(Conrad’s “Secret Sharer”)
Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” introduces us to a young man meeting his first complete responsibility in life, in circumstances of novelty and solitude, for he is new to his ship and its sailors and can, being the captain, have no friend to share his thoughts with. He is then like a teacher meeting his first class, but without any fellow teachers nearby, like an orphaned oldest child left with the duty to rear his brothers and sisters, or a sole commander the night before battle.
Ill at ease, unsure of himself, the very first evening of his command, Conrad’s young captain gives the veteran crew the night off. Taking the watch himself, he suddenly sees right beside the ship in the water a fugitive and against all prudence, the young captain not only lets the fugitive swimmer aboard but, upon hearing the man’s story, hides him in his own cabin. According to the man (named Leggatt), he, though only the chief mate, in the course of saving his ship in a terrific storm, by setting the reefed foresail,[1] did also fell an habitually malingering, malevolent, and this time recklessly interfering sailor, and yet his feckless captain clapped him in irons for later capital trial on shore. To escape that inevitable sentence, he was willing to swim miles in dangerous waters, would again, and would accept lifelong exile.
To appreciate how Conrad’s young captain reconciles his admiration for Leggatt’s courageous good deed with its accompanying bloody injustice, how he remains true to nature and to convention, to the sea and to the land — to appreciate all that this compact, rich short story has to teach, you would best read it first to the end. Meanwhile, let me pose the most profound issue the story treats and then the most personal, which is also the most political in our century filled with fugitives.
Is it sometimes naturally right that natural right be violated by conventional right? That the exception submit to the rule? That the noble bow to the mediocre? And that the just suffer for their justice?
The beasts, who are natural, do not need to ask such questions; neither the distinction nor the things distinguished are intelligible to them; and the intelligent gods, who are naturally right, would not care about such questions, unless they should become human.
We humans, we seldom just ones, long for justice. Our hearts long for justice for ourselves, our souls want it for others as well, and our minds would be deeply pleased to discover it in the fundamental order of the whole. Yet all this is hard. To be sure, often what is just is clear and the hard part is to do it. But sometimes what is just is hard even to see.[2] Should the small boy receive the small coat that fits him, rather than the large boy to whom it belongs by inheritance, by gift, or by purchase? After a conquest, migration, or settlement how many years have to pass to make a new land into a homeland for its new possessors?[3] More generally, what is the relation of justice and law? Is what is just by nature also what is right by convention? Most of the time? Some time? Seldom? Does the truth about justice ever accord with opinion about it, even the best? And if and when justice and opinion are not in accord, how should a just man act? How should a just man act in an unjust regime? A philosopher in any actual, thus imperfect city?
Many are the answers. Most profound are those of Plato and Aristotle, of Thomas, and in opposition, of Machiavelli and the train of his captains.[4]
Among the poets who have addressed such questions is Joseph Conrad. In his story “The Secret Sharer,”[5] the young Captain, having erred at first, eventually satisfies, rather well I think, the conflicting claims of natural right and conventional right. In doing so, he learns much about himself, about justice, and about statesmanship. However, because Conrad’s story gives, as poetry does, such intelligent support to conflicting views, readers must think things through, perhaps even philosophize, before they can arrive at Conrad’s teaching. Thus, this story makes a fine beginning for students of justice, of statesmanship, and for teachers.[6]
I. Truth
Why are we being told the story of “The Secret Sharer”? Presumably for our sake. We may benefit from it, and especially if we are young. Will the teller benefit too? If he has never told it before, perhaps he will now discover its full meaning by telling it, as Pierre and Natasha do in War and Peace, for by appearing in a story truth strengthens, or even appears. It is no wonder that statesmen often write memoirs, not just to serve their country, their cause or themselves, but, some at least, for self-knowledge, as Tocqueville wrote his Recollections, the purity of his motive, being protected by writing it for no living human being (not even Beaumont), or even soon to be living one, just for himself alone. He sought self-knowledge in solitude. Is that the best way? Perhaps by speaking to a listener, a friend, or potential friend, Conrad’s narrator is seeking such self-knowledge.[7] And if we are the same age as the narrator, then perhaps we, as we approach the end of the long gauntlet of life, will have the pleasure of finding someone with the same understanding of the things that matter. It would be good if the speech of old men, even unto garrulity, benefited young men.[8] And young men who are too impatient to listen to advice will sometimes listen to a story.[9] To be sure, the most famous story by a tutor, by Phoenix to Achilleus (Iliad IX), though it predicted that clinging to his anger would make him responsible for the death of his best friend, did not persuade him to consider fame more important than his anger at his dishonor.
There is a special clarity in stories. In them the vistas do not trail off into infinity; within their borders there is everything we need to know; in “history” you might always learn something else that might cause you to revise your view. Those who participate in a great war know some things; as Coolidge said of the Great War “What the end of the four years of carnage meant those who remember it will never forget and those who do not can never be told.” Yet the participants at the time do not know some other things, for example what the enemy was planning each year, which had they known it at the time, they would have acted differently and won; and those who come fifty years later, who can read all the memoirs, on both sides, get to know even more, things neither side knew about their own side; and yet, nevertheless, all these after-livers do not know some things the participants knew all too well, such as Coolidge referred to; and even the “historians” who have finished their books, do not know what is still in the files, or attics, or secret memoirs, or code books, that may still emerge, or may not. In “history” the vistas pass off to infinity on all sides. Thus, by fixing the facts, and excluding this infinity, poetry can put forward moral questions more cleanly, more starkly and yet also still subtly and richly, and thus more philosophicly. No wonder Aristotle says poetry is more philosophic than history.
If stories are more philosophical than histories, they are so by being more personal as well, and thus more the cause of self-examination. (Self-knowledge and knowledge of the whole proceed together, as Socrates was the first to learn.) Thus, this story by Conrad, “The Secret Sharer,” asks every reader a personal question. What would you do if a man arrived in the dark of night at your door? What if he were naked, exhausted, and probably pursued? Would you invite him in immediately? Invite him in first and only later hear his story? Or would you insist on his story first and be ready to turn him over to his pursuers? And if his story included killing a man, would you believe his explanation of it? And even if you did, would you then hide him from the authorities on his trail? Or would you instead let the authorities and institutions take over? In our century a truly terrible number of persons have had to face such questions, from a suppliant at the door, but no century can be without them. We humans get in trouble, need help, and sometimes must ask for it from strangers in situations so urgent that not much examination is possible.[10] How will it be decided? By a look in the eye, a chance connection, a slight mistake, an intuition of trust, a sweeping predilection, or a sweeping prejudice.[11]
II. Veracity
Just as with Hamlet we see everything at first through the eyes of the young prince, so in “The Secret Sharer” we know everything through the young Captain. Yet there is more than perspective to secure our trust. The story of the young Captain is told by the older man he has become and became during his youthful first command. Stepping on board, that young man “suddenly . . . rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.” But the older man, now telling his story, knows “it is only the young who are ever confronted by such clear issues.”[12] When a self-critical man tells a story of his youth we are not inclined to doubt it.
