Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf

Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our / phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or / ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago, to / take up his lodging in this country. For there was always an air of / mystery about him. It was partly his Polish birth, partly his memorable / appearance, partly his preference for living in the depths of the / country, out of ear-shot of gossips, beyond reach of hostesses, so that / for news of him one had to depend upon the evidence of simple visitors / with a habit of ringing door-bells who reported of their unknown host / that he had the most perfect manners, the brightest eyes, and spoke / English with a strong foreign accent.[14]

Still, though it is the habit of death to quicken and focus our / memories, there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially, / and not accidentally, difficult of approach. His reputation of later / years was, with one obvious exception, undoubtedly the highest in / England; yet he was not popular. He was read with passionate delight by / some; others he left cold and lustreless. Among his readers were people / of the most opposite ages and sympathies. Schoolboys of fourteen, / driving their way through Marryat, Scott, Henty, and Dickens, swallowed / him down with the rest; while the seasoned and the fastidious, who in / process of time have eaten their way to the heart of literature and / there turn over and over a few precious crumbs, set Conrad scrupulously / upon their banqueting table. One source of difficulty and disagreement / is, of course, to be found, where men have at all times found it, in his / beauty.

One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she / looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could / never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been / gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a / strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather / than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or / insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little / somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then / how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and / majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit / and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this / incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his / critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the / habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of / English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they / complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the / voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as / difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when _Figaro_ is / played.

They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of / sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they / conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of / scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That / beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince / them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and / to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the / bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not / hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, / its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, / how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is / concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill / work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little / saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their / power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a / constant quality of Conrad's prose.

For it was by virtue of something drastic in him, the qualities of a / leader and captain, that Conrad kept his hold over boys and young / people. Until _Nostromo_ was written his characters, as the young were / quick to perceive, were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle / the mind and indirect the method of their creator. They were seafarers, / used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with Nature, but at / peace with man. Nature was their antagonist; she it was who drew forth / honour, magnanimity, loyalty, the qualities proper to man; she who in / sheltered bays reared to womanhood beautiful girls unfathomable and / austere. Above all, it was Nature who turned out such gnarled and tested / characters as Captain Whalley and old Singleton, obscure but glorious in / their obscurity, who were to Conrad the pick of our race, the men whose / praises he was never tired of celebrating: