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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Joseph Conrad
-
-Author: Hugh Walpole
-
-Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
-Last Updated: November 20, 2016
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-JOSEPH CONRAD
-
-By Hugh Walpole
-
-New York
-
-Henry Holt And Company
-
-1916
-
-[Illustration: 0001]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-TO
-
-SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
-
-
-
-
-I--BIOGRAPHY
-
-
-I
-
-
-|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
-plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
-very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
-an author’s artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
-his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
-with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
-again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
-reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
-creation of his characters.
-
-With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
-with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
-has been placed we have some compulsory connection.
-
-Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
-December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
-Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
-rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
-and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
-Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.
-
-Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
-1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
-In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
-at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
-joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
-Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
-naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
-nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
-writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
-With that publisher’s acceptance of _Almayer’s Folly_ the third period
-of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
-books.
-
-Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
-relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
-security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
-they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
-all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
-enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
-melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
-deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
-
-Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
-tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
-monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
-impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
-size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
-of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
-them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
-and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
-That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
-him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
-to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
-of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
-he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
-for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
-wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
-and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
-could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
-his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
-who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
-threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
-struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
-realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
-their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
-about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
-of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
-performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
-possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
-have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
-sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
-in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
-by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
-had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
-despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
-citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
-how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
-him.
-
-Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
-creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
-of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
-and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
-confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
-his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
-_Almayer’s Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
-but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
-might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
-have been declared to the world. _Almayer’s Folly_, however, was not
-rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: “The name of
-Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
-Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
-of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
-have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The Nigger
-of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
-new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
-of his adventure.
-
-The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
-almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
-behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
-“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
- that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This
-has been their history.
-
-II
-
-His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
-period, beginning with _Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
-Jim_ in 1900. The second contains {014}the two volumes of _Youth_ and
-_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
-Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
-period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
-receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
-and _Victory_ (1915).
-
-His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
-language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
-view of the “schools,” to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
-very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves
-upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild
-beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer’s Folly_ and _The Outcast of the
-Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in
-the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their
-world had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of
-his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and
-a new vigour. In the {015}character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of
-Bahalatchi and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of
-great things. Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with
-atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style
-a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. His vision of his background was
-pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make
-it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a
-determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else.
-
-These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
-Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad’s difficulties. One study in
-this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the
-crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds.
-It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung himself
-free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
-what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The Nigger of the
-Narcissus_. This {015}was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of
-a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon
-the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
-an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
-tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
-vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
-the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
-The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
-the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
-is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
-lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
-book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was to
-remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel. It
-is the story of a young Englishman’s loss of honour in a moment of panic
-and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely
-sustained development of a {016}vividly remembered scene, the second
-half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
-rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
-worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
-choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
-he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
-creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
-whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
-
-There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
-the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
-but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
-a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
-abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
-of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the forests
-that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of the
-sea. He was never, after {018}these tales, to write again of the sea
-as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
-regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
-
-This second period closed with the production of a work that was
-deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
-have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
-stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
-anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
-in many ways the greatest of all Conrad’s works, but, for the moment,
-one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
-ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.’s Weekly_--and astonished and
-bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
-and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
-its critics did not understand it, and its author’s own admirers were
-puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
-
-_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one {019}can easily imagine that
-its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
-however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
-plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of “cases” that
-interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
-heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
-Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
-but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
-so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
-accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
-artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
-_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
-the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
-Conrad’s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
-completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western Eyes_
-spoke strongly of a Russian influence {020}Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had
-too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan
-circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
-
-A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
-emphatically Conrad’s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
-chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars--_The
-Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note.
-In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _‘Twixt Land and Sea_, to unite
-some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _A
-Smile, of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of
-retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The
-sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something
-that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him
-something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless
-_The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its
-completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the {021}contrast
-between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
-of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
-finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
-wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
-_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
-popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
-the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
-and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
-prophecy.
-
-III
-
-To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
-no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
-reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
-list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
-consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author’s work,
-because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
-anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
-afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
-
-In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
-cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
-nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
-novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
-the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
-_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
-
-We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
-reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
-starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer’s
-Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
-Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
-of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
-maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
-clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
-that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
-very essence of Conrad’s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
-him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
-life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
-would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
-unfortunate author: “Ah! yes. I’m interesting, of course, but don’t you
-remember...?”
-
-The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
-not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
-figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
-be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
-book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B-------- of the
-_Nonsuch_ who... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
-that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the
-year ‘88 when...
-
-In the course of his thrilling voyage of {024}discovery we are, by a
-kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of
-the author’s own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
-miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship’s officer (this the merest
-glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle’s house in Poland.
-
-So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at
-them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed
-those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been,
-by us, only partially realised.
-
-Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
-breathless, and, by the virtue of its author’s style, solemn, we do
-obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
-revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
-our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical,
-often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of
-vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells
-us: {025} “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the
-temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they
-must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the
-idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
-some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
-revolutionary in my writings.” (Page 20.)
-
-Or again:
-
-“All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
-from which a philosophical mind should be free.” (Page 21.)
-
-Or again:
-
-“Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
-sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
-the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
-can be rendered without shame.” (Page 194.)
-
-This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
-self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
-implication of the colour of the work that will {026}arise from them;
-and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and
-vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that
-he was to do.
-
-It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
-detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
-of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
-Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
-to be most grievously disappointed.
-
-If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
-disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
-very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all
-their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad’s
-faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its
-honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there
-is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that
-supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any
-work of {027}art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged,
-incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent
-reminiscence poured into a friend’s ear in a moment of sudden
-confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
-reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
-enlightening introduction to its author.
-
-With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
-already said, this is Conrad’s happiest book--indeed, with the possible
-exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
-is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his
-dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself
-the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that
-enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
-variance with the distrust of his later novels.
-
-The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
-papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, {028}_Overdue
-and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_.
-No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a
-strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to
-him, mto the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she
-really is, he has been made free of a great order.
-
-The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
-power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of
-the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that
-sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life
-and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in
-exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power
-both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is
-the life of the sea.
-
-Conrad’s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
-and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
-realism, her deceits, her {029}cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
-lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
-of her like this:
-
-“The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of
-manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever
-been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
-has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much
-adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has
-remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
-men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of
-his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable
-cruelty.”
-
-Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
-he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
-cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right,
-and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In
-this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself
-a {030}lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never
-again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such free and
-spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
-
-_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
-to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
-confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
-devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
-element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the
-characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in
-his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to
-be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later
-analysis of Conrad’s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some
-mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions
-that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to
-be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from “poor Captain
-B--------, who used {031}to suffer from sick headaches, in his young
-days, every time he was approaching a coast,” to the dramatic Dominic
-(“from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man
-you would think he had never smiled in his life”), are silent and
-thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful,
-half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast.
-Captain B------- dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women
-sitting beside him in the quiet room, “his eyes resting fondly upon the
-faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar
-objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed
-often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea”--“poor
-P--------,” with “his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
-_Punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
-looking-glasses, for instance”--that captain who “did everything with an
-air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
-but the result somehow was always on stereotyped {032}lines,
-unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart”--that
-other captain in whom “through a touch of self-seeking that modest
-artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament”--here are little
-sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well,
-Marlowe, Captain M’Whirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many
-others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere
-enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such
-themes, such subjects, such “cases” that it is hard, almost beyond
-discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has
-obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious
-muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the
-Sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and
-his picture.
-
-Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
-soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
-that _The Mirror of The Sea_, ultimately, has most to do. {033}As other
-men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his
-ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated
-to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance,
-but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a
-technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and
-letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
-crime in speaking of “casting” an anchor when the true technicality is
-“brought up”--“to an anchor” understood. In the chapter on “Yachts” he
-provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand
-and then suddenly there come these sentences--“the art of handling
-slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.”... “A ship is a
-creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to
-keep us up to mark.”
-
-Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
-which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
-her birth, in no ordered sequence of {034}events, but admitting us ever
-more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
-more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
-appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
-Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
-new, in the dock, “her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
-seamen who were to share their life with her.”... “She looked modest to
-me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
-shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
-intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already
-familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
-men.”
-
-Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
-salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
-contrast, his companion’s “Ships are all right....”
-
-He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the
-wickedly malicious, {035}the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
-adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has
-indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be
-severe before such a world of fine spirits.
-
-Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
-that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
-Inlands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar, he
-shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
-material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of Dominic,
-the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting
-the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his
-house of romance.
-
-This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly
-of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
-creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
-
-It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
-
-
-
-
-
-II--THE NOVELIST
-
-
-I
-
-|IN {036}discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet
-or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the
-Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
-
-It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
-applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
-novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the
-novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_ bear
-witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain,
-but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
-of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
-position as novelist {037}and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in
-his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work
-will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a
-novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human
-beings, with his attitude to those histories.
-
-Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
-seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves
-but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
-deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
-story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able
-to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any
-respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was
-quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously
-abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a
-fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time
-forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties;
-{038}but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_
-was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer’s
-Folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_
-had already preceded it.
-
-With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the
-novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame
-Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew
-into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed
-how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not
-very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about
-everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard
-Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At
-the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way
-that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a bright existence,
-flamed, and died. “Art for Art’s sake” was slain by the trial of Oscar
-Wilde in 1895.
-
-{039}Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about
-shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society
-made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period
-and the Boer War completed an old one.
-
-Of the whole question of Conrad’s place in the history of the English
-novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter.
-I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the
-French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents
-in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the
-time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic reaction
-that followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed
-away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him,
-a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for
-the work that he had to do.
-
-
-II
-
-{040}The form in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is
-the question which must always come first in any consideration of him
-as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has
-been most frequently attacked.
-
-His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
-suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
-instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
-between two seamen. One has “knifed” the other, and the quarrel has been
-watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
-wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
-seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give
-us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins,
-_oratio recta_, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just
-over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man
-and the girl are. He {041}describes the little barber and is, at once,
-amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. Seen
-standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but
-once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his
-melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the
-young girl who lodges with him. That leads one back, through many years,
-to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for
-a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps
-a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This old woman, now
-so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. Once she
-was...
-
-And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
-the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
-witness to Conrad’s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
-James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses,
-says: “It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a {042}votary of the way
-to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,” and his amazement
-at Conrad’s patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the
-stranger if we consider that in _What Maisie Knew_ and _The Awkward Age_
-he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside
-the intricate but masterly form of _The Awkward Age_ the duplicate
-narration of _Chance_ seems child’s play. Mr Henry James makes the
-mistake of speaking as though Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the
-form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun
-of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the
-easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the
-ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the Ancient Mariner
-and all the seamen before and alter him. Conrad must have his direct
-narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had
-generally come to him. He wishes to deny the effect of that direct and
-simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to {043}him. He must
-have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself
-has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth
-of it then must he have two or three.
-
-Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels:
-_Lord Jim, Nostromo_ and _Chance_. It is possible that _Lord Jim_ was
-conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
-from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
-Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others
-remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of
-the _Patna_, or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions
-waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation
-of these four men Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of
-the _Patna_: “He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
-on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a. soiled
-sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
-pair of ragged straw slippers {044}on his bare feet, and somebody’s
-cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up
-with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.” There are also two
-other “no-account chaps with him”--a sallow faced mean little chap with
-his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat,
-as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey
-moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and,
-with these three, Jim, “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as
-promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.” Here are these four, in the
-same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That boy in the
-same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has fastened
-on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and
-discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist’s thrill. We watch
-our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
-discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go?
-We are thrilled with the suspense. {045}Conrad, having discovered his
-subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most
-deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. “I was not
-there myself,” he tells us, “but I can show you someone who was.” He
-introduces us to a first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. “Now tell
-your story.” He has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest,
-and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at
-everyone’s disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself
-go. He is bothered now by no question but the thorough investigation of
-his discovery. What had Jim done that he should be in such a case? We
-must have the story of the loss of the _Patna_, that marvellous journey
-across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain
-and Jim’s fine, chivalrous soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so
-much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. At present, so
-absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. The
-illusion is perfect. We come to the inquiry. {046}One of the judges is
-Captain Brierley. “What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah! but I must tell
-you! Most extraordinary thing!”
-
-The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the
-_Patna_, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems
-now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the
-author’s hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre
-of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry
-and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing.
-We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every
-possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
-
-There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the
-method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue
-with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again.
-But the trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth
-and {047}reality of his story. He saw--we cannot for an instant doubt
-it--that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that
-we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not
-inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on--that is the truly terrible
-thing about Marlowe--and at the moment when we question his authenticity
-we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his
-flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that
-is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he
-duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent
-raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, halts and histories. That then
-is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held,
-but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster
-is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create
-your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw
-stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe has certainly been compelled to
-{048}face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.
-
-_Nostromo_ is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the
-narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to deny
-that _Nostromo_ is extremely contused in places, but it is a
-confusion that arises rather from Conrad’s confidence in the reader’s
-fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
-narrations are sometimes complicated--old Captain Mitchell does not
-always achieve authenticity--but on the whole, the reader may be said to
-be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
-little about others.
-
-But this assurance of the author’s that we must have already learnt the
-main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
-of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. “Of course,”
- he says to us, “you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that
-revolution that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be
-there myself. I know all {049}the people concerned, and the central
-figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor Monyngham--no, it was a man
-about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. I knew the
-man well.... He.. and there we all are.”
-
-The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
-successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning
-which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing
-at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to
-our conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal
-of _Nostromo_, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the
-silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola
-girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of
-Viola’s wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone
-on the Isabels, of Hirsch’s torture, of Captain Mitchell’s watch--here
-are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely,
-in any other hands, be fantastic {050}melodrama, and both characters and
-scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth.
-Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt
-the author’s word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because
-it is entirely convincing.
-
-Not so with the third example, _Chance_. Here, as with _Lord Jim_, we
-may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
-in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the
-_Patna_ waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over
-_Chance_ reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of
-their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps
-of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That
-desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous
-Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her
-and too double-faced for him gives the book’s theme, and never in all
-the stories that preceded Flora’s has Conrad been so {051}eager to
-afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the
-unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a
-riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain
-Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough
-to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses
-that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us,
-more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible
-narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides
-from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the
-Knight and the Maiden--as the author names them--are retiring souls,
-and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate their timid
-hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and
-the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure
-realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here
-achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half
-of {052}_Lord Jim_ and the whole of _Nostromo_. We believe most
-emphatically in that first narration of young Powell’s about his first
-chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite
-casually he talks like this: “I do not even think that there was in
-what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly
-pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or
-equivocal situations.” We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely
-drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe’s interview with Flora on the
-pavement outside Anthony’s room.
-
-We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
-are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
-it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves,
-that we resent, a little, Marlowe’s intimacy which prevents, with
-patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have
-seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
-
-But when the second half of the book {053}arrives we can be confident
-no longer. Here, as in _Lord Jim_, it is possible to feel that Conrad,
-having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not
-know how to continue it. The true thing in _Lord Jim_ is the affair of
-the _Patna_; the true thing in _Chance_ is Captain Anthony’s rescue of
-Flora after her disaster. But whereas in _Lord Jim_ the sequel to Jim’s
-cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the
-sequel to Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any
-rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter
-in _Chance_ entitled _A Moonless Night_ is, in the first half of it,
-surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early
-short story, _The Return_. The conclusion of _Chance_ and certain tales
-in his volume, _Within the Tides_, make one wonder whether that
-alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully
-maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the
-former of these two qualities.
-
-{054}It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails,
-as it must before the end of _Chance_, the form of narration in _Oratio
-Recta_ is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in
-Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony
-and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were
-so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a
-deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.
-
-I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books
-are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
-unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held
-by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to
-tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if
-his presence be not true...
-
-
-III
-
-If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad’s attention we shall
-see that {055}in almost every case his subjects are concerned with
-unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to
-the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the
-blindness that renders men’s honesty and heroism of so little account
-that gives occasion for his irony.
-
-He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
-human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
-whom he can admire. “If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
-thing up,” we can hear him say. “He can see at once that the odds are
-too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
-the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
-and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven’s bolts and lightnings
-and they will not quail.” They command his pity, his reverence, his
-tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his
-shoulders, he says: “You see. I told you so. He may even think he has
-won. We know better, you and I.” {056}The theme of _Almayer’s Folly_
-is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the
-Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of
-death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against
-nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth).
-_Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which
-stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first.
-_Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against
-the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the
-very epitome of Conrad’s themes, is the struggle of M’Whirr against the
-storm (here again it is M’Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear,
-in the very last line of the book, the storm’s confident chuckle of
-ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest.
-In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad’s finest
-figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three
-tales in _‘Twixt Land, and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the
-struggle of simple, {057}unimaginative men against forces too strong
-for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character,
-finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_
-Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains
-and struggles of insignificant individuals.
-
-Of Conrad’s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
-to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
-of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them
-and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
-
-Whatever Conrad’s books are or are not, it may safely be said that
-they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
-probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
-affection, his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding
-over the inequality of life’s battle. His humour, often of a very
-fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
-light-heartedness.
-
-Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would {058}have found Marlowe, Jim and
-Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
-they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
-
-I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
-and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
-that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
-meeting a number of Conrad’s characters is that they have existences
-and histories entirely independent of their introducer’s kind offices.
-Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
-are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
-about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
-all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
-histories.
-
-One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
-mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
-the robust vitality of their {059}predecessors; the figures in the novel
-of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
-
-In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
-fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before
-an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
-wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy
-before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton
-before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy
-before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his
-inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it
-may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
-their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author’s own
-determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
-
-This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
-novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
-contemporaries--namely, the assurance that {060}his characters have
-their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that
-he is describing to us.
-
-The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
-the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
-speculating deeply upon “what happened afterwards” to Gayef or Barbara,
-to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad’s sea captains as with Tchekov’s
-Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
-incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
-from the author’s eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for
-him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
-in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
-doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
-but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
-only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
-things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
-M’Whirr that he wrote long letters home, {061}beginning always with the
-words, “My darling Wife,” and relating in minute detail each successive
-trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs M’Whirr, we learn, was “a pretentious person
-with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in
-the neighbourhood considered as ‘quite superior.’ The only secret of her
-life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
-to stay for good.” Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate “who never
-wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and
-though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with
-extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges
-of a boarding-house.” How conscious we are of Jim’s English country
-parsonage, of Captain Anthony’s loneliness, of Marlowe’s isolation. By
-this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole
-character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on
-board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing,
-{062}we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on
-board, “A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol.”... “Very soon
-the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her
-over the side. We didn’t recognise him at all....” And Mr Baker, the
-chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends
-for life?
-
-“No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
-Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
-and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
-town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
-in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady,
-he thought, sitting down for a moment’s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
-enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere.
-He didn’t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The
-darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck;
-and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom
-through many {063}long years he had given the best of a seaman’s care.
-And never a command in sight. Not once!”
-
-There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. “Donkin entered.
-They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. ‘I give you a bad
-discharge,’ he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: ‘I don’t want your
-bloomin’ discharge--keep it. I’m goin’ ter ‘ave a job hashore.’ He turned
-to us. ‘No more bloomin’ sea for me,’ he said, aloud. All looked at him.
-He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any
-of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
-declaration.”
-
-In how many novels would Donkin’s life have been limited by the part
-that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus?_ As it
-is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
-only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--“As I came up I saw a
-red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, {064}fluffy
-hair, fall on Charley’s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
-him:--‘Oh, my boy! my boy!’--‘Leggo me,’ said Charley, ‘leggo,
-mother!’ I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of
-the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic,
-courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life
-to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
-good-naturedly:--‘If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall ‘ave a bob for
-a drink out of my pay.’”
-
-But one passes from these men of the sea--from M’Whirr and Baker,
-from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
-suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
-men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About
-such men as M’Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not
-believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will,
-we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little
-details, {065}M’Whirr’s wife, Mr Baker’s proud sister, Charley’s
-mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
-world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister Nikita,
-the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
-confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
-perfect sympathy.
-
-His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
-_idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
-unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you.
-But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing
-finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because
-they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the
-imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind
-upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved,
-the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough
-to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again
-{066}we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees
-him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality
-and its significance. “His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of
-having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.”
-
-With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
-character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we
-have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists’ lives
-beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
-independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
-to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
-things.
-
-Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée
-fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
-phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
-it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
-soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
-upon which he has {067}placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of
-an _idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
-other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
-tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book’s close,
-that we should have been told so much more.
-
-Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
-Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
-romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott,
-with the single exception of Thackeray’s Beatrix--and here I am not
-forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own
-immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so
-unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
-Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
-shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
-romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
-through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: “... his hat, a gay
-sombrero with {068}a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
-Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the
-embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam
-of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the
-silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when--...
-in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
-opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside
-a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his
-eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or
-moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to
-the most atrocious sufferings”--we are conscious of his superb figure;
-and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the
-book assure us--“In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to
-ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of
-the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of
-solid silver, the {069}genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores
-dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
- His genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture
-standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not
-given us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us.
-Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of
-the Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes
-might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
-truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
-our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
-not met him.
-
-Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
-basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
-so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
-daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in
-the whole of Conrad’s art--the drive in the {070}cab of old Mrs Verloc,
-Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange
-gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S------, Peter
-Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in
-_Romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in
-others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his
-lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the
-world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of
-all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is,
-finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose
-pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends
-with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know
-the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
-
-Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
-seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its
-sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness
-s. Although each {071}work, from, the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely
-perfect _Secret Share_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart,
-the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
-surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.
-
-
-
-
-III--THE POET
-
-|THE {072}poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical
-side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, _The Secret
-Agent_, and _Under Western Eyes_, or such short stories as _The
-Informer_, or _Il Conde_, but the philosophic note sounded poetically,
-as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
-
-Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad
-the novelist deserve consideration--style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
-the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
-of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier
-works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from {073}Conrad’s
-second novel, _An Outcast of the Islands_:
-
-“He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing
-each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of
-the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone
-by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies
-that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He
-seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness,
-spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to
-hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by
-the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an
-aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold
-scrutiny of glittering stars.”
-
-And from his latest novel, _Chance_:
-
-“The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there
-in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man
-from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick
-{074}glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced
-no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight,
-and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the
-immensity of space made visible--almost palpable. Young Powell felt
-it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy,
-powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something
-almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two
-feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a
-darkening universe.”
-
-It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice
-of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of
-the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The
-first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be
-denied, something of the “purple patch.” We feel that the prose is too
-dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work
-slightly affected by the author’s {075}determination that it shall be
-fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any
-poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though
-it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally,
-there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument
-to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again
-and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in _Almayer’s
-Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth,
-Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim_,--prose piled high with sonorous and
-slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds
-hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the
-suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority
-places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous.
-For instance, in the tale called _The Return_, there is the following
-passage:--
-
-“He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if
-dazed. There was {076}less than a second of suspense while they both
-felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall
-into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted,
-‘Come back,’ and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in
-peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last
-chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible,
-and dark, and safe--like a grave.”