All Conrad’s art makes us fall in with the young Captain’s immediate, intuitive identification with the unknown swimmer in the water, fall in naturally and easily, in truth uncritically. Our youth, like his, makes us side with a virtuous man who killed a vicious man. His sense of the mediocrity of his crew inclines us to share his delight in Leggatt’s presence. Who would I look forward to talking to on such a long voyage ahead?” we may ask ourselves. The red whiskeradoded chief mate ready to waste hours wondering how a scorpion got on board? Perish the thought! Everything is designed by Conrad to make us side with the Captain siding with Leggatt — our unsureness about ourselves, our keen desire to find a friend, and the clear high standards we youths exult in, that we judge everything by, and hope to live up to in the life before us.
Thus we never doubt his story and we never doubt Leggatt’s story. Not really. Initially perhaps a bit, and if we question his conduct later a bit, still we do not question the veracity of his story. On only one point may we have a doubt: whether the captain of the Sephora or Leggatt gave the order to put up the reefed foresail that saved the ship. However, meeting Captain Archbold of the Sephora shortly convinces us he never gave that order. He, the captain, seeking the fugitive, with all the resources of authority, and country, and even civilization backing him, shows himself weaker than the lone fugitive hunched in a corner of that tiny cabin, listening without agitation, to his dogged pursuer. We too, or the youth in us, side with Leggatt, just as the young Captain does. We think all good things must surely go together.
Does Conrad know that no captain, no man in command, no prince can enjoy friendship with those he rules? Every prince is an island. Only incognito in a cloak like Henry V before Agincourt can a ruler enjoy a little fellowship in the long life of rule ending only in death. But the young Captain didn’t know this and the mature narrator hides it from us, in order to lure us into the discovery of it, and much more. Meanwhile, Conrad knows it all.
III. Justice Versus Law
Thus, despite all that inclines us to side with the young Captain taking the side of Leggatt, we must ask, as Conrad intends us to: Was what Leggatt did just? Was it good? Was it the best thing to do? Might he have done better? Been more just? Found a way to save the ship and not kill the man? And as we ask these questions about Leggatt’s conduct, we are on our way to asking the general and permanent questions the story provokes: What is justice? What is good? What shall we do? And: how shall we live?
First, we must ascertain truth in the case. In a storm, chief mate Leggatt killed a man. When the man resisted his authority, Leggatt knocked him down with a blow, and when the man then came at him, came just as a terrible wave descended, Leggatt locked his hands on his neck. And when that great wave passed, the two were found together, Leggatt’s hands still on his neck, squeezing, tight, the man’s face black, his tongue hanging, all hideous, and then Leggatt was put in the brig to stand trial later, back in England.
The incident was not isolated. Leggatt had joined a ship accustomed to lax discipline. Captain Archbold had his wife on board. Probably, from time to time, he was, as Leggatt claims, drunk. When not drunk, he was, anyway, habitually weak. The crew is used to this weakness. They must have resented any effort of Leggatt to introduce good discipline. No wonder they united against him later. In the storm itself they were just as reluctant to do what needed to be done as they ever had been. The man Leggatt killed was more reluctant, and not only reluctant. He was not only shiftless; he was not only a malcontent; he was a rebel, the kind of man who “knows all about his rights and nothing about his duties.”[13] And this rebel already had a following among the crew. Worse, he was supported by the captain, who has never reprimanded his malingering, punished any of his fomenting, and who, in short, had not exercised proper authority. If at some earlier time, Leggatt had asked Captain Archbold to confront the rebel, he might have said, in the idiom of our still weaker time, “Oh, we have to have a spirit of community here. He’s a sensitive fellow. Treat him gently. And, you know, we have to watch out for a suit, too.” And then sighed, “Oh, if only everybody would just be nice to each other!”[14] As it happens, in the storm, Leggatt rids the ship of a poison apple, delicious to an infected crew, and polished by a negligent captain. “Lak of Steadfastnesse,” as Chaucer says.
Still, did Leggatt act justly? Of course, as chief mate he was not called to reform the ship; it was not his duty to do what the captain would not do; only if the captain had assured him he wished to restore discipline, that he would back his efforts to do so (as Duke Vincentio would Angelo in Measure for Measure), and then did back him in some initial steps, would it have been Leggatt’s duty to restore discipline. This the Captain did not intend, he had not chosen Leggatt as mate, and he surely would not welcome it, and yet Leggatt may well have tried to restore some discipline anyway. That he was disgusted with the lack of discipline on board is evident. That he and this rebel had clashed before the killing is also evident. Perhaps then Leggatt erred in prudence. Perhaps he tried to move too fast, too far, too much out ahead of his captain, or entirely without his support.
It is certainly hard to be subordinate to an inferior man, be a provost under a lax and flashy president,[15] or be a president with an ungiving yet meddling board, a general ordered to break off after a hundred hours and before victory, or a sergeant under an inexperienced “90 day” lieutenant. Perhaps, Leggatt tried to run the whole show from a subordinate position, like Churchill at the Dardanelles, unable to force Admiral Rook to force them with a second effort, and having to watch more slaughter in trenches before Gallipolli, precisely what knocking Turkey out was meant to end. If it fails, you get all the blame, and yet you had not enough of all in your power to make success depend on you. In a famous scene in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Ventidius explains why he is not pursuing the Parthians: to conquer them, even in Antony’s name, will expose him to the perilous envy of his master. In addition, being a mate not captain may impose another hard burden. After his great adventure in the desert, T. E. Lawrence preferred to serve in the lowest rank rather than anything in the middle, where you will be commanded to pass on the injustice of your superiors to your subordinates. And the day will come when you will be asked to mistreat someone, to do nothing to prevent evil to a good assistant you hired, and yet if like the Servant in King Lear when asked to take out the eye of innocent Gloucester, and you resist, probably be killed for resisting.[16]
Nevertheless, although Leggatt probably made such mistakes, one cannot say that in that storm he erred. In such a storm everything about rule is different. Then the survival of all demanded immediate intervention by someone. Then survival required heroism. Then survival called for the best man to rule.
In a storm, virtue shines. In a storm, a mariner shows his stuff, and in a great storm, the great mariner shows it greatly, as he could not in any thing less. And in a storm, he who can by his art calm the winds, or by his art run safely before the wind, also rules. His excellence makes him the ruler.[17] Moreover, in a storm, the best want to rule.[18] And, most important, in such a storm, the best man rules justly. What is good for him is good for all others.
