IAN WATT
117
Marlow 's overriding moral commitmeOl
LO
civilization, however
deluded, weak, and unjust it is found to be, is rather similar
to
that of
Conrad's coOlemporary, Freud. Freud's observations had forced him
LO
a position which dramatically undermined the accepted psychological
foundations of the social and moral order, since man was shown to be
unconsciously dominated, not by reason or benevolence or duty, but by
the omnivorous and ultimately unappeasable appetities of the id; and
so, in
Civilization and
f
ts Discontents
and
The Future of an Illusion
Freud wondered whether any secular mechanism could ever replace
religion in cOOlrolling the aggressive drives which led to war and
hatred of civilization. Freud had a deeper belief in systematic thought
than Conrad, and Conrad was not interested in Freud; nevertheless,
they shared not only the same dark view of man's innate constitution,
and the same conviction that culture was based on repression of
restraint, but a similar sense that the destructive tendencies of man
which their vision emphasized must be controlled as far as possible,
partly by promoting a greater understanding of the inherent darkness
of the self, and partly by supporting the modest countertruths on
which civilization depends. As against the more absolute negations of
Rimbaud or Nietzsche, or the equally absolute transcendeOlal affirma–
tions of Dostoevsky or Yeats, both Freud and Conrad defend a practical
social ethic based on their fairly similar reformulations of the Victorian
trinity of work, duty, and restraint.
The general modern tendency has been
to
overlook this aspect of
the thought of Conrad and Freud in favour of its more dramatic and
original destructive side; in effect both of them have been either
attacked or praised more for what they saw than for what they said
about it. In the process their insistence on the need
to
cOOlrol · the
unconscious and egotistic sides of man has been misiOlerpreted or
overlooked: and this bias has often been reflected in the modern critical
treatmeOl of Kurtz.
Kurtz dramatizes Conrad's fear of the ultimate directions of
nineteeOlh-century thought. These directions are beautifully expressed
in Auden's poem "In Father's Footsteps," which begins with a poig–
nant valediction to the basic psychological strategy of the Victorian
religion of progress as it assimilated the implications of biological
evolution:
Our hunting fathers told the story
Of the sadness of the creatures
Pitied the limits and the lack
Set in their finished features;
Saw in the lion 's intolerant look