-
-The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words--“moral
-annihilation,” “devouring nowhere,” “peaceful desperation,” “last chance
-of life,” “terrible,” “like a grave.” That he shouted gives a final
-touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
-
-Often, in the earlier books, Conrad’s style has the awkward
-over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is
-using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus
-we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier
-style, the marked effect of {077}two influences. One influence is that
-of the French language and especially of the author of _Madame Bovary_.
-When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career
-as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand
-this French inflection. Flaubert’s effect on his style is quite
-unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert’s: “Toutes ses velléités de
-dénigrement l’envanouissaiont sous la poésie du rôle qui l’envahissait;
-et entrainée vers l’homme par l’illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se
-figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide...”
- and this a sentence of Conrad’s: “Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard’s
-shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if
-to her--to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature--had been
-revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of
-the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting.”
-
-Conrad’s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It
-is probable, {078}however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French
-language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in
-any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The
-influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and
-sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a
-crutch before he could walk alone.
-
-The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
-importance--the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
-that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for
-his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its
-full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations
-of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of
-which we think in many pages of _Almayer’s Folly_ and _An Outcast of
-the Island_, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
-emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
-rapture.
-
-He was under the influence of these powers {079}also in that, at that
-time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent
-to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately
-under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions
-and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired
-moment comes to him--often the inspiration does not come because he
-cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his
-middle period, in the period of _Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness_ and
-_Nostromo_, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating,
-steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as
-it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage
-from _Typhoon_ with that earlier one from _The Outcast of the Islands_
-that I quoted above:
-
-“He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild
-scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds.
-She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane
-{080}the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the
-deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a
-living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest.
-It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes’ head a few stars
-shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc
-frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too
-seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster
-of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.”
-
-That is poet’s work, and poet’s work at its finest. Instead of
-impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the
-author has made the very most of a rather thin moment--feels, indeed,
-himself that it is thin--we are here under the influence of something
-that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is
-thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of
-the heart of the finest material--and yet it remains, through all its
-discipline, spontaneous.
-
-These three tales, _Typhoon, Youth_ and {081}_Heart of Darkness_, stand
-by themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We
-may remember such characters as M’Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are
-figures as the old seneschal in _The Eve of St Agnes_ or the Ancient
-Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought
-and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman’s _When Lilac
-first on the Door yard bloomed_ or Keats’ _Nightingale._ Their author
-was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of
-his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
-
-The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to
-the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist
-whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible
-way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of
-sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but
-only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed
-minister, is older--he must look back now on the colours of {082}_Youth_
-with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as
-_The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_, in such a volume of
-stories as _A Set of Six_, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly
-abandoned--we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and
-sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that
-passage from _Chance_ quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although
-we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of _An Outcast of
-the Islands_, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there,
-but--“Young Powell felt it.” In that magical storm that was _Typhoon_
-God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later
-experience young Powell is our companion.
-
-
-II.
-
-The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
-atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists
-in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his
-{083}daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such
-a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play
-the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway
-station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters
-immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick
-slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background
-react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that
-reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with
-other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of
-stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own
-day, Mr Arnold Bennett’s Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or
-Mrs Wharton’s New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most
-successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us
-with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation
-with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the
-contemplation of some scene and is thence {084}extended to the whole
-vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be
-as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits
-are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities
-of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and
-Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the
-scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting
-between Beauchamp and René in _Beauchamp’s Career_. It is not only that
-these scenes are “done” to the full extent of their “doing,” it is also
-that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with
-all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev,
-Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.
-Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
-
-But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
-lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in Literature_,
-has named this element Glamour. {085}In writing of the novels by George
-Eliot he says: “Indeed there is almost every element of literature,
-except a certain indescribable thing called _Glamour_, which was the
-whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
-clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
-when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
-Castlewood.” Now’ this matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens,
-for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the
-house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit’s escape after the murder do
-not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate,
-that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential it is certain also to
-have glamour.
-
-The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very
-strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is
-his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
-important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.
-In _The Outcast {086}of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain
-Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
-terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it
-has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
-power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord Jim_ the contrast
-of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast not only
-immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain’s
-gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
-ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
-degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of the
-Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects
-the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
-intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the
-negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
-boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
-that single voyage of the _Narcissus_. {087}When Winnie Verloc, her old
-mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not
-seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark,
-dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton
-lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend.
-That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate
-companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples
-might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
-
-He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
-significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he
-wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather
-because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the
-most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We
-may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they
-drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now
-see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.”
- But {088}Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later
-credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries.
-Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is
-as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that
-no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure.
-But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around
-and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness,
-trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze
-of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer,
-a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy
-splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the
-austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba,
-asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the
-mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the
-dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so
-{089}that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the
-cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are
-“a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique--it
-bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a
-remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible
-final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs
-Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
-
-“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
-soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers
-of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
-European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
-petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a
-slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
-clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
-wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
-place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
-blankets that {090}lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat....
-Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and
-crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in
-the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the
-big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot
-brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some
-dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
-
-And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--“the forests
-unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of
-heaven--and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from
-every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the
-juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse
-beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however,
-select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about
-_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
-
-The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination {091}of the silver of the
-Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near
-it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the
-white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad,
-then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,
-the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure
-and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,
-romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of
-the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
-silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been
-there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks
-swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which
-the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early
-sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from
-Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing
-coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their {092}evening
-meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without
-a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
-triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to
-a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
-walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp
-under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse
-of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without
-penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the
-strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and
-above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers
-the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue
-sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created
-beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,
-many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and
-princesses passing--but the detail of it is {093}built with careful
-realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We
-wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral,
-its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its
-hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns
-for us.
-
-Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is
-a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most
-fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of
-Stevenson’s chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,
-gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast
-that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s
-treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco
-tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The
-detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book
-incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is
-{094}finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We
-have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of
-the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,
-many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the
-Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality
-of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a
-house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The
-two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
-described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio
-concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in
-from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon
-the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
-some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a
-broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
-chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
-at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and,
-{095}ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very
-stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his
-long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old
-Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black
-brute, with a hammer bead--you would have seen in the street dozing
-motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the
-curbstone of the side-walk!”
-
-How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the
-exclamation of some reader “Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like
-that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable
-veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed
-doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!--and can we not sniff
-something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more
-about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he
-must remember enough to fill a volume!
-
-He is able, therefore, upon this foundation {096}of a minute and
-scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases
-without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate,
-choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression
-of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is
-of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or
-Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the
-life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little
-tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the
-unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons,
-catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember
-also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest
-and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
-
-Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet,
-working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is
-at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to
-the last {097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of
-certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It
-_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that
-has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or
-fable for its interpretation....
-
-When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
-creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,
-certain limitations.
-
-
-III
-
-As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
-that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
-men.
-
-It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
-watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
-cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
-they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
-{098}ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the
-horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he
-can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the
-very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but
-his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
-
-There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
-it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free
-from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound
-is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove
-his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
-creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
-Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He
-passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
-and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to
-celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
- {099}Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the
-history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit
-has been vain--as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
-
-And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
-observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
-character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his
-merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
-whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
-
-M’Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
-tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
-from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has
-witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley,
-watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that
-nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
-degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
-leap--the victim is always in his power. {100}It comes from this
-philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most
-definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of
-brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are melancholy and ironic: “If you see
-far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way
-to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is
-tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he
-chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he
-has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of
-the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
-Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For
-Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond
-words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women
-of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for
-them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty
-of his own sea captains. {101}This then is quite simply his philosophy.
-It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters
-to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is
-stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant,
-hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of
-any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his
-own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all
-this: preparing to leave...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his
-butterflies.”
-
-Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
-whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
-Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication,
-save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in
-their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many
-ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation
-of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here.
-Browning’s {102}interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of
-him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of
-men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual
-and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s
-clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual
-philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately
-enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has
-exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be
-seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
-
-Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
-of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the most
-romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
-such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
-forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did.
-Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo?_ Mr Chesterton has
-written of {103}Browning: “He substituted the street with the green
-blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted
-match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for
-the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged,
-faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a
-fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
-
-The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
-precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
-
-And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
-Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
-Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
-to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
-these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
-of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
-heart, it is also that the worlds of these {104}two poets are the same.
-How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
-de Barrel, M’Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
-witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s
-wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
-ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though
-he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
-
-Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
-statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
-simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
-last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
-of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
-temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
-buttresses and towers.
-
-Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as
-I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
-carried Romantic-Realism showed {105}the author of _Almayer’s Folly_ the
-signs of the road that he was to follow.
-
-If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
-may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
-novelist?
-
-
-
-
-IV--ROMANCE AND REALISM
-
-
-I
-
-|THE {106}terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years
-very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of
-character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England
-at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study
-of _Robert Louis Stevenson_, said: “Stevenson, reviving the
-never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has
-brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if
-romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
-personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
-a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade
-finished his vocifer{107}ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if
-it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
-
-We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to
-his estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without
-denying that the date of the publication of _St Ives_ was also the date
-of the death of the purely romantic novel.
-
-But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic”
- is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the
-popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has,
-recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in
-its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like
-romances,” we hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away
-from real life, which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is
-defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant
-facts by an observant pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain
-order of novel {108}exclaim, “because it is so like life. It tells me
-just what I myself see every day--I know where I am.”
-
-Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas
-of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
-everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive
-an ambition--I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of
-life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and
-reminiscence--Romance is the study of life with the faculties of
-imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional,
-poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and
-recorded---it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance
-may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its
-spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and
-sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here
-that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary
-divorce from reality, nor does {109}Realism imply a detailed and dusty
-preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for
-Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is
-not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult
-of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as
-eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve
-eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard
-to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may
-be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its
-strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and
-that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been
-very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards
-Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by
-Romantic-Realism, such a novel as _The Brothers Karamazov_, such a
-play as _The Cherry Orchard_ are there before us, as the best possible
-examples. We might say, in a word, that _Karamazov_ has, in the England
-{110}of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _Madame
-Bovary_....
-
-
-II
-
-It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
-development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
-Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
-kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
-their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
-Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
-hold that same position.
-
-Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
-French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is
-to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for
-him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts,
-sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently
-realistic, when it is merely {111}recorded and perceived by any
-observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without
-for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it,
-giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the
-whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
-
-As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
-often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
-of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
-who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used
-by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a
-little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the
-required ground.
-
-Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
-and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
-determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
-of all honest men. {112}In that intention he has absolutely succeeded;
-he has not abated one jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart
-of Darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our
-literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is
-falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
-
-The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
-determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
-by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him
-in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his
-clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define,
-but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by
-Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and Punishment,
-The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are romantic realism
-at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is
-ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince
-Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, {113}Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to
-us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from
-us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s
-love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it,
-with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical
-as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony,
-Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the
-limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves
-on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity,
-tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes,
-never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of
-the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his
-pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
-he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--Conrad finds
-humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
-
-Nevertheless he has been influenced by {114}the Russian writer
-continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under
-Western Eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason,
-perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as
-though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of
-him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
-independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
-creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
-hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
-English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
-found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
-his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they
-find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
-that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they
-may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
-they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
-{115}because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than
-they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because
-characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
-dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
-determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
-Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr,
-demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
-
-Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
-has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
-through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing
-that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the zest of
-creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their
-art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life.
-That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the
-work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows
-exhaustion and sterility {116}means nothing; the stream will soon ran
-full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel,
-in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip
-of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that
-cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for
-form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws
-or the paradise of free love.
-
-
-III
-
-Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
-English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
-provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that
-it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English
-novelists--in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J.
-D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan,
-Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young--this influence is to be detected.
-{117}Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr
-Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism
-of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent
-a novel as Mr Swinnerton’s _On the Staircase_ with Mr Arnold Bennett’s
-_Sacred and Profane Love_, or Mr Galsworthy’s _Man of Property_--and Mr
-E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose
-_Longest Journey_ and _Howard’s End_ may possibly provide the historian
-of English literature with dates as important as the publication of
-_Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly
-belong to this essay.
-
-It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
-realism can return. We have been shown in _Nostromo_ something that has
-the colour of _Treasure Island_ and the reality of _New Grub Street_.
-If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is
-dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely,
-on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that
-at few periods in {118}English literature has the novel shown more signs
-of a thrilling and original future.
-
-For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance
-for a moment at his last novel, _Victory_.
-
-The conclusion of _Chance_ and the last volume of short stories had
-shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
-ultimately, from reality. _Victory_, splendid tale though it is, does
-not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of
-almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and
-malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and
-Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as
-the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then
-returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for
-man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair
-to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He
-prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another,
-that elemental catastrophe is pre{119}vented he consoles himself
-by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his
-characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does
-immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the
-whole of Conrad--the last conversation between Heyst and Lena--that we
-see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
-more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence
-of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects.
-At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the
-boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent
-in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
-
-Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
-incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the
-discipline and restraint that were once his law.
-
-Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years,
-from the _Almayer’s Folly_ of 1895 to the _Victory_ of 1915, one
-{120}realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor
-insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our
-shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to
-enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.
-
-
-
-
-A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
-
-[The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
-signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
-
-Almayer’s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New
-editions. (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
-
-An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
-
-The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
-edition, 1910.
-
-Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
-
-Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
-
-The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M.
-Hueffer (Heinemann). 1901.
-
-Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
-
-Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
-
-Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith,
-Elder). 1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
-
-Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
-Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
-Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
-
-New edition, 1914.
-
-A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
-New edition, 1915.
-
-Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
-
-Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
-
-Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
-(Dent). 1915.
-
-Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
-
-
-
-
-AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
-
-{123}Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (_Macmillan_). 1895.
-New editions, 1912; (_Doubleday_). 1911.
-
-An Outcast of the Islands (_Appleton_). 1896. New edition (_Doubleday_).
-1914.
-
-Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (_Dodd, Mead_). 1897.
-New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: “The Nigger of the
-‘Narcissus’” (_Doubleday_). 1914.
-
-Tales of Unrest (_Scribner_). 1898.
-
-Lord Jim (_Doubleday_) 1900. New edition, 1914.
-
-The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (_McClure Co._).
-1901.
-
-Typhoon (_Putman_). 1902. New edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
-
-Youth, and two Other Stories (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred to
-_Doubleday_). 1903.
-
-Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (_McClure Co._). 1903. New
-edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
-
-Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (_McClure Co_.
-Afterwards transferred to _Doubleday_). 1904.
-
-Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (_Harper_), 1904. {124}The Mirror of
-the Sea: Memories and Impressions (_Harper_). 1906.
-
-The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (_Harper_). 1907.
-
-A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred
-to _Doubleday_). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (_Harper_). 1911.
-
-A Personal Retold (_Harper_). 1912.
-
-‘Twist Land and Sea: Tales (_Doran_). 1912. New edition (_Doubleday_).
-1911.
-
-Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (_Doubleday_). 1914.
-
-A Set of Six [Tales: one, “The Duel.” previously issued as “A Point of
-Honour”] (_Doubleday_). 1915.
-
-Victory: An Island Tale (_Doubleday_). 1915.
-
-Within the Tides: Tales (_Doubleday_). 1916.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 52453 ***
+
+JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+By Hugh Walpole
+
+New York
+
+Henry Holt And Company
+
+1916
+
+[Illustration: 0001]
+
+[Illustration: 0008]
+
+[Illustration: 0009]
+
+TO
+
+SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
+
+
+
+
+I--BIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I
+
+
+|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
+plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
+very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
+an author’s artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
+his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
+with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
+again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
+reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
+creation of his characters.
+
+With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
+with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
+has been placed we have some compulsory connection.
+
+Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
+December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
+Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
+rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
+and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
+Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.
+
+Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
+1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
+In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
+at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
+joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
+Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
+naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
+nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
+writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
+With that publisher’s acceptance of _Almayer’s Folly_ the third period
+of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
+books.
+
+Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
+relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
+security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
+they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
+all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
+enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
+melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
+deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
+
+Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
+tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
+monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
+impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
+size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
+of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
+them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
+and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
+That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
+him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
+to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
+of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
+he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
+for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
+wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
+and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
+could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
+his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
+who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
+threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
+struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
+realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
+their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
+about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
+of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
+performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
+possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
+have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
+sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
+in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
+by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
+had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
+despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
+citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
+how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
+him.
+
+Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
+creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
+of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
+and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
+confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
+his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
+_Almayer’s Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
+but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
+might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
+have been declared to the world. _Almayer’s Folly_, however, was not
+rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: “The name of
+Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
+Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
+of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
+have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The Nigger
+of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
+new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
+of his adventure.
+
+The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
+almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
+behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
+“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
+ that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This
+has been their history.
+
+II
+
+His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
+period, beginning with _Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
+Jim_ in 1900. The second contains {014}the two volumes of _Youth_ and
+_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
+Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
+period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
+receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
+and _Victory_ (1915).
+
+His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
+language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
+view of the “schools,” to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
+very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves
+upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild
+beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer’s Folly_ and _The Outcast of the
+Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in
+the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their
+world had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of
+his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and
+a new vigour. In the {015}character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of
+Bahalatchi and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of
+great things. Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with
+atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style
+a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. His vision of his background was
+pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make
+it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a
+determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else.
+
+These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
+Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad’s difficulties. One study in
+this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the
+crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds.
+It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung himself
+free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
+what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_. This {015}was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of
+a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon
+the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
+an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
+tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
+vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
+the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
+The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
+the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
+is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
+lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
+book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was to
+remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel. It
+is the story of a young Englishman’s loss of honour in a moment of panic
+and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely
+sustained development of a {016}vividly remembered scene, the second
+half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
+rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
+worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
+choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
+he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
+creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
+whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
+
+There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
+the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
+but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
+a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
+abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
+of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the forests
+that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of the
+sea. He was never, after {018}these tales, to write again of the sea
+as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
+regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
+
+This second period closed with the production of a work that was
+deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
+have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
+stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
+anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
+in many ways the greatest of all Conrad’s works, but, for the moment,
+one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
+ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.’s Weekly_--and astonished and
+bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
+and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
+its critics did not understand it, and its author’s own admirers were
+puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
+
+_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one {019}can easily imagine that
+its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
+however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
+plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of “cases” that
+interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
+heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
+Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
+but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
+so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
+accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
+artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
+_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
+the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
+Conrad’s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
+completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western Eyes_
+spoke strongly of a Russian influence {020}Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had
+too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan
+circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
+
+A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
+emphatically Conrad’s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
+chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars--_The
+Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note.
+In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _‘Twixt Land and Sea_, to unite
+some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _A
+Smile, of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of
+retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The
+sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something
+that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him
+something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless
+_The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its
+completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the {021}contrast
+between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
+of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
+finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
+wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
+_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
+popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
+the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
+and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
+prophecy.
+
+III
+
+To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
+no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
+reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
+list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
+consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author’s work,
+because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
+anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
+afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
+
+In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
+cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
+nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
+novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
+the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
+
+We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
+reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
+starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer’s
+Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
+Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
+of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
+maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
+clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
+that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
+very essence of Conrad’s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
+him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
+life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
+would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
+unfortunate author: “Ah! yes. I’m interesting, of course, but don’t you
+remember...?”
+
+The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
+not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
+figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
+be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
+book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B-------- of the
+_Nonsuch_ who... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
+that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the
+year ‘88 when...
+
+In the course of his thrilling voyage of {024}discovery we are, by a
+kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of
+the author’s own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
+miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship’s officer (this the merest
+glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle’s house in Poland.
+
+So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at
+them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed
+those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been,
+by us, only partially realised.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
+breathless, and, by the virtue of its author’s style, solemn, we do
+obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
+revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
+our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical,
+often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of
+vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells
+us: {025} “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the
+temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they
+must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the
+idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
+some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
+revolutionary in my writings.” (Page 20.)
+
+Or again:
+
+“All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+from which a philosophical mind should be free.” (Page 21.)
+
+Or again:
+
+“Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
+sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
+the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
+can be rendered without shame.” (Page 194.)
+
+This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
+self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
+implication of the colour of the work that will {026}arise from them;
+and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and
+vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that
+he was to do.
+
+It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
+detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
+of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
+Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
+to be most grievously disappointed.
+
+If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
+disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
+very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all
+their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad’s
+faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its
+honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there
+is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that
+supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any
+work of {027}art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged,
+incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent
+reminiscence poured into a friend’s ear in a moment of sudden
+confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
+reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
+enlightening introduction to its author.
+
+With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
+already said, this is Conrad’s happiest book--indeed, with the possible
+exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
+is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his
+dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself
+the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that
+enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
+variance with the distrust of his later novels.
+
+The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
+papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, {028}_Overdue
+and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_.
+No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a
+strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to
+him, mto the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she
+really is, he has been made free of a great order.
+
+The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
+power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of
+the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that
+sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life
+and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in
+exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power
+both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is
+the life of the sea.
+
+Conrad’s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
+and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
+realism, her deceits, her {029}cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
+lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
+of her like this:
+
+“The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of
+manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever
+been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
+has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much
+adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has
+remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
+men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of
+his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable
+cruelty.”
+
+Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
+he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
+cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right,
+and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In
+this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself
+a {030}lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never
+again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such free and
+spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
+
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
+to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
+confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
+devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
+element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the
+characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in
+his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to
+be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later
+analysis of Conrad’s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some
+mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions
+that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to
+be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from “poor Captain
+B--------, who used {031}to suffer from sick headaches, in his young
+days, every time he was approaching a coast,” to the dramatic Dominic
+(“from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man
+you would think he had never smiled in his life”), are silent and
+thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful,
+half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast.
+Captain B------- dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women
+sitting beside him in the quiet room, “his eyes resting fondly upon the
+faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar
+objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed
+often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea”--“poor
+P--------,” with “his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
+_Punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
+looking-glasses, for instance”--that captain who “did everything with an
+air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
+but the result somehow was always on stereotyped {032}lines,
+unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart”--that
+other captain in whom “through a touch of self-seeking that modest
+artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament”--here are little
+sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well,
+Marlowe, Captain M’Whirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many
+others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere
+enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such
+themes, such subjects, such “cases” that it is hard, almost beyond
+discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has
+obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious
+muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the
+Sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and
+his picture.
+
+Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
+soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
+that _The Mirror of The Sea_, ultimately, has most to do. {033}As other
+men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his
+ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated
+to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance,
+but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a
+technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and
+letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
+crime in speaking of “casting” an anchor when the true technicality is
+“brought up”--“to an anchor” understood. In the chapter on “Yachts” he
+provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand
+and then suddenly there come these sentences--“the art of handling
+slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.”... “A ship is a
+creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to
+keep us up to mark.”
+
+Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
+which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
+her birth, in no ordered sequence of {034}events, but admitting us ever
+more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
+more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
+appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
+Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
+new, in the dock, “her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
+seamen who were to share their life with her.”... “She looked modest to
+me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
+shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
+intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already
+familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
+men.”
+
+Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
+salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
+contrast, his companion’s “Ships are all right....”
+
+He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the
+wickedly malicious, {035}the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
+adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has
+indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be
+severe before such a world of fine spirits.