While there is no doubt that the Sephora’s captain is weak, he claims to have given the critical order, the only action left to save the ship, but with great trepidation knowing how dangerous that command would be to execute. Of course, it would fall to Leggett, as chief mate, to be directly, personally in charge of the actual operation.
In a gale force storm, a storm that will capsize the ship and drown all those whose life depends on it, Leggatt forthrightly executes what he himself (and most of the crew) would undoubtedly know to be precisely the correct course of action, setting a storm “trysail”, i.e., a reefed[19] foresail or jib (whether ordered by the Sephora’s captain or not). Leggatt organizes sufficient crew and directs them in carrying out this dangerous operation, essential in the extreme weather conditions to saving the ship. Twenty-four or so lives were saved by him. And the man not saved, the man strangled, was resisting the man who was saving the ship.[20]
The good, the common good, the good that includes each, is superior to the just, certainly to the just as understood as mere fairness, and perhaps to justice in any sense. Certainly to any law. Salus publica, suprema lex.[21]
But wait. The sail, which did save the ship, was already up when Leggatt locks his hands on the man’s throat. The order had been given, the crucial thing had been done, safety was in sight. Nothing more needed to be done. So, couldn’t Leggatt have merely knocked the man down again as he had already done once? Did he need to strangle him? A second blow would have served well enough for reproof. And why did Leggatt not call upon the crew to hold the rebel and put him in the brig? Probably in the midst of the storm, and just at that terrible moment, with that great wave descending, the latter was not possible. And then again, the man was making for Leggatt, making for him, to get him, perhaps to kill him. Was it not self-defense then? Strangle or be strangled? However, since neither Leggatt nor the young captain make this defense, we must set it aside.
Thus we must face the choice starkly and reply like this: if you say Leggatt should have merely struck a second blow, you do not understand storms and you do not understand the spirit of the singular man capable of overcoming one. It is no wonder that Leggatt went for the neck the second time. There was a great force, a great force for good, mighty in him at that moment. He and he alone was capable of making the men obey the order that they, quaking and undisciplined as they were, had not the stuff to leap to by themselves, nor even the stuff to obey an order to do so, except that Leggatt give it. At such moments, may a good man do with an evil one standing in the way what he wishes? It seems that at such times virtue is beyond good and evil, certainly beyond good and evil as the land and the law are likely to understand them. That mutinous sailor was killed in a fit of duty. And Nature expects every man to do his duty.
IV. Statesmanship
Ah, but would not the truly virtuous man have acted sooner, with foresight, with patience, with cunning, and long before the storm arose? Leggatt knew the man was a bad apple. Could he not have lured him into some false step, one so egregious that it left him without the support of Captain Archbold and even without the support of his fellow crew members, a step so false that his fellow crew members were for once sore at him, perhaps because he was claiming something for himself alone that they wanted for themselves as well, more rum?—and thus a false step so unsupported that not even the weak Captain would shield the man? To foresee evil way off in the distance, over the horizon, like an AWAC pilot, and then to do away with it even before it is visible to others — that is heroic prudence. That is the achievement of a great statesman. And clearly Leggatt did not have that degree of prudence.
Granted, that is heroic virtue. Must one require it of all who act from natural right? Leggatt was not the captain. It is not easy to rule from the second position. Especially when all aboard are used to ease, to being slack, and to having it overlooked. Maybe a De Gaulle, or a Churchill, or a Lincoln could have done so. Still, would it be just to punish Leggatt for not having the far-seeing prudence of the greatest statesmen? In Leggatt, I suppose we are talking about a lesser man, but, make no mistake, he is a worthy man.
Moreover, those great men, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, actually did not get into a position to rule until the storm was pelting everyone, flooding the plains, and at last obvious even to houseless fools. Though they tried, they were not able to head off the storm as it gathered. Churchill did not convince Hitler to choose peace;[22] he did not convince his party to stay vigilant, his nation to stay armed, to resist each small aggression, and, when they did not, to expect more, and more, and more. De Gaulle did not convince Petain about tanks, he did not convince the politicians of the Third Republic to establish a professional army capable of acting beyond a fixed defensive line (which dictated a passive foreign policy—how sitting behind the Maginot Line can you help the Poles or even the Czechs? — and later he did not convince Premier Reynaud to fight on, outside metropolitan France. And Lincoln did not convince his fellow countrymen to maintain the Missouri Compromise, to overturn Justice Roger Taney‘s obiter dictum that Dred Scott was no man, and to reject Douglas and his temptation of popular sovereignty. Only by being elected, did Lincoln begin to achieve these roll-backs, and yet soon inflamed South Carolina led others into hasty secession. And then a war came, whose bloody length ultimately required the nation to rededicate itself to its founding principles. The tasks of these three were great but not the same. Churchill’s task was hard, to save a nation from slavery and extinction (or capitulation, which would have led to extinction). De Gaulle’s task was harder, to lead a nation from defeat and capitulation to victory and then to give it a new regime, capable of healing its 150 year open wound of the Revolution. And Lincoln’s was hardest: to risk his nation’s extinction in a war, which he partly provoked, at least invited, that the nation might return to its principles. All succeeded, did so greatly, but none did so without the storm of war. If they, great as they were, did not head off such evils earlier in peace, then perhaps Leggatt can be excused for not doing so too.
Thus, in judging Leggatt, our standard should not be the farthest-seeing statesmanship. We may wish he had somehow introduced discipline before the storm, but we cannot insist that he have done so to receive our measured praise, or our exoneration. We must merely ask whether what he did in the storm was just. Was Leggatt just? Did he do right?
It is a hard question. Perhaps there are situations in which only heroic virtue “escapes whipping.” And where it is better to do nothing than to do something middling. And thus where it is better to refuse subordinate command, as T. E. Lawrence did after his great desert exploit, knowing that intermediate command will inevitably require you to pass on injustice from your superiors to your subordinates. If you cannot protect those you invite to join you, should you ask them to join? If you asked them to join you, aren’t you obligated to protect them? And, a lower consideration, if you don’t, if your enemies see you sacrificing a loyal subordinate, won’t that blood in the water make them hungry for yours?
