GUILT, LOVE AND EXTINCTION:

BORN IN EXILE AND UNDER WESTERN EYES

L. R. LEAVIS

University of Nijmegen, English Department,

P.O. Box 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Abstract

The suggestion is supported that George Gissing’s Born in Exile had a direct influence
on Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. The differences between the art of the late-
Victorian pioneer Gissing in one of his most original novels and that of the 20th-century
revolutionary Conrad, who came from outside the English tradition, are instructive; but
the parallels prove revealing, in a period in England of incredible literary change.

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In a letter to William Blackwood of 31 May 1902, Joseph Conrad pro-

claimed:
I am modern, and I would rather recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the sculptor
who both had to starve a little in their day – and Whistler the painter who made Ruskin
the critic foam at the mouth with scorn and indignation. They too have arrived. They
too had to suffer for being ‘new’.

Conrad’s later, post-sea novels ironically were to be so originally and

idiosyncratically modern that he would undergo considerably more suf-
fering for being ‘new’. Interestingly (and I think with special relevance),
George Gissing towards the end of November of the same year praised
Conrad’s recently-appearing Youth to the banker and acquaintance of
famous novelists, Edward Clodd:

No man at present writing fiction has such a grip of reality, such imaginative vigour,
and such wonderful command of language, as Joseph Conrad. I think him a great writer
– there’s no other word. And, when one considers his personal history, the English of
his books is something of a miracle. 1

As Halperin mentions in his Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford, 1982),

Clodd passed these words on to Conrad himself, who was an admirer
of Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea, and Conrad, moved, in his turn eloquently
wrote to Gissing thanking him for his praise. Conrad had actually met
Gissing through H.G. Wells at the latter’s house at Sandgate in June
1901.
Conrad’s Blackwood letter was no mere assertion, for, as we know

Neophilologus 85: 153–162, 2001.

 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
154 L. R. Leavis

(with more evidence to go on than the perceptive Gissing), he proved

indeed to be a great modern writer, whose greatness and ‘modernity’
can be seen to eclipse the best qualities of Gissing’s oeuvre. However,
I wish to suggest a possible direct influence of one of Gissing’s best
and most original works, Born in Exile (1892), on Conrad when he was
writing his Under Western Eyes (1911), or at the least to posit this by
a revealing comparison of striking aspects in both novels. Previously
in the pages of this periodical2 I have argued (I hope with some con-
viction) the possible effect of Hardy’s Tess on another Conrad book. It
is not that I regard Conrad as an essentially derivative writer, or other-
wise embrace some mechanical concept of a rigid process of a total
literary influence; but most great writers such as Conrad (other notable
examples being Lawrence and Joyce) transform what has struck them
in authors of perhaps other temperaments, and often of lesser abilities,
and from other societies, in achieving their own expression. This is
after all a more independent and original version of how minor writers
are affected by influence, often to the extent of their being swallowed
up by the character and expression of some greater artist. We have long
been familiar with such human interaction on different levels in litera-
ture, which T.S. Eliot studiously drew attention to when preparing the
reading public for his own work early in the last century. This was cer-
tainly rather more than simple propaganda on Eliot’s part, and was once
even seen, from Eliot’s grasp and mastery of literary movements, as
central literary criticism. It is just that this human view of creative activity
has been discarded more recently by a literary theory that has wished
to remove the life and personality of the artist. Instead some facile if
sophisticated scheme of dogma quite external (if not inimical) to liter-
ature has been substituted, obliterating the nature of how expression is
built up through individuality.
Born in Exile is anyway a key novel in that it can be viewed as an
original development in an important English tradition – which Conrad
was outside – dealing with the isolated individual in English society
that stretches from Kingsley’s Alton Locke and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
through Dickens’s Great Expectations,3 culminating after Wells’s Tono-
Bungay and The New Machiavelli in Lawrence’s Women in Love. In
the case of Gissing’s possible influence on Conrad, the situation is com-
plicated by the common, if different, effect of Dostoevsky on both writers.
Gissing at the time of writing Born in Exile had long admired Dostoevsky,
particularly Crime and Punishment, and Jacob Korg4 and others have
linked his novel with a number of European novels of spiritual crisis
including Dostoevsky’s. Whatever the validity of viewing Gissing in such
a perspective,5 there are unmistakable signs of Gissing’s being taken
by Dostoevsky’s psychology of the profound, neurotic affliction of a guilt
that brooks no denial. So the tensions Raskolnikov undergoes when faced
“Born in Exile” and “Under Western Eyes” 155