+
+Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
+that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
+Inlands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar, he
+shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
+material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of Dominic,
+the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting
+the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his
+house of romance.
+
+This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly
+of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
+creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
+
+It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
+
+
+
+
+
+II--THE NOVELIST
+
+
+I
+
+|IN {036}discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet
+or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the
+Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
+
+It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
+applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
+novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the
+novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_ bear
+witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain,
+but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
+of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
+position as novelist {037}and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in
+his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work
+will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a
+novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human
+beings, with his attitude to those histories.
+
+Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
+seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves
+but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
+deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
+story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able
+to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any
+respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was
+quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously
+abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a
+fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time
+forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties;
+{038}but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_
+was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer’s
+Folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_
+had already preceded it.
+
+With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the
+novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame
+Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew
+into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed
+how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not
+very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about
+everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard
+Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At
+the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way
+that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a bright existence,
+flamed, and died. “Art for Art’s sake” was slain by the trial of Oscar
+Wilde in 1895.
+
+{039}Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about
+shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society
+made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period
+and the Boer War completed an old one.
+
+Of the whole question of Conrad’s place in the history of the English
+novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter.
+I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the
+French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents
+in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the
+time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic reaction
+that followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed
+away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him,
+a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for
+the work that he had to do.
+
+
+II
+
+{040}The form in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is
+the question which must always come first in any consideration of him
+as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has
+been most frequently attacked.
+
+His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
+suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
+instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
+between two seamen. One has “knifed” the other, and the quarrel has been
+watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
+wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
+seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give
+us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins,
+_oratio recta_, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just
+over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man
+and the girl are. He {041}describes the little barber and is, at once,
+amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. Seen
+standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but
+once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his
+melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the
+young girl who lodges with him. That leads one back, through many years,
+to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for
+a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps
+a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This old woman, now
+so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. Once she
+was...
+
+And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
+the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
+witness to Conrad’s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
+James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses,
+says: “It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a {042}votary of the way
+to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,” and his amazement
+at Conrad’s patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the
+stranger if we consider that in _What Maisie Knew_ and _The Awkward Age_
+he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside
+the intricate but masterly form of _The Awkward Age_ the duplicate
+narration of _Chance_ seems child’s play. Mr Henry James makes the
+mistake of speaking as though Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the
+form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun
+of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the
+easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the
+ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the Ancient Mariner
+and all the seamen before and alter him. Conrad must have his direct
+narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had
+generally come to him. He wishes to deny the effect of that direct and
+simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to {043}him. He must
+have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself
+has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth
+of it then must he have two or three.
+
+Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels:
+_Lord Jim, Nostromo_ and _Chance_. It is possible that _Lord Jim_ was
+conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
+from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
+Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others
+remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of
+the _Patna_, or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions
+waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation
+of these four men Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of
+the _Patna_: “He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
+on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a. soiled
+sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
+pair of ragged straw slippers {044}on his bare feet, and somebody’s
+cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up
+with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.” There are also two
+other “no-account chaps with him”--a sallow faced mean little chap with
+his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat,
+as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey
+moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and,
+with these three, Jim, “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as
+promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.” Here are these four, in the
+same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That boy in the
+same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has fastened
+on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and
+discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist’s thrill. We watch
+our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
+discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go?
+We are thrilled with the suspense. {045}Conrad, having discovered his
+subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most
+deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. “I was not
+there myself,” he tells us, “but I can show you someone who was.” He
+introduces us to a first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. “Now tell
+your story.” He has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest,
+and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at
+everyone’s disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself
+go. He is bothered now by no question but the thorough investigation of
+his discovery. What had Jim done that he should be in such a case? We
+must have the story of the loss of the _Patna_, that marvellous journey
+across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain
+and Jim’s fine, chivalrous soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so
+much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. At present, so
+absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. The
+illusion is perfect. We come to the inquiry. {046}One of the judges is
+Captain Brierley. “What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah! but I must tell
+you! Most extraordinary thing!”
+
+The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the
+_Patna_, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems
+now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the
+author’s hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre
+of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry
+and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing.
+We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every
+possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
+
+There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the
+method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue
+with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again.
+But the trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth
+and {047}reality of his story. He saw--we cannot for an instant doubt
+it--that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that
+we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not
+inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on--that is the truly terrible
+thing about Marlowe--and at the moment when we question his authenticity
+we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his
+flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that
+is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he
+duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent
+raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, halts and histories. That then
+is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held,
+but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster
+is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create
+your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw
+stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe has certainly been compelled to
+{048}face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.
+
+_Nostromo_ is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the
+narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to deny
+that _Nostromo_ is extremely contused in places, but it is a
+confusion that arises rather from Conrad’s confidence in the reader’s
+fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
+narrations are sometimes complicated--old Captain Mitchell does not
+always achieve authenticity--but on the whole, the reader may be said to
+be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
+little about others.
+
+But this assurance of the author’s that we must have already learnt the
+main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
+of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. “Of course,”
+ he says to us, “you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that
+revolution that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be
+there myself. I know all {049}the people concerned, and the central
+figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor Monyngham--no, it was a man
+about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. I knew the
+man well.... He.. and there we all are.”
+
+The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
+successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning
+which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing
+at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to
+our conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal
+of _Nostromo_, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the
+silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola
+girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of
+Viola’s wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone
+on the Isabels, of Hirsch’s torture, of Captain Mitchell’s watch--here
+are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely,
+in any other hands, be fantastic {050}melodrama, and both characters and
+scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth.
+Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt
+the author’s word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because
+it is entirely convincing.
+
+Not so with the third example, _Chance_. Here, as with _Lord Jim_, we
+may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
+in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the
+_Patna_ waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over
+_Chance_ reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of
+their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps
+of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That
+desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous
+Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her
+and too double-faced for him gives the book’s theme, and never in all
+the stories that preceded Flora’s has Conrad been so {051}eager to
+afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the
+unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a
+riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain
+Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough
+to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses
+that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us,
+more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible
+narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides
+from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the
+Knight and the Maiden--as the author names them--are retiring souls,
+and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate their timid
+hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and
+the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure
+realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here
+achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half
+of {052}_Lord Jim_ and the whole of _Nostromo_. We believe most
+emphatically in that first narration of young Powell’s about his first
+chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite
+casually he talks like this: “I do not even think that there was in
+what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly
+pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or
+equivocal situations.” We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely
+drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe’s interview with Flora on the
+pavement outside Anthony’s room.
+
+We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
+are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
+it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves,
+that we resent, a little, Marlowe’s intimacy which prevents, with
+patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have
+seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
+
+But when the second half of the book {053}arrives we can be confident
+no longer. Here, as in _Lord Jim_, it is possible to feel that Conrad,
+having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not
+know how to continue it. The true thing in _Lord Jim_ is the affair of
+the _Patna_; the true thing in _Chance_ is Captain Anthony’s rescue of
+Flora after her disaster. But whereas in _Lord Jim_ the sequel to Jim’s
+cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the
+sequel to Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any
+rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter
+in _Chance_ entitled _A Moonless Night_ is, in the first half of it,
+surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early
+short story, _The Return_. The conclusion of _Chance_ and certain tales
+in his volume, _Within the Tides_, make one wonder whether that
+alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully
+maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the
+former of these two qualities.
+
+{054}It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails,
+as it must before the end of _Chance_, the form of narration in _Oratio
+Recta_ is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in
+Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony
+and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were
+so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a
+deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.
+
+I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books
+are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
+unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held
+by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to
+tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if
+his presence be not true...
+
+
+III
+
+If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad’s attention we shall
+see that {055}in almost every case his subjects are concerned with
+unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to
+the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the
+blindness that renders men’s honesty and heroism of so little account
+that gives occasion for his irony.
+
+He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
+human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
+whom he can admire. “If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
+thing up,” we can hear him say. “He can see at once that the odds are
+too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
+the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
+and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven’s bolts and lightnings
+and they will not quail.” They command his pity, his reverence, his
+tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his
+shoulders, he says: “You see. I told you so. He may even think he has
+won. We know better, you and I.” {056}The theme of _Almayer’s Folly_
+is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of
+death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against
+nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth).
+_Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which
+stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first.
+_Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against
+the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the
+very epitome of Conrad’s themes, is the struggle of M’Whirr against the
+storm (here again it is M’Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear,
+in the very last line of the book, the storm’s confident chuckle of
+ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest.
+In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad’s finest
+figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three
+tales in _‘Twixt Land, and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the
+struggle of simple, {057}unimaginative men against forces too strong
+for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character,
+finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_
+Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains
+and struggles of insignificant individuals.
+
+Of Conrad’s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
+to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
+of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them
+and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
+
+Whatever Conrad’s books are or are not, it may safely be said that
+they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
+probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
+affection, his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding
+over the inequality of life’s battle. His humour, often of a very
+fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
+light-heartedness.
+
+Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would {058}have found Marlowe, Jim and
+Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
+they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
+
+I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
+and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
+that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
+meeting a number of Conrad’s characters is that they have existences
+and histories entirely independent of their introducer’s kind offices.
+Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
+are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
+about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
+all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
+histories.
+
+One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
+mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
+the robust vitality of their {059}predecessors; the figures in the novel
+of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
+
+In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
+fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before
+an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
+wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy
+before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton
+before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy
+before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his
+inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it
+may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
+their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author’s own
+determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
+
+This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
+novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
+contemporaries--namely, the assurance that {060}his characters have
+their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that
+he is describing to us.
+
+The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
+the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
+speculating deeply upon “what happened afterwards” to Gayef or Barbara,
+to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad’s sea captains as with Tchekov’s
+Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
+incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
+from the author’s eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for
+him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
+in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
+doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
+but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
+only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
+things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
+M’Whirr that he wrote long letters home, {061}beginning always with the
+words, “My darling Wife,” and relating in minute detail each successive
+trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs M’Whirr, we learn, was “a pretentious person
+with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in
+the neighbourhood considered as ‘quite superior.’ The only secret of her
+life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
+to stay for good.” Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate “who never
+wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and
+though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with
+extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges
+of a boarding-house.” How conscious we are of Jim’s English country
+parsonage, of Captain Anthony’s loneliness, of Marlowe’s isolation. By
+this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole
+character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on
+board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing,
+{062}we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on
+board, “A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol.”... “Very soon
+the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her
+over the side. We didn’t recognise him at all....” And Mr Baker, the
+chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends
+for life?
+
+“No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
+Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
+and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
+town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
+in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady,
+he thought, sitting down for a moment’s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
+enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere.
+He didn’t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The
+darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck;
+and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom
+through many {063}long years he had given the best of a seaman’s care.
+And never a command in sight. Not once!”
+
+There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. “Donkin entered.
+They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. ‘I give you a bad
+discharge,’ he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: ‘I don’t want your
+bloomin’ discharge--keep it. I’m goin’ ter ‘ave a job hashore.’ He turned
+to us. ‘No more bloomin’ sea for me,’ he said, aloud. All looked at him.
+He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any
+of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
+declaration.”
+
+In how many novels would Donkin’s life have been limited by the part
+that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus?_ As it
+is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
+only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--“As I came up I saw a
+red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, {064}fluffy
+hair, fall on Charley’s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
+him:--‘Oh, my boy! my boy!’--‘Leggo me,’ said Charley, ‘leggo,
+mother!’ I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of
+the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic,
+courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life
+to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
+good-naturedly:--‘If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall ‘ave a bob for
+a drink out of my pay.’”
+
+But one passes from these men of the sea--from M’Whirr and Baker,
+from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
+suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
+men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About
+such men as M’Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not
+believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will,
+we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little
+details, {065}M’Whirr’s wife, Mr Baker’s proud sister, Charley’s
+mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
+world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister Nikita,
+the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
+confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
+perfect sympathy.
+
+His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
+_idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
+unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you.
+But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing
+finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because
+they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the
+imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind
+upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved,
+the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough
+to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again
+{066}we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees
+him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality
+and its significance. “His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of
+having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.”
+
+With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
+character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we
+have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists’ lives
+beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
+independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
+to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
+things.
+
+Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée
+fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
+phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
+it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
+soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
+upon which he has {067}placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of
+an _idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
+other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
+tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book’s close,
+that we should have been told so much more.
+
+Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
+Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
+romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott,
+with the single exception of Thackeray’s Beatrix--and here I am not
+forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own
+immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so
+unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
+Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
+shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
+romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
+through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: “... his hat, a gay
+sombrero with {068}a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
+Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the
+embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam
+of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the
+silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when--...
+in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
+opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside
+a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his
+eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or
+moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to
+the most atrocious sufferings”--we are conscious of his superb figure;
+and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the
+book assure us--“In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to
+ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of
+solid silver, the {069}genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores
+dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
+ His genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture
+standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not
+given us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us.
+Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of
+the Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes
+might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
+truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
+our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
+not met him.
+
+Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
+basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
+so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
+daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in
+the whole of Conrad’s art--the drive in the {070}cab of old Mrs Verloc,
+Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange
+gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S------, Peter
+Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in
+_Romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in
+others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his
+lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the
+world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of
+all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is,
+finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose
+pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends
+with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know
+the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
+
+Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
+seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its
+sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness
+s. Although each {071}work, from, the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely
+perfect _Secret Share_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart,
+the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
+surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.
+
+
+
+
+III--THE POET
+
+|THE {072}poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical
+side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, _The Secret
+Agent_, and _Under Western Eyes_, or such short stories as _The
+Informer_, or _Il Conde_, but the philosophic note sounded poetically,
+as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
+
+Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad
+the novelist deserve consideration--style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
+the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
+of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier
+works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from {073}Conrad’s
+second novel, _An Outcast of the Islands_:
+
+“He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing
+each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of
+the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone
+by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies
+that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He
+seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness,
+spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to
+hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by
+the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an
+aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold
+scrutiny of glittering stars.”
+
+And from his latest novel, _Chance_:
+
+“The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there
+in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man
+from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick
+{074}glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced
+no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight,
+and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the
+immensity of space made visible--almost palpable. Young Powell felt
+it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy,
+powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something
+almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two
+feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a
+darkening universe.”
+
+It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice
+of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of
+the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The
+first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be
+denied, something of the “purple patch.” We feel that the prose is too
+dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work
+slightly affected by the author’s {075}determination that it shall be
+fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any
+poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though
+it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally,
+there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument
+to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again
+and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in _Almayer’s
+Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth,
+Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim_,--prose piled high with sonorous and
+slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds
+hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the
+suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority
+places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous.
+For instance, in the tale called _The Return_, there is the following
+passage:--
+
+“He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if
+dazed. There was {076}less than a second of suspense while they both
+felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall
+into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted,
+‘Come back,’ and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in
+peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last
+chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible,
+and dark, and safe--like a grave.”
+
+The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words--“moral
+annihilation,” “devouring nowhere,” “peaceful desperation,” “last chance
+of life,” “terrible,” “like a grave.” That he shouted gives a final
+touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
+
+Often, in the earlier books, Conrad’s style has the awkward
+over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is
+using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus
+we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier
+style, the marked effect of {077}two influences. One influence is that
+of the French language and especially of the author of _Madame Bovary_.
+When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career
+as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand
+this French inflection. Flaubert’s effect on his style is quite
+unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert’s: “Toutes ses velléités de
+dénigrement l’envanouissaiont sous la poésie du rôle qui l’envahissait;
+et entrainée vers l’homme par l’illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se
+figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide...”
+ and this a sentence of Conrad’s: “Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard’s
+shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if
+to her--to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature--had been
+revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of
+the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting.”
+
+Conrad’s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It
+is probable, {078}however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French
+language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in
+any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The
+influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and
+sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a
+crutch before he could walk alone.
+
+The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
+importance--the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
+that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for
+his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its
+full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations
+of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of
+which we think in many pages of _Almayer’s Folly_ and _An Outcast of
+the Island_, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
+emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
+rapture.
+
+He was under the influence of these powers {079}also in that, at that
+time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent
+to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately
+under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions
+and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired
+moment comes to him--often the inspiration does not come because he
+cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his
+middle period, in the period of _Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness_ and
+_Nostromo_, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating,
+steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as
+it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage
+from _Typhoon_ with that earlier one from _The Outcast of the Islands_
+that I quoted above:
+
+“He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild
+scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds.
+She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane
+{080}the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the
+deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a
+living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest.
+It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes’ head a few stars
+shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc
+frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too
+seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster
+of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.”
+
+That is poet’s work, and poet’s work at its finest. Instead of
+impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the
+author has made the very most of a rather thin moment--feels, indeed,
+himself that it is thin--we are here under the influence of something
+that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is
+thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of
+the heart of the finest material--and yet it remains, through all its
+discipline, spontaneous.
+
+These three tales, _Typhoon, Youth_ and {081}_Heart of Darkness_, stand
+by themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We
+may remember such characters as M’Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are
+figures as the old seneschal in _The Eve of St Agnes_ or the Ancient
+Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought
+and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman’s _When Lilac
+first on the Door yard bloomed_ or Keats’ _Nightingale._ Their author
+was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of
+his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
+
+The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to
+the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist
+whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible
+way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of
+sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but
+only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed
+minister, is older--he must look back now on the colours of {082}_Youth_
+with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as
+_The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_, in such a volume of
+stories as _A Set of Six_, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly
+abandoned--we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and
+sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that
+passage from _Chance_ quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although
+we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of _An Outcast of
+the Islands_, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there,
+but--“Young Powell felt it.” In that magical storm that was _Typhoon_
+God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later
+experience young Powell is our companion.
+
+
+II.
+
+The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
+atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists
+in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his
+{083}daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such
+a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play
+the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway
+station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters
+immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick
+slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background
+react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that
+reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with
+other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of
+stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own
+day, Mr Arnold Bennett’s Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or
+Mrs Wharton’s New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most
+successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us
+with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation
+with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the
+contemplation of some scene and is thence {084}extended to the whole
+vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be
+as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits
+are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities
+of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and
+Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the
+scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting
+between Beauchamp and René in _Beauchamp’s Career_. It is not only that
+these scenes are “done” to the full extent of their “doing,” it is also
+that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with
+all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev,
+Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.
+Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
+
+But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
+lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in Literature_,
+has named this element Glamour. {085}In writing of the novels by George
+Eliot he says: “Indeed there is almost every element of literature,
+except a certain indescribable thing called _Glamour_, which was the
+whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
+clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
+when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
+Castlewood.” Now’ this matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens,
+for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the
+house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit’s escape after the murder do
+not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate,
+that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential it is certain also to
+have glamour.
+
+The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very
+strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is
+his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
+important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.
+In _The Outcast {086}of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain
+Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
+terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it
+has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
+power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord Jim_ the contrast
+of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast not only
+immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain’s
+gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
+ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
+degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects
+the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
+intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the
+negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
+boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
+that single voyage of the _Narcissus_. {087}When Winnie Verloc, her old
+mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not
+seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark,
+dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton
+lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend.
+That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate
+companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples
+might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
+
+He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
+significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he
+wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather
+because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the
+most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We
+may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they
+drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now
+see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.”
+ But {088}Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later
+credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries.
+Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is
+as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that
+no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure.
+But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around
+and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness,
+trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze
+of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer,
+a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy
+splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the
+austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba,
+asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the
+mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the
+dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so
+{089}that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the
+cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are
+“a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique--it
+bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a
+remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible
+final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs
+Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
+
+“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
+soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers
+of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
+European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
+petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a
+slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
+clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
+wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
+place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
+blankets that {090}lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat....
+Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and
+crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in
+the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the
+big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot
+brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some
+dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
+
+And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--“the forests
+unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of
+heaven--and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from
+every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the
+juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse
+beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however,
+select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about
+_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
+
+The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination {091}of the silver of the
+Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near
+it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the
+white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad,
+then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,
+the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure
+and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,
+romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
+silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been
+there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks
+swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which
+the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early
+sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from
+Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing
+coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their {092}evening
+meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without
+a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
+triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to
+a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
+walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp
+under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse
+of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without
+penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the
+strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and
+above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers
+the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue
+sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created
+beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,
+many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and
+princesses passing--but the detail of it is {093}built with careful
+realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We
+wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral,
+its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its
+hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns
+for us.
+
+Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is
+a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most
+fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of
+Stevenson’s chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,
+gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast
+that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s
+treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco
+tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The
+detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book
+incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is
+{094}finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We
+have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of
+the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,
+many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the
+Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality
+of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a
+house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The
+two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
+described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio
+concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in
+from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon
+the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
+some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a
+broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
+chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
+at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and,
+{095}ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very
+stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his
+long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old
+Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black
+brute, with a hammer bead--you would have seen in the street dozing
+motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the
+curbstone of the side-walk!”
+
+How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the
+exclamation of some reader “Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like
+that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable
+veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed
+doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!--and can we not sniff
+something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more
+about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he
+must remember enough to fill a volume!
+
+He is able, therefore, upon this foundation {096}of a minute and
+scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases
+without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate,
+choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression
+of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is
+of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or
+Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the
+life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little
+tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the
+unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons,
+catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember
+also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest
+and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
+
+Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet,
+working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is
+at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to
+the last {097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of
+certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It
+_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that
+has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or
+fable for its interpretation....
+
+When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
+creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,
+certain limitations.
+
+
+III
+
+As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
+that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
+men.
+
+It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
+watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
+cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
+they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
+{098}ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the
+horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he
+can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the
+very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but
+his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
+
+There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
+it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free
+from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound
+is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove
+his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
+creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
+Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He
+passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
+and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to
+celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
+ {099}Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the
+history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit
+has been vain--as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
+
+And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
+observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
+character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his
+merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
+whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
+
+M’Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
+tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
+from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has
+witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley,
+watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that
+nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
+degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
+leap--the victim is always in his power. {100}It comes from this
+philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most
+definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of
+brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are melancholy and ironic: “If you see
+far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way
+to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is
+tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he
+chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he
+has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of
+the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
+Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For
+Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond
+words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women
+of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for
+them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty
+of his own sea captains. {101}This then is quite simply his philosophy.
+It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters
+to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is
+stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant,
+hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of
+any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his
+own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all
+this: preparing to leave...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his
+butterflies.”
+
+Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
+whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
+Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication,
+save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in
+their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many
+ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation
+of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here.
+Browning’s {102}interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of
+him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of
+men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual
+and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s
+clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual
+philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately
+enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has
+exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be
+seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
+
+Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
+of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the most
+romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
+such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
+forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did.
+Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo?_ Mr Chesterton has
+written of {103}Browning: “He substituted the street with the green
+blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted
+match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for
+the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged,
+faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a
+fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
+
+The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
+precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
+
+And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
+Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
+Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
+to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
+these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
+of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
+heart, it is also that the worlds of these {104}two poets are the same.
