CHAPTER CIX
THE STEALTHY NEMESIS
While I am writing this book death swings his scythe, and two more artists enter the ghostly marathon of Fame.
The first of them is Joseph Conrad. Away back in my early days someone sent me from England a copy of his first novel, “Almayer’s Folly,” and after that I kept watch, and managed somehow to get hold of “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim” and “Youth.” I used to rave about these books to everyone I knew; but when at last Conrad became famous I had a secret resentment--he had been mine for so long that I did not like to give him up to those who did not understand him! In his later writings he deteriorated, as many old men do, and I saw the critics giving to these inferior books the praise which belonged to the earlier ones.
Conrad’s death has been the occasion for much discussion of the “romanticism” of his novels. The fact is that he was as realistic as he knew how to be. The reason he seems “romantic” is because the scenes and characters of his stories are remote and strange to us. But they were not at all strange to Conrad; he had sailed these Eastern seas and met these people, and their tragic fates were as commonplace to him as street-car traffic to us.
One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon--that he was the perfect type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a venomous fury.
The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, and was nearly forty before his first novel was published.
This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches the congregations implore:
Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to Thee For those in peril on the sea.
No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: “a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, and unites in one blending the terror of four different races--Greek, Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly and weak.
Such is the fact of man’s life; and the question then becomes: what shall man do? The first thing, obviously, is for him to understand; and so the great master toils incessantly and with religious ardor to embody his philosophic theory in human types and experiences. Do not let anyone lead you astray on this point: these dignified and noble art-works are “thesis novels,” composed for a didactic purpose, in exactly the same way as the Sunday school tales about little Bobbie who fell into the creek because he disobeyed his mother and went fishing on the Lord’s day. Great moral lessons do not get embodied in art-works by accident, any more than the wheels of a watch get put together by accident; so, while you absorb the elaborately contrived pessimism of Joseph Conrad, you must know that you are attending an Agnostic Sunday school.
Men have not merely to understand, but to act; therefore the pupils of this school are taught a moral code. They must stand together against the stealthy Nemesis which seeks to destroy them; and their rules of behavior must be so deeply graven in their souls that the reaction will be instinctive--for you never know at what moment the stealthy Nemesis will strike at you, in the form of fire at sea, or storm, or collision, or submerged reefs, or savages, or the slow, insidious action of physical or moral disease.
What is this code? The answer is, the code of the British merchant service. Its primary purpose is the protection of the ship, a valuable piece of property. So, in place of an imaginary God in a speculative heaven, we have a vaguely suggested Owner on the shore. This Owner is the force which creates the shipping industry and keeps it going; He is the goal of loyalty for officers and crew. Agnosticism upon closer study turns out to be Capitalism.
The ship has for ages been the source of a natural and spontaneous autocracy, begotten of the constant threat of danger; hence it comes that the naval officer is the most complete and instinctive snob in the world, and the merchant officer the perfect task-master. And when the self-made, risen-from-the-ranks merchant officer comes on shore, and has to deal with shore questions, we are not surprised to find him a hearty and boisterous Tory. In “Chance” we meet--but assuredly not by chance!--a feminist woman, and learn what Conrad thinks of this species; he impresses us as a fuming old British clubman, who would like to get the heads of all thinking women upon one neck--and then wring the neck!
In the same way, in “Under Western Eyes” we get Conrad’s view of politics; in a book written in the days of the Tsardom, we learn that a Siberian refugee who devotes his life to the overthrow of this hideous tyranny is an odious and unspeakable creature, and that a woman of means who helps him is a gawk and a bundle of scandals. It is a picture of social revolutionists of a sort you may pick up at any tea-table where the wives of legation attachés shrug their delicate white shoulders and prattle snobbish wit. Published in 1911, this book is a prophecy of the White Terror, that combination of holy knavery and romantic reaction which has made Poland the curse of Europe.
But the proper place to study Conrad is at sea. And we find that, just as Meredith takes the British caste system to be God, just as O. Henry takes the Standard Oil Company to be God, so Conrad takes the capitalist ownership and control of marine transportation. Analyzing the stories in the light of economic science, we find the stealthy Nemesis revealed as organized greed exploiting unorganized ignorance.
Take that most fascinating of sea tales, one of the great imaginative feats of literature: take “Youth.” A young man puts out to sea in an old tub of a vessel, and the old tub goes to pieces beneath his feet. One after another comes a procession of calamities; but he is young, and what does he care for troubles and dangers? The ship goes down in the end, but it is all a glory and a thrill to Youth, which laughs at the stealthy Nemesis and lives to tackle it again.