Still, we cannot ignore the truth. A whole crew, a whole college, and even a whole nation, can corrupt. We do not want to counsel, ”Unless you are the supreme ruler, you should stand aside, keep quiet, seek shelter,” (which may look like “Go along, get along,” though it is not). Churchill, De Gaulle, and Lincoln did not. Nor do we want to say, “Only success is worthy.” Say that, say that no risk, or great risk, should be taken and you go against the long history of man, both the successes that would not have been a success without risk, and the noble failures, too.[23] Say “Only success is worthy” and you declare yourself indifferent to virtue. Indifferent to its beauty. After all, only in grave situations, in situations where failure is probable, does virtue really shine brightest. In that storm, Leggatt radiated that brightness. In truth, virtue is what stands out in life. It alone can satisfy the man who wants to respect himself. It alone is noble. Every human being worthy of the name glories in it, wants it to rule, longs for natural right. Moreover, virtue alone is capable of reviving a crew, an institution, a nation. Every army in flight that ever turned and fought, says Aristotle, did so because first one soldier stood, and then another, and then another.[24] Ask Rosa Parks.
Yet on the other side, we do not want to put aside convention, consent, and law, with juries, even though these juries be of land dwellers, who may well never face, and thus never understand, Nature, the stern teacher, who sends storms to test men and to perfect a few. Why? Is it because often we are among such as cannot prevail in a storm? Are like the crew of the Sephora? Maybe. Is that our reason for not wanting to do without convention and law? Partly. Yes, we are like that crew. (Such Leggatt acknowledges, too, when he says they were not to be much blamed for being terrified by that storm.) Every hero is also a human. And certainly the law, in its regularity, in its impartiality, in its complication, its thickness, and even in its obscurity, and also in its process, the very slowness of it, offers protection.
Yet there is another justification, not based on our vice or on our weakness, but on our human condition (including its weakness). Although we are not like others, we recognize that human societies cannot but exist on a basis that dilutes natural right, that the truths upon which any society can be founded will always, even the best, have a strong residue of opinion in their make-up — we are lucky if these “truths” are noble opinions, noble lies, rather than base ones. We are not sovereign, independent, free, not enough. We need others and therefore must needs, in some measure, accommodate ourselves to them. We must submit to the law. Recognizing something like this, Plato, the author of the Republic, with the idea of the best regime, the rule of wisdom or its love, also has his Athenian Stranger speak well of lesser things, in The Laws. We humans want the best and greatest, but we also want the good and merely better.
And there is also a higher supporting justification as well: we think it noble to treat human beings better than they deserve. A noble man does not insist others be as good as himself. The hero who requires others to be heroic is less heroic thereby. As it turns out, Leggatt is made of such stuff. Thus, he acknowledges that that storm was simply terrible. He felt all the apprehension that in others was unheroic. Though he did not succumb to it, he felt it, and feeling it, he does not blame the crew. He was a hero. The storm was terrible. Both are true. Thus also, upon hearing Captain Archbold say that he gave the order to set the reef foresail, Leggatt does not insist the man lies, only that he may now really believe he gave the order.
Whether Leggatt is made of the greater stuff, the stuff of charity, that not only does not require others to be heroes, but dedicates itself to their good we may doubt. One way to express that dedication would have been to have faced trial. But Leggatt is a young man and, who knows, he may find, in exile, a situation that calls such virtue out of him. And the young Captain is also young and may do better some later time.[25]
V. Torn Between the Twain
What is the disposition of our young captain, who is telling the story, toward all this? Clearly, at first, even before Leggatt appeared, he felt he might not pass the test of sovereign command. Though having some sea experience, he has never commanded a ship. Never before has he been responsible for everything in his sight. This command has come to him suddenly. He has not had time to think much, imagine much, or foresee much. He does not know the ship, he does not know the men, and, in truth, he does not know himself. Although none of his crew knows himself —can a man really know himself if he has never had the responsibility of command? — they do “know” each other. They have been together. They are used to each other. They “know” the ship. He is younger than all but one of them. He and he alone is a stranger.
Right off the young captain commits an error. Aware of his inferiority to the crew, above all of his uncertainty, he excuses all hands from the first watch. It is a mistake, and he realizes it right away, with chagrin. Going easy on the crew, violating the custom of their labor, will just make them think him strange or, worse, weak.
As a consequence of this mistake, the ladder is there, for the nearly exhausted Leggatt to cling to. Thus, without the imprudence of our captain, Leggatt wouldn’t be there. There he is, and without the slightest hesitation, our captain invites him up the ladder. That was an act of humanity, but it soon turns into more. We know love at first sight exists. This is something rarer, friendship at first sight. “Because it was he, because it was I,” as old Montaigne said of his instant, exalted friendship with Étienne de La Boétie.[26] And yet, from the moment our Captain hears Leggatt’s story, the relation is admiration at first sight. Leggatt is master of himself, and our Captain is not. There relation is not unlike that between a freshman and a senior. There is no question, no doubt, just immediate intuition, immediate trust, followed by never shaken conviction, and steadfast loyalty. And yet there is agony. From the moment the Captain shelters Leggatt in his own cabin, he is a divided man.[27] What do I owe my friend and what do I owe my command?
The agony begins immediately, it never lets up, not until it teaches our captain. First, it teaches him to be on guard, alert, hyper-alert. It teaches him to be foresightful, too. Hyper-foresightful. He has to think how to prevent discovery. He must hide Leggatt, he must head off potential discoveries, and he must hide the agitation that this creates in himself. He must be more than usually alert and more than usually self-controlled. And he must do so without compromising his authority even further.
What is Authority? That too is something he learns about. Authority is something men see in another, and that the “authority” knows is something conferred by them, not him, which he must encourage, even cause, in them, but which he did not create, just as Shakespeare’s Henry V did not create the “ceremony” that cannot comfort him for the solitude it imposes on all monarchs. What could be more absolute than the authority of a ship’s captain, and yet how limited! He can order anything, and yet he dares not lock his cabin door. He, his soul, is bound to Leggatt, his secret sharer, and he, his office, is subject to the opinions of his crew. The low does in some measure control the higher.
Later the young captain must plan ahead more fully. He must anticipate and he must prepare, not just react. Thus, he must expect the captain of the Sephora to come searching, he must anticipate his questions, and he must prepare answers. With his “punctilious courtesy,” with his feigned deafness, with his showing off his ship, and despite overdoing all these, our young Captain is able to put off this obstinate yet spiritless man, but only barely. One direct question would have sprung the lock. Being young, our Captain is not used to lying for the good. That a lie might be required to prevent natural right from destroying conventional right and that a lie might be required to prevent conventional right from destroying natural right, he has no yet considered. (It is a mark of Kant’s inability to see the virtue of prudence, so crucial in a Statesman, that he identifies the just with the lawful, with lawful self-legislation, and forbids lying for the good.)
