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hollow soundbox of egoti sti c pretensions; and Marlow 's "memory of
that time" lingers round him still " like a dying vibration of one
immense jabber. " For Marlow, women such as his aunt and the
Intended are des tined to be the mere echo chambers of this jabber. His
aunt 's illusions about the civilizing work in Africa came to her only
because she lived " right in the rush of all that humbug" which had
been " let loose in print and talk just about that time," while the
illusions o f the Intended a re only " the echo of [Kurtz's] magnificent
eloquence." Bo th Marlow's aunt and the Intended unconsciousl y
funClion as the facade for the operations of the manager and his
croni es; they are indeed , as Kurtz 's oil painting suggests, the blind
publicists for the venal h ypocrisies of the sepulchral city; and words are
its whitewash.
Marlow sees both the Intended and Kurtz as pitiful victims of the
unrea l aspirations of their century. The developing imperatives of
Romantic individualism had set up the ideal of absolute liberation
from religious, social and ethical norms; and this trend was later
reinforced by many others-most obviously by the Utilitarian view of
society as composed of an aggregate of economic individuals, by the
democratic egalitariani sm of liberal political theory, and by the
thought of Herbert Spencer, who assumed that the progressive differen–
tiation of individuals was the ultimate and sufficient aim of the
evolutionary process. All these views a t least agreed that progress
required the removal o f most es tablished economi c, political and social
" restraints"; and the harl equin 's surrender to Kurtz thus represents hi s
cen tury's innocent but fa teful surrender to that tota l Fausti an unre–
straint which believes tha t anythin g is justifi ed it it "enl arges the
mind."
Conrad's criti cal intelligence had arrived, independentl y perhaps,
but suppo rted, surely, by his qui ck sensitiveness to what h e could use
in the thought and speech of others, at an unformulated but resolute
intell ectual conviction which had much in common with tha t genera l
tendency among so many o f the thinkers of the la ter nineteenth
century, who began (rom the assumption tha t reason was not the
controlling facto r in human affa irs. This view, in very varied forms,
controls the philosophy of von Hartmann , Vaihinger, and Nietzsche,
the psychology of William James, Bergson , and Freud , the anthropo l–
ogy of Sir James Frazer, and the socio logy of Tonnies, Sorel, Pa reto,
Max Weber and Durkheim; a ll o f these shared Conrad's total skep ti–
cism abou t progress.
As a naturalized Englishman and a sea captain, however, Conrad
had also come to adop t other much more positive and conserva tive
