IAN WATT
113
writing in a leller to Grant Allen: "We are in the course of rebarbarisa–
tion."
Heart of Darkness,
then, expresses a perspective that was very
representative of many currents of thought in late nineteenth-century
England; but it is representative in a very tangential way. Conrad's
imaginative world seems wholly independent; the ideas don't stick out,
or ask for support or confirmation. Thus the closeness of Conrad's
moral and social assumptions to Huxley's later evolutionary thought is
very striking if we compare Conrad's picture of man and society with
that of Hardy, Wells, or Shaw; but we could hardly say that
H eart of
Darkness
is about evolution; and even if one said it is about colonial–
ism, or about the implications of colonialism for the colonizers and
their civilization, the description would still seem both too analytic
and too restrictive.
Yet in his own way Conrad was an intellectual, and his first
mention of writing
Heart of Darkness
presented it in specifically
intellectual terms: "The
idea
in it," he explained
to
his publisher,
William Blackwood, " is not as obvious as in 'Youth' -or at least not so
obviously presented," and added: "The subject is of our time
distinctly-though not topically treated. "
This description , written on December 31, 1898, when the story
was barely begun, refers only to its most obvious ideological content:
that is, as Conrad rather defensively put it in the same leller, " the
justifiable idea" of exposing "the criminality of inefficiency and pure
selfishness when tackling the civilizing work in Africa." This anticolo–
nial tenor is very similar
to
that of Conrad's earlier story, "An Outpost
of Progress," which had led Cunninghame Graham, an avowed
Marxist who shared platforms with such men as Engels and Kropotkin ,
to
write a letter of enthusiastic praise. What Cunninghame Graham
had correctly recognized was a general political perspective very similar
LO
his own definition of "the Imperial Mission" as "the Stock Ex–
change Militant"; and Cunninghame Graham was equally enthusias–
tic about the anticolonial first part of
Heart of Darkness.
Conrad,
however, urged him to delay final judgment, writing that "There are
two more instalments in which the idea is so wrapped up in secondary
notions that You-even You I-may miss it. "
Conrad nowhere specifies what these "secondary notions" were;
but he gives a clue in a later letter
to
Blackwood when he says that the
final scene, where Marlow finds himself forced to lie about Kurtz's end
to
the Intended, "locks in " the whole narrative " into one suggestive
view of a whole phase of life. "
