Conrad's Romanticism

In Conrad’s Lord Jim, the issues that most deeply plague Jim himself aren’t matters of physical hardship. Rather, he is haunted by his guilt and shame at the Patna incident so that it overrides any rational or practical circumstances he finds himself in. His pathological need to punish himself by avoiding confrontation with his past mistakes and dishonorable conduct drives him south and east along the coasts of the Indian and Pacific oceans, further and further from the source of his shame, until he ends up in Patusan (somewhere in Borneo or Sumatra), where he eventually meets his end. Conrad filters Jim’s cautionary tale through another voice, the veteran captain Marlowe, whose attempts to help and mentor Jim lead to his end. The central conflict of the book isn’t the civil warfare of Patusan, or the grim and tense accident on the Patna, it is Jim’s attempts to wrestle with his own inescapable shadow. It is a personal conflict, a self-inflicted one (although perhaps unconsciously) that could have been entirely avoidable if Jim had not been so comprehensively afflicted by romanticism. Conrad presents a series of stories as nesting-dolls, every event in the book is being related ex post facto by some witness to an ignorant third party, and these relations reveal a great deal about the events themselves. Lord Jim is not just a rollicking adventure story. Underneath the majestic prose of rich nautical fiction, the book is a philosophical parable about the merits and pitfalls of living a romantic life. “’How steady she goes,’ thought Jim with wonder, with something like gratitude for this high peace of sea and sky. At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with a heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself” (Conrad 11). Cloaked with his great skill in the genre, Conrad sets out a range of examples of lives lived with romance, and invites the reader to decide for themselves which type of life is led the best.

            There are three stages to Jim’s story: his boyhood before the Patna affair (which defines his life), his intermediate period of guilt-ridden wandering and flight, and his final disappearance from the world into the remote village of Patusan. Throughout the first two acts, Conrad places Jim among men of his ilk, implicitly assigning the reader the duty of comparing and contrasting these other nautical Europeans with his protagonist. There is no life more predisposed to romanticism than the life at sea, as Jim knew. “He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread—but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea” (Conrad 15, emphasis mine). Any man willing to leave the comforts of Western civilization to pursue the tribulations of the open ocean is probably a romantic soul in one way or another. The question then becomes not one of ‘if’, but one of ‘how’. How do they live with their romanticism? How do they control it, or does it control them?

            The first peer of Jim’s is the captain of the Patna, a “renegade New South Wales German, very anxious to curse publicly his native country, who… brutalised all those he was not afraid of, and wore a ‘blood-and-iron’ air” (Conrad 8). The captain is the most despicable member of Jim’s social class in the book, both for his actions on the Patna and his utter lack of romanticism. Every other major character of the sort is portrayed nobly, with a consciousness towards the importance of their profession and the camaraderie of the nautical governing class. Meanwhile, the German captain is portrayed brutally. “His gorge rose at the mass of panting flesh from which issued gurgling mutters, a cloudy trickle of filthy expressions; but he was too pleasurably languid to dislike actively this or any other thing. The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was different” (Conrad 12-13). He’s a grotesque, massive man whose behavior shows nothing but cowardice and contempt for everyone around him, for everyone is lesser than he is. His behavior on the Patna is of course condemnable, but none of the choices anybody made that night merit any sort of redemption, so for best comparison we ought to look elsewhere. As the officers of the “sunken” ship are rescued and returned to civilization to stand trial, the captain sets the tone for his crew. “The skipper… seemed to be swollen to an unnatural size by some awful disease… He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting, opened his mouth with an extraordinary, sneering contortion of his puffed face—to speak to them, I suppose—and then a thought seemed to strike him… [H]e went off in a resolute waddle” (Conrad 54). As soon as the severity of his actions set in, the captain flees in this comically insulting manner and is never seen again. Conrad makes it very clear that the reader should be nothing but disdainful of the aromantic German captain, who calls his Arabic passengers “dese cattle” and abandons them and his duty at the first sign of danger. This is an early chance for us to compare Jim with a man who’s ostensibly his senior. “‘I couldn’t clear out,’ Jim began. ‘The skipper did—that’s all very well for him. I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t. They all got out of it in one way or another, but it wouldn’t do for me” (Conrad 88). For Jim, the right thing to do is to face the tribunal, so that is what he does. Jim is governed by his romanticized principle of honor, and he views the world through such a childlike lens of black and white that others must pick up the rest of the shades in between. As Marlow describes him, Jim “complicated matters be being so simple… the simplest poor devil!” (Conrad 105). The other captain, Captain Brierly, chairs Jim’s tribunal. His response to the Patna incident, extreme as it is, makes him a foil to the German captain.