When we are young we read this, and our hearts are lifted up, and we know ourselves to be gods. But with maturing years and understanding, we come back to it, and what do we find? The cruel power which we took to be Nature, the perils of the deep, turns out to be nothing more romantic than the practice of marine insurance! If you own a ship and it becomes old and unseaworthy, you would in the ordinary course of events not trust a valuable cargo and a score of human lives to that ship. But finding that you can insure both ship and cargo, and get more money by sinking her than by selling her for junk, you continue to send her out until she falls to pieces; and Youth, deliberately kept in ignorance by capitalist control of schools and colleges, thinks it glory and wonder to sail out and fight a losing battle with “Nature.”
There is a story concerning Joseph Conrad, that when he became master of a ship, he conceived a desire to bring her home through the Torres Straits, which are especially dangerous waters. He had the fantastic idea that he wanted to sail in them, because he had read stories about them. The owners permitted him to have his way, and the critics and reviewers are thrilled by this sign of “romance” in ship owners. Critics and reviewers, you see, are sweet and innocent souls; only an evil-minded “muck-rake man” would make inquiries as to the age of that ship and the amount of insurance she carried through the Torres Straits!
The capitalist shipping industry is full of facts of this sort. Take, for example, the “Plimsoll line.” There was an English workingman who became a rich manufacturer, and did not forget his class, but devoted his life to trying to save the seamen and officers who were sent out in these “coffin ships.” He was elected to Parliament, and brought in a bill providing that ships should not be loaded beyond a certain line--the “Plimsoll line,” it was called. When his fellow-members voted it down, he shook his fist at them and called them “villains.” Of course they were shocked, and wanted to expel him, but they didn’t quite dare; they gave him ten days to think it over, and then he apologized, and they passed his bill--a most admirable form of compromise for a reformer!
For a generation after this, as cold statistics showed, some thousands of British seamen and officers escaped all the cruelties of Nature, the stealthy Nemesis of Joseph Conrad. For years this “Plimsoll line” served these thousands of seamen and officers in place of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, the Gentle Jesus meek and mild, the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and likewise all the Saints in the calendar, the glorious company of the Apostles, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets, the noble Army of Martyrs, the heavenly choir of Angels and Archangels, the Cherubim and Seraphim, and the Holy Church throughout all the world. But this divine supervision cost British shipping owners a certain number of millions of pounds of profit every year, and so they paid the campaign funds of their Tory and Liberal parties and got their henchman, David Lloyd-George, in authority and repealed that law; so now those thousands of seamen and officers are once more falling victims to the stealthy Nemesis!
And Joseph Conrad--what has he to say about this? As a man of the sea, he knows the facts; and in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” that most cruel-souled book, he takes occasion to pour his jeering scorn upon those who try to save the lives of seamen. You have to read the actual text to get the full effect of his venom. A seaman is talking:
“I mind I once seed in Cardiff the crew of an overloaded ship--leastways she weren’t overloaded, only a fatherly old gentleman with a white beard and an umbreller came along the quay and talked to the hands. Said as how it was crool hard to be drownded in winter just for the sake of a few pounds more for the owner--he said. Nearly cried over them--he did; and he had a square mainsail coat, and a gaff-topsail hat too--all proper. So they chaps, they said they wouldn’t go to be drownded in winter--depending upon that ’ere Plimsoll man to see ’em through the court. They thought to have a bloomin’ lark and two or three days’ spree. And the beak giv’ ’em six weeks--coss the ship warn’t overloaded. Anyways they made it out in court that she wasn’t. There wasn’t one overloaded ship in Penarth Dock at all. ‘Pears that old coon he was only on pay and allowance for some kind people, under orders to look for overloaded ships, and he couldn’t see no further than the length of his umbreller. Some of us in the boarding-house, where I live when I’m looking for a ship in Cardiff, stood by to duck that old weeping spunger in the dock. We kept a good look out, too--but he topped his boom directly he was outside the court.... Yes. They got six weeks’ hard....”
The coast of California, near which I live, is a favored lurking place of the stealthy Nemesis. The entire coast is a line of jagged rocks, with very few harbors, and vessels continually strike upon the rocks and are pounded to pieces. Sometimes they are great passenger steamers, and hundreds of people are in danger and have to be taken off on tugs; the newspapers give us hourly bulletins of what is happening, and their correspondents perform prodigies of daring and speed to get us photographs of the disaster in the first editions. The public reads of these tragedies, and is awed by the spectacle of man struggling in vain against the stealthy Nemesis.
What is the fact about this matter? It is very simple: the Nemesis here consists of the fact that the Pacific Coast from Seattle to San Diego makes a convex curve; so ships of all sorts, the great lumber schooners, the little salmon steamers, the great passenger liners, have to go a few miles farther out to sea in order to be safe. But that additional distance at sea means so many million dollars a year out of the pockets of the owners. It means not merely that more fuel has to be burned, it means that more of the ship’s time has to be taken, and more wages paid to officers and crew; in the case of the great liners it means that several hundred passengers have to be fed an additional meal!
So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and operate the steamship lines!
Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” a whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of “agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad has with them! Such lofty sarcasm:
Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers.
In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word Mutiny--and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!”
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