominates his novel beyond the place of Little Dorrit in her novel as a ‘silent centre’, who has her moral supporters like Arthur Clennam and Doyce. At the same time Little Dorrit does far more as a positive force in sacrifice than a Lena (it’s more difficult to remain living!). In this respect, Conrad with Lena has invented an enig-matic mixture of a figure who can be ‘defined’ by Heyst, whom she wishes to save, in his valuation of her, but whose changeable qualities defy analysis:But in the intimacy of their life her grey, unabashed gaze forced upon him the sensa-tion of something inexplicable reposing within her; stupidity or inspiration, weakness or force – or simply an abysmal emptiness, reserving itself even in the moments of complete surrender. (part 3, chapter 2)One might also trace parallels with Arthur Clennam’s vulnerability through his lack of self-belief in Heyst’s confession to Lena about his ‘giving in’ to Morrison:“It’s difficult to resist where nothing matters,” he observed. “And perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me to go about uttering silly, common-place phrases. I was never so well thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish like the veriest idiot. Upon my word, I believe I was actually respected for a time. I was as grave as an owl over it; I had to be loyal to the man. I have been from first to last, completely loyal to the best of my ability. [. . .] Truth, work, ambition, love itself, may only be counters in the lamentable or despicable game of life, but when one takes a hand one must play the game.” (part 3, chapter 4)This is a more inert, far less cynical philosophy (for it is partly motivated by an aristocratic idealism as well as the decadence of Heyst senior’s fatalism) than the aggressively self-serving one of a Henry Gowan, Clennam’s rival and opponent in Little Dorrit:‘What all we fellows do, we do to sell. If we didn’t want to sell it for the most we can get for it, we shouldn’t do it. Being work, it has to be done; but it’s easily enough done. All the rest is hocus-pocus.’ (book 1, chapter 34)For like Heyst, Arthur Clennam may be a hollow victim, in this case of his mock-childhood and of his Egyptian mummy pseudo-mother, butConrad’s Victory and the English Tradition491 he is also driven by a sense of higher duty and a code of decency. Clennam’s motives in mistakenly investing in Merdle’s bank may well have inspired Conrad in his rather different depiction of the psychology of the aristocratic Heyst toying with his involvement with Morrison under the toils of his father’s philosophical resignation, though clearly other factors are relevant.Immediately after his father’s funeral Heyst feels (despite his ‘pro-fessional’ mournful detachment) some kind of reaction:He became aware of his eyes being wet. It was not that the man was his father. For him it was purely a matter of hearsay which could not in itself cause this emotion. No! It was because he had looked at him so long that he missed him so much. (part 3, chapter 1)In the spirit of a Louisa Gradgrind before her marriage to Bounderby when fishing (in front of her bemused father) for definitions of what she was not allowed to feel, Heyst wrestles with his dignity in the face of a loss that he in theory should be indifferent to. In continuing to follow his instructions to observe a superior detachment, to “look on and never make a sound”, Heyst also finds himself entering ‘by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies’. He orders for some of his father’s things to be sent out to him at Samburan ‘just as any ordinary, credulous person would have done’. In a concentrated, evocative passage Conrad depicts Heyst’s haunting conception of his father’s existence that causes him to deviate from his father’s instructions and give some of his own:The elder Heyst had left behind him a little money and a certain quantity of movable objects, such as books, tables, chairs, and pictures, which might have complained of heart-less desertion after many years of faithful service; for there is a soul in things. Heyst, our Heyst, had often thought of them, reproachful and mute, shrouded and locked up in those rooms, far away in London with the sounds of the street reaching them faintly, and sometimes a little sunshine, when the blinds were pulled up and the windows opened from time to time in pursuance of his original instructions and later reminders. It seemed as if in his conception of a world not worth touching, and perhaps not substantial enough to grasp, these objects familiar to his childhood and his youth and associated with the memory of an old man, were the only realities, something having an absolute existence. He would never have them sold, or even moved from the places they occupied when he looked upon them last. When he was advised from London that his lease had expired, and that the house, with some others as like it as two peas, was to be demolished, he was surprisingly distressed. (part 3, chapter 1)There are some quintessentially English Romantic values affecting Heyst here, and Conrad too! This is the philosophy of ‘emotional anti-materialism’ of Wordsworth as in Michael and The Prelude that informed the great English novel of the nineteenth century. We can see it in Dombey and Son when the inadequate Dombey is attempting to shelter behind the492L. R. Leavis and Detlef Wagenaar triumph of his pride, in Hard Times with the collapse of Gradgrind’s hard facts (Dickens at his most simple is often close to Wordsworth), and again in Silas Marner with the study of the deprived Silas in the grip of money, and his subsequent redemption. And we can see it outside fiction with J. S. Mill, when in his Autobiography after diagnosing through Coleridge his condition induced by his father’s training, he is revitalising himself with Wordsworth’s ‘very culture of the feelings’ after his breakdown. Mill in expressing his conviction of the power of women (in his tribute to Harriet Taylor) may indeed have pointed the way to Lena for Conrad.The ‘certain quantity of moveable objects’ which ‘might have com-plained of heartless desertion after many years of faithful service’ brings out in a Romantic