Does our young Captain learn more than to deceive? Yes, but not for a while. He nearly breaks under the strain. Always he is thinking of two things at once, anticipating discovery with anxiety, watching his authority with his crew melt away, and he powerless to stem it, and always he is thinking of Leggatt, his double, his better self, the personal incarnation of the virtues he looks up to, hopes he has, hopes he will have. It is nearly unbearable. Being true to Leggatt and to his command, true to natural right and to conventional right, is almost more than he can bear. He wonders if he is going mad and admires Leggatt’s self-mastery. Left to himself the young Captain would continue this intolerable situation, which is bound to lead to eventual discovery, and to the loss of Leggatt’s life and his own career, the only one he knows himself suited for. And it is not he who hits upon a solution to this strain.
VI. Justice and Law
How might justice and law, natural and conventional right be united? Only when the philosophers are elected by the people, or when they come to command absolute power over nature and thus men, will natural and conventional right be united. As to the first, it is very unlikely; only in dire straits will a people elect even a statesman such as Churchill and as soon as they are breathing easy again, they will caste him aside. As to the second, it would mean the mastery of nature, such as Shakespeare’s Prospero enjoys over the seas and winds, and his rival Bacon schemed for. Both lie outside the horizon of Conrad’s story. No one is going to elect Leggatt Captain and the minute it is known that the young captain is harboring him, there will be a mutiny. And neither of these young friends has the power to calm or raise the winds like Prospero, to power the ship like Homer’s Phaiakians, or to command the sea and Leviathan in it. However, if no unity of justice and law is on the horizon, still perhaps some good relation of justice and law, though well short of unity, may be attained.
It is Leggatt who understands the discontinuity of nature and law. Perhaps he always did, or perhaps he only came to it in the long inactive time on the Sephora after his arrest. Just after the killing, he seems to consider only how right he was, but gradually he seems to recognize some right on the other side. Although he has some contempt for landlubbers and juries, he also has some care for them, including his parson father. Thus, Leggatt understands, in some measure, or comes to understand, that both nature and law have a claim on a man. And that if a man cannot unite them or harmonize them, then he must suffer their discontinuity.
Thus Leggatt does not ask Captain Archbold to let him escape when they reach port, only to escape where he will have to risk his life swimming. In other words, he accepts such hardships and accidents as just punishment for his just deed. Yes, his deed in the storm was just, but it is also just that he suffer for it. He killed a man. True, he saved the ship; true, the man was bad and the cause of badness in others. But no society, or at least no democratic society, can permit individuals to make such judgments and not be judged by their peers. Thus, Leggatt never says, as we may say for him, that he acted justly in the storm, or that a land jury that found him guilty would be unjust. He says only that they are incompetent to really judge. It is enough that a society accords a ship’s captain nearly dictatorial powers. To a mate, even a chief mate, however just he act, it cannot do more. Leggatt knows this and he accepts it. Thus he is willing, without complaint, without rancor or inward moral resistance, to accept as a price for his just deed, exile and all its enduring ills, and also the chance that he drown and never make it to exile.
Does Conrad think that such violent deeds as Leggatt’s are what found societies, but that no society can acknowledge such a beginning of morality in immorality? That a lie will always obtain between the foundation of a society and the self-respect it needs to continue after its founding? That such a lie must never be unmasked? And does Conrad write accordingly, exposing the truth to a few and yet covering it from all others? If Conrad thinks so, he gives no hint. Although his story is about saving a society, not founding one, it would have been easy to make a single comparison of the virtue in Leggatt to that in some founder, such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and the like. Conrad also differs from Plato and from the Gospels. For his just crime Leggatt is not to suffer death, as Socrates argues he should in the Crito, nor is he to suffer death as Christ, by his suffering the Cross, shows He should. Leggatt is, instead, to suffer exile. Exile if he, a proud swimmer, can make it. Trial by suffering is a good way to settle the conflicting claims of natural right and conventional right, justice by sea and justice by land, as they meet in him through his deed, which was both just and a murder.[28]
It is naturally right that natural right suffer for conventional right. As Nietzsche said, the exception must not wish to become the rule.[29] All the noble share this secret. Leggatt discovers it and gradually teaches it to the young Captain. This secret is what these two “secret sharers” share most.
VII. Prudence and Luck
It is Leggatt who first finds a way to be true to both natural and conventional right. Leggatt knows that our young Captain is willing to keep him hidden forever, certainly as long as it takes to reach some port where his undetected disappearance might gain him freedom. When first sheltered, Leggatt may hope for such a deliverance, for Singapore is only a week of normal sailing away. Leggatt is, of course, grateful to his benefactor, the Captain, but more is required. Since the killing, the young Captain is the only human being who has helped and sheltered Leggatt, and the only one who has understood him. All that time before, Leggatt had been alone; alone and surrounded by opposition on every side, he had to insist on the truth, and while holding tight to it, not lose the qualifications and conditions intrinsic to that truth. Now, however, there is something new. Leggatt has a friend. And just as that proudest and loneliest of heroes, Achilleus, the superhuman, is connected to humanity, and to its laws, by his friend, Patroklus, so is Leggatt connected by his friend. It is all very well, when truly alone, to insist ‘I am subject to no human judge and jury. Only God can try me, as he did Cain,’ but what if your friend will suffer thereby? Leggatt comes to care for his friend; he sees him suffering more anxiety than he does; and he does not want him to suffer much more of this torture. So Leggatt insists he cannot stay on board until he can be smuggled ashore in safety; he insists that he must soon cast off into the sea, with only the chance to swim to some distant shore.
And it is then that the two friends find a way to satisfy the two obligations pulling the young Captain apart (and through him Leggatt, too). Acknowledging the rightness of Leggatt’s choice, the young Captain devises a plan to steer his ship close to the Cambodge shore, where Leggatt may swim for it. It is easy to see how this fulfills his obligation to Leggatt, a man he admires, and who thanks him above all, beyond even shelter, for his understanding. Is the course chosen just? Is it just to the ship and its crew? Leggatt’s deed was a part of saving a whole ship. Our Captain’s deed will risk a whole ship. He would not ordinarily steer so close, he says. And, of course, steering the ship in those uncharted waters will make him seem even odder to the crew. However, unlike his earlier eccentricities, this one is stern. It compels the crew to obey. And our Captain does take a good pleasure in forcing them to, in reproving them, and in showing a steadiness that he is far from feeling.
Yes, he would not have to pursue this course had he not compromised his authority earlier, when he did so even from the beginning when he took the first watch and later by all his odd shifts to conceal Leggatt. Perhaps we might say, with Thomas Aquinas, if ever you find yourself in a bind, when it seems you cannot but do evil that good come, that is because at some earlier point up the trail you chose wrong. (Does Thomas appreciate that even Christ acted so that he Himself wished He did not have to die? That is, not all His foresight was enough to avoid what he Himself considered a choice with enough evil in it to ask His Father that it not happen — that He not be delivered up to evil, to quote from the prayer He left us.)