            Where the German sees the severity of the incident and flees the consequences, Brierly sees the condemnable implications for the nautical professions as a whole. “This is a disgrace. We’ve got all kinds amongst us—some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?—trusted!… We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency. Such an affair destroys one’s confidence. A man may go pretty near through his whole sea-life without any call to show a stiff upper lip. But when the call comes …” (Conrad 76). We spend little time with Brierly, but each of his actions makes it clear that he is a well-respected, experienced, and honorable man. Juxtaposed with the German, we can extend that characterization-by-opposition to include calling him a romantic. Surely Brierly’s final act, his suicide shortly after the events of the Patna, is a romantic one. Marlow, who knew the captain well enough to speak highly of him, records it thusly: “he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence with him in that leap into the sea. If I understand anything of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one of those trifles that awaken ideas—start into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live” (Conrad 67). A trifle that awakens ideas, which a man unused to such companionship finds it impossible to live. To be burdened by a trifle to the point of agony is a quintessentially romantic principle, and one we know Jim fights against as well. Where Jim will flee his own past for the rest of the novel, uprooting his life over and again until he winds up in Patusan, Captain Brierly flees in the most permanent sense “barely a week after the end of the inquiry” (Conrad 67). Yet even in suicide, Brierly remains a man of honor. He does his duty to the last, telling his officer he will set the log and doing so immediately before he jumps into the water to drown. Not only does Brierly complete his duty to the last, he also leaves letters recommending the officer inherit his command with high praise. In the context of these two commanding officers, Jim seems to sit in the middle of the romantic spectrum. Thus far in his own story, Jim has made mistakes, yet acted honorably at trial and avoided going to extremes. He faces the music but doesn’t let it consume him. Yet that romantic level-headedness from Jim ceases quickly after the verdict is handed down by the tribunal.

            In the second act of Jim’s tale, he is once again placed between two more experienced men of his same social class. Marlow and Stein. When Jim’s certificate is cancelled, Marlowe takes the lad under his wing, stepping into an active role in the plot after observing most of the events passively thus far. Marlow is the most admirable romantic that Conrad presents in the novel: he’s an accomplished captain in his own right, well-connected, and he takes a great deal of pride in mentoring young sailors. The majority of Lord Jim is framed within his telling, so when Marlow’s attention drifts from the tale at hand, it’s easy to imagine him waxing poetic as his audience fidgets impatiently, waiting for him to get back to the excitement of the story. Take his aside about re-encountering those sailors he’d helped get their start: “I tell you this is good; it tells you that once in your life at least you had gone the right way to work. I have been thus slapped, and I have winced, for the slap was heavy, and I have glowed all day long and gone to bed feeling less lonely in the world by virtue of that hearty thump” (Conrad 53). This romantic notion, taking that satisfaction in the mentorship of others, compels Marlow to help Jim over and over, setting him up with jobs and steering him away from unsavory company. Jim starts at a rice mill on Marlow’s recommendation but flees when the Patna’s engineer shows up and begins working in the same place. He “couldn’t stand the familiarity of the little beast” and runs hundreds of miles away at the first reminder of his past mistakes (Conrad 206). But Marlow’s a romantic, and he can’t write off his protégé so quickly. He forgives Jim over and again as he records the young man’s flight across the coasts of the Indian and Pacific, and he recognizes Jim’s tendencies in a respectful way. To Marlow, Jim’s “manner of dealing with himself under the new conditions of his life” is “tinged by a high-minded absurdity of intention which made their futility profound and touching”. He concedes that “[t]o fling away your daily bread so as to get your hands free for a grapple with a ghost may be an act of prosaic heroism” but can’t decide if Jim is bravely facing his demons and simply moving on as a matter of honor, or “shirking his ghost” and avoiding confrontation with his past mistakes entirely (Conrad 215). Regardless, he is determined to aid Jim however he can, and after helping Jim yet again by helping him get out of Bangkok, he decides to consult a friend named Stein, whom he “considered… an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences about Jim’s difficulties as well as my own” (Conrad 140).

            Stein is the expert romantic, “he lived solitary, but not misanthropic, with his books and his collection, classing and arranging specimens, corresponding with entomologists in Europe, writing up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures” (Conrad 143). This is the life of an obsessive romantic, and he’s the best candidate to diagnose Jim’s problems. Stein’s romanticism is the most overt of any character aside from Jim. Where Brierly’s nature is revealed posthumously and Marlow’s tendencies are shown in his narrative asides and actions, Stein makes romantic proclamations aloud. “Look! The beauty—but that is nothing—look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature—the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so—and every blade of grass stands so—and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces—this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature—the great artist” (Conrad 227). Stein knows the life of the romantic well, he’s able to diagnose Jim so simply that it “resembled… a medical consultation” and he knows that the problem is not Jim’s aversion to his past (Conrad 232).  The romantic’s burden is not the object of their romantic notions, or the actions that motivate them, but their very nature. “There is only one remedy! One thing alone can us from being ourselves cure!” (Conrad 232). For Stein knows innately that romanticism, once a soul is afflicted with it, becomes an unavoidable part of that individual: “man will never on his heap of mud keep still… He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil—and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow—so fine as he can never be” (Conrad 233). Jim’s curse is that he cannot go back, but there are few places left for him to move forward, a circumstance that Stein is familiar with. He himself has finished the great deeds of his life and is essentially living out the rest of his days in wealthy seclusion, focused on his butterflies. Where Jim cannot go back to England out of shame, Stein cannot return to his home and family because they were killed. Where Jim cannot move forward because he’s convinced of his own utter exclusion from the sailing class, Stein is too old to begin a new life. But like Marlow, he finds honor and satisfaction in his mentorship

