Norman Sherry - Joseph Conrad: The Critical Heritage

Review entitled White Man and Brown.

Let us begin by acknowledging Mr. Conrads main triumph before proceeding to criticism: he has written a short novel, with scene pitched in a far foreign land, with foreign characters, about which the majority of people have only the vaguest ideas, and he has not for one moment caused us to wish that his pictures and his plot had been nearer home. He is a man who can write of Borneo and never bore, if so frivolous a phrase, used in honest and deserved compliment, do not offend him. The few Malay words sprinkled about his pages set up none of the feeble irritation that most foreign tongues, used as local colour, are apt to do; they have the piquancy of capsicums in a curry. Mr. Conrad, like many another novelist, is content with an idea rather than a plot, and he is well advised. His idea is of one white man, a Dutchman, with the sensitive, nervous temperament of the West, a dreamy lack of initiative and will-power, condemned by circumstances to dwell in a native settlement upon a Bornean river, his only companions, besides his native wife and his half-caste daughter, the strange Eastern beings realised, with one exception (Babalatchi, the Comic Opera Minister) very perfectly and with great apparent ease. The ever-failing fortune of this man, Almayer; the savage hatred for him of his Malay wife; the half-hearted affection of his daughter; and the consistent treachery of every other creature towards him, save the hero, a Rajahs son, Dain Maroola, form the thread of the story. Dain and Nina, the daughter, are lovers, and the author rises to scenes of considerable power and passion in telling their story; a story which makes one feel that the old notion of hero and heroine may still have some excuse, that there are still novelists who can breathe life into the old ideals of love and bravery. But Mr. Conrads claims to be read rest not only upon his finely conceived and simply executed love-scenes; he essays and succeeds in a subtler task when he shows the emasculating and despair-breeding effect of the tired but scheming East upon a weak neurotic Western organisation. This is done in no set piece of description, but the knowledge of it is built up in the readers mind by a hundred touches, small in themselves. Mr. Conrad has also the art of creating an atmosphere, poetic, romantic. He tells, as only one who has seen it can, of the creeping decay of house and boat, stage, balcony, and building; he makes one know the warm moisture that slowly rots, as readily as he makes one feel the inertia that fails ever to repair or reconstruct.

The scenery does not appear behind the characters like the back cloth at a theatreit mingles with them to the end that one may know they would not have been what they were had the white fogs not risen nightly from the river. The lush green backgrounds of poisonous jungle; the broad waters, slapped with tropic rain or gleaming in miasmic moonlit mist; the swift dark canoes, shooting noiselessly on errands of love and hatred; the slump of the sullen alligator seeking the streamall this is not a setting of the story, it is as much the story as the human interest. To say this is to say much; but we have been struck with the book, and know nothing quite like it of recent years. It is slight and short enough, but gives evidence of abundant stores of material in the authors possession. Mr. Conrad may go on, and with confidence; he will find his public, and he deserves his place.