with his police-inquisitor Porfiry are clearly well understood by Gissing,

and affect the psychology of his Godwin Peak haunted by a quite
Calvinistic sense of the dishonesty of his methods in using religion to
infiltrate into a conservative family. After his withdrawal from the stifled
courtship of one of the daughters of this family (Sidwell), a growing
ridicule of self-mockery sweeps over his inner unease:

It was in the endeavour to expel the subtlest enemy of his peace that Godwin dwelt so
defiantly upon this view of the temptation to which he had yielded. Since his farewell
interview with Sidwell, he knew no rest from the torment of a mocking voice which
bade him bear in mind that all his dishonour had been superfluous, seeing that whilst
he played the part of a zealous Christian, Sidwell herself was drifting further and further
away from the old religion. This voice mingled with his dreams, and left not a waking
hour untroubled. He refused to believe it, strove against the suggestion as a half-despairing
man does against the persistent thought of suicide.

This quality of psychological disintegration (so powerful in Crime and

Punishment) was not present in Gissing’s previous novel New Grub
Street, where Reardon and Biffen are overwhelmed by another kind of
failure, not to do with moral integrity. When the author of New Grub
Street concentrates on providing studies of the attitudes and mentality
of all the main characters, the novel can be said to veer towards an objec-
tivity – the real novelist in Gissing working its way out, as it were.
This attempt at authorial detachment from material relating to his personal
history is formally taken further and is perhaps more consistent in Born
in Exile, abetted by Gissing’s capturing of a Dostoevskian strain of
hysteria in Peak.
Darwin occupies Gissing, which can’t be said at all of Conrad in Under
Western Eyes. It is self-evident that Gissing has done a lot of boning-
up on literature of the Darwinian controversy. A most interesting aspect
of this thematic strand in his novel is a later letter of Peak’s to Earwaker
recalling an earlier mystical experience in a quarry. Peak recalls:

Sitting down before some interesting strata, I lost myself in something like nirvana,
grew so subject to the idea of vastness in geological time that all human desires and
purposes shrivelled to ridiculous unimportance. Awaking for a minute, I tried to realise
the passion which not long ago rent and racked me, but I was flatly incapable of under-
standing it. Will this philosophic state endure? Perhaps I have used up all my emotional
energy?

This is to foreshadow Peak’s loss of grip on his own destiny.6 It stands

in a probably indirect relation to a passage in Dickens’s ‘George
Silverman’s Explanation’ (1866), where the clergyman Silverman is about
to commit the ultimate masochistic act of marrying a man he formed
in his own image to the girl he loves. Early in the morning, before the
wedding-service, he walks down to the rocks on the sea-shore:
156 L. R. Leavis

The tranquillity upon the deep, and on the firmament, the orderly withdrawal of the
stars, the calm promise of coming day, the rosy suffusion of the sky and waters, the
ineffable splendour that then burst forth, attuned my mind afresh after the discords of
the night. Methought that all I looked on said to me, and that all I heard in the sea and
in the air said to me, “Be comforted, mortal, that thy life is so short. Our preparation
for what is to follow has endured, and shall endure, for unimaginable ages.”