Perhaps we might also think of some foresight that the true statesman would have devised and thus not have found himself in such a situation. Maybe so. Assuredly, the torture the statesman will meet with in a purgatory fittingly devised just for him is to recognize how he might have avoided such a situation. As Auden might have said, “Then they will show you how really sage you would have been, how by hitting upon this other way, you would have secured an even greater good, and also without committing a lesser evil, and then you would really have been a statesman.”[30] That would be torture indeed, fitted perfectly to the man, to the best in him, his virtue and his discernment, a perfect torture, because it would be measuring him by his own highest standard, the one he cares the most for.
Nevertheless, must we not say that given the situation as it is now, there could be no better way to restore the young Captain’s authority than for him to command the crew to do something they fear, that they do not understand, and that, nonetheless, they will submit to? If the soul of discipline aboard ship is the “exact performance of small things,” isn’t the soul of duty in a subordinate officer the unprotesting performance of a tall order he does not understand?
In the end, the course the two friends plan is blessed with success. Conrad arranges this result beautifully, for the hat that our Captain gives Leggatt, out of sudden “pity,”[31] thinking of the sun beating down upon his friend proves to be the marker that he needs to steer the ship by. Looking at that hat floating in the water, our Captain could have again felt how hard the sun would be on Leggatt. He doesn’t. He’s thinking of steering the ship. First given out of friendship, and farewell, the hat becomes the means of the ship’s safety and the crew’s, and consequently the young Captain‘s ascendancy to command. Only when that hat becomes a marker in the water does the Captain get things right and learn the lesson of Leggatt. That hat is the image of the whole story, from admiration at first sight to becoming the man you admired.
Thus, something given out of sympathy becomes the aid to duty, a passion turns to a virtue. Something given in admiration of Leggatt’s heroism, and recognition of the truth that in the storm he who saves the ship rules justly, becomes the decisive thing in our Captain’s own heroism that establishes himself as the Captain to be obeyed. It does not always happen that way. Our mistakes, our excesses, our passions, the risks we take, don’t always lead to good, and our divided duties are seldom divided satisfactorily, let alone united in a harmonious success. Failure was nigh to success; the ship might have run aground, it might have sunk, and then never again would the young captain have had another command. In this case, even sympathy, merely a passion, and one felt in a degree approaching or becoming weakness, tends toward the good, the good of the better man (Leggatt), who first acknowledges that he, though justified by acting for the common good, deserves punishment, and the good of the younger captain, his student, whose authority over his crew is restored by his holding to such a dangerous, and to his crew so incomprehensible, a course. And things luck out (and are so arranged by Conrad).
Leggatt is a good teacher and the young Captain a good learner. Both are attentive to the way things are, more exactly to the ways things, such as natural right, and conventional right, are. It could have been a tragedy. That is always true of the situations where, nevertheless, the virtues of the statesman prevail. And sometimes the two, tragedy and statesmanship, are very close, or they coincide, as for example the result of World War II, which Churchill entitled Triumph and Tragedy.[32] Not so in this Conrad story, because Conrad wished to teach something about natural right and conventional right, virtue and suffering, justice and law: namely that sometimes it is naturally right that natural right be violated by conventional right, that the exception sometime submit to the rule, that the noble sometime bow to the mediocre, and that the just sometime suffer.
Of course, it is the exceptional man who must decide when that “sometime” is. Since the distinction is invisible to most, to the unexceptional majority, they cannot decide at all. Only the exceptional can choose such nobility, which is a choice, in one sense, against himself, in another sense, for himself utterly. The tragedy underlying that nobility could not be spoken of in any other way than in a story. In any other mode it would pit natural and conventional right directly and publicly against each other; it would damage both, it would contradict itself, and it would show a want of sagacity in the author, as it conspicuously does in Machiavelli. Conrad’s wonderful “Secret Sharer” allows us to understand why of all modern writers, since Shakespeare, he is most fit to rule a country.[33]
Dr. Michael Platt
Friends of the Republic
The original version of this essay was published in The Moral of the Story: Literature & Public Ethics ed. Hank Edmundson (Lexington Books, 2000) pp. 177-192.
Caboose: 8,500 words in text (730 in Preface; 1576 in IV Statesmanship, w. standard of De Gaulle, Churchill; and extra 2800 in notes:
Add: in “Heart of Darkness” there is a similar contradiction between the truth in the jungle and the distortion of it back in “civilization.” However, the contradiction is stark, between barbarism and corruption. It convicts the idealizing society for civilization (“for the suppression…) and the intended bride of Kurtz of very bad faith. In “The Secret Sharer” there is important moral weight for conventional land-lubber justice. In this lies the superiority of the story to the novella. (I must see what the commentators make of the fact that to rule the savages Kurtz becomes savage. Putting the shrunken heads of your victims up on poles is a savage custom. What about Henry VIII putting More’ head up on a pike. Well, that was tyrannical. The custom, however, had as its justifying purpose the display of justice and the threat of it to others inclined to the injustice of rebellion.
Also: in the beginning, one man felled to save 24 … and in the end, 24 or so risked for one man
[1] From a sailing friend (Jeff Wallin), I have been instructed: As far as “setting a reefed foresail is concerned” remember that the foresail is the most forward one on the ship. On an old ship of the sort in the story, this was set way out on the bowsprit (the big spar point directly out in front of the ship), and was very dangerous to be on in a big blow as it would have been plunging up and down with the huge seas. To reef a sail is to make it smaller by tying the reefing points (ropes or grommets sewn in at preset places — my own boat has two sets of reefing points on the mainsail, if I were to take it out in really heavy weather I would probably add a third set) round the boom, with the extra sail material made by lowering the sail wrapped up and tied down so it doesn’t flap. None of this is very difficult if one knows that bad weather is approaching, but doing it once the weather has turned bad can be pretty hairy, especially on large ships.).
[2] On our twofold relation to the good, see my “The Good, the Great, and the Small,” based on the first precept of law, according to Aquinas (Su. Th. I-II, Q 94, a. 2, c): ”The good is to be done, and followed, and evils shunned” in Faith and Reason Vol. XXIII, nos. 3-4 (1997-98), pp. 323-354.
[3] According to Roger Scruton (in conversation), somewhere Joseph de Maistre observes that all countries are inhabited by those who conquered their country from others or who inherited it from those who did, except the Dutch, in so far as they claimed their country from the sea. To this list one must add Iceland since no one preceded the Vikings, maybe New Zeeland, and North America when the “mound-builders arrived, later to be conquered by the “native American” “indigenous peoples”. It seems that longest revived claim to a homeland is the Jews to Israel.