+How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
+de Barrel, M’Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
+witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s
+wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
+ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though
+he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
+
+Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
+statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
+simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
+last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
+of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
+temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
+buttresses and towers.
+
+Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as
+I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
+carried Romantic-Realism showed {105}the author of _Almayer’s Folly_ the
+signs of the road that he was to follow.
+
+If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
+may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
+novelist?
+
+
+
+
+IV--ROMANCE AND REALISM
+
+
+I
+
+|THE {106}terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years
+very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of
+character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England
+at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study
+of _Robert Louis Stevenson_, said: “Stevenson, reviving the
+never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has
+brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if
+romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
+personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
+a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade
+finished his vocifer{107}ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if
+it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
+
+We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to
+his estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without
+denying that the date of the publication of _St Ives_ was also the date
+of the death of the purely romantic novel.
+
+But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic”
+ is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the
+popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has,
+recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in
+its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like
+romances,” we hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away
+from real life, which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is
+defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant
+facts by an observant pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain
+order of novel {108}exclaim, “because it is so like life. It tells me
+just what I myself see every day--I know where I am.”
+
+Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas
+of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
+everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive
+an ambition--I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of
+life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and
+reminiscence--Romance is the study of life with the faculties of
+imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional,
+poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and
+recorded---it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance
+may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its
+spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and
+sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here
+that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary
+divorce from reality, nor does {109}Realism imply a detailed and dusty
+preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for
+Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is
+not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult
+of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as
+eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve
+eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard
+to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may
+be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its
+strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and
+that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been
+very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards
+Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by
+Romantic-Realism, such a novel as _The Brothers Karamazov_, such a
+play as _The Cherry Orchard_ are there before us, as the best possible
+examples. We might say, in a word, that _Karamazov_ has, in the England
+{110}of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _Madame
+Bovary_....
+
+
+II
+
+It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
+development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
+Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
+kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
+their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
+Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
+hold that same position.
+
+Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
+French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is
+to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for
+him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts,
+sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently
+realistic, when it is merely {111}recorded and perceived by any
+observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without
+for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it,
+giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the
+whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
+
+As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
+often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
+of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
+who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used
+by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a
+little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the
+required ground.
+
+Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
+and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
+determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
+of all honest men. {112}In that intention he has absolutely succeeded;
+he has not abated one jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart
+of Darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our
+literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is
+falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
+
+The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
+determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
+by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him
+in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his
+clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define,
+but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by
+Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and Punishment,
+The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are romantic realism
+at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is
+ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince
+Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, {113}Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to
+us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from
+us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s
+love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it,
+with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical
+as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony,
+Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the
+limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves
+on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity,
+tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes,
+never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of
+the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his
+pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
+he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--Conrad finds
+humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
+
+Nevertheless he has been influenced by {114}the Russian writer
+continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under
+Western Eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason,
+perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as
+though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of
+him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
+independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
+creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
+hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
+English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
+found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
+his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they
+find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
+that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they
+may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
+they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
+{115}because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than
+they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because
+characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
+dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
+determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
+Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr,
+demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
+
+Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
+has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
+through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing
+that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the zest of
+creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their
+art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life.
+That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the
+work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows
+exhaustion and sterility {116}means nothing; the stream will soon ran
+full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel,
+in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip
+of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that
+cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for
+form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws
+or the paradise of free love.
+
+
+III
+
+Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
+English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
+provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that
+it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English
+novelists--in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J.
+D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan,
+Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young--this influence is to be detected.
+{117}Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr
+Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism
+of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent
+a novel as Mr Swinnerton’s _On the Staircase_ with Mr Arnold Bennett’s
+_Sacred and Profane Love_, or Mr Galsworthy’s _Man of Property_--and Mr
+E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose
+_Longest Journey_ and _Howard’s End_ may possibly provide the historian
+of English literature with dates as important as the publication of
+_Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly
+belong to this essay.
+
+It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
+realism can return. We have been shown in _Nostromo_ something that has
+the colour of _Treasure Island_ and the reality of _New Grub Street_.
+If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is
+dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely,
+on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that
+at few periods in {118}English literature has the novel shown more signs
+of a thrilling and original future.
+
+For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance
+for a moment at his last novel, _Victory_.
+
+The conclusion of _Chance_ and the last volume of short stories had
+shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
+ultimately, from reality. _Victory_, splendid tale though it is, does
+not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of
+almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and
+malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and
+Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as
+the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then
+returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for
+man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair
+to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He
+prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another,
+that elemental catastrophe is pre{119}vented he consoles himself
+by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his
+characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does
+immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the
+whole of Conrad--the last conversation between Heyst and Lena--that we
+see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
+more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence
+of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects.
+At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the
+boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent
+in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
+
+Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
+incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the
+discipline and restraint that were once his law.
+
+Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years,
+from the _Almayer’s Folly_ of 1895 to the _Victory_ of 1915, one
+{120}realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor
+insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our
+shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to
+enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.
+
+
+
+
+A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+
+[The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
+signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
+
+Almayer’s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New
+editions. (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
+
+The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
+edition, 1910.
+
+Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
+
+Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M.
+Hueffer (Heinemann). 1901.
+
+Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
+
+Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
+
+Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith,
+Elder). 1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
+Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
+Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
+
+New edition, 1914.
+
+A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
+New edition, 1915.
+
+Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
+
+Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
+(Dent). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+{123}Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (_Macmillan_). 1895.
+New editions, 1912; (_Doubleday_). 1911.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (_Appleton_). 1896. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1914.
+
+Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (_Dodd, Mead_). 1897.
+New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: “The Nigger of the
+‘Narcissus’” (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Tales of Unrest (_Scribner_). 1898.
+
+Lord Jim (_Doubleday_) 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (_McClure Co._).
+1901.
+
+Typhoon (_Putman_). 1902. New edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Youth, and two Other Stories (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred to
+_Doubleday_). 1903.
+
+Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (_McClure Co._). 1903. New
+edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (_McClure Co_.
+Afterwards transferred to _Doubleday_). 1904.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (_Harper_), 1904. {124}The Mirror of
+the Sea: Memories and Impressions (_Harper_). 1906.
+
+The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (_Harper_). 1907.
+
+A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred
+to _Doubleday_). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (_Harper_). 1911.
+
+A Personal Retold (_Harper_). 1912.
+
+‘Twist Land and Sea: Tales (_Doran_). 1912. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1911.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+A Set of Six [Tales: one, “The Duel.” previously issued as “A Point of
+Honour”] (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Within the Tides: Tales (_Doubleday_). 1916.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 52453 ***
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-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Joseph Conrad
-
-Author: Hugh Walpole
-
-Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
-Last Updated: November 20, 2016
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
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-</pre>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      JOSEPH CONRAD
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Hugh Walpole
-    </h2>
-    <h4>
-      New York: Henry Holt And Company
-    </h4>
-    <h3>
-      1916
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0001.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008.jpg" alt="0008 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      TO
-    </h3>
-    <h3>
-      SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>CONTENTS</b>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II&mdash;THE NOVELIST </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III&mdash;THE POET </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S
-      PRINCIPAL WRITINGS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY </a>
-    </p>
-   <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#linkindex"> INDEX </a>
-    </p>
-
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>O any<span
-      class="pagenum">7</span><a name="link007" id="link007"></a> reader of the
-      books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate
-      experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making
-      of his art. It may happen often enough that an author&rsquo;s artistic life is
-      of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a
-      personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of Joseph Conrad
-      the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer
-      deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with
-      the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with
-      the three backgrounds against whose form and colour <span class="pagenum">8</span><a
-      name="link008" id="link008"></a>his art has been placed we have some
-      compulsory connection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th December
-      1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of Poland. In 1862
-      his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish rebellion, was
-      banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother and father there until
-      his mother died, when he was sent back to the Ukraine. In 1870 his lather
-      died.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until 1874,
-      when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. In the
-      month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew at that
-      time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the
-      <i>Duke of Sutherland</i> as ordinary seaman. He became a Master in the
-      English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. In
-      1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years:
-      he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various
-      periods during <span class="pagenum">9</span><a name="link009" id="link009"></a>his
-      sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin. With that publisher&rsquo;s acceptance of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
-      Folly</i> the third period of his life began. Since then his history has
-      been the history of his books.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
-      relationship of these three backgrounds&mdash;Poland, the Sea, the inner
-      security and tradition of an English country-side&mdash;one can realise
-      what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed
-      through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may
-      be enough to give life and vigour to any poet&rsquo;s temperament. The romantic
-      melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
-      deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
-      tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
-      monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
-      impulses <span class="pagenum">10</span><a name="link010" id="link010"></a>those
-      were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of
-      a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. He
-      sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an
-      ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men
-      when to them also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never
-      afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse
-      from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered
-      the Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He
-      thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so
-      honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only
-      personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He found in
-      her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the
-      contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over
-      the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. <span class="pagenum">11</span><a
-      name="link011" id="link011"></a>He found, too, in her service, the type of
-      man who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
-      threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
-      struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who realised
-      so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their
-      master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about
-      it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of
-      freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
-      performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
-      possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
-      have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
-      sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in
-      nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his
-      companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision had
-      driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
-      despair of <span class="pagenum">12</span><a name="link012" id="link012"></a>any
-      possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where
-      freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise;
-      the two sides of the shield were revealed to him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then, towards the end of his twenty years&rsquo; service of the sea, the
-      creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments of
-      opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and
-      diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence
-      in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations,
-      will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>
-      had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well
-      believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and
-      surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world.
-      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>, however, was not rejected; its publication caused
-      <i>The Spectator</i> to remark: &ldquo;The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but
-      it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay
-      Archipelago.&rdquo; He <span class="pagenum">13</span><a name="link013"      id="link013"></a>had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind
-      from the beginning. He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that
-      day in 1897 when Henley accepted <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> for <i>The
-      New Review</i> as a more important date in his new career. That date may
-      serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
-      almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
-      behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
-      &ldquo;case&rdquo; of his earlier life. It was as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; that he saw it, a &ldquo;case&rdquo;
-       that was to produce all those other &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that were his books. This has
-      been their history.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
-      period, beginning with <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in 1895, ended with <i>Lord
-      Jim</i> in 1900. The second contains <span class="pagenum">14</span><a
-      name="link014" id="link014"></a>the two volumes of <i>Youth</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>,
-      the novel <i>Romance</i> that he wrote in collaboration with Ford Madox
-      Hueffer, and ends with <i>Nostromo</i>, published in 1903. The third
-      period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with <i>The Secret Agent</i>,
-      and receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of <i>Chance</i> in
-      1914, and <i>Victory</i> (1915).
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
-      language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
-      view of the &ldquo;schools,&rdquo; to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
-      very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves upon
-      him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild beasts
-      behind iron bars. <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i>
-      (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in the
-      freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their world
-      had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of his own
-      individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and a new
-      vigour. In the <span class="pagenum">15</span><a name="link015"      id="link015"></a>character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Bahalatchi
-      and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of great things.
-      Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were
-      clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style a sense of rhetoric
-      and lack of ease. His vision of his background was pulled out beyond its
-      natural intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so
-      obvious as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out
-      of malicious perversity, anything else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, <i>Tales of
-      Unrest</i>, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad&rsquo;s difficulties. One study
-      in this book, <i>The Return</i>, with its redundancies and overemphasis,
-      is the crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume
-      succeeds. It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung
-      himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
-      what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, <i>The Nigger of the
-      Narcissus</i>. This <span class="pagenum">16</span><a name="link016"      id="link016"></a>was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a ship
-      from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the human
-      souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death, an influence
-      ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always tender and
-      humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other vessels, the <i>Narcissus</i>.
-      Never again, except perhaps in <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i>, was he to be
-      so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. The book is a gallery of
-      remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in
-      perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant,
-      abandoned. It is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence.
-      Of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period
-      of his work, <i>Lord Jim</i>. This was to remain, until the publication of
-      <i>Chance</i>, his most popular novel. It is the story of a young
-      Englishman&rsquo;s loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious
-      recovery. The first half of the book is a finely sustained development of
-      a <span class="pagenum">17</span><a name="link017" id="link017"></a>vividly
-      remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea
-      pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. Here
-      then in 1900 Conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the
-      jungle and was able to choose his path. His choice was still dictated by
-      the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of
-      observation his creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim,
-      Marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a
-      new birth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There appeared now in <i>Youth, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>
-      three of the finest short stories in the English language, work of
-      reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and
-      flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now
-      to be abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in <i>Youth</i> and its
-      evocation of the East, in <i>The Heart of Darkness</i> and its evocation
-      of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in <i>Typhoon</i> and its
-      evocation of the sea. He was never, after <span class="pagenum">18</span><a
-      name="link018" id="link018"></a>these tales, to write again of the sea as
-      though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
-      regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This second period closed with the production of a work that was
-      deliberately created rather than reminiscent, <i>Nostromo</i>. Conrad may
-      have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
-      stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
-      anything for their creation. There is much to be said about <i>Nostromo</i>,
-      in many ways the greatest of all Conrad&rsquo;s works, but, for the moment, one
-      would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical
-      births, in a journal&mdash;<i>T.P.&lsquo;s Weekly</i>&mdash;and astonished and
-      bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
-      and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its
-      critics did not understand it, and its author&rsquo;s own admirers were puzzled
-      by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>Nostromo</i> was followed by a pause&mdash;one <span class="pagenum">19</span><a
-      name="link019" id="link019"></a>can easily imagine that its production
-      did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When, however, in 1907
-      appeared <i>The Secret Agent</i>, a new attitude was most plainly visible.
-      He was suddenly detached, writing now of &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that interested him as an
-      investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning
-      participation of experience. He is tender towards Winnie Verloc and her
-      old mother, the two women in <i>The Secret Agent</i>, but he studies them
-      quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim so radiantly, that
-      fierce contempt that in <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i> accompanied
-      Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer artist, but we
-      have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. <i>The Secret
-      Agent</i> is a tale of secret service in London; it contains the
-      wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
-      Conrad&rsquo;s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
-      completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 <i>Under Western Eyes</i>
-      spoke strongly of a Russian influence <span class="pagenum">20</span><a
-      name="link020" id="link020"></a>Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had too markedly
-      their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in
-      Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A volume of short stories, <i>A Set of Six</i>, illustrating still more
-      emphatically Conrad&rsquo;s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
-      chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars&mdash;<i>The
-      Duel</i>&mdash;a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained
-      note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land and Sea</i>, to
-      unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method.
-      <i>A Smile, of Fortune</i> and <i>The Secret Sharer</i> are amazing in the
-      beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the
-      reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as
-      something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken
-      from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress.
-      Nevertheless <i>The Secret Sharer</i> is a most marvellous story,
-      marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the
-      <span class="pagenum">21</span><a name="link021" id="link021"></a>contrast
-      between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of
-      its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared <i>Chance</i>, by no means the
-      finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
-      wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of <i>The
-      Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, of <i>Nostromo</i>. With
-      the popular success of <i>Chance</i> the first period of his work is
-      closed. On the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the
-      artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
-      prophecy.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      III
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad, no
-      better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading
-      of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. <i>Some
-      Reminiscences</i> and <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> demand consideration on
-      the threshold of any survey of this author&rsquo;s work, because <span
-      class="pagenum">22</span><a name="link022" id="link022"></a>they reveal,
-      from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the
-      individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the
-      process of creation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares
-      to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor
-      fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels.
-      <i>Some Reminiscences</i> has only <i>Tristram Shandy</i> for its rival in
-      the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. <i>The
-      Mirror of the Sea</i> has no rival at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
-      reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
-      starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
-      Folly</i>, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of <i>Some
-      Reminiscences</i>, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of
-      <i>Almayer</i> has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
-      maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of <span
-      class="pagenum">23</span><a name="link023" id="link023"></a>the clock have
-      covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply that the
-      fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the very essence
-      of Conrad&rsquo;s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that
-      to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short.
-      His reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take
-      on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: &ldquo;Ah! yes.
-      I&rsquo;m interesting, of course, but don&rsquo;t you remember...?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
-      not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
-      figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be
-      crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the book
-      with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
-      of the <i>Nonsuch</i> who... or there is the window just behind the
-      writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one
-      of the year &lsquo;88 when...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the course of his thrilling voyage of <span class="pagenum">24</span><a
-      name="link024" id="link024"></a>discovery we are, by a kind of most
-      blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the author&rsquo;s own
-      most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the miracle, learn
-      something of Conrad as ship&rsquo;s officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a
-      visitor to his uncle&rsquo;s house in Poland.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them
-      with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those
-      glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us,
-      only partially realised.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
-      breathless, and, by the virtue of its author&rsquo;s style, solemn, we do
-      obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
-      revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
-      our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often
-      sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality.
-      Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells us: <span
-      class="pagenum">25</span><a name="link025" id="link025"></a>"Those who
-      read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a
-      few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It
-      rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when
-      nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to
-      attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.&rdquo;
-       (Page 20.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or again:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
-      from which a philosophical mind should be free.&rdquo; (Page 21.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or again:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
-      sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
-      the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
-      can be rendered without shame.&rdquo; (Page 194.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
-      self-satisfaction, this sobriety&mdash;these qualities do give some
-      implication of the colour of the work that will <span class="pagenum">26</span><a
-      name="link026" id="link026"></a>arise from them; and when to these
-      qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we must have some
-      true conception of the nature of the work that he was to do.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is for this that <i>Some Reminiscences</i> is valuable. To read it as a
-      detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book of
-      modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the <i>My
-      Autobiography</i> or <i>My Life</i> of some eminent scientist or
-      theologian, is to be most grievously disappointed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
-      disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
-      very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all their
-      own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad&rsquo;s faults and
-      of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and
-      simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there is almost
-      everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift
-      that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of <span
-      class="pagenum">27</span><a name="link027" id="link027"></a>art,
-      overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged, incoherent,
-      inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured
-      into a friend&rsquo;s ear in a moment of sudden confidence. That may or may not
-      be the best way to conduct reminiscences; the book remains a supremely
-      intimate, engaging and enlightening introduction to its author.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> we are on very different ground. As I
-      have already said, this is Conrad&rsquo;s happiest book&mdash;indeed, with the
-      possible exception of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, his only happy
-      book. He is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his
-      distrust, his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here
-      permitting himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and
-      behind that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely
-      at variance with the distrust of his later novels.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
-      papers, with such titles as <i>Landfalls and Departures</i>, <span
-      class="pagenum">28</span><a name="link028" id="link028"></a><i>Overdue and
-      Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft</i>. No reader
-      however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely
-      binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to him, mto the
-      very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she really is, he
-      has been made free of a great order.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources&mdash;the
-      majesty, power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the
-      lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships
-      that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole
-      life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements
-      in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its
-      power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which
-      is the life of the sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Conrad&rsquo;s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and
-      passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism,
-      her deceits, her <span class="pagenum">29</span><a name="link029"      id="link029"></a>cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men,
-      but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The sea&mdash;this truth must be confessed&mdash;has no generosity. No
-      display of manly qualities&mdash;courage, hardihood, endurance,
-      faithfulness&mdash;has ever been known to touch its irresponsible
-      consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a
-      savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest
-      appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships
-      and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat
-      together in the face of his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep
-      is its unfathomable cruelty.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
-      he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
-      cruelty. She positively &ldquo;brings it off,&rdquo; this assertion of her right, and
-      once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In this
-      worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a <span
-      class="pagenum">30</span><a name="link030" id="link030"></a>lyrical
-      freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never again, not even in
-      <i>Typhoon</i> and <i>Youth</i>, to write with such free and spontaneous
-      lyricism as in his famous passage about the &ldquo;West Wind.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> forms then the best possible introduction to
-      Conrad&rsquo;s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently
-      than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion. It
-      presents also, however, in its treatment of the second element of his
-      subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the characters whom
-      he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in his novels. About
-      these same men there are certain characteristics to be noticed,
-      characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later analysis of
-      Conrad&rsquo;s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some mention here as
-      witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions that he, most
-      naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to be marked that almost
-      all the men upon the sea, from &ldquo;poor Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
-      who used <span class="pagenum">31</span><a name="link031" id="link031"></a>to
-      suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was
-      approaching a coast,&rdquo; to the dramatic Dominic (&ldquo;from the slow,
-      imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had
-      never smiled in his life&rdquo;), are silent and thoughtful. Granted this
-      silence, Conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous survey, is instantly
-      attracted by any possible contrast. Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;- dying
-      in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in the quiet
-      room, &ldquo;his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the
-      pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home whose
-      abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of
-      stress and anxiety at sea&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;poor P&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,&rdquo;
-       with &ldquo;his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in <i>Punch</i>, his
-      little oddities&mdash;like his strange passion for borrowing
-      looking-glasses, for instance&rdquo;&mdash;that captain who &ldquo;did everything with
-      an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
-      but the result somehow was always on stereotyped <span class="pagenum">32</span><a
-      name="link032" id="link032"></a>lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson
-      that one could lay to heart&rdquo;&mdash;that other captain in whom &ldquo;through a
-      touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to
-      his temperament&rdquo;&mdash;here are little sketches for those portraits that
-      afterwards we are to know so well, Marlowe, Captain M&rsquo;Whirr, Captain
-      Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many others. Here we may fancy that his eye
-      lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little oddities and
-      contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects, such &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that
-      it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they
-      have to be left. He has obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition
-      of the curious muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august
-      power of the Sea&mdash;that is all that his present subject demands, that
-      is his theme and his picture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
-      soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
-      that <i>The Mirror of The Sea</i>, ultimately, has most to do. <span
-      class="pagenum">33</span><a name="link033" id="link033"></a>As other men
-      write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his ships. He
-      sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and
-      beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises
-      them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft.
-      You may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell
-      the journalists of their crime in speaking of &ldquo;casting&rdquo; an anchor when the
-      true technicality is &ldquo;brought up&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;to an anchor&rdquo; understood. In the
-      chapter on &ldquo;Yachts&rdquo; he provides as much technical detail as any book of
-      instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences&mdash;&ldquo;the
-      art of handling slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.&rdquo;...