The Dickens is informed by a Christian stoicism in the face of the

universe glimpsed by Darwinian Science. Gissing’s is a non-religious,
prosaic version of the same experience. The poetry in the Dickens
seems not only Tennysonian, but very Wordsworthian in rhythm and
mood, partly recalling the feeling of the opening of ‘Resolution and
Independence’. This comparison between the prose passages gives one
more comprehension of the effects of Darwinism than the more obvious
‘novel of ideas’ commentary in Born in Exile on the geologist and anti-
evolutionist Hugh Miller’s book Testimony of the Rocks (1857).7
One tends to read Under Western Eyes purely as a reaction both against
Russian extremism (whether Tsarist or Revolutionary) and against
Dostoevsky. Marcus Wheeler in a valuable article in Journal of Russian
Studies No. 38 (1979) called ‘Turgenev and Conrad’ succinctly pointed
out that commentators on Conrad’s work had often stressed ‘his contorted
literary relationship with Dostoevsky’ at the expense of the impact on
him of Turgenev, whom Conrad admired. In his corrective, Wheeler
contrasts the ideas in Under Western Eyes expressed by Razumov and
by the narrator, the old English teacher of languages, with the neo-
Slavophilism of Nathalie Haldin which he argues with some plausibility
is not alien to Conrad’s beliefs. The point seems a shrewd one, especially
as we know from Nostromo and The Secret Agent that mature Conrad
delights in what evolves into a method of ‘sympathetic’ total irony,
where a whole range of viewpoints and outlooks are offered, ironic
detachment not precluding authorial moral involvement. Hence, any
estimation of the effect of Crime and Punishment on Conrad, as with
my suggested influence of Born in Exile, must take into consideration
that Conrad was a fully-formed writer with a strongly-defined artistic
character.
My contention is that Conrad, in touch with Gissing and some of
his work, and grateful for his genuine, judicious admiration, bothered
to acquaint himself with one of his best novels at some time before
writing Under Western Eyes – even the title Born in Exile would have
had a strong appeal for Conrad, given his childhood! The plot of Gissing’s
novel ought also to have appealed; a most lonely university student
(Godwin Peak) is forced to throw up his prize-winning ambitions of
academic distinction, and starts a ‘new life’ in infiltrating into a quite
different environment. In doing so, he has to dissimulate in behaviour
and belief, causing acute psychological disturbance that has difficulty
“Born in Exile” and “Under Western Eyes” 157

in being masked from observation. Peak first ‘falls in love’ with a cul-
tivated but conservative family ethos, one completely new to him.
Gradually he also falls in love with Sidwell Warricombe, the oldest
daughter of the family, first as a representative of a class and then as pas-
sionately as his nature allows him. He is faced with his past; a very
Radical milieu that he has become detached from, and even hates, and
his lower-middle-class family with whom he has no emotional ties. Peak’s
dislocation grows as his path towards the Church and Sidwell seems to
run smoothly, and his ‘enemies’, both the cultivated exploiter and ‘dandy’
Bruno Chilvers, fated to succeed where Peak fails, and the hostile radical
brother, Buckland Warricombe, obsess him increasingly. ‘Inevitably’
he is unmasked by the brother, who discovers that he once (in his Radical
period) published an atheistic article attacking casuistry used to defend
traditional Christianity against Darwin. Though Peak directly gives up
his aims when challenged, he has a confession scene with Sidwell.
Finally, severing his links with England, he dies in a hotel in Vienna,
exiled from any human contact.
The suggestive parallels in Under Western Eyes are fascinating, always
remembering that Conrad’s irony bites deeper than Gissing’s, and the
psychology is more intense. Razumov’s loathing for Nikita and Peter
Ivanovitch, or his fear of Sophia Antonovna’s penetration,8 are on another
plane from Peak’s ordeals. Conrad’s university student (at St. Petersburg)
is quite as isolated as Peak at the start of the novel, and for more coherent
reasons; he bears the stigma of illegitimacy, so proving himself to his
noble ‘patron’ Prince K- by winning the silver medal is a clear induce-
ment.9 Razumov is less in touch with his fellow students than Peak,
and thought sympathetic by Russian radicals for far less reason than Peak
is by the English variety. Razumov defines himself honestly in the
‘manifesto’ stuck on his bedroom wall as a natural conservative. People
(including the secret police) consistently construct a convenient image
of Razumov throughout the novel. His hopes are shattered by the fanatic
Haldin’s sudden intrusion; and in being forced to announce his ideology,
he becomes meat for Mikulin and a barbarous regime. The shattering
bears a direct relation to events in the novel in a way that Peak’s uncle
with his eating-house (who drives Peak away from his studies) doesn’t
in Born in Exile. But both protagonists are forced to ‘rebuild’ their
outward identity. Razumov is compelled to work as a police spy among
revolutionaries in Geneva, and Peak voluntarily almost drifts into being
a conservative Church apologist; he has left the fire of his Radicalism
behind by now, but not his scrupulosity of self-inquiry. He is not a simple
hypocrite, and genuinely sympathises with Mr Warricombe’s belief.
Razumov hates both the revolutionaries he spies on and his vulnerable
role as double-agent despicably pretending to be their hero.
Both experience increasingly-obsessive guilt, tensions of self-disgust
158 L. R. Leavis

at the roles they are playing, isolation, and love. Gissing directly depicts
the passion mingled with insecurity which threatens Peak’s poise:

Passion at length constrained him to believe that his ardour might be genuinely recipro-
cated, but even now it was only in paroxysms that he held this assurance; the hours of
ordinary life still exposed him to the familiar self-criticism, sometimes more scathing than
ever. He dreaded the looking-glass, consciously avoided it; and a like disparagement of
his inner being tortured him through the endless labyrinths of erotic reverie.

Conrad (typically) leaves it to the reader through the various narratives

to deduce the underground processes of Razumov’s tortured emotions10
– which he does! Naturally, events and personages are more extreme
in Conrad – only in late Hardy does Victorian England begin to resemble
Tsarist Russia. Razumov, being between the devil and the deep blue
sea and haunted by Haldin’s death, has far more ground for feeling evil
than Peak (who only feels that he has betrayed himself ); and his hates,
guilts, strain and anger are commensurately greater. Also his oscilla-
tion between extreme feelings for Natalia Haldin, the sister of the man
he ‘betrayed’, until his love forces him to reveal himself, has a dimen-
sion completely beyond Gissing. Razumov, after all, unlike Peak,
confesses when he is completely safe (his ‘article’ is his written con-
fession plus his ‘manifesto’). Yet one suspects that the mixture of Peak’s
physical and moral loathing of Marcella Moxey with his vision of the
controlled, self-disciplined Sidwell might have proved more than useful
as a psychological starting-point for Conrad.
Peak’s assertion (which is repeated in the novel) that he was ‘born
in exile’, so an outcast without a real family to connect with intellec-
tually and emotionally, without a place in society, or even some defined
future, is used by Gissing both as a thesis (which the novel savagely
fulfils) and with an ironic detachment apparently showing the protago-
nist’s wilfulness. The combination of direct and ironic emphases does
provoke natural confusion in the reader, though this happens with other
Gissing books. The critic must resist the temptation to apply a simple
autobiographical reading to the novel, where Peak’s life is seen as being
a straight drama in fiction of Gissing’s.11 Whatever the relation between
fiction and authorial reality with other writers or other Gissing novels,
in Born in Exile Gissing has constructed a sort of ‘half-way house’
between his life and ‘art for art’s sake’, where the artist can allegorize
his experiences of society while standing back with his arms sternly
folded. Yet the detachment can strike one as masochistic in its obses-
siveness, even masking hysteria. The very heavy play on the canard
that Peak has been seen in Boston, so stimulating gossip among acquain-
tances that Peak has been up to no good, is surely an over-worked private
joke. One links this with Whelpdale’s American experiences in New Grub
Street; both refer to Gissing’s down-and-out American adventures imme-
“Born in Exile” and “Under Western Eyes” 159

diately after serving his jail sentence for theft when a student, but the
New Grub Street version was a good deal lighter and more off-hand; a
sort of ‘stocking-filler’. Now, the sardonic irony stems from the author’s
sense that here at least is one grave charge that Peak can’t be convicted
of, even if he was – and as Gissing said, Peak is ‘one phase of myself ’.
Another bitter twist in the novel comes in what must be a calculated
echo of part of the plot of Disraeli’s Coningsby. There the hero’s inde-
pendence was established by his infatuated cousin Flora leaving him a
fortune on her death so that he could marry the girl he loved in a
triumphant ending. Marcella Moxey, hopelessly in love with Peak, who
finds her repellent, similarly altruistically leaves him her fortune on
her death. This, however, does not get him the woman he was striving
for, only a miserable death in exile. The book reeks of a loneliness studied
at an ironic remove which one can compare with Conrad’s view in fiction
of a tragic isolation. Somewhere behind Razumov’s story, told with
even more pronouncedly shifting perspectives than Peak’s, beside knowl-
edge of Russian conditions gained from Conrad’s father who studied at
St. Petersburg (like Razumov), lies Conrad’s personal understanding of
what it is to be cut-off. We meet this in letters, as in the one of 29 August
1908 to Arthur Symons:
As I wrote to a friend lately, I have been quarrying my English out of a black night,
working like a coal-miner in his pit. For fourteen years now I have been living as if in
a cave without echoes. If you come shouting gloriously at the mouth of the same you can’t
really expect from me to pretend I am not there . . .

