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PARTISAN REVIEW
loyalties which supply some of the other secondary notions by which
Marlow judges his experience in
Heart of Darkness.
Ford Madox Ford
wrote that Conrad ideally "desired to be ... a member of the ruling
classes of England" in the stable days of Lord Palmerston, and the
positive standards in
Heart of Darkness
have something of this early
Victorian quality. These standards-roughly, Duty, Restraint, and
Work-are those by which Marlow lives; and in various guises they
were a firm, indeed a notorious, presence in early Victorian thought.
John Stuart Mill wrote in his "The Utility of Religion" that it was
characteristic of "an age of weak beliefs" that "such beliefs as men
have" should be "much more determined by their wish to believe than
by any mental appreciation of evidence." We can see this wish to
believe both in Marlow and in Conrad. Thus in his first letter to
Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote:
"It
is impossible to know
anything," but added, "tho' it is possible to believe a thing or two. "
Marlow makes the distinction even more explicit in
Lord Jim
when he
comments: "Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the
back-door of your mind, each ... carrying away some crumb of that
belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live
decently and would like to die easy."
One of the few stable points of reference in
Heart of Darkness,
which Marlow much admires in others and what keeps him more or
less sane himself, is efficiency at work. This emphasis on the psycho–
logically stabilizing function of labor is close to Carlyle's remark in
Sartor Resartus
(1834) on "the folly of that impossible precept, 'Know
thyself,' till it be translated into this partially possible one, 'Know what
thou canst work at.'"
In
Conrad's own day the idea of the supreme value of work had
been made the basic social and political issue not only by Marx, but by
Ruskin and Morris; while notions of group duty and discipline, a
necessary component of the Imperialist mission as well as of the
nautical order, were advocated by W. E. Henley and Kipling. At the
back of these insistences was the Victorian nightmare that the disap–
pearance of God would destroy all social and moral sanctions for
individual conduct, and that thereafter, in Tennyson's words, men
would merely "submit all things to desire." The question, in its
simplest terms, was whether in a secularized world there would remain
anything which corresponded to the word "conscience."
Heart of
Darkness
continues this Victorian preoccupation. For instance, when
the dying Kurtz is said to have "judged" his life, Marlow is surely
implying the real existence of the conscience, of some inner moral
constrain
t.