perception the difference between the mechanistic and the human, which last recognises from the emotional attachment by association that ‘there is a soul in things’. So Heyst, consumed by what his upbringing and his father meant (and still mean) to him – despite his father’s philosophy imparted in this same upbringing! – opposes against the ‘conception of a world not worth touching’ ‘these objects familiar to his childhood and his youth and associated with the memory of an old man’. They become ‘the only realities, something having an absolute existence’. Heyst becomes ‘surprisingly distressed’ at the news that the London house is to be demolished, possibly just like those people involved with ‘some others as like it as two peas’ under the same threat. Heyst is still connected to the human race despised by his father. One thinks back to Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon(1903), who, when in his chart room during a lull in the wind’s fury, appreciates how his orderly existence has been shaken up from the rulers, pencils and inkstand missing on his cleared desk. The heightened awareness of commonplace, everyday things gives him (at last!) some index of the meaning of disaster, and so links even this unimaginative man with the human condition.Like Silas Marner, who can emotionally value his brown earthen-ware pot with what remains of his ‘sap of affection’ and can help Sally Oates with her heart trouble, Heyst exhibits the workings of what is left of a basic human need under thwarting, before Lena, who from this perspective can be seen as Conrad’s version of an Eppie (if a most curious one!), comes along to intensify the process.3Conrad has his own treat-ment of ‘the Romantic humanisation’ theme which leads to a different, characteristically more bitter, kind of affirmation from Wordsworth’s, Dickens’s, or George Eliot’s. The story ‘Amy Foster’ (1903) already showed how in examining total alienation Conrad could respond with complete originality to Silas Marner, with its fable of a man taking over a golden-haired child after he has been robbed of his hoard, and adapting to a village community. Yanko Goorall, emigrant from CentralConrad’s Victory and the English Tradition493 Europe who is lured to America with the idea that gold can be found in the streets, thinks when washed up in an English coastal village that he has found his ‘true gold’ in the heart of Amy Foster. Both Silas with his herbs and Yanko with his sharp mountaineer’s vision perform unusual services in their alien environments. Amy makes a deliberately grotesque Eppie in Conrad’s disturbing version of an allegory of iden-tities and behaviour, and of communities, prejudice and circumscribed adaptation.2It is not only in the Wordsworthian ‘emotional anti-materialism’ that John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and to a lesser degree Dickens’s Hard Times are relevant in a discussion of Victory, but also in the way that Heyst is determined by the upbringing and education he received from his father. He is caught between the opposing realities of the detachment based on his father’s principles and the emotional ties to his father’s objects he cannot help but feel – a Conradian adaptation of the opposi-tion of fact and fancy in Hard Times. The famous opening paragraph of Hard Times, in which Gradgrind states his principles for the educa-tion of children – “In this life we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!” – is echoed effectively by Axel Heyst’s answer to the question posed to him by his business associate Mr Tesman:‘And you are interested in?’‘Facts,’ broke in Heyst in his courtly voice. ‘There is nothing worth knowing but facts. Hard facts! Facts alone, Mr. Tesman.’ (part 1, chapter 1)Any suggestion that Charles Dickens exaggerated the rigours of Benthamite education attacked in Hard Times, a novel published nineteen years before Mill’s Autobiography, is belied by the grim reality of the story of Mill’s life. Significantly, the pattern found in both works –namely Mill finding in Wordsworth’s poetry a romantic corrective for the deficiencies in his utilitarian upbringing and the fictional correction of the utilitarian upbringing of Gradgrind’s children by the romantic concepts of imagination and human sympathy – also emerge in Victory. The ‘pitiless cold blasts of the father’s analysis’ and the elder Heyst’s embittered renunciation of life which led to the son’s detachment from human society is eventually – and too late – corrected by Lena’s self-sacrifice.The economical description of Heyst’s father, convincing as it is chilling, throws some light on the importance of the father-son motive in Victory:For fifteen years Heyst had wandered, invariably courteous and unapproachable, and in turn was generally considered ‘a queer chap.’ He had started off on these travels of his494L. R. Leavis and Detlef Wagenaar after the death of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected his wisdom.Thinker, stylist, and man of the world in his time, the elder Heyst had begun by coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages. For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilisation had ever fashioned to its ends of dis-illusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. His mother Heyst had never known, but he kept his father’s pale, distinguished face in affectionate memory. He remembered him mainly in an ample blue dressing-gown in a large house of a quiet London suburb. For three years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. The young man learned to reflect, which is a destructive process, a reckoning of the cost. It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father’s analysis had blown away from the son. (part 2, chapter 3)A biographical reading of this paragraph is very tempting; Conrad had lived alone with his father, an embittered Polish patriot, during the last two years of the latter’s life. Likewise, when reading about the disillu-sioned Heyst using his father’s books and objects as a funeral pyre for himself and Lena, one cannot help being reminded of the vivid account in A Personal Record of Conrad’s father, ‘a vanquished man’, burning