– it’s plain, however, that Conrad’s art transcends his private predica-
ment far beyond Gissing’s abilities and intentions.
Adrian Poole12 makes a telling contrast between the childhood of Peak
and that of Pip in Great Expectations, surely the great English example
of a novel exploring total alienation from a society. Peak, unlike Pip,
is denied, and perhaps denies himself, any meaningful contact both sus-
taining or guilt-ridden during his upbringing.13 In this respect, Born in
Exile seems to depict emotional atrophy rather than Pip’s emotional
and moral development, despite Peak’s claim to Earwaker before he
leaves England at the end of the novel:
It isn’t often that fortune does a man such a kind turn. One often hears it said: If only I
could begin life again with all the experience I have gained! That is what I can do. I
can break utterly with the past, and I have learnt how to live in the future. 14

Also his friends Earwaker and Christian Moxey only function as

confidants or reflections of a different if parallel way of life. This makes
his sudden vision of social warmth in the Warricombe family so com-
pelling. Certainly a comparison with poor Razumov’s situation, both in
St. Petersburg with his remote ‘benefactor’, and in Geneva with what
160 L. R. Leavis

is left of the Haldin family, seems appropriate. Peak and Razumov are
outsiders, while Pip only becomes one. Razumov’s first impulse, of
course, unlike Peak with his woman, is to steer clear of Natalia Haldin,
feeling outlawed from the human race. When the English teacher tries
to explain Natalia’s character to him, Razumov disavows any interest
in women, saying ‘I am not a young man in a novel’ – besides The
Bostonians or Love and Mr Lewisham (for instance), the novel might
be Born in Exile? In the ending Conrad originally planned for Under
Western Eyes, Razumov does infiltrate into the Haldin family; he gets
further than Peak by marrying Natalia Haldin, only to be undone by
nemesis when his son proves to be the image of the dead brother.15 This
implies a possible reworking of Gissing’s basic situation. Understandably
Conrad abandoned this idea for the powerful conclusion of physical
isolation (through being deafened) for Razumov after the moral one;
and Dickens’s reported objection on psychological grounds to Arthur
Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter that he could never have become a
father would apply to Razumov even more.
By the end of Gissing’s life the conventions and art of the English
novel were changing drastically. While he can be seen in his time to have
been in the vanguard in his most distinguished work, after his death
writers like Conrad and Lawrence made him suddenly old-fashioned. His
effect on these ‘modern’ writers should not be ignored, though. Born
in Exile is a crucial stepping-stone between Alton Locke and Women in
Love, and also a likely taking-off point for Conrad. Gissing was also a
fertile influence for other late-Victorian writers.16 In Born in Exile
Marcella Moxey sees at an Academy exhibition in London a sculpture
of a female head called ‘A Nihilist’ by an woman artist she knew at
school. Marcella, a nihilist herself, procures an invitation to the artist’s
house, and goes expecting a Russian revolutionary atmosphere. Instead
she encounters a crowd of Mrs. Grundies, while the head turns out to
be only a modish idea, not a political statement. Here we have a left-
wing anticipation of the disillusion Jude gets with his hymn-writing
Wessex composer in Jude the Obscure (1895). But that Marcella is earlier
described by another character in these terms:

She was remarkably honest, and I have sometimes thought that in morals, on the whole,
she stood far above most women. She hated falsehood – hated it with all her heart, and
a story of injustice maddened her. When I think of Marcella it helps me to picture the
Russian girls who propagate Nihilism. . . .

