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sciousness was destined to be in total contradiction to its physical and
moral environment. "What makes men tragic," Conrad wrote to
Cunninghame Graham, " is not that they are victims of nature, it is that
they are conscious of it. ... There is no morality, no knowledge, and
no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us
about a world that whether seen in a convex or a concave mirror is
always but a vain and fleeting appearance."
It
was primarily the two forms of natural science which most
affected the general Victorian outlook-physics and biology-that had
been decisive in making man see himself as the victim of nature. The
traditional belief that the creation of the world, and of man, was a
unique manifestation of God's providence had been fatally under–
mined long before by astronomy. Then in the nineteenth century
geology had suggested, not only that the earth itself was a transitory
phenomenon, but that, as Tennyson put it in
In Memoriam,
even man
himself might one day, like the fossils in the books, become extinct and
"Be blown about the desert dust, or sealed within the iron hills."
Finally Victorian physics had confirmed this vista of coming extinc–
tion. For, it now appeared, our terrestrial planet had originated, not
out of the hand of God but accidentally out of the cooling gases of the
sun; and the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics by Lord
Kelvin in 1851 seemed to mean that the destiny of the earth was to end
in cold and drought through the diffusion of heat-energy.
This astrophysical pessimism, widely popularised by Balfour
Stewart's
The Conservation of Energy
in 1873, soon became a standard
feature of late Victorian thought. As Edward Carpenter wrote about the
universe of his youth: "one of its properties was that it could run down
like a clock, and would eventuate in time in a cold sun and a dead
earth-and there was an end of it." The eighteenth century had
inferred a divine watch-maker from the operations of the celestial
machine; it was now discovered that there was no watch-maker and
that the watch's spring was running down.
This dispiriting historical perspective pervades
Heart of Darkness.
Marlow's first remark, as the sun sets over London, is: "And this also
.. . has been one of the dark places of the earth." Dismissing from our
minds both the present lights on the shore and the glories of the
national past enacted along the estuary of the Thames, Marlow harks
back to the darkness which had here confronted the first Roman settlers
in Britain; and we are made to see civilization, not as a stable human
achievement, but as a brief interruption of the normal rule of darkness;
the extent and duration of ci vilized order are as limited and brief as "a