            The difference between Marlow and the rest of these romantics is that he enjoys life through his romantic lens but does not let his romantic nature plague him to a debilitating state. Perhaps that is merely because he’s not done anything so accursed that it would follow him around for the rest of his life. By many metrics, Marlow is the most successful player in Lord Jim. He tells much of the tale from a rocking chair on a temperate night, smoking cigars and drinking with his compatriots as they wax romantic about past adventures. Presumably, he’s survived to some more advanced age, nearing retirement after a lifetime on the waves. He’s met tribesmen and con men, honorable captains with golden binoculars for their service to the company and comically shameful ones, and lived through it all to tell those tales. Yet what does he have to show for it all? Conrad gives us Marlow both as a narrator and as a critical example of the moderate life. These five men of the sea (Stein, Jim, Brierly, Marlow, Brierly, and the German) are arrayed across the spectrum of romantic life. Their choices and ends reflect the ramifications of the sort of lives they’ve chosen to live, and the reader is invited to consider them all. The German is certainly not meant to receive any sort of respect or be followed down his aromantic, dishonorable path. With his suicide as dignified as can be, Brierly’s not a role model, either. That leaves three. Old Stein, after surviving all of his adventures, lives alone with his butterflies. Driven to Patusan by his own spiritual burdens, fleeing like Frankenstein’s Creature into the Arctic, Jim dies young and unsuccessful in his flight. Finally, Marlow lives out his days surrounded by friends and colleagues, shaking his head and wondering at the whole affair that he facilitated. “’And it’s easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight’” (Conrad 17).

            On the surface, it’s easy to categorize Joseph Conrad as an adventure writer. He wrote as he sailed, and his subjects are often thrown into far-flung locales where they live adventurous lives, but to call Conrad an adventure writer would like calling Van Gogh a floral painter. The depths Conrad ventures out to include in his “adventures” leave the Robert Louis Stevensons of the world on the shore. In Lord Jim, Conrad uses the medium of the romantic adventure novel to weave in a parable. The adventures of a boy at sea, who survives a shipwreck and reckons with his role in the tragedy. That could be a bedtime story (albeit a Victorian-era one, to be sure), but the harder questions Conrad raises are far beyond the stakes of a penny dreadful. Is it better to live an unadventurous life but live it romantically, like Marlow? That path provides in many ways, Marlow lives long enough to think retrospectively, but he is fixated on Jim’s life because it holds adventures beyond any he has experienced himself. Stein, then, is a man who survived great adventures, lived many lives and has reached old age with wealth and wisdom to show for his life, but where Marlow is surrounded by peers and listeners for his stories, Stein is alone with his butterflies. Finally, Jim himself is a cautionary tale about how strong one ought to hold to his principles, and how fixation on honor and the romantic life can drive one to desperate and remote corners of the world. None of them live a perfect life, but the concept of perfection is itself a romantic ideal that cannot be reached by mortals.

            Conrad does not condemn romanticism by any means, but he is certainly not recommending giving oneself entirely over to romantic idealism either. There is a moderation to be found in Lord Jim, a middle ground between the choices and values of all these major players, where the world can be appreciated as the romantic place that it indeed can be. “Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows” (Conrad 9). The beauty of the sun shining over open ocean ought to be enjoyed as only a romantic can enjoy it, but we needn’t live our lives by the black and white principles that extreme romantics like Jim insist upon, for only heartbreak and tragedy will be found there.

            This principle of moderation reminded me of another English writer, working abroad at the end of the 19^th century. Yes, Conrad was Polish, but he wrote in English, so bear with me. Rudyard Kipling’s time in India drove his work much as Conrad’s time at sea powered his own, and while they do not appear to have been close confidants, they did correspond. On October 9, 1906, Kipling wrote Conrad to praise his latest work: “What a book- The Mirror of the Sea! I took it up as soon as I arrived and sailed along with it until I went to bed. Certainly I recognised the description of the winds, which I consider almost as splendid as the description of the darkness in 'Typhoon', but I have read and reread it all and I thank you sincerely and gratefully” (Bojarski). Most of their extant correspondence seems trapped on papers in special collections, an adventure for this romantic to pursue further. In particular, Kipling’s great poem If feels especially relevant:

“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

                        If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

                        And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

                        Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools” (Kipling).

Had Jim lived by these words, Lord Jim would have been a far different work. Kipling published If for the first time in 1910, a decade after Jim was serialized in Blackwood’s Magazine, and I must imagine that, familiar as he was with Conrad’s body of work, he must have had Stein’s voice somewhere deep in his mind. For both If and Jim teach their readers to walk the middle line, to see the romance of life without letting romanticism rule them. What a difference a century makes. Our modern, rational world might be far better served if we looked back at Conrad and Kipling’s time and took a page or two from their books. Nights rarely descend like benedictions in the twenty-first century. Perhaps they ought to.