[4] For a succinct survey, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953),Chapters IV especially, which treats the relation of natural right and natural law, wisdom and law, purposes and laws, and the prudential question of when to follow the rule and when to allow the exception, the balance in Machiavelli tilted to the founding exception brazenly versus the balance the other way in Aristotle, and in Thomas.
[5] I have used the old paperback edition of Albert J. Guerard (New York: Signet, 1950), but there are so many editions, the text is stable, and the tale is so short that page references would not help the reader; Bruce Harkness’ Conrad’s Secret Sharer and the Critics (Belmont, California: Wadsworth, 1962) includes the articles in The Times [of London] of 5 July and 4 August of 1882 reporting events on the Cutty Sark that are the source for the tale and pages from an alternate account published after Conrad’s death; the man the Leggatt figure killed was black and there was no storm; the mate escaped and got a new position immediately; Captain Wallace had let him escape, the crew knew it, and Wallace committed suicide four days later; some years later the mate was sentenced to hard labor, after which he worked his way up to an Atlantic command, lived to a ripe old age, and could have read “The Secret Sharer.”
[6] If a first meeting is long enough to read this story aloud, the natural course of the following discussion, driven by the students, may arrive at the questions statesmen face and political philosophers ponder. That’s why I’ve done so when beginning my Statesmanship classes.
[7] When Jesse Conrad read the story, she chided Joseph, “You never told me that,” and he chuckled, “It’s pure fiction.” See her Joseph Conrad and His Circle (1935), p. 77. Revealing isn’t it, that Conrad’s own wife thought the story was his. The way its told convinced her, and that’s some evidence that the narrator is speaking to a wife or friend, much as Leggatt spoke to him, assuming understanding.
[8] I once knew a young man beginning to teach. In the week before his first classes, ones he was wholly responsible for, he read this story and one other, by Lionel Trilling, about teaching. Yet reading them did not prevent him from erring a few years later, by giving a grade to a remarkable student solely on the basis of his promise of later work. Why did he do this? Early on, this young teacher had discovered that time spent in class with students is almost always more fruitful than time spent with colleagues. This, of course, makes your best students much more dear to you than colleagues. How could it not? You and your students are students of the same things, as colleagues seldom are in the modern college with its specialized, coreless curriculum. Nevertheless, he later came to see, and not because this student failed to turn in the promised work, that nothing justifies such a violation of conventional right, certainly not the good of that outstanding student, which would have been better served by receiving the “failure” his tardiness deserved. So I have long thought, and practiced, but I wonder. Though Newman failed “schools” repeatedly, his examiners simply decided, since they knew he was excellent, to pass him; see the beginning of Dwight Culler’s Imperial Intellect (1965) for the story.
[9] Young nations too, such as America; “I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able . . . to learn from the experience of other people,” writes Solzhenitsyn in the Foreword to the abridgement for English-speaking readers he permitted of the Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956 by Edward Ericson (New York: Harper, 1985).
[10] It is impossible to read this story (or any like it) without examining oneself. All stories provoke parallel thoughts. Must I give mine? Here is just a taste: from the first morning I would have made sure the Steward brought two pots of coffee, and ask “do we have any Kona?” My friends would suspect nothing, and that crew hearing of it would just count it another eccentricity, as perhaps my friends already do. As to other parallels, to each his own self-examination.
[11] For such, see The Rescuers ed. Gay Block and Malka Drucker (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1992).
[12] For some reason Conrad never tells us the name of his young Captain. To be sure, his narrator treats us as already intimate, a friend, or maybe a nephew, or protegé. But Conrad could have found a way around that, as he does by having his Marlow introduced before he tells the tale of Kurtz in the Congo. (Is this too Marlow, but unnamed?) Maybe Conrad wanted to make it difficult for us, referring to the story, to always be saying “the young Captain,” just to remind us how hard it is to speak the truth so deeply embedded in this story, and according to that truth, so rightly embedded deep. For another nameless young man growing into a statesman, read Owen Wister’s Virginian.
[13] I believe I first heard this phrase Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus.
[14] For keen reflections on the type, see Montaigne’s “Cowardice, The Mother of Cruelty” in his Essais, (II, 26) and Tocqueville on soft despotism, in Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 4., Chapter 6. Reading Tocqueville, you would think that agents of soft despotism would be pliant, gentle, or in a word, soft, but today there are despots of softness, enforcers of therapy, energetic deans of frailty, joke police, litigators of victimization, and stern administrators of sensitivity. The spirit is soft, the spread of it gradual, all as Tocqueville foresaw, but the agents are as hard as nails. Good shepherds beware. Some sheep now have teeth.
[15] Read Professor Al Kernan’s tale of serving under President Kingman Brewster at Yale, in his In Plato’s Cave.
[16] Asked who in all of Shakespeare he would choose to be, C. S. Lewis immediately replied, “the Servant in Lear.
[17] Thus, in the opening scene of The Tempest, the nobles, highest by convention and on land, must obey the Boatswain, highest by natural right, on the sea. For more, also on Laws 709a-712a, see my “Shakespeare’s Apology for Poetry,” in Shakespeare and the Arts: A Collection of Essays from the Ohio Shakespeare Conference—1981, eds. C. W. Cary and H. S. Limouze (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 231-244. The situation of The Tempest, in which one man, Prospero, controls the winds is an exhibition of what the pure natural right solution to the dilemma of “The Secret Sharer” would be; for natural right to rule entirely without dilution of conventional right or consent, it would have to have power over the tempest, power to invoke it, direct it, in other words, the power to command Ariel, that suffering come to each on board according to his crimes or inclinations to crime. Yet this too is limited, as Prospero appreciates, for the mutual affection of his daughter and Ferdinand must be free, and when Antonio will not repent, reform, forgive, Prospero must recognize that it is better to forgive than to destroy him. Moreover, Prospero’s last use of the winds, before giving them up, is to get all persons from the mainland back to the mainland, where conventional right, such as hereditary inheritance, will be restored, and Italy will be united by the marriage of his daughter Mirada to Ferdinand (a gentle slap at Machiavelli that).
[18] Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says the best want to rule, contra Plato (Zarathustra III “Old and New Tablets”), but one wonders: if a storm, which he might be the only one able to calm, might persuade Socrates to rule. In a storm wouldn’t his good coincide with all the others?