-      &ldquo;A ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on
-      purpose to keep us up to mark.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which
-      I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from her birth,
-      in no ordered sequence of <span class="pagenum">34</span><a name="link034"      id="link034"></a>events, but admitting us ever more closely into her
-      intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little
-      things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to
-      our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. Conrad is tender to her as
-      he is to nothing human. He watches her shy, new, in the dock, &ldquo;her
-      reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share
-      their life with her.&rdquo;... &ldquo;She looked modest to me. I imagined her
-      diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the
-      wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the
-      company of her tried and experienced bisters already familiar with all the
-      violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
-      salutes her grace and spirit&mdash;he echoes, with all the implied irony
-      of contrast, his companion&rsquo;s &ldquo;Ships are all right....&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He explains the many kinds of ships that there are&mdash;the rogues, the
-      wickedly malicious, <span class="pagenum">35</span><a name="link035"      id="link035"></a>the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the
-      staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has indulgences that
-      he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be severe before such a
-      world of fine spirits.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Finally, in the episode of the <i>Tremolino</i> and her tragic end (an end
-      that has in it a suggestion of that later story, <i>Freya of the Seven
-      Inlands</i>), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar,
-      he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
-      material. He gives us the soul of the <i>Tremolino</i>, the soul of
-      Dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever
-      deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon
-      it his house of romance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of
-      all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
-      creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      II&mdash;THE NOVELIST
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N <span
-      class="pagenum">36</span><a name="link036" id="link036"></a>discussing the
-      art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three
-      special questions that we may ask&mdash;as to the Theme, as to the Form,
-      as to the creation of Character.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
-      applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
-      novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel,
-      as, for instance, <i>The Ring and the Book</i> and <i>Aurora Leigh</i>
-      bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are
-      vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
-      of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
-      position as novelist <span class="pagenum">37</span><a name="link037"      id="link037"></a>and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most
-      truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in
-      this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist&mdash;that is, as a
-      narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to
-      those histories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
-      seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but
-      slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
-      deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
-      story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to
-      make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect.
-      Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite
-      unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned
-      themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which
-      forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A
-      new period began at the end of the fifties; <span class="pagenum">38</span><a
-      name="link038" id="link038"></a>but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel
-      called <i>Evan Harrington</i> was of any special importance; it made no
-      more stir than did <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in the early nineties, although
-      the wonderful <i>Richard Feverel</i> had already preceded it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel,
-      springing straight from the shores of France, where <i>Madame Bovary</i>
-      and <i>Une Vie</i> showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into
-      a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how
-      important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much
-      to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything
-      that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling
-      showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the
-      beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that
-      things were done. <i>The Yellow Book</i> sprang into a bright existence,
-      flamed, and died. &ldquo;Art for Art&rsquo;s sake&rdquo; was slain by the trial of Oscar
-      Wilde in 1895.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <span class="pagenum">39</span><a name="link039" id="link039"></a>Mr
-      Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop
-      assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made
-      socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the
-      Boer War completed an old one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of the whole question of Conrad&rsquo;s place in the history of the English
-      novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I
-      would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French
-      influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its
-      destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of
-      <i>The Yellow Book</i>, passing through all the realistic reaction that
-      followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed away
-      by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new
-      stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the
-      work that he had to do.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      <span class="pagenum">40</span><a name="link040" id="link040"></a>The form
-      in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which
-      must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the
-      question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently
-      attacked.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
-      suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
-      instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
-      between two seamen. One has &ldquo;knifed&rdquo; the other, and the quarrel has been
-      watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
-      wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
-      seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us
-      the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, <i>oratio
-      recta</i>, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the
-      spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the
-      girl are. He <span class="pagenum">41</span><a name="link041" id="link041"></a>describes
-      the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he
-      discovers about the man. Seen standing in his doorway he is the most
-      ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a
-      strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing
-      fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. That leads
-      one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the
-      bibulous old man, and for a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous
-      old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This
-      old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her
-      own. Once she was...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
-      the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
-      witness to Conrad&rsquo;s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
-      James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says:
-      &ldquo;It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a <span class="pagenum">42</span><a
-      name="link042" id="link042"></a>votary of the way to do a thing that shall
-      make it undergo most doing,&rdquo; and his amazement at Conrad&rsquo;s patient pursuit
-      of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that
-      in <i>What Maisie Knew</i> and <i>The Awkward Age</i> he has practised
-      almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside the intricate but
-      masterly form of <i>The Awkward Age</i> the duplicate narration of <i>Chance</i>
-      seems child&rsquo;s play. Mr Henry James makes the mistake of speaking as though
-      Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most
-      difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the
-      truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought
-      straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration
-      used by the Ancient Mariner and all the seamen before and alter him.
-      Conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which
-      stories in the past had generally come to him. He wishes to deny the
-      effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so
-      attractive to <span class="pagenum">43</span><a name="link043" id="link043"></a>him.
-      He must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he
-      himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the
-      truth of it then must he have two or three.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: <i>Lord
-      Jim, Nostromo</i> and <i>Chance</i>. It is possible that <i>Lord Jim</i>
-      was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
-      from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
-      Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains
-      with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the <i>Patna</i>,
-      or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions waiting outside
-      for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation of these four men
-      Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the <i>Patna</i>: &ldquo;He made
-      me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was
-      extravagantly gorgeous too&mdash;got up in a. soiled sleeping-suit, bright
-      green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw
-      slippers <span class="pagenum">44</span><a name="link044" id="link044"></a>on
-      his bare feet, and somebody&rsquo;s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes
-      too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big
-      head.&rdquo; There are also two other &ldquo;no-account chaps with him&rdquo;&mdash;a sallow
-      faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a
-      blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with
-      drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty
-      imbecility, and, with these three, Jim, &ldquo;clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm
-      on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.&rdquo; Here are these
-      four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That
-      boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has
-      fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities
-      and discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist&rsquo;s thrill. We watch
-      our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
-      discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go? We
-      are thrilled with the suspense. <span class="pagenum">45</span><a
-      name="link045" id="link045"></a>Conrad, having discovered his subject,
-      must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply
-      cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. &ldquo;I was not there myself,&rdquo;
-       he tells us, &ldquo;but I can show you someone who was.&rdquo; He introduces us to a
-      first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. &ldquo;Now tell your story.&rdquo; He has at
-      once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience
-      clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone&rsquo;s disposal, whiskies and
-      cigars without stint, he lets himself go. He is bothered now by no
-      question but the thorough investigation of his discovery. What had Jim
-      done that he should be in such a case? We must have the story of the loss
-      of the <i>Patna</i>, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the
-      world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and Jim&rsquo;s fine, chivalrous
-      soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so much to say and so many fine
-      words in which to say it. At present, so absorbed are we, so successful is
-      he, that we are completely held. The illusion is perfect. We come to the
-      inquiry. <span class="pagenum">46</span><a name="link046" id="link046"></a>One
-      of the judges is Captain Brierley. &ldquo;What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah!
-      but I must tell you! Most extraordinary thing!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the <i>Patna</i>,
-      Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich
-      that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author&rsquo;s
-      hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the
-      episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the
-      Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe
-      even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe
-      into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method
-      is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with
-      him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the
-      trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth and <span
-      class="pagenum">47</span><a name="link047" id="link047"></a>reality of his
-      story. He saw&mdash;we cannot for an instant doubt it&mdash;that group on
-      the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly,
-      awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic
-      sequel. He must go on&mdash;that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe&mdash;and
-      at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his
-      very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding
-      something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The
-      author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his
-      narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts,
-      contrasts, halts and histories. That then is the peril of the method.
-      Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver
-      for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any
-      other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at
-      once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe
-      has certainly been compelled to <span class="pagenum">48</span><a
-      name="link048" id="link048"></a>face, at moments in his career, an angry,
-      irritated audience.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>Nostromo</i> is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in
-      the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to
-      deny that <i>Nostromo</i> is extremely contused in places, but it is a
-      confusion that arises rather from Conrad&rsquo;s confidence in the reader&rsquo;s
-      fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
-      narrations are sometimes complicated&mdash;old Captain Mitchell does not
-      always achieve authenticity&mdash;but on the whole, the reader may be said
-      to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
-      little about others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But this assurance of the author&rsquo;s that we must have already learnt the
-      main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
-      of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he
-      says to us, &ldquo;you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that revolution
-      that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be there myself. I
-      know all <span class="pagenum">49</span><a name="link049" id="link049"></a>the
-      people concerned, and the central figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor
-      Monyngham&mdash;no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic
-      was told a syllable. I knew the man well.... He.. and there we all are.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
-      successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which
-      we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all,
-      but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our
-      conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of <i>Nostromo</i>,
-      can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of
-      Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola,
-      Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola&rsquo;s wife, of the
-      expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of
-      Hirsch&rsquo;s torture, of Captain Mitchell&rsquo;s watch&mdash;here are characters
-      the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other
-      hands, be fantastic <span class="pagenum">50</span><a name="link050"      id="link050"></a>melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely
-      supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the
-      first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author&rsquo;s word.... Here
-      the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not so with the third example, <i>Chance</i>. Here, as with <i>Lord Jim</i>,
-      we may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
-      in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the <i>Patna</i>
-      waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over <i>Chance</i>
-      reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their
-      comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her
-      horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate
-      flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain
-      Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too
-      double-faced for him gives the book&rsquo;s theme, and never in all the stories
-      that preceded Flora&rsquo;s has Conrad been so <span class="pagenum">51</span><a
-      name="link051" id="link051"></a>eager to afford us first-hand witnesses.
-      We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine
-      phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once
-      served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there
-      surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the
-      number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been
-      enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself
-      as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it
-      positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de
-      Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden&mdash;as the author names them&mdash;are
-      retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate
-      their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young
-      Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it
-      should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not
-      here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of
-      <span class="pagenum">52</span><a name="link052" id="link052"></a><i>Lord
-      Jim</i> and the whole of <i>Nostromo</i>. We believe most emphatically in
-      that first narration of young Powell&rsquo;s about his first chance. We believe
-      in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like
-      this: &ldquo;I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and
-      lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power
-      which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.&rdquo; We
-      believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in
-      Marlowe&rsquo;s interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony&rsquo;s room.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
-      are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
-      it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that
-      we resent, a little, Marlowe&rsquo;s intimacy which prevents, with patronising
-      complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed.
-      Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But when the second half of the book <span class="pagenum">53</span><a
-      name="link053" id="link053"></a>arrives we can be confident no longer.
-      Here, as in <i>Lord Jim</i>, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having
-      surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to
-      continue it. The true thing in <i>Lord Jim</i> is the affair of the <i>Patna</i>;
-      the true thing in <i>Chance</i> is Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora after
-      her disaster. But whereas in <i>Lord Jim</i> the sequel to Jim&rsquo;s cowardice
-      has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to
-      Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a
-      pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in <i>Chance</i>
-      entitled <i>A Moonless Night</i> is, in the first half of it, surely the
-      worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story,
-      <i>The Return</i>. The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and certain tales in
-      his volume, <i>Within the Tides</i>, make one wonder whether that alliance
-      between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained
-      is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these
-      two qualities.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <span class="pagenum">54</span><a name="link054" id="link054"></a>It
-      remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must
-      before the end of <i>Chance</i>, the form of narration in <i>Oratio Recta</i>
-      is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in
-      Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are
-      the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in.
-      It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered
-      a charlatan.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are
-      developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
-      unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by
-      the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell
-      us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his
-      presence be not true...
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      III
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad&rsquo;s attention we shall
-      see that <span class="pagenum">55</span><a name="link055" id="link055"></a>in
-      almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats&mdash;unequal
-      to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in
-      them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men&rsquo;s
-      honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his
-      irony.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
-      human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom
-      he can admire. &ldquo;If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up,&rdquo;
-       we can hear him say. &ldquo;He can see at once that the odds are too strong for
-      him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before
-      them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon
-      them you may loosen all heaven&rsquo;s bolts and lightnings and they will not
-      quail.&rdquo; They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his
-      love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: &ldquo;You
-      see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and
-      I.&rdquo; <span class="pagenum">56</span><a name="link056" id="link056"></a>The
-      theme of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> is a struggle of a weak man against
-      nature, of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> the struggle of many simple
-      men against the presence of death, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, again, the struggle
-      of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at
-      the cost of truth). <i>Nostromo</i>, the conquest of a child of nature by
-      the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory,
-      from the very first. <i>Chance</i>, the struggle of an absolutely simple
-      and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not
-      understand. <i>Typhoon</i>, the very epitome of Conrad&rsquo;s themes, is the
-      struggle of M&rsquo;Whirr against the storm (here again it is M&rsquo;Whirr who
-      apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the
-      storm&rsquo;s confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In <i>Heart of Darkness</i>
-      the victory is to the forest. In <i>The End of the Tether</i> Captain
-      Whalley, one of Conrad&rsquo;s finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness
-      of his character. The three tales in <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land, and Sea</i> are all
-      themes of this kind&mdash;the struggle of simple, <span class="pagenum">57</span><a
-      name="link057" id="link057"></a>unimaginative men against forces too
-      strong for them. In <i>The Secret Agent</i> Winnie Verloc, another simple
-      character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In <i>Under
-      Western Eyes</i> Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs
-      at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Of Conrad&rsquo;s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough to
-      say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character of a
-      story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them and
-      leave defeat or victory to the stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whatever Conrad&rsquo;s books are or are not, it may safely be said that they
-      are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all probability,
-      resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler affection, his art,
-      nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding over the inequality
-      of life&rsquo;s battle. His humour, often of a very fine kind, is always
-      sinister, because his choice of theme forbids light-heartedness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would <span class="pagenum">58</span><a
-      name="link058" id="link058"></a>have found Marlowe, Jim and Captain
-      Anthony quite impossibly solemn company&mdash;but I do not deny that they
-      might not have been something the better for a little of it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple and
-      unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple that
-      there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in meeting
-      a number of Conrad&rsquo;s characters is that they have existences and histories
-      entirely independent of their introducer&rsquo;s kind offices. Conrad has met
-      them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we are sure not only
-      that there is very much more that he could tell us about them if he had
-      time and space, but that even when he had told us all that he knew he
-      would only have touched on the fringe of their real histories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
-      mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
-      the robust vitality of their <span class="pagenum">59</span><a
-      name="link059" id="link059"></a>predecessors; the figures in the novel of
-      to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters fade
-      before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before an
-      idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
-      wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy before
-      the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton before the
-      shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy before the omnipotence
-      of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his inevitability, Mr Hardy himself
-      is arranging in the background; it may be claimed for the characters of Mr
-      Conrad that they yield their solidity to no force, no power, not even to
-      their author&rsquo;s own determination that they are doomed, in the end, to
-      defeat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer novelist
-      than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries&mdash;namely,
-      the assurance that <span class="pagenum">60</span><a name="link060"      id="link060"></a>his characters have their lives and adventures both
-      before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at the
-      close of <i>The Three Sisters</i> or <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> we are left
-      speculating deeply upon &ldquo;what happened afterwards&rdquo; to Gayef or Barbara, to
-      Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad&rsquo;s sea captains as with Tchekov&rsquo;s Russians
-      we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we
-      are told about them. This independence springs partly from the author&rsquo;s
-      eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for him to introduce us to
-      any officer on his ship without whispering to us in an aside details about
-      his life, his wife and family on shore. By so doing he forges an extra
-      link in his chain of circumstantial evidence, but we do not feel that here
-      he is deliberately serving his art&mdash;it is only that quality already
-      mentioned, his own astonished delight at the things that he is
-      discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain M&rsquo;Whirr that he wrote
-      long letters home, <span class="pagenum">61</span><a name="link061"      id="link061"></a>beginning always with the words, &ldquo;My darling Wife,&rdquo; and
-      relating in minute detail each successive trip of the <i>Nan-Shan</i>. Mrs
-      M&rsquo;Whirr, we learn, was &ldquo;a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a
-      disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in the neighbourhood
-      considered as &lsquo;quite superior.&rsquo; The only secret of her life was her abject
-      terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good.&rdquo;
-       Also in <i>Typhoon</i> there is the second mate &ldquo;who never wrote any
-      letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had
-      been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme
-      bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a
-      boarding-house.&rdquo; How conscious we are of Jim&rsquo;s English country parsonage,
-      of Captain Anthony&rsquo;s loneliness, of Marlowe&rsquo;s isolation. By this simple
-      thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole character
-      stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on board the <i>Narcissus</i>
-      there is not one about whom, after his landing, <span class="pagenum">62</span><a
-      name="link062" id="link062"></a>we are not curious. There is the skipper,
-      whose wife comes on board, &ldquo;A real lady, in a black dress and with a
-      parasol.&rdquo;... &ldquo;Very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white
-      shirt, went with her over the side. We didn&rsquo;t recognise him at all....&rdquo;
-       And Mr Baker, the chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make
-      us his friends for life?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
-      Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
-      and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
-      town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
-      in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady, he
-      thought, sitting down for a moment&rsquo;s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
-      enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere. He
-      didn&rsquo;t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The darkness
-      of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck; and Mr
-      Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom through
-      many <span class="pagenum">63</span><a name="link063" id="link063"></a>long
-      years he had given the best of a seaman&rsquo;s care. And never a command in
-      sight. Not once!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There are others&mdash;the abominable Donkin for instance. &ldquo;Donkin
-      entered. They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. &lsquo;I give you
-      a bad discharge,&rsquo; he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want
-      your bloomin&rsquo; discharge&mdash;keep it. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; ter &lsquo;ave a job hashore.&rsquo;
-      He turned to us. &lsquo;No more bloomin&rsquo; sea for me,&rsquo; he said, aloud. All looked
-      at him. He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than
-      any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
-      declaration.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In how many novels would Donkin&rsquo;s life have been limited by the part that
-      he was required to play in the adventures of the <i>Narcissus?</i> As it
-      is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue only. Or
-      there is Charley, the boy of the crew&mdash;&ldquo;As I came up I saw a
-      red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, <span
-      class="pagenum">64</span><a name="link064" id="link064"></a>fluffy hair,
-      fall on Charley&rsquo;s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over him:&mdash;&lsquo;Oh,
-      my boy! my boy!&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Leggo me,&rsquo; said Charley, &lsquo;leggo, mother!&rsquo; I was
-      passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of the blubbering woman
-      he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic, courageous, and profound,
-      that seemed to put all my knowledge of life to shame. I nodded and passed
-      on, but heard him say again, good-naturedly:&mdash;&lsquo;If you leggo of me
-      this minyt&mdash;ye shall &lsquo;ave a bob for a drink out of my pay.&rsquo;&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But one passes from these men of the sea&mdash;from M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker,
-      from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
-      suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
-      men of the land&mdash;and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed.
-      About such men as M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will
-      not believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they
-      will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets&mdash;those
-      little details, <span class="pagenum">65</span><a name="link065"      id="link065"></a>M&rsquo;Whirr&rsquo;s wife, Mr Baker&rsquo;s proud sister, Charley&rsquo;s
-      mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
-      world&mdash;with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister
-      Nikita, the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself&mdash;we cannot
-      be so confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that
-      same perfect sympathy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an <i>idée fixe</i>,
-      that you must search for this patiently, honestly, unsparingly&mdash;having
-      found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you. But is it? Is it not
-      possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing finger, offer up
-      instantly any <i>idée fixe</i> ready to hand because they wish to be left
-      alone? Decoud himself, for instance&mdash;Decoud, the imaginative
-      journalist in <i>Nostromo</i>, speculating with his ironic mind upon
-      romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved, the
-      burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough to
-      suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again <span
-      class="pagenum">66</span><a name="link066" id="link066"></a>we have a
-      quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees him. That first
-      description of him is wonderful, both in its reality and its significance.
-      &ldquo;His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of having wallowed, fully
-      dressed, all day on an unmade bed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
-      character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have
-      the convictions of the extension of the protagonists&rsquo; lives beyond the
-      stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives independent of
-      the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end to the things that
-      we should be told about them, and they must be true things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his <i>idée fixe</i>&mdash;namely,
-      that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his phlegmatic state of
-      self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of it. At the first sign of
-      threatened change he is terrified to his very soul. Conrad never, for an
-      instant, allows him to leave this ground upon which he has <span
-      class="pagenum">67</span><a name="link067" id="link067"></a>placed him. We
-      see the man tied to his rock of an <i>idée fixe</i>, but he has,
-      nevertheless, we are assured, another life, other motives, other humours,
-      other terrors. It is perhaps a direct tribute to the authors reserve power
-      that we feel, at the book&rsquo;s close, that we should have been told so much
-      more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
-      Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
-      romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott, with the
-      single exception of Thackeray&rsquo;s Beatrix&mdash;and here I am not forgetting
-      Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own immediate time,
-      young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so unjustly obscure
-      fiction, <i>The Shadow of a Titan</i>. As a picture, Nostromo shines with
-      a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel shines, with a glow that is
-      flung by the contrasted balance of its romance and realism. From that
-      first vision of him as he rides slowly through the crowds, in his
-      magnificent dress: &ldquo;... his hat, a gay sombrero with <span class="pagenum">68</span><a
-      name="link068" id="link068"></a>a silver cord and tassels. The bright
-      colours of a Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver
-      buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons
-      down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with
-      embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that
-      last moment when&mdash;... in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head
-      slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure
-      perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his
-      head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died
-      without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short
-      shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings&rdquo;&mdash;we are
-      conscious of his superb figure; and after his death we do, indeed, believe
-      what the last lines of the book assure us&mdash;&ldquo;In that true cry of love
-      and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to
-      the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like
-      a mass of solid silver, the <span class="pagenum">69</span><a
-      name="link069" id="link069"></a>genius of the magnificent Capatuz de
-      Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure
-      and love.&rdquo; His genius dominates, yes&mdash;but it is the genius of a
-      magnificent picture standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul.
-      And that soul is not given us&mdash;Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses
-      to surrender it to us. Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton
-      in <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> gives us the very heart of the man,
-      so that volumes might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender
-      him to us more truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves
-      him beyond our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him&mdash;we
-      have not met him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
-      basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
-      so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
-      daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in the
-      whole of Conrad&rsquo;s art&mdash;the drive in the <span class="pagenum">70</span><a
-      name="link070" id="link070"></a>cab of old Mrs Verloc, Winnie and Stevie&mdash;compels,
-      additionally, our gratitude) or that strange gathering, the Haldins,
-      Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, Peter Ivanovitch,
-      Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in <i>Romance</i> (a
-      book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in others), Falk or
-      Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his lover, all those and
-      so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the world that is offered
-      to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will
-      be near to us, some more distant? It is, finally, a world that Conrad
-      offers us, not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or
-      three figures returning to us&mdash;old friends with new faces and new
-      names&mdash;but a planet that we know, even as we know the Meredith
-      planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and seas,
-      its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid hovels,
-      its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness s. Although each
-      <span class="pagenum">71</span><a name="link071" id="link071"></a>work,
-      from, the vast <i>Nostromo</i> to the minutely perfect <i>Secret Share</i>,
-      has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the swarming life that he
-      has created knows no boundary. And in this, surely, creation has
-      accomplished its noblest work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      III&mdash;THE POET
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
-      class="pagenum">72</span><a name="link072" id="link072"></a>poet in Conrad
-      is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain
-      of his works, as, for example, <i>The Secret Agent</i>, and <i>Under
-      Western Eyes</i>, or such short stories as <i>The Informer</i>, or <i>Il
-      Conde</i>, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument
-      of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the
-      novelist deserve consideration&mdash;style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
-      the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
-      of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works
-      and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from <span class="pagenum">73</span><a
-      name="link073" id="link073"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s second novel, <i>An Outcast of
-      the Islands</i>:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each
-      other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the
-      forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the
-      life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that
-      crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed
-      to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading
-      his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in
-      the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful
-      compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen
-      this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering
-      stars.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And from his latest novel, <i>Chance</i>:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in
-      the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all
-      passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick <span
-      class="pagenum">74</span><a name="link074" id="link074"></a>glance he
-      threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring
-      limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the
-      clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space
-      made visible&mdash;almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in
-      the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his
-      first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost
-      undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before
-      that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening
-      universe.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of
-      Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the
-      two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first
-      piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied,
-      something of the &ldquo;purple patch.&rdquo; We feel that the prose is too dependent
-      upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly
-      affected by the author&rsquo;s <span class="pagenum">75</span><a name="link075"      id="link075"></a>determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it,
-      however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the
-      picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual
-      tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the
-      inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture.
