26
LIONEL TRILLING
society which undertakes to represent itself as benign, although
in fact it is vicious. Consider too that he is a practitioner of
several arts, a painter, a writer, a musician, and into the bargain
a political orator. He is at once the most idealistic and the most
practically successful of all the agents of the Belgian exploita–
tion of the Congo. Everybody knows what truth about him Mar–
low discovers-that Kurtz's success is the result of a terrible
ascendancy he has gained over the natives of his distant station,
an ascendancy which is derived from his presumed magical or
divine powers, that he has exercised his rule with the extreme of
cruelty, that he has given himself to unnamable acts of lust.
This is the world of the darker pages of
The Golden Bough.
It is
one of the great points of Conrad's story that Marlow speaks of
the primitive life of the jungle not as being noble or charming or
even free but as being base and sordid-and for
that
reason com–
pelling: he himself feels quite overtly its dreadful attraction.
It
is to this devilish baseness that Kurtz has yielded himself, and
yet Marlow, although he does indeed treat him with hostile
irony, does not find it possible to suppose that Kurtz is anything
but a hero of the spirit. For me it is still ambiguous whether
Kurtz's famous deathbed cry, "The horror! The horror!" refers
to the approach of death or to his experience of savage life.
Whichever it is, to Marlow the fact that Kurtz could utter this
cry at the point of death, while Marlow himself, when death
threatens
him,
can know it only as a weary greyness, marks the
difference between the ordinary man and a hero of the spirit. Is
this not the essence of the modern belief about the nature of
the artist, the man who goes down into that hell which is the
historical beginning of the human soul, a beginning not out–
grown but established in humanity as we know it now, prefer–
ring the reality of this hell to the bland lies of the civilization
that has overlaid it?
This idea is proposed again in the somewhat less powerful
hut still very moving work with which I followed
Heart of Dark–
ness,
Thomas Mann's
Death in Venice.
I wanted this story not
SO
much for its account of an extravagantly Apollonian personal-