[19] “Reefing” a sail is to “shorten” it, by tying down the reefing points (ropes or grommets sewn in at preset places horizontally on the sail) reducing sail area and force on the sailplan for better control of the vessel in heavy air. Typically, the sail is already set and operating when reefing is done in anticipation of worsening conditions. Setting a reefed foresail, given that all the other sails were “lost”, was the only way to have any chance of controlling the ship running before the storm. So the crew of the Sephora, perhaps already on the point of foundering, was setting, i.e., raising, a foresail, which was to have been already “reefed”. Then, when hoisted up to its full length on the ship’s forestay as it was being set it would not extend down to the bowsprit, as it would under normal operation, thereby effecting the desired reduced sail area.
[20] The malicious sailor’s interference specifically with handling the sail’s “sheets” is of great significance in judging Leggatt’s actions. The sheets are the lines tied to the bottom inboard end of the sail, which is triangular in shape, and attached only along its “luff”, or front edge, to control it and “trim” it properly for the conditions and the point of sail. In this operation, setting a sail with a huge following sea, the wind blowing hard from astern, and no other larger sails set aft which would “blanket” the foresail, it would be critical to have complete control of the sheets before actually raising the sail. This is so that as it was being raised it would not blow out and away, forward of the bowsprit from behind the men, with no possibility of recovering it without turning the ship, which would likely as not be suicidal. Under these conditions, any interference with the crew on sheet handling (and it would be a difficult multi-man job on each of the two sheets) ultimately risks the ship’s being swamped, in effect causing her to be scuttled.
This elucidation comes thanks to an experienced San Francisco Bay sailor who was my first assistant at Dartmouth and a current participant in my Seminar of former students voyaging through the great works of literature, philosophy, and statesmanship of the West together.
[21] Or, as the American Constitution acknowledges, analogously: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” (Article 1, Section 9)
[22] A little after Hitler came to power, Churchill wrote a piece, to be found in his Great Contemporaries (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1937; rprt. University of Chicago Press) entitled “Hitler and his Choice” in which he praises Hitler for raising the spirits of his nation but tries to dissuade him from continuing along the path indicated by the methods he had so far employed. Cf. The Gathering Storm, pp. 304-05 for Hitler’s missed chance to meet Churchill and pp. 224-25 for Churchill’s later disinclination to meet Hitler.
[23] In the early 80s, fifty Mujahadeen from Afghanistan were brought to Dallas for medical attention. Learning of them, meeting them, realizing that they were seeing only the insides of hospitals and convenience stores, I proposed a trip to the Alamo, to Rep. Dick Armey, whose assistant said, “I know the congressman will be for it, but the first thing we have to think about is insurance.” To which I replied, “Let’s us Americans have a moment of silence to think about what you just said. If those men at the Alamo had thought of insurance, there would be no Texas. And if two Afghans, brothers, have one pair of shoes, one is always wearing them, looking for a Soviet officer to kill, not thinking about insurance.” In the end, the trip did not happen. The man who wanted to drive the donated school bus lacked the proper driver’s license. However, before the warriors returned home to fight, I secured for each a pair of small, light, powerful binoculars, from L. L. Bean. To some potential subscribers, I said “It may save a man’s life.” To others the fuller truth, “With this a Mujahadeen will hunt a Soviet invader better.” One subscriber, he knows who he is, has yet to pay up what he pledged to defend his liberty.
[24] That the metaphor comes during Aristotle’s discussion of insight (Posterior Analytics. II, 19; 100a11-13) is pertinent.
[25] Conrad returned to such a situation in Lord Jim, which starts with a young idealist abandoning a ship that did not sink as expected and ever after, in the exile of disgrace, seeking a situation to do better, and when he finds it, not doing better, through his idealism; as a student of mine, Amy Bonnette, once said on an exam, “The nation that thinks Jim is a hero is in for trouble.” Yet some young men have done better. As a young man, Jim Bridger was persuaded to leave a man for dead; when the man awoke and crawled 60 miles across the prairie, caught up with him, and vilified him, Bridger went on to become the most trustworthy mountain man the West ever saw.
[26] Montaigne’s celebrated account of friendship and his remarkable friend is in “Of Friendship,” Chapter XXVIII in volume I of his Essais; for their conspiracy to change the West, see my “Montaigne, Of Friendship, and On Tyranny,” in Freedom Above Servitude: Montaigne, La Boétie, and “On Voluntary Servitude, ed. David Schaefer, with essays by D. Schaefer, Randall Runion, & Daniel Martin, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 31-85.
[27] There is a lot in the narrator’s description of Leggatt as a “double”; he is, but the “psychological” critics, even the best, such as Albert Guerard (in the preface mentioned above and in his Conrad the Novelist [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), blur the point; yes the Captain “identified” with Leggatt, but in truth he thought Leggatt superior, and thus he remained himself; being both like and unlike, he is divided, painfully so. Moreover, how to be true to the truth in Leggatt and how to be true to his command is very hard for the Captain, as it would be for any of us. In the end, which comes with separation, and the loss of friendship, he achieves it.
[28] See Isak Dineson’s story, “Sorrow Acre,” for a remarkable example of justice under the Ancien Regime and a justification of it. Another story that by its merits is fit to start a course on Statesmanship is “Paso Por Qui” by Eugene Manlove Rhodes, in which the sheriff, who is Pat Garret, the representative of conventional right, recognizes natural right and bows to it. Cf. Dorothy Johnson’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and Jack Schaefer’s Shane for the distinction of natural and conventional right embodied in differing characters. Recall also the Lone Ranger and how he, who is natural right, is always helping, the slow “law-man” Sherriff, that is conventional right, capture the bad guys. If Kleist, the author of Der Prinz von Homburg, ever wrote a “western,” he would have the Lone Ranger capture the bad guy, but be hung for doing so illegally (but also have the rope made of silver break)
[29] Jenseits von gut und böse, II, no. 26.
[30] As Auden says, “You hope, yes, your books will excuse you, save you from hell: nevertheless, without looking sad, without in any way seeming to blame . . . God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.” From “The Cave of Making,” in About the House (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 13; Hannah Arendt uses these telling lines as the epigram to her essay on Bertolt Brecht.
[31] The narrator says he offered the hat out of pity, but it’s in the midst of their last conversation; they will surely never see each other again; and really, it’s an expression of how dear they have become to each other, and how the end of that friendship will be suffered.
[32] In the short story, “The Dream” of 1947, Churchill imagines painting his father, and his father appearing to ask him about his life, hearing the result of WWII, and then saying ‘well, maybe you should have gone into politics.”
[33] Solzhenitsyn might be a candidate. Maybe Jane Austen. I am grateful to my fellow panelists at the APSA convention in Washington in 1996, to Marlo Lewis especially, for asking how the story would go if natural and conventional right were united, and to Will Morrisey for a detailed reading informed by an appreciation of Leo Strauss’ remark, to a forgotten non-writer, “I write, you publish.”
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