-      Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the
-      earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly, Tales of
-      Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness,
-      Lord Jim</i>,&mdash;prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving
-      adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern
-      invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not
-      believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements
-      and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale
-      called <i>The Return</i>, there is the following passage:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed.
-      There was <span class="pagenum">76</span><a name="link076" id="link076"></a>less
-      than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very
-      edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere.
-      Then almost simultaneously he shouted, &lsquo;Come back,&rsquo; and she let go the
-      handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who
-      has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the
-      room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe&mdash;like a grave.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words&mdash;&ldquo;moral
-      annihilation,&rdquo; &ldquo;devouring nowhere,&rdquo; &ldquo;peaceful desperation,&rdquo; &ldquo;last chance
-      of life,&rdquo; &ldquo;terrible,&rdquo; &ldquo;like a grave.&rdquo; That he shouted gives a final touch
-      of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Often, in the earlier books, Conrad&rsquo;s style has the awkward over-emphasis
-      of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a
-      foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand
-      him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked
-      effect of <span class="pagenum">77</span><a name="link077" id="link077"></a>two
-      influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of
-      the author of <i>Madame Bovary</i>. When we recollect that Conrad
-      hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in
-      French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert&rsquo;s
-      effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of
-      Flaubert&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l&rsquo;envanouissaiont sous la
-      poésie du rôle qui l&rsquo;envahissait; et entrainée vers l&rsquo;homme par l&rsquo;illusion
-      du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante,
-      extraordinaire, splendide...&rdquo; and this a sentence of Conrad&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Her hands
-      slipped slowly off Lingard&rsquo;s shoulders and her arms tell by her side,
-      listless, discouraged, as if to her&mdash;to her, the savage, violent and
-      ignorant creature&mdash;had been revealed clearly in that moment the
-      tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and
-      transparent, elusive and everlasting.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Conrad&rsquo;s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is
-      probable, <span class="pagenum">78</span><a name="link078" id="link078"></a>however,
-      that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily
-      exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply
-      into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the
-      arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of
-      his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
-      importance&mdash;the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
-      that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his
-      remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full
-      strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the
-      sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we
-      think in many pages of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>An Outcast of the
-      Island</i>, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
-      emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
-      rapture.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was under the influence of these powers <span class="pagenum">79</span><a
-      name="link079" id="link079"></a>also in that, at that time, they were too
-      strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder
-      and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style,
-      in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man
-      who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him&mdash;often
-      the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with
-      sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of
-      <i>Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Nostromo</i>, this lyrical
-      impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously,
-      with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will
-      and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from <i>Typhoon</i> with
-      that earlier one from <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i> that I quoted
-      above:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene
-      of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved
-      slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane <span
-      class="pagenum">80</span><a name="link080" id="link080"></a>the excess of
-      her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of
-      the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea
-      impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still
-      air moaned. Above Jakes&rsquo; head a few stars shone into the pit of black
-      vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the
-      patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as
-      if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem
-      on a lowering brow.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That is poet&rsquo;s work, and poet&rsquo;s work at its finest. Instead of impressing
-      us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made
-      the very most of a rather thin moment&mdash;feels, indeed, himself that it
-      is thin&mdash;we are here under the influence of something that can have
-      no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though
-      it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest
-      material&mdash;and yet it remains, through all its discipline,
-      spontaneous.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      These three tales, <i>Typhoon, Youth</i> and <span class="pagenum">81</span><a
-      name="link081" id="link081"></a><i>Heart of Darkness</i>, stand by
-      themselves as the final expression of Conrad&rsquo;s lyrical gift. We may
-      remember such characters as M&rsquo;Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures
-      as the old seneschal in <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i> or the Ancient Mariner
-      himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and
-      finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman&rsquo;s <i>When Lilac first on
-      the Door yard bloomed</i> or Keats&rsquo; <i>Nightingale.</i> Their author was
-      never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his
-      enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the
-      things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose
-      business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is
-      conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and
-      high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them
-      that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older&mdash;he
-      must look back now on the colours of <span class="pagenum">82</span><a
-      name="link082" id="link082"></a><i>Youth</i> with an indulgent smile. And
-      when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as <i>The Secret Agent</i> and <i>Under
-      Western Eyes</i>, in such a volume of stories as <i>A Set of Six</i>, the
-      lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned&mdash;we are led forward by
-      sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city
-      policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from <i>Chance</i> quoted at the
-      beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined
-      enthusiasm of <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i>, the lyrical impulse still
-      remains. Yes, it is there, but&mdash;&ldquo;Young Powell felt it.&rdquo; In that
-      magical storm that was <i>Typhoon</i> God alone can share our terror and
-      demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II.
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
-      atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in
-      the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his <span
-      class="pagenum">83</span><a name="link083" id="link083"></a>daily bread or
-      game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business.
-      He produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action
-      in the waiting-room of an English railway station. There is the novelist
-      who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it
-      and <i>does</i> produce it in thick slabs. There are the novelists whose
-      theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is
-      provided simply by that reaction&mdash;and there, finally, it is left, put
-      into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than
-      the immediate one of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists
-      and, in our own day, Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s Brighton background in <i>Hilda
-      Lessways</i> or Mrs Wharton&rsquo;s New York background in <i>The House of Mirth</i>
-      offer most successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class
-      provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in
-      relation with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly,
-      by the contemplation of some scene and is thence <span class="pagenum">84</span><a
-      name="link084" id="link084"></a>extended to the whole vista, of life, from
-      birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as
-      conlined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its
-      progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. Such a
-      moment is the death of Bazarov in <i>Fathers and Children</i>, the
-      searching of Dmitri in <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i>, the scene at the
-      theatre in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, the London meeting between
-      Beauchamp and René in <i>Beauchamp&rsquo;s Career</i>. It is not only that these
-      scenes are &ldquo;done&rdquo; to the full extent of their &ldquo;doing,&rdquo; it is also that
-      they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with all the
-      emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev, Dostoievsky,
-      Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. Conrad, at his
-      highest moments, is also of that company.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
-      lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless <i>Victorian Age in Literature</i>,
-      has named this element Glamour. <span class="pagenum">85</span><a
-      name="link085" id="link085"></a>In writing of the novels by George Eliot
-      he says: &ldquo;Indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a
-      certain indescribable thing called <i>Glamour</i>, which was the whole
-      stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
-      clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
-      when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
-      Castlewood.&rdquo; Now&rsquo; this matter of <i>Glamour</i> is not all, because
-      Dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or
-      the house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit&rsquo;s escape after the murder do
-      not put us into touch with other worlds&mdash;but we may say, at any rate,
-      that when, in a novel atmosphere <i>is</i> potential it is certain also to
-      have glamour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The potential qualities of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere are amongst his very
-      strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is his
-      union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
-      important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. In
-      <i>The Outcast <span class="pagenum">86</span><a name="link086"      id="link086"></a>of the Islands</i>, when Willems is exiled by Captain
-      Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
-      terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described&mdash;it
-      has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
-      power of something stronger than ourselves. In <i>Lord Jim</i> the
-      contrast of Jim with the officers of the <i>Patna</i> is a contrast not
-      only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain&rsquo;s
-      gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
-      ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
-      degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In <i>The Nigger of the
-      Narcissus</i> the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the
-      lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
-      intimates we have become&mdash;but that shadow that traps the feet of the
-      negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
-      boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
-      that single voyage of the <i>Narcissus</i>. <span class="pagenum">87</span><a
-      name="link087" id="link087"></a>When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the
-      boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us
-      that the tears of &ldquo;that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient
-      silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace&rdquo; should move us as
-      though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous
-      journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful
-      and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite
-      indefinitely.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
-      significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes
-      to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because
-      he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic
-      adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We may hear, with
-      many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another
-      nail into the framework that supports their picture. &ldquo;Now see how firmly
-      it stands,&rdquo; they say. &ldquo;That last nail settled it.&rdquo; But <span
-      class="pagenum">88</span><a name="link088" id="link088"></a>Conrad is
-      utterly unconscious as to his readers&rsquo; later credulity&mdash;he is too
-      completely held by his own amazing discoveries. Sometimes, as in <i>The
-      Return</i>, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were
-      banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should
-      perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. But, in his real
-      discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how
-      we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage,
-      finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin&rsquo;s cave! If he
-      is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its
-      natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending
-      forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply
-      disciplined realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping
-      himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes
-      buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal
-      and defies Lingard and Almayer, so <span class="pagenum">89</span><a
-      name="link089" id="link089"></a>that they are like men disheartened by
-      some tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a
-      house for Almayer&rsquo;s baby are &ldquo;a dirty double pack&rdquo; with which he used to
-      play Chinese bézique&mdash;it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted
-      in it, considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The
-      atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a
-      room in which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
-      soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of
-      books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
-      European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
-      petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender
-      book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
-      clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
-      wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
-      place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
-      blankets that <span class="pagenum">90</span><a name="link090" id="link090"></a>lay
-      in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat.... Through the half-open
-      shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room,
-      beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then,
-      travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its
-      solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm
-      of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there
-      amongst yellow papers for many a day!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And this room is set in the very heart of the forests&mdash;&ldquo;the forests
-      unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven&mdash;and
-      as indifferent.&rdquo; Had I space I could multiply from every novel and tale
-      examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the
-      lyrical and the realistic&mdash;the lyrical pulse beating through
-      realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however, select one book, a
-      supreme example of this effect. What I say about <i>Nostromo</i> may be
-      proved from any other work of Conrad&rsquo;s.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The theme of <i>Nostromo</i> is the domination <span class="pagenum">91</span><a
-      name="link091" id="link091"></a>of the silver of the Sulaco mine over the
-      bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. The light of the
-      silver shines over the book. It is typified by &ldquo;the white head of
-      Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.&rdquo; Conrad, then, in choosing
-      his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver
-      treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. His
-      atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until
-      that last vision of all of &ldquo;the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a
-      big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver.&rdquo; Sulaco burns with
-      colour. We can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets
-      with the coaches, &ldquo;great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full
-      of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and
-      black,&rdquo; the houses, &ldquo;in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink,
-      pale blue,&rdquo; or, after dark, from Mrs Gould&rsquo;s balcony &ldquo;towards the plaza
-      end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women
-      cooking their <span class="pagenum">92</span><a name="link092" id="link092"></a>evening
-      meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a
-      sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
-      triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a
-      point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked
-      his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the
-      dark shape of the rider.&rdquo; Later there is that sinister glimpse of the
-      plaza, &ldquo;where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating
-      into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars
-      issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and above the roofs, next to
-      the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of
-      Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows
-      of the Intendencia.&rdquo; In its final created beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as
-      coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose
-      gates we watch Grimm&rsquo;s princes and princesses passing&mdash;but the detail
-      of it is <span class="pagenum">93</span><a name="link093" id="link093"></a>built
-      with careful realism demanded by the &ldquo;architecture of Manchester or
-      Birmingham.&rdquo; We wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its
-      cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its
-      sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not
-      created towns for us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a
-      shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s Wessex map is the most fascinating
-      document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson&rsquo;s
-      chart in <i>Treasure Island</i>. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us
-      a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far
-      excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver&rsquo;s treasure. If
-      any attentive reader of <i>Nostromo</i> were put down in Sulaco tomorrow
-      he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail
-      that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but
-      never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is <span
-      class="pagenum">94</span><a name="link094" id="link094"></a>finished, to
-      any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led,
-      quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama,
-      through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in
-      retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that &ldquo;extended
-      to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic
-      quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a High official
-      of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed
-      doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in
-      the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the
-      gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard,
-      where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a
-      moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and
-      bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands
-      crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops
-      of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came
-      to your ears, and, <span class="pagenum">95</span><a name="link095"      id="link095"></a>ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first
-      steps, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé
-      moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm&rsquo;s length, through
-      an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse&mdash;a strong-hearted but
-      persevering black brute, with a hammer bead&mdash;you would have seen in
-      the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost
-      touching the curbstone of the side-walk!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation
-      of some reader &ldquo;Yes&mdash;those orange-trees! It was just like that when I
-      was there!&rdquo; How convinced we are of Conrad&rsquo;s unimpeachable veracity! How
-      like him are those remembered details, &ldquo;the nailed doors,&rdquo; &ldquo;the fine stone
-      hands,&rdquo; &ldquo;at arm&rsquo;s-length&rdquo;!&mdash;and can we not sniff something of the
-      author&rsquo;s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that
-      &ldquo;hammer-headed horse&rdquo; of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember
-      enough to fill a volume!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He is able, therefore, upon this foundation <span class="pagenum">96</span><a
-      name="link096" id="link096"></a>of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to
-      build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth.
-      He does not, in <i>Nostromo</i> at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but
-      he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town
-      under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as
-      beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we
-      remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near
-      to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the
-      last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding,
-      with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the
-      crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride.
-      Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy
-      story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Here, then, is the secret of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere. He is the poet, working
-      through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the
-      heart of his work from the first line of <i>Almayer s Folly</i> to the
-      last <span class="pagenum">97</span><a name="link097" id="link097"></a>line
-      of <i>Victory. Nostromo</i> is not simply the history of certain lives
-      that were concerned in a South American revolution. It <i>is</i> that
-      history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no
-      country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for
-      its interpretation....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
-      creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain
-      limitations.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      III
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
-      that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
-      men.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
-      watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
-      cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
-      they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
-      <span class="pagenum">98</span><a name="link098" id="link098"></a>ambition
-      of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is
-      limitless; he can see farther than they&mdash;from his height he can
-      follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very
-      last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony
-      springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
-      it is, surely, Conrad&rsquo;s harshest limitation that he should never be free
-      from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is
-      he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his
-      faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
-      creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
-      Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s the end. He
-      passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
-      and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate
-      his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.&rdquo; <span
-      class="pagenum">99</span><a name="link099" id="link099"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s
-      ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim&rsquo;s
-      endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain&mdash;as
-      vain as Stein&rsquo;s butterflies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
-      observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
-      character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart&rsquo;s desire it is that his
-      merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
-      whom human achievements are nothing&mdash;lust of treasure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      M&rsquo;Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous
-      of God&rsquo;s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm,
-      so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he
-      might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the
-      degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems,
-      can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in
-      the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap&mdash;the victim is always in his
-      power. <span class="pagenum">100</span><a name="link100" id="link100"></a>It
-      comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul
-      that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to
-      duty. His men of brain&mdash;Marlowe, Decoud, Stein&mdash;are melancholy
-      and ironic: &ldquo;If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle
-      is.&rdquo; The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and,
-      because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if
-      possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea
-      whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men
-      of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
-      Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc,
-      for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For
-      the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land,
-      Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but
-      they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea
-      captains. <span class="pagenum">101</span><a name="link101" id="link101"></a>This
-      then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He
-      will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw
-      the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does
-      not, tor an instant, hamper his interest&mdash;that is as keen and acute
-      as is the absorption of any collector of specimens&mdash;but at the end of
-      it all, as with his own Stein: &ldquo;He says of him that he is &lsquo;preparing to
-      leave all this: preparing to leave...&rsquo; while he waves his hand sadly at
-      his butterflies.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom,
-      in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles&mdash;Robert Browning.
-      As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the
-      honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects
-      and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an
-      amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that
-      resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning&rsquo;s
-      <span class="pagenum">102</span><a name="link102" id="link102"></a>interest
-      in life was derived, on the novelist&rsquo;s side of him, from his absorption in
-      the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet&rsquo;s side,
-      in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those
-      affairs. Conrad has not Browning&rsquo;s clear-eyed realisation of the necessity
-      of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual
-      case&mdash;he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming
-      melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of
-      romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest
-      realism.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Browning&rsquo;s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
-      of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in <i>Sordello</i> the most
-      romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
-      such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
-      forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is
-      not this exactly what we may say of <i>Nostromo?</i> Mr Chesterton has
-      written of <span class="pagenum">103</span><a name="link103" id="link103"></a>Browning:
-      &ldquo;He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of
-      Watteau, and the &lsquo;blue spirt of a lighted match&rsquo; for the monotony of the
-      evening star.&rdquo; Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his
-      mistress&rsquo; window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot
-      boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an
-      elderly, taciturn sea captain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
-      precisely Conrad&rsquo;s characters. Is not Waring Conrad&rsquo;s man?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
-      Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in <i>The
-      Secret Agent</i>, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
-      to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
-      these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of
-      truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart,
-      it is also that the worlds of these <span class="pagenum">104</span><a
-      name="link104" id="link104"></a>two poets are the same. How deeply would
-      Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, M&rsquo;Whirr,
-      Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation
-      of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee&rsquo;s wife, of the figures in the
-      Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed&rsquo;s
-      Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these
-      discoveries!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Finally, <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, with its multiplied witnesses, its
-      statement as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
-      simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
-      last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of
-      that superb building&mdash;here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
-      temple that has <i>Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo</i> amongst its other
-      turrets, buttresses and towers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Conrad is his own master&mdash;he has imitated no one, he has created, as
-      I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
-      carried Romantic-Realism showed <span class="pagenum">105</span><a
-      name="link105" id="link105"></a>the author of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> the
-      signs of the road that he was to follow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we
-      not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as novelist?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
-      class="pagenum">106</span><a name="link106" id="link106"></a>terms,
-      Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means
-      of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely
-      romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely
-      dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of <i>Robert Louis Stevenson</i>,
-      said: &ldquo;Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England,
-      created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
-      costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if
-      it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious
-      virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The
-      art was jaded when Reade finished his vocifer<span class="pagenum">107</span><a
-      name="link107" id="link107"></a>ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead.
-      And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his
-      estimate of Stevenson&rsquo;s present and future literary value without denying
-      that the date of the publication of <i>St Ives</i> was also the date of
-      the death of the purely romantic novel.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term &ldquo;Romantic&rdquo; is
-      used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular
-      idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term &ldquo;Realism&rdquo; has, recently,
-      been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern
-      use, covers everything that is removed from reality: &ldquo;I like romances,&rdquo; we
-      hear the modern reader say, &ldquo;because they take me away from real life,
-      which I desire to forget.&rdquo; In the same way Realism is defined by its
-      enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant
-      pessimist. &ldquo;I like realism,&rdquo; admirers of a certain order of novel <span
-      class="pagenum">108</span><a name="link108" id="link108"></a>exclaim,
-      &ldquo;because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day&mdash;I
-      know where I am.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of
-      Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
-      everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an
-      ambition&mdash;I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life
-      with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence&mdash;Romance
-      is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that
-      Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always
-      upon truth perceived and recorded&mdash;-it is the essence ol observation.
-      In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in
-      its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often
-      upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any
-      rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply
-      a necessary divorce from reality, nor does <span class="pagenum">109</span><a
-      name="link109" id="link109"></a>Realism imply a detailed and dusty
-      preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance
-      to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy
-      for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than
-      observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as
-      Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its
-      fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign
-      literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence
-      of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885
-      and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian
-      novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the
-      last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly
-      what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as <i>The Brothers
-      Karamazov</i>, such a play as <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> are there before
-      us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that <i>Karamazov</i>
-      has, in the England <span class="pagenum">110</span><a name="link110"      id="link110"></a>of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by
-      <i>Madame Bovary</i>....
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
-      development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry
-      James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic,
-      influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger
-      generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr
-      H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same
-      position.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French
-      novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say
-      that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely
-      to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they
-      are, make the story of Almayer&rsquo;s degradation sufficiently realistic, when
-      it is merely <span class="pagenum">111</span><a name="link111" id="link111"></a>recorded
-      and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad&rsquo;s
-      imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked,
-      beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it
-      mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of
-      life and death.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
-      often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
-      of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
-      who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by
-      his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little
-      colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required
-      ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Conrad had, from the first, a poet&rsquo;s&mdash;that is to say, a romantic&mdash;mind,
-      and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
-      determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of
-      all honest men. <span class="pagenum">112</span><a name="link112"      id="link112"></a>In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not
-      abated one jot of his romance&mdash;<i>Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of
-      Darkness</i> are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature&mdash;but
-      the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification,
-      whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
-      determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by
-      his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in
-      this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue.
-      This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that
-      Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by Dostoievsky very
-      considerably, cannot be denied. <i>Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The
-      Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov</i> are romantic realism at the most
-      astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to
-      attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri
-      Karamazov, <span class="pagenum">113</span><a name="link113" id="link113"></a>Nicolas
-      Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or
-      sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic
-      passion of Dostoievsky&rsquo;s love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole
-      world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of
-      creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad.
-      Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do
-      they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as
-      &ldquo;cases&rdquo; involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He
-      feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his
-      sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his
-      scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless
-      in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
-      he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity&mdash;Conrad finds
-      humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless he has been influenced by <span class="pagenum">114</span><a
-      name="link114" id="link114"></a>the Russian writer continuously and
-      sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, <i>Under Western Eyes</i>, the
-      influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that novel is
-      the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though Dostoievsky had
-      given him Razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too
-      overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. What,
-      however, Conrad has in common with the creator of Raskolnikov is his
-      thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his
-      characters. Conrad alone of all English novelists shares this zest with
-      the great Russian. Dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his
-      fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet&rsquo;s cry for
-      colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men&mdash;and
-      they find it not as Flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art,
-      not as Turgéniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant
-      beauty, not as Tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel&mdash;simply
-      they pursue their quest <span class="pagenum">115</span><a name="link115"      id="link115"></a>because the breathless interest of the pursuit is
-      stronger than they. They have, both of them, created characters simply
-      because characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
-      dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
-      determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
-      Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M&rsquo;Whirr, demanded
-      that they should be flung upon the page.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he has
-      triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
-      through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing that
-      Conrad has done for the English novel&mdash;he has brought the zest of
-      creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their art&mdash;the
-      Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. That at
-      this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of
-      Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows exhaustion and
-      sterility <span class="pagenum">116</span><a name="link116" id="link116"></a>means
-      nothing; the stream will soon ran full again. Meanwhile we, in England,
-      know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the
-      novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of
-      romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a
-      means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many
-      adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      III
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
-      English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
-      provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it
-      does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists&mdash;in
-      the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W.