all his manuscripts shortly before his death. Conrad, however, broke with his background; so the relationship between Charles Gould and his father in Nostromo for instance is treated differently, and one feels that the psychologies of Heyst and Gould as sons have to do with the art of the novels they are in rather than purely with their creator’s biography. Anyway, the relationship of Heyst with his father shows more of a marked similarity with that of John Stuart Mill and his father. There is a curious tension in the descriptions of James Mill by his son; on the one hand John Stuart Mill is quite capable of analysing the defects of his upbringing, on the other hand he defends wholeheartedly the rigorous educational system of his father, making allowances for his own failure as a student; significantly, the relationship between father and son is mainly defined in terms of a teacher and his pupil:The element which was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings them-selves. If we consider further that he was in the trying position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pityConrad’s Victory and the English Tradition495for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source. (Autobiography, chapter 2)The conclusion Mill arrives at in his account of his youth is that his education, founded on Benthamite principles, had separated feeling from thought; the stifling focus on the development of the intellect had caused the complete neglect of the emotions, and eventually brought on his emo-tional crisis:My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while the whole course of my intellectual cultiva-tion had made precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. [. . .] For now I saw, what I had always before received with incredulity – that the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings . . . (chapter 5)Mill’s idea that ‘the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings’ is taken some steps further with Conrad’s formulation that ‘reflection is a destructive process’. Heyst in a way is an uncorrected John Stuart Mill; he kept living according to those philosophies instilled by his father – which in themselves differ from Mill’s – only to be con-fronted with the delusion of his impossible detachment too late by a series of chance occurrences, more or less brought on by his own straying from his principles. The many similarities between Mill and Heyst seem to support this hypothesis. For not only are they in a similar position, their attitudes towards their fathers are also similar; while talking to Lena about his background and the importance of his father’s teachings in his life, Heyst exhibits a deferential awe for his father’s role as a philoso-pher and a feeling of being privileged for having been influenced by him that is reminiscent of John Stuart Mill’s uncritical appraisal of his father’s teachings:I don’t know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced – even by a negation. He was very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special insight into its mastery of despair. (Victory, part 3, chapter 2)As with Mill, Heyst’s relationship with his father is defined by teacher and pupil roles; there is something painfully moving in the fact that Heyst feels flattered by being allowed to be close to his father; evidently this is the closest he could get to receiving anything that resembles natural affection and tenderness.496L. R. Leavis and Detlef Wagenaar The elder Heyst of course is not a Benthamite philosopher. He finds his inspiration in Schopenhauer’s philosophy that all action is moti-vated by the human will, which is a force not governed by reason, therefore all actions and expressions, including existence, with all its chaos and suffering, are ultimately senseless, and that our only way of triumphing over this existence is by either forgetting it or by an ascetic renunciation of everything. Well aware of the evil aspects of life, the elder Heyst rejects it by renouncing human society and by preaching this attitude of detachment to his son. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is certainly echoed in Heyst’s father, yet his renunciation is not on ethical grounds but motivated by his disillusionment and anger with the world; it is a scornful negation of life. What the young Heyst quite naturally fails to see is that his father’s teachings of detachment have a personal, not a philosophical basis; hence the disillusionment of the father governs the life of the son. In their last conversation, in which Axel asks if there is no guidance at all in the outside world, the scepticism of the father becomes apparent in the fact that he picks up on Schopenhauer’s notion of pity – Schopenhauer states that through our compassion of the suffering of others we increase our understanding of the evil aspects of existence – only in his cynically distorted perspective, pity is a form of contempt:‘You still believe in something then?’ he said in a clear voice, which had been growing feeble of late. ‘You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least difficult –always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.’ (part 3, chapter 1)It is, however, genuine pity, and not a form of contempt, which moved Axel Heyst to help Captain Morrison and later to save Lena. After the failure of the Tropical Belt Company and the untimely death of Morrison Heyst acutely feels that he has vainly betrayed the principles on which he has based his mature life:Action – the first thought, or perhaps the first impulse, on earth! The barbed hook, baited with the illusion of progress, to bring out of the lightless void the shoals of unnumbered generations!‘And I, the son of my father, have been caught too, like the silliest fish of them all,’Heyst said to himself.He suffered. He was hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to have been a masterpiece of aloofness. (part 3, chapter 1)This hurt increases after his rescue of Lena. Back on his island Heyst explains himself to Davidson, in an attempt to detach himself once more from the outer world, and the echoes of Schopenhauer’s philosophy can be heard clearly:。