may have got Conrad working along certain lines as a preliminary to

Under Western Eyes.
“Born in Exile” and “Under Western Eyes” 161

Notes

1. See Halperin’s detailed account in his Gissing: A Life in Books (Oxford, 1982)
pp. 336–337. And a Christmas Eve (24 December 1902) letter from Gissing to Clara Collet
expressing similar enthusiasm for Conrad can be found in Letters of George Gissing to
Members of his Family, collected and arranged by Algernon and Ellen Gissing (London,
1927, reprinted New York, 1970), page 391.
2. ‘Marriage, Murder, and Morality: The Secret Agent and Tess’, Neophilologus 80,
1996, pp. 161–169.
3. Gissing had carefully read Alton Locke (1850) before writing Born in Exile,
which clearly is partly modelled on Kingsley’s book. He deliberately has characters dis-
cussing Lucy Snowe in London from a scene in Villette, which is not just space-filling.
I draw attention to the pessimism in other passages that could be from the pen of Lucy
Snowe as: ‘It belongs to the pathos of human nature that only in looking back can one
appreciate the true value of those long tracts of monotonous ease which, when we are
living through, seem of no account save in relation to past or future; only at a distance
do we perceive that the exemption from painful shock was in itself a happiness, to be rated
highly in comparison with most of those disturbances known as moments of joy.’ And
Gissing’s comment on Great Expectations in his Charles Dickens, A Critical Study (1898)
that it was ‘a book which Dickens meant, and rightly meant, to end in a minor key’
tells us a lot about his own ‘low key’ ending for Born in Exile.
4. See for instance Jacob Korg’s ‘The Spiritual Theme of Born in Exile’ in Collected
Articles on George Gissing, ed. Pierre Coustillas (London, 1968).
5. Gillian Tindall in The Born Exile (London, 1974) and Adrian Poole in Gissing
in Context (London, 1975) both argue against the rigidity of Korg’s thesis. How Conrad
himself would have regarded Born in Exile, whether he would have seen it in a European
or British tradition, is an interesting speculation!
6. Peak becomes in the course of the novel essentially a drifter like Razumov in Under
Western Eyes, finally after his ‘exposure’ losing all will-power and ambition, perhaps
(despite himself ) anticipating the fatalism of Axel Heyst of Victory.
7. Testimony of the Rocks was a posthumous book, as during a debilitating illness
in 1856 Miller killed himself. This caused some people to suspect that geology was a
dangerous subject.
8. Though Gissing’s Sylvia Moorhouse, Sidwell’s amiable but perceptive radical
friend, could well have prompted the idea for Sophia Antonovna.
9. Peak, on the other hand, at the opening of Born in Exile even before his uncle’s
intrusion, is coming to the conclusion that prize-winning does not alter his lack of social
status.
10. Conrad helps the reader by other characters’ observations about Razumov; so
compare the previous Gissing quote with Mikulin’s survey of Razumov: ‘He saw great
possibilities of special usefulness in that uncommon young man on whom he had a hold
already, with his peculiar temperament, his unsettled mind and shaken conscience, a strug-
gling in the toils of a false position. . . .’
11. This question of Gissing drawing in art directly on episodes in his life has long
proved a key one, and John Halperin’s biography (even in its title, Gissing: A Life in
Books) encapsulates the extreme in Gissing scholarship. This is not to say that contem-
porary ‘theoretical’ approaches, by concentrating on other people’s set definitions of
elaborate obscurity, and by denying as a tenet the experience of the living artist in the
art, tell us more about Gissing than Halperin does. For instance, Halperin’s account of
Gissing’s ‘exile’ psychology as a background to the composition of Born in Exile surely
touches on some truth.
12. In ‘The Exile and the Country House’, part 6 of Gissing in Context.
162 L. R. Leavis

13. One gets quite a different impression from Gissing’s letters of his relationship
with his own family!
14. Women in Love (1921) will be the exploration by an English novelist of an utter
break with the (English) past and a living abroad in the future – as Lawrence did himself.
Peak merely perishes on the continent, while Tono-Bungay (1909) concludes with its
narrator sailing away from England in his destroyer to the unknown. The New Machiavelli
(1911) does show an expatriate Briton, but a regretful exile in the Lucy Snowe style (as
far as this is possible!). Arnold Bennett’s black comedy of 1908, Buried Alive, does
have the painter Priam Farll with wife departing on a steamer to Algiers without one
backward look, but this is a thumb-to-nose gesture, not an exploration of alternative living.
15. Conrad outlines his original concept of the novel in a letter of 6 January 1908
to John Galsworthy.
16. One feels that it is no accident that Wells gave the atheist and loner George
Ponderevo of Tono-Bungay the same initials as Godwin Peak.