Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/1046

972 imaginative appeal to George Meredith's best in quite another field, and, in strength, flexibility, and scope of expression, unsurpassed by any.

In the novel referred to this is the obvious situation: a steamer on the Red Sea, with a human cargo of eight hundred pilgrims, struck in her placid course by some floating derelict and threatened with imminent destruction, from which, in the face of a black squall that seems sure to precipitate instant shipwreck, the officers, including Lord Jim, chief mate, escape in a boat, leaving the sleeping or dazed pilgrims to their fate—which was not so tragical, after all, as the ship did not sink and was towed into port the next morning by a French gunboat. When we have added that Lord Jim's participation in the escape was contrary to his resolution maintained up to the last moment, the result of a fatuous, almost hypnotic impulse, repented at once but irredeemable forever, the theme of the novel is laid bare. Very bare, indeed; and in the hands of the sea-novelist as we know him—even of one so extraordinary as Victor Hugo—we should have only an outwardly dramatic investment of this skeleton,—incidents in a striking and picturesque narrative leading up to the situation which we have indicated, but which he would vividly describe in all its terrors, probably adding thereto the excitement of a storm, filling the scene with strenuous action and wild panic, and then proceed to a sequel as picturesque and striking as his prelude.

Not so Conrad. The deck of the Patna is as calm, at the supreme moment, as the sleep of the pilgrims below. While the captain and second mate and engineer are struggling to detach a boat from its davits for their own safety our regard is fixed upon Lord Jim, and it is not a conflict with the elements which we are called upon to witness, but that which is going on in his breast.

But the story does not proceed with such directness, else the main situation, portrayed, as thus it must be, in a straightforward narrative, would lose all of its subjective meaning. The direct narrative stops at the point of the steamer's encounter with the floating obstacle, over which it passes quivering through its entire length. What follows we think will be told in the Court of Inquiry to which we are introduced in the next scene, located in an Eastern port,—told by Lord Jim himself from the witness-box, where he confronts the inquisition alone. But this expectation is futile—as futile as the inquisition itself, or as the wandering efforts which Jim makes to clear up a situation in peremptory answers to questions pointing to a matter-of-fact solution.

No. We have here only a vivid picture of an Oriental court of marine justice, but not the story. And yet the essence of the story is in a single situation, involving a simple choice between apparent death and sure disgrace. But it must have its leisure for a spontaneous unfolding, its proper dramatic investment—something different in circumstance from anything possible in a court of inquiry. And thus we have it, as it is told to Marlow by Lord Jim, dining with him at the Malabar House. Here is the artist's opportunity for a full disclosure of every element, even the most subtle and indefinable, in a conflict wholly psychical, the issue of which is a critical choice. We might in the detachment of an intellectual view reason about such a choice, all the pros and cons touching either alternative, condemning or condoning according to our rating of human nature, our estimate of its possibilities, ranging from faith in the highest heroism to the pessimistic verdict that man is a born poltroon and "all that he hath will he give for his life." But Jim is not thus detached; he is dramatis persona, and his soul surcharged with the burden of an awful moment quakes under it and emits lightning flashes, in which we scan the living record. Thus, for fifty pages of the novel,—the thrilling story of that moment! In all this no argument, only the quivering plea of a lost soul—such as the condemned in Inferno might have made to Dante.

In such passages in the best modern fiction the most is made of the situation, not by summation and elaboration, but by illumination. There are no rhetorical effects, no glosses of any sort; but there is the masque, the full imaginative investment, the play and indirection of thought following the fugitive and elusive truths of life.