-      L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr
-      Brett Young&mdash;this influence is to be detected. <span class="pagenum">117</span><a
-      name="link117" id="link117"></a>Even with such avowed realists as Mr
-      Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very
-      different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once
-      by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton&rsquo;s <i>On the Staircase</i>
-      with Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, or Mr
-      Galsworthy&rsquo;s <i>Man of Property</i>&mdash;and Mr E. M. Forster is a
-      romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose <i>Longest Journey</i>
-      and <i>Howard&rsquo;s End</i> may possibly provide the historian of English
-      literature with dates as important as the publication of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
-      Folly</i> in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to
-      this essay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
-      realism can return. We have been shown in <i>Nostromo</i> something that
-      has the colour of <i>Treasure Island</i> and the reality of <i>New Grub
-      Street</i>. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English
-      novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is,
-      surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who
-      believe that at few periods in <span class="pagenum">118</span><a
-      name="link118" id="link118"></a>English literature has the novel shown
-      more signs of a thrilling and original future.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for
-      a moment at his last novel, <i>Victory</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and the last volume of short stories had
-      shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
-      ultimately, from reality. <i>Victory</i>, splendid tale though it is, does
-      not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost
-      helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy;
-      that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as
-      elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and
-      slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old
-      early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as
-      though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown,
-      finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that
-      eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe
-      is pre<span class="pagenum">119</span><a name="link119" id="link119"></a>vented
-      he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered
-      corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as
-      it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in
-      the whole of Conrad&mdash;the last conversation between Heyst and Lena&mdash;that
-      we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
-      more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of
-      the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the
-      same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of
-      the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its
-      austerity and truth as ever it was.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
-      incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline
-      and restraint that were once his law.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the
-      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> of 1895 to the <i>Victory</i> of 1915, one <span
-      class="pagenum">120</span><a name="link120" id="link120"></a>realises that
-      it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that
-      brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to
-      the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of
-      character and high adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      [The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
-      signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Almayer&rsquo;s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New editions.
-      (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Nigger of the &ldquo;Narcissus&rdquo;: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
-      edition, 1910.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer
-      (Heinemann). 1901.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith, Elder).
-      1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
-      Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
-      Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      New edition, 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
-      New edition, 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
-      (Dent). 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
-    </h2>
-    <p>
-      <span class="pagenum">123</span><a name="link123" id="link123"></a>Almayer&rsquo;s
-      Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1895. New editions,
-      1912; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1911.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An Outcast of the Islands (<i>Appleton</i>). 1896. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
-      1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (<i>Dodd, Mead</i>). 1897.
-      New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: &ldquo;The Nigger of the
-      &lsquo;Narcissus&rsquo;&rdquo; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Tales of Unrest (<i>Scribner</i>). 1898.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Lord Jim (<i>Doubleday</i>) 1900. New edition, 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (<i>McClure Co.</i>).
-      1901.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Typhoon (<i>Putman</i>). 1902. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Youth, and two Other Stories (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards transferred to
-      <i>Doubleday</i>). 1903.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (<i>McClure Co.</i>). 1903. New
-      edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (<i>McClure Co</i>.
-      Afterwards transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1904.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (<i>Harper</i>), 1904. <span
-      class="pagenum">124</span><a name="link124" id="link124"></a>The Mirror of
-      the Sea: Memories and Impressions (<i>Harper</i>). 1906.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (<i>Harper</i>). 1907.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards
-      transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (<i>Harper</i>).
-      1911.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A Personal Retold (<i>Harper</i>). 1912.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &lsquo;Twist Land and Sea: Tales (<i>Doran</i>). 1912. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
-      1911.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A Set of Six [Tales: one, &ldquo;The Duel.&rdquo; previously issued as &ldquo;A Point of
-      Honour&rdquo;] (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Victory: An Island Tale (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Within the Tides: Tales (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1916.
-    </p>
-
-<p>
-      <a name="linkindex" id="linkindex"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      INDEX
-    </h2>
-<pre xml:space="preserve">
-
-
-
-_Almayer&rsquo;s Folly_, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link012">12</a>, <a
-      href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
-      href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
-
-
-Bennett, Arnold, <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
-Beresford, J. D., <a href="#link116">116</a>
-_Brothers Karamazov, The_, <a href="#link109">109</a>
-Browning, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a href="#link101">101</a>, <a
-      href="#link102">102</a>, <a href="#link103">103</a>, <a href="#link104">104</a>
-
-
-_Chance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
-      href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link033">33</a>, <a
-      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
-_Cherry Orchard, The_, <a href="#link060">60</a>, <a href="#link109">109</a>
-Chesterton, G. K., <a href="#link084">84</a>
-Conrad, J., birth, <a href="#link008">8</a>, naturalised, <a href="#link008">8</a>
-Curie, R., <a href="#link099">99</a>
-
-
-Dickens, <a href="#link085">85</a>
-Dostoievsky, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
-      href="#link113">113</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
-
-
-Eliot, George, <a href="#link085">85</a>
-_End of the Tether, The_, <a href="#link056">56</a>
-_Evan Harrington_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
-_Eve of St Agnes, The_, <a href="#link081">81</a>
-
-
-Flaubert, <a href="#link077">77</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
-Form, <a href="#link040">40</a>
-Forster, E. M., <a href="#link117">117</a>
-_Freya of the Seven Islands_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
-
-
-Galsworthy, J., <a href="#link059">59</a>
-George, W. L., <a href="#link116">116</a>
-
-
-Hardy, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
-_Heart of Darkness_, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
-      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link081">81</a>
-Hueffer, F. M., <a href="#link014">14</a>
-
-
-Irony, <a href="#link055">55</a>
-
-
-James, Henry, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a
-      href="#link042">42</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
-
-
-Keats, <a href="#link081">81</a>
-Kipling, R., <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
-
-
-_Lord Jim_, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
-      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link073">73</a>, <a
-      href="#link080">80</a>
-Lyrical impulse, <a href="#link082">82</a>
-
-
-_Madame Bovary_, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link077">77</a>,110
-Meredith, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>
-Method in fiction, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a href="#link048">48</a>, etc.
-Mid-Victorian English novel, <a href="#link058">58</a>
-_Mirror of the Sea, The_, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a
-      href="#link027">27</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link032">32</a>
-
-
-Nature, <a href="#link078">78</a>
-_Nigger of the Narcissus_, The, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link015">15</a>. 27, <a
-      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link063">63</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a
-      href="#link086">86</a>
-_Nostrcmo_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link018">18</a>, <a
-      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link049">49</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
-      href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link090">90</a>, <a href="#link096">96</a>, <a
-      href="#link097">97</a>, <a href="#link102">102</a>
-
-
-_Outcast of the Islands, An_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
-      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
-      href="#link085">85</a>
-
-
-Philosophy, <a href="#link057">57</a>
-Poland, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link024">24</a>
-
-
-Realism. 108, <a href="#link110">110</a>
-_Return, The_, <a href="#link075">75</a>
-_Richard Feverel,_ 38
-_Romance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link070">70</a>
-Romance, <a href="#link108">108</a>. Russian influence, <a href="#link109">109</a>, <a
-      href="#link112">112</a>
-
-
-Sea, <a href="#link008">8</a>, <a href="#link028">28</a>
-_Secret Agent, The_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
-      href="#link057">57</a>, <a href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
-      href="#link103">103</a>
-_Secret Sharer, The_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
-_Set of Six, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
-Shaw, Bernard. 39
-Ships, <a href="#link033">33</a>
-_Smile of Fortune, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
-_Some Réminiscences_, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
-      href="#link026">26</a>
-_Sordello_, <a href="#link102">102</a>
-_Spectator, The_, <a href="#link012">12</a>
-Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
-Style, <a href="#link082">82</a>
-Swinnerton, Frink, <a href="#link106">106</a>, <a href="#link107">107</a>, <a
-      href="#link116">116</a>
-
-
-_Tales of Unrest_, <a href="#link015">15</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>
-Tchekov, <a href="#link060">60</a>
-Themes, <a href="#link054">54</a>
-Tolstoi, <a href="#link114">114</a>
-_T. P.&lsquo;s Weekly_, <a href="#link018">18</a>
-_Trtmolino_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
-Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#link093">93</a>
-Turgeniev, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
-      href="#link114">114</a>
-_'Twixt Land and Sea_, <a href="#link020">20</a> 56
-_Typhoon_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a
-      href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link061">61</a>, <a
-      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
-      href="#link082">82</a>
-
-
-_Under Western Eyes_, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a href="#link057">57</a>, <a
-      href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
-_Une Vie_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
-
-
-_Victory_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link118">118</a>
-
-
-Wells, H. G., <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a
-      href="#link110">110</a>
-Wharton, Mrs, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
-Whitman, <a href="#link081">81</a>
-
-
-_Yellow Book, The_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
-_Youth_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a
-      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
-      href="#link082">82</a>
-
-</pre>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
-
-***** This file should be named 52453-h.htm or 52453-h.zip *****
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-
-</pre>
-
-  </body>
-</html>
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
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+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; text-align: justify; font-size: 80%; font-style: italic;}
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .xx-small {font-size: 60%;}
+    .x-small {font-size: 75%;}
+    .small {font-size: 85%;}
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+                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
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+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border:        solid 1px;}
+    .head      { float: left; font-size: 90%; width: 98%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: center;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border:        solid 1px;}
+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 52453 ***</div>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      JOSEPH CONRAD
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Hugh Walpole
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      New York: Henry Holt And Company
+    </h4>
+    <h3>
+      1916
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0001.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0008.jpg" alt="0008 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      TO
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II&mdash;THE NOVELIST </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III&mdash;THE POET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S
+      PRINCIPAL WRITINGS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY </a>
+    </p>
+   <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#linkindex"> INDEX </a>
+    </p>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>O any<span
+      class="pagenum">7</span><a name="link007" id="link007"></a> reader of the
+      books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate
+      experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making
+      of his art. It may happen often enough that an author&rsquo;s artistic life is
+      of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a
+      personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of Joseph Conrad
+      the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer
+      deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with
+      the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with
+      the three backgrounds against whose form and colour <span class="pagenum">8</span><a
+      name="link008" id="link008"></a>his art has been placed we have some
+      compulsory connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th December
+      1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of Poland. In 1862
+      his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish rebellion, was
+      banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother and father there until
+      his mother died, when he was sent back to the Ukraine. In 1870 his lather
+      died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until 1874,
+      when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. In the
+      month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew at that
+      time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the
+      <i>Duke of Sutherland</i> as ordinary seaman. He became a Master in the
+      English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. In
+      1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years:
+      he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various
+      periods during <span class="pagenum">9</span><a name="link009" id="link009"></a>his
+      sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin. With that publisher&rsquo;s acceptance of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i> the third period of his life began. Since then his history has
+      been the history of his books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
+      relationship of these three backgrounds&mdash;Poland, the Sea, the inner
+      security and tradition of an English country-side&mdash;one can realise
+      what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed
+      through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may
+      be enough to give life and vigour to any poet&rsquo;s temperament. The romantic
+      melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
+      deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
+      tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
+      monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
+      impulses <span class="pagenum">10</span><a name="link010" id="link010"></a>those
+      were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of
+      a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. He
+      sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an
+      ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men
+      when to them also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never
+      afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse
+      from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered
+      the Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He
+      thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so
+      honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only
+      personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He found in
+      her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the
+      contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over
+      the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. <span class="pagenum">11</span><a
+      name="link011" id="link011"></a>He found, too, in her service, the type of
+      man who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
+      threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
+      struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who realised
+      so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their
+      master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about
+      it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of
+      freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
+      performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
+      possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
+      have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
+      sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in
+      nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his
+      companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision had
+      driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
+      despair of <span class="pagenum">12</span><a name="link012" id="link012"></a>any
+      possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where
+      freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise;
+      the two sides of the shield were revealed to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, towards the end of his twenty years&rsquo; service of the sea, the
+      creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments of
+      opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and
+      diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence
+      in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations,
+      will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>
+      had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well
+      believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and
+      surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world.
+      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>, however, was not rejected; its publication caused
+      <i>The Spectator</i> to remark: &ldquo;The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but
+      it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay
+      Archipelago.&rdquo; He <span class="pagenum">13</span><a name="link013"      id="link013"></a>had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind
+      from the beginning. He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that
+      day in 1897 when Henley accepted <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> for <i>The
+      New Review</i> as a more important date in his new career. That date may
+      serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
+      almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
+      behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
+      &ldquo;case&rdquo; of his earlier life. It was as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; that he saw it, a &ldquo;case&rdquo;
+       that was to produce all those other &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that were his books. This has
+      been their history.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
+      period, beginning with <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in 1895, ended with <i>Lord
+      Jim</i> in 1900. The second contains <span class="pagenum">14</span><a
+      name="link014" id="link014"></a>the two volumes of <i>Youth</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>,
+      the novel <i>Romance</i> that he wrote in collaboration with Ford Madox
+      Hueffer, and ends with <i>Nostromo</i>, published in 1903. The third
+      period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with <i>The Secret Agent</i>,
+      and receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of <i>Chance</i> in
+      1914, and <i>Victory</i> (1915).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
+      language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
+      view of the &ldquo;schools,&rdquo; to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
+      very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves upon
+      him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild beasts
+      behind iron bars. <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i>
+      (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in the
+      freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their world
+      had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of his own
+      individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and a new
+      vigour. In the <span class="pagenum">15</span><a name="link015"      id="link015"></a>character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Bahalatchi
+      and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of great things.
+      Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were
+      clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style a sense of rhetoric
+      and lack of ease. His vision of his background was pulled out beyond its
+      natural intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so
+      obvious as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out
+      of malicious perversity, anything else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, <i>Tales of
+      Unrest</i>, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad&rsquo;s difficulties. One study
+      in this book, <i>The Return</i>, with its redundancies and overemphasis,
+      is the crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume
+      succeeds. It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung
+      himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
+      what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, <i>The Nigger of the
+      Narcissus</i>. This <span class="pagenum">16</span><a name="link016"      id="link016"></a>was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a ship
+      from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the human
+      souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death, an influence
+      ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always tender and
+      humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other vessels, the <i>Narcissus</i>.
+      Never again, except perhaps in <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i>, was he to be
+      so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. The book is a gallery of
+      remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in
+      perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant,
+      abandoned. It is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence.
+      Of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period
+      of his work, <i>Lord Jim</i>. This was to remain, until the publication of
+      <i>Chance</i>, his most popular novel. It is the story of a young
+      Englishman&rsquo;s loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious
+      recovery. The first half of the book is a finely sustained development of
+      a <span class="pagenum">17</span><a name="link017" id="link017"></a>vividly
+      remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea
+      pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. Here
+      then in 1900 Conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the
+      jungle and was able to choose his path. His choice was still dictated by
+      the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of
+      observation his creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim,
+      Marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a
+      new birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appeared now in <i>Youth, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>
+      three of the finest short stories in the English language, work of
+      reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and
+      flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now
+      to be abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in <i>Youth</i> and its
+      evocation of the East, in <i>The Heart of Darkness</i> and its evocation
+      of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in <i>Typhoon</i> and its
+      evocation of the sea. He was never, after <span class="pagenum">18</span><a
+      name="link018" id="link018"></a>these tales, to write again of the sea as
+      though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
+      regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This second period closed with the production of a work that was
+      deliberately created rather than reminiscent, <i>Nostromo</i>. Conrad may
+      have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
+      stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
+      anything for their creation. There is much to be said about <i>Nostromo</i>,
+      in many ways the greatest of all Conrad&rsquo;s works, but, for the moment, one
+      would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical
+      births, in a journal&mdash;<i>T.P.&lsquo;s Weekly</i>&mdash;and astonished and
+      bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
+      and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its
+      critics did not understand it, and its author&rsquo;s own admirers were puzzled
+      by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Nostromo</i> was followed by a pause&mdash;one <span class="pagenum">19</span><a
+      name="link019" id="link019"></a>can easily imagine that its production
+      did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When, however, in 1907
+      appeared <i>The Secret Agent</i>, a new attitude was most plainly visible.
+      He was suddenly detached, writing now of &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that interested him as an
+      investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning
+      participation of experience. He is tender towards Winnie Verloc and her
+      old mother, the two women in <i>The Secret Agent</i>, but he studies them
+      quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim so radiantly, that
+      fierce contempt that in <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i> accompanied
+      Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer artist, but we
+      have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. <i>The Secret
+      Agent</i> is a tale of secret service in London; it contains the
+      wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
+      Conrad&rsquo;s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
+      completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 <i>Under Western Eyes</i>
+      spoke strongly of a Russian influence <span class="pagenum">20</span><a
+      name="link020" id="link020"></a>Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had too markedly
+      their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in
+      Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A volume of short stories, <i>A Set of Six</i>, illustrating still more
+      emphatically Conrad&rsquo;s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
+      chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars&mdash;<i>The
+      Duel</i>&mdash;a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained
+      note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land and Sea</i>, to
+      unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method.
+      <i>A Smile, of Fortune</i> and <i>The Secret Sharer</i> are amazing in the
+      beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the
+      reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as
+      something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken
+      from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress.
+      Nevertheless <i>The Secret Sharer</i> is a most marvellous story,
+      marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the
+      <span class="pagenum">21</span><a name="link021" id="link021"></a>contrast
+      between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of
+      its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared <i>Chance</i>, by no means the
+      finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
+      wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of <i>The
+      Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, of <i>Nostromo</i>. With
+      the popular success of <i>Chance</i> the first period of his work is
+      closed. On the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the
+      artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
+      prophecy.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad, no
+      better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading
+      of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. <i>Some
+      Reminiscences</i> and <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> demand consideration on
+      the threshold of any survey of this author&rsquo;s work, because <span
+      class="pagenum">22</span><a name="link022" id="link022"></a>they reveal,
+      from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the
+      individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the
+      process of creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares
+      to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor
+      fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels.
+      <i>Some Reminiscences</i> has only <i>Tristram Shandy</i> for its rival in
+      the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. <i>The
+      Mirror of the Sea</i> has no rival at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
+      reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
+      starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i>, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of <i>Some
+      Reminiscences</i>, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of
+      <i>Almayer</i> has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
+      maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of <span
+      class="pagenum">23</span><a name="link023" id="link023"></a>the clock have
+      covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply that the
+      fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the very essence
+      of Conrad&rsquo;s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that
+      to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short.
+      His reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take
+      on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: &ldquo;Ah! yes.
+      I&rsquo;m interesting, of course, but don&rsquo;t you remember...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
+      not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
+      figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be
+      crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the book
+      with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      of the <i>Nonsuch</i> who... or there is the window just behind the
+      writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one
+      of the year &lsquo;88 when...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of his thrilling voyage of <span class="pagenum">24</span><a
+      name="link024" id="link024"></a>discovery we are, by a kind of most
+      blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the author&rsquo;s own
+      most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the miracle, learn
+      something of Conrad as ship&rsquo;s officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a
+      visitor to his uncle&rsquo;s house in Poland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them
+      with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those
+      glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us,
+      only partially realised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
+      breathless, and, by the virtue of its author&rsquo;s style, solemn, we do
+      obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
+      revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
+      our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often
+      sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality.
+      Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells us: <span
+      class="pagenum">25</span><a name="link025" id="link025"></a>"Those who
+      read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a
+      few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It
+      rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when
+      nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to
+      attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.&rdquo;
+       (Page 20.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+      from which a philosophical mind should be free.&rdquo; (Page 21.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
+      sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
+      the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
+      can be rendered without shame.&rdquo; (Page 194.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
+      self-satisfaction, this sobriety&mdash;these qualities do give some
+      implication of the colour of the work that will <span class="pagenum">26</span><a
+      name="link026" id="link026"></a>arise from them; and when to these
+      qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we must have some
+      true conception of the nature of the work that he was to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is for this that <i>Some Reminiscences</i> is valuable. To read it as a
+      detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book of
+      modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the <i>My
+      Autobiography</i> or <i>My Life</i> of some eminent scientist or
+      theologian, is to be most grievously disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
+      disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
+      very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all their
+      own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad&rsquo;s faults and
+      of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and
+      simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there is almost
+      everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift
+      that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of <span
+      class="pagenum">27</span><a name="link027" id="link027"></a>art,
+      overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged, incoherent,
+      inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured
+      into a friend&rsquo;s ear in a moment of sudden confidence. That may or may not
+      be the best way to conduct reminiscences; the book remains a supremely
+      intimate, engaging and enlightening introduction to its author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> we are on very different ground. As I
+      have already said, this is Conrad&rsquo;s happiest book&mdash;indeed, with the
+      possible exception of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, his only happy
+      book. He is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his
+      distrust, his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here
+      permitting himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and
+      behind that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely
+      at variance with the distrust of his later novels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
+      papers, with such titles as <i>Landfalls and Departures</i>, <span
+      class="pagenum">28</span><a name="link028" id="link028"></a><i>Overdue and
+      Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft</i>. No reader
+      however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely
+      binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to him, mto the
+      very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she really is, he
+      has been made free of a great order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources&mdash;the
+      majesty, power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the
+      lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships
+      that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole
+      life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements
+      in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its
+      power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which
+      is the life of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad&rsquo;s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and
+      passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism,
+      her deceits, her <span class="pagenum">29</span><a name="link029"      id="link029"></a>cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men,
+      but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sea&mdash;this truth must be confessed&mdash;has no generosity. No
+      display of manly qualities&mdash;courage, hardihood, endurance,
+      faithfulness&mdash;has ever been known to touch its irresponsible
+      consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a
+      savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest
+      appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships
+      and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat
+      together in the face of his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep
+      is its unfathomable cruelty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
+      he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
+      cruelty. She positively &ldquo;brings it off,&rdquo; this assertion of her right, and
+      once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In this
+      worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a <span
+      class="pagenum">30</span><a name="link030" id="link030"></a>lyrical
+      freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never again, not even in
+      <i>Typhoon</i> and <i>Youth</i>, to write with such free and spontaneous
+      lyricism as in his famous passage about the &ldquo;West Wind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> forms then the best possible introduction to
+      Conrad&rsquo;s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently
+      than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion. It
+      presents also, however, in its treatment of the second element of his
+      subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the characters whom
+      he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in his novels. About
+      these same men there are certain characteristics to be noticed,
+      characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later analysis of
+      Conrad&rsquo;s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some mention here as
+      witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions that he, most
+      naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to be marked that almost
+      all the men upon the sea, from &ldquo;poor Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+      who used <span class="pagenum">31</span><a name="link031" id="link031"></a>to
+      suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was
+      approaching a coast,&rdquo; to the dramatic Dominic (&ldquo;from the slow,
+      imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had
+      never smiled in his life&rdquo;), are silent and thoughtful. Granted this
+      silence, Conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous survey, is instantly
+      attracted by any possible contrast. Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;- dying
+      in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in the quiet
+      room, &ldquo;his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the
+      pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home whose
+      abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of
+      stress and anxiety at sea&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;poor P&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,&rdquo;
+       with &ldquo;his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in <i>Punch</i>, his
+      little oddities&mdash;like his strange passion for borrowing
+      looking-glasses, for instance&rdquo;&mdash;that captain who &ldquo;did everything with
+      an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
+      but the result somehow was always on stereotyped <span class="pagenum">32</span><a
+      name="link032" id="link032"></a>lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson
+      that one could lay to heart&rdquo;&mdash;that other captain in whom &ldquo;through a
+      touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to
+      his temperament&rdquo;&mdash;here are little sketches for those portraits that
+      afterwards we are to know so well, Marlowe, Captain M&rsquo;Whirr, Captain
+      Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many others. Here we may fancy that his eye
+      lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little oddities and
+      contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects, such &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that
+      it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they
+      have to be left. He has obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition
+      of the curious muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august
+      power of the Sea&mdash;that is all that his present subject demands, that
+      is his theme and his picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
+      soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
+      that <i>The Mirror of The Sea</i>, ultimately, has most to do. <span
+      class="pagenum">33</span><a name="link033" id="link033"></a>As other men
+      write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his ships. He
+      sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and
+      beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises
+      them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft.
+      You may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell
+      the journalists of their crime in speaking of &ldquo;casting&rdquo; an anchor when the
+      true technicality is &ldquo;brought up&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;to an anchor&rdquo; understood. In the
+      chapter on &ldquo;Yachts&rdquo; he provides as much technical detail as any book of
+      instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      art of handling slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.&rdquo;...
+      &ldquo;A ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on
+      purpose to keep us up to mark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which
+      I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from her birth,
+      in no ordered sequence of <span class="pagenum">34</span><a name="link034"      id="link034"></a>events, but admitting us ever more closely into her
+      intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little
+      things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to
+      our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. Conrad is tender to her as
+      he is to nothing human. He watches her shy, new, in the dock, &ldquo;her
+      reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share
+      their life with her.&rdquo;... &ldquo;She looked modest to me. I imagined her
+      diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the
+      wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the
+      company of her tried and experienced bisters already familiar with all the
+      violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
+      salutes her grace and spirit&mdash;he echoes, with all the implied irony
+      of contrast, his companion&rsquo;s &ldquo;Ships are all right....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explains the many kinds of ships that there are&mdash;the rogues, the
+      wickedly malicious, <span class="pagenum">35</span><a name="link035"      id="link035"></a>the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the
+      staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has indulgences that
+      he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be severe before such a
+      world of fine spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, in the episode of the <i>Tremolino</i> and her tragic end (an end
+      that has in it a suggestion of that later story, <i>Freya of the Seven
+      Inlands</i>), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar,
+      he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
+      material. He gives us the soul of the <i>Tremolino</i>, the soul of
+      Dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever
+      deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon
+      it his house of romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of
+      all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
+      creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II&mdash;THE NOVELIST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N <span
+      class="pagenum">36</span><a name="link036" id="link036"></a>discussing the
+      art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three
+      special questions that we may ask&mdash;as to the Theme, as to the Form,
+      as to the creation of Character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
+      applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
+      novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel,
+      as, for instance, <i>The Ring and the Book</i> and <i>Aurora Leigh</i>
+      bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are
+      vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
+      of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
+      position as novelist <span class="pagenum">37</span><a name="link037"      id="link037"></a>and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most
+      truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in
+      this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist&mdash;that is, as a
+      narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to
+      those histories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
+      seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but
+      slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
+      deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
+      story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to
+      make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect.
+      Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite
+      unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned
+      themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which
+      forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A
+      new period began at the end of the fifties; <span class="pagenum">38</span><a
+      name="link038" id="link038"></a>but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel
+      called <i>Evan Harrington</i> was of any special importance; it made no
+      more stir than did <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in the early nineties, although
+      the wonderful <i>Richard Feverel</i> had already preceded it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel,
+      springing straight from the shores of France, where <i>Madame Bovary</i>
+      and <i>Une Vie</i> showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into
+      a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how
+      important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much
+      to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything
+      that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling
+      showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the
+      beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that
+      things were done. <i>The Yellow Book</i> sprang into a bright existence,
+      flamed, and died. &ldquo;Art for Art&rsquo;s sake&rdquo; was slain by the trial of Oscar
+      Wilde in 1895.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">39</span><a name="link039" id="link039"></a>Mr
+      Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop
+      assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made
+      socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the
+      Boer War completed an old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the whole question of Conrad&rsquo;s place in the history of the English
+      novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I
+      would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French
+      influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its
+      destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of
+      <i>The Yellow Book</i>, passing through all the realistic reaction that
+      followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed away
+      by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new
+      stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the
+      work that he had to do.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">40</span><a name="link040" id="link040"></a>The form
+      in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which
+      must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the
+      question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently
+      attacked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
+      suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
+      instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
+      between two seamen. One has &ldquo;knifed&rdquo; the other, and the quarrel has been
+      watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
+      wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
+      seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us
+      the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, <i>oratio
+      recta</i>, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the
+      spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the
+      girl are. He <span class="pagenum">41</span><a name="link041" id="link041"></a>describes
+      the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he
+      discovers about the man. Seen standing in his doorway he is the most
+      ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a
+      strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing
+      fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. That leads
+      one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the
+      bibulous old man, and for a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous
+      old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This
+      old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her
+      own. Once she was...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
+      the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
+      witness to Conrad&rsquo;s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
+      James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says:
+      &ldquo;It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a <span class="pagenum">42</span><a
+      name="link042" id="link042"></a>votary of the way to do a thing that shall
+      make it undergo most doing,&rdquo; and his amazement at Conrad&rsquo;s patient pursuit
+      of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that
+      in <i>What Maisie Knew</i> and <i>The Awkward Age</i> he has practised
+      almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside the intricate but
+      masterly form of <i>The Awkward Age</i> the duplicate narration of <i>Chance</i>
+      seems child&rsquo;s play. Mr Henry James makes the mistake of speaking as though
+      Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most
+      difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the
+      truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought
+      straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration
+      used by the Ancient Mariner and all the seamen before and alter him.
+      Conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which
+      stories in the past had generally come to him. He wishes to deny the
+      effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so
+      attractive to <span class="pagenum">43</span><a name="link043" id="link043"></a>him.
+      He must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he
+      himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the
+      truth of it then must he have two or three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: <i>Lord
+      Jim, Nostromo</i> and <i>Chance</i>. It is possible that <i>Lord Jim</i>
+      was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
+      from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
+      Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains
+      with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the <i>Patna</i>,
+      or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions waiting outside
+      for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation of these four men
+      Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the <i>Patna</i>: &ldquo;He made
+      me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was
+      extravagantly gorgeous too&mdash;got up in a. soiled sleeping-suit, bright
+      green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw
+      slippers <span class="pagenum">44</span><a name="link044" id="link044"></a>on
+      his bare feet, and somebody&rsquo;s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes
+      too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big
+      head.&rdquo; There are also two other &ldquo;no-account chaps with him&rdquo;&mdash;a sallow
+      faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a
+      blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with
+      drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty
+      imbecility, and, with these three, Jim, &ldquo;clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm
+      on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.&rdquo; Here are these
+      four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That
+      boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has
+      fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities
+      and discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist&rsquo;s thrill. We watch
+      our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
+      discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go? We
+      are thrilled with the suspense. <span class="pagenum">45</span><a
+      name="link045" id="link045"></a>Conrad, having discovered his subject,
+      must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply
+      cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. &ldquo;I was not there myself,&rdquo;
+       he tells us, &ldquo;but I can show you someone who was.&rdquo; He introduces us to a
+      first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. &ldquo;Now tell your story.&rdquo; He has at
+      once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience
+      clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone&rsquo;s disposal, whiskies and
+      cigars without stint, he lets himself go. He is bothered now by no
+      question but the thorough investigation of his discovery. What had Jim
+      done that he should be in such a case? We must have the story of the loss
+      of the <i>Patna</i>, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the
+      world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and Jim&rsquo;s fine, chivalrous
+      soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so much to say and so many fine
+      words in which to say it. At present, so absorbed are we, so successful is
+      he, that we are completely held. The illusion is perfect. We come to the
+      inquiry. <span class="pagenum">46</span><a name="link046" id="link046"></a>One
+      of the judges is Captain Brierley. &ldquo;What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah!
+      but I must tell you! Most extraordinary thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the <i>Patna</i>,
+      Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich
+      that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author&rsquo;s
+      hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the
+      episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the
+      Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe
+      even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe
+      into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method
+      is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with
+      him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the
+      trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth and <span
+      class="pagenum">47</span><a name="link047" id="link047"></a>reality of his
+      story. He saw&mdash;we cannot for an instant doubt it&mdash;that group on
+      the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly,
+      awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic
+      sequel. He must go on&mdash;that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe&mdash;and
+      at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his
+      very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding
+      something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The
+      author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his
+      narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts,
+      contrasts, halts and histories. That then is the peril of the method.
+      Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver
+      for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any
+      other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at
+      once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe
+      has certainly been compelled to <span class="pagenum">48</span><a
+      name="link048" id="link048"></a>face, at moments in his career, an angry,
+      irritated audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Nostromo</i> is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in
+      the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to
+      deny that <i>Nostromo</i> is extremely contused in places, but it is a
+      confusion that arises rather from Conrad&rsquo;s confidence in the reader&rsquo;s
+      fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
+      narrations are sometimes complicated&mdash;old Captain Mitchell does not
+      always achieve authenticity&mdash;but on the whole, the reader may be said
+      to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
+      little about others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this assurance of the author&rsquo;s that we must have already learnt the
+      main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
+      of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he
+      says to us, &ldquo;you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that revolution
+      that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be there myself. I
+      know all <span class="pagenum">49</span><a name="link049" id="link049"></a>the
+      people concerned, and the central figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor
+      Monyngham&mdash;no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic
+      was told a syllable. I knew the man well.... He.. and there we all are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
+      successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which
+      we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all,
+      but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our
+      conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of <i>Nostromo</i>,
+      can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of
+      Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola,
+      Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola&rsquo;s wife, of the
+      expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of
+      Hirsch&rsquo;s torture, of Captain Mitchell&rsquo;s watch&mdash;here are characters
+      the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other
+      hands, be fantastic <span class="pagenum">50</span><a name="link050"      id="link050"></a>melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely
+      supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the
+      first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author&rsquo;s word.... Here
+      the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not so with the third example, <i>Chance</i>. Here, as with <i>Lord Jim</i>,
+      we may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
+      in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the <i>Patna</i>
+      waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over <i>Chance</i>
+      reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their
+      comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her
+      horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate
+      flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain
+      Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too
+      double-faced for him gives the book&rsquo;s theme, and never in all the stories
+      that preceded Flora&rsquo;s has Conrad been so <span class="pagenum">51</span><a
+      name="link051" id="link051"></a>eager to afford us first-hand witnesses.
+      We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine
+      phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once
+      served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there
+      surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the
+      number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been
+      enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself
+      as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it
+      positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de
+      Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden&mdash;as the author names them&mdash;are
+      retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate
+      their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young
+      Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it
+      should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not
+      here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of
+      <span class="pagenum">52</span><a name="link052" id="link052"></a><i>Lord
+      Jim</i> and the whole of <i>Nostromo</i>. We believe most emphatically in
+      that first narration of young Powell&rsquo;s about his first chance. We believe
+      in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like
+      this: &ldquo;I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and
+      lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power
+      which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.&rdquo; We
+      believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in
+      Marlowe&rsquo;s interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony&rsquo;s room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
+      are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
+      it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that
+      we resent, a little, Marlowe&rsquo;s intimacy which prevents, with patronising
+      complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed.
+      Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when the second half of the book <span class="pagenum">53</span><a
+      name="link053" id="link053"></a>arrives we can be confident no longer.
+      Here, as in <i>Lord Jim</i>, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having
+      surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to
+      continue it. The true thing in <i>Lord Jim</i> is the affair of the <i>Patna</i>;
+      the true thing in <i>Chance</i> is Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora after
+      her disaster. But whereas in <i>Lord Jim</i> the sequel to Jim&rsquo;s cowardice
+      has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to
+      Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a
+      pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in <i>Chance</i>
+      entitled <i>A Moonless Night</i> is, in the first half of it, surely the
+      worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story,
+      <i>The Return</i>. The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and certain tales in
+      his volume, <i>Within the Tides</i>, make one wonder whether that alliance
+      between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained
+      is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these
+      two qualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">54</span><a name="link054" id="link054"></a>It
+      remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must
+      before the end of <i>Chance</i>, the form of narration in <i>Oratio Recta</i>
+      is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in
+      Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are
+      the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in.
+      It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered
+      a charlatan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are
+      developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
+      unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by
+      the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell
+      us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his
+      presence be not true...
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad&rsquo;s attention we shall
+      see that <span class="pagenum">55</span><a name="link055" id="link055"></a>in
+      almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats&mdash;unequal
+      to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in
+      them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men&rsquo;s
+      honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his
+      irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
+      human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom
+      he can admire. &ldquo;If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up,&rdquo;
+       we can hear him say. &ldquo;He can see at once that the odds are too strong for
+      him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before
+      them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon
+      them you may loosen all heaven&rsquo;s bolts and lightnings and they will not
+      quail.&rdquo; They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his
+      love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: &ldquo;You
+      see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and
+      I.&rdquo; <span class="pagenum">56</span><a name="link056" id="link056"></a>The
+      theme of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> is a struggle of a weak man against
+      nature, of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> the struggle of many simple
+      men against the presence of death, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, again, the struggle
+      of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at
+      the cost of truth). <i>Nostromo</i>, the conquest of a child of nature by
+      the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory,
+      from the very first. <i>Chance</i>, the struggle of an absolutely simple
+      and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not
+      understand. <i>Typhoon</i>, the very epitome of Conrad&rsquo;s themes, is the
+      struggle of M&rsquo;Whirr against the storm (here again it is M&rsquo;Whirr who
+      apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the
+      storm&rsquo;s confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In <i>Heart of Darkness</i>
+      the victory is to the forest. In <i>The End of the Tether</i> Captain
+      Whalley, one of Conrad&rsquo;s finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness
+      of his character. The three tales in <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land, and Sea</i> are all
+      themes of this kind&mdash;the struggle of simple, <span class="pagenum">57</span><a
+      name="link057" id="link057"></a>unimaginative men against forces too
+      strong for them. In <i>The Secret Agent</i> Winnie Verloc, another simple
+      character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i> Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs
+      at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Conrad&rsquo;s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough to
+      say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character of a
+      story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them and
+      leave defeat or victory to the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever Conrad&rsquo;s books are or are not, it may safely be said that they
+      are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all probability,
+      resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler affection, his art,
+      nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding over the inequality
+      of life&rsquo;s battle. His humour, often of a very fine kind, is always
+      sinister, because his choice of theme forbids light-heartedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would <span class="pagenum">58</span><a
+      name="link058" id="link058"></a>have found Marlowe, Jim and Captain
+      Anthony quite impossibly solemn company&mdash;but I do not deny that they
+      might not have been something the better for a little of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple and
+      unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple that
+      there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in meeting
+      a number of Conrad&rsquo;s characters is that they have existences and histories
+      entirely independent of their introducer&rsquo;s kind offices. Conrad has met
+      them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we are sure not only
+      that there is very much more that he could tell us about them if he had
+      time and space, but that even when he had told us all that he knew he
+      would only have touched on the fringe of their real histories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
+      mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
+      the robust vitality of their <span class="pagenum">59</span><a
+      name="link059" id="link059"></a>predecessors; the figures in the novel of
+      to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters fade
+      before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before an
+      idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
+      wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy before
+      the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton before the
+      shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy before the omnipotence
+      of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his inevitability, Mr Hardy himself
+      is arranging in the background; it may be claimed for the characters of Mr
+      Conrad that they yield their solidity to no force, no power, not even to
+      their author&rsquo;s own determination that they are doomed, in the end, to
+      defeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer novelist
+      than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries&mdash;namely,
+      the assurance that <span class="pagenum">60</span><a name="link060"      id="link060"></a>his characters have their lives and adventures both
+      before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at the
+      close of <i>The Three Sisters</i> or <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> we are left
+      speculating deeply upon &ldquo;what happened afterwards&rdquo; to Gayef or Barbara, to
+      Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad&rsquo;s sea captains as with Tchekov&rsquo;s Russians
+      we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we
+      are told about them. This independence springs partly from the author&rsquo;s
+      eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for him to introduce us to
+      any officer on his ship without whispering to us in an aside details about
+      his life, his wife and family on shore. By so doing he forges an extra
+      link in his chain of circumstantial evidence, but we do not feel that here
+      he is deliberately serving his art&mdash;it is only that quality already
+      mentioned, his own astonished delight at the things that he is
+      discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain M&rsquo;Whirr that he wrote
+      long letters home, <span class="pagenum">61</span><a name="link061"      id="link061"></a>beginning always with the words, &ldquo;My darling Wife,&rdquo; and
+      relating in minute detail each successive trip of the <i>Nan-Shan</i>. Mrs
+      M&rsquo;Whirr, we learn, was &ldquo;a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a
+      disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in the neighbourhood
+      considered as &lsquo;quite superior.&rsquo; The only secret of her life was her abject
+      terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good.&rdquo;
+       Also in <i>Typhoon</i> there is the second mate &ldquo;who never wrote any
+      letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had
+      been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme
+      bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a
+      boarding-house.&rdquo; How conscious we are of Jim&rsquo;s English country parsonage,
+      of Captain Anthony&rsquo;s loneliness, of Marlowe&rsquo;s isolation. By this simple
+      thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole character
+      stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on board the <i>Narcissus</i>
+      there is not one about whom, after his landing, <span class="pagenum">62</span><a
+      name="link062" id="link062"></a>we are not curious. There is the skipper,
+      whose wife comes on board, &ldquo;A real lady, in a black dress and with a
+      parasol.&rdquo;... &ldquo;Very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white
+      shirt, went with her over the side. We didn&rsquo;t recognise him at all....&rdquo;
+       And Mr Baker, the chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make
+      us his friends for life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
+      Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
+      and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
+      town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
+      in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady, he
+      thought, sitting down for a moment&rsquo;s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
+      enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere. He
+      didn&rsquo;t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The darkness
+      of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck; and Mr
+      Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom through
+      many <span class="pagenum">63</span><a name="link063" id="link063"></a>long
+      years he had given the best of a seaman&rsquo;s care. And never a command in
+      sight. Not once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There are others&mdash;the abominable Donkin for instance. &ldquo;Donkin
+      entered. They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. &lsquo;I give you
+      a bad discharge,&rsquo; he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want
+      your bloomin&rsquo; discharge&mdash;keep it. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; ter &lsquo;ave a job hashore.&rsquo;
+      He turned to us. &lsquo;No more bloomin&rsquo; sea for me,&rsquo; he said, aloud. All looked
+      at him. He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than
+      any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
+      declaration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In how many novels would Donkin&rsquo;s life have been limited by the part that
+      he was required to play in the adventures of the <i>Narcissus?</i> As it
+      is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue only. Or
+      there is Charley, the boy of the crew&mdash;&ldquo;As I came up I saw a
+      red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, <span
+      class="pagenum">64</span><a name="link064" id="link064"></a>fluffy hair,
+      fall on Charley&rsquo;s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over him:&mdash;&lsquo;Oh,
+      my boy! my boy!&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Leggo me,&rsquo; said Charley, &lsquo;leggo, mother!&rsquo; I was
+      passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of the blubbering woman
+      he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic, courageous, and profound,
+      that seemed to put all my knowledge of life to shame. I nodded and passed
+      on, but heard him say again, good-naturedly:&mdash;&lsquo;If you leggo of me
+      this minyt&mdash;ye shall &lsquo;ave a bob for a drink out of my pay.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But one passes from these men of the sea&mdash;from M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker,
+      from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
+      suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
+      men of the land&mdash;and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed.
+      About such men as M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will
+      not believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they
+      will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets&mdash;those
+      little details, <span class="pagenum">65</span><a name="link065"      id="link065"></a>M&rsquo;Whirr&rsquo;s wife, Mr Baker&rsquo;s proud sister, Charley&rsquo;s
+      mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
+      world&mdash;with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister
+      Nikita, the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself&mdash;we cannot
+      be so confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that
+      same perfect sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an <i>idée fixe</i>,
+      that you must search for this patiently, honestly, unsparingly&mdash;having
+      found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you. But is it? Is it not
+      possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing finger, offer up
+      instantly any <i>idée fixe</i> ready to hand because they wish to be left
+      alone? Decoud himself, for instance&mdash;Decoud, the imaginative
+      journalist in <i>Nostromo</i>, speculating with his ironic mind upon
+      romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved, the
+      burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough to
+      suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again <span
+      class="pagenum">66</span><a name="link066" id="link066"></a>we have a
+      quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees him. That first
+      description of him is wonderful, both in its reality and its significance.
+      &ldquo;His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of having wallowed, fully
+      dressed, all day on an unmade bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
+      character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have
+      the convictions of the extension of the protagonists&rsquo; lives beyond the
+      stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives independent of
+      the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end to the things that
+      we should be told about them, and they must be true things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his <i>idée fixe</i>&mdash;namely,
+      that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his phlegmatic state of
+      self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of it. At the first sign of
+      threatened change he is terrified to his very soul. Conrad never, for an
+      instant, allows him to leave this ground upon which he has <span
+      class="pagenum">67</span><a name="link067" id="link067"></a>placed him. We
+      see the man tied to his rock of an <i>idée fixe</i>, but he has,
+      nevertheless, we are assured, another life, other motives, other humours,
+      other terrors. It is perhaps a direct tribute to the authors reserve power
+      that we feel, at the book&rsquo;s close, that we should have been told so much
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
+      Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
+      romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott, with the
+      single exception of Thackeray&rsquo;s Beatrix&mdash;and here I am not forgetting
+      Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own immediate time,
+      young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so unjustly obscure
+      fiction, <i>The Shadow of a Titan</i>. As a picture, Nostromo shines with
+      a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel shines, with a glow that is
+      flung by the contrasted balance of its romance and realism. From that
+      first vision of him as he rides slowly through the crowds, in his
+      magnificent dress: &ldquo;... his hat, a gay sombrero with <span class="pagenum">68</span><a
+      name="link068" id="link068"></a>a silver cord and tassels. The bright
+      colours of a Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver
+      buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons
+      down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with
+      embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that
+      last moment when&mdash;... in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head
+      slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure
+      perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his
+      head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died
+      without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short
+      shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings&rdquo;&mdash;we are
+      conscious of his superb figure; and after his death we do, indeed, believe
+      what the last lines of the book assure us&mdash;&ldquo;In that true cry of love
+      and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to
+      the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like
+      a mass of solid silver, the <span class="pagenum">69</span><a
+      name="link069" id="link069"></a>genius of the magnificent Capatuz de
+      Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure
+      and love.&rdquo; His genius dominates, yes&mdash;but it is the genius of a
+      magnificent picture standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul.
+      And that soul is not given us&mdash;Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses
+      to surrender it to us. Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton
+      in <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> gives us the very heart of the man,
+      so that volumes might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender
+      him to us more truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves
+      him beyond our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him&mdash;we
+      have not met him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
+      basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
+      so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
+      daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in the
+      whole of Conrad&rsquo;s art&mdash;the drive in the <span class="pagenum">70</span><a
+      name="link070" id="link070"></a>cab of old Mrs Verloc, Winnie and Stevie&mdash;compels,
+      additionally, our gratitude) or that strange gathering, the Haldins,
+      Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, Peter Ivanovitch,
+      Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in <i>Romance</i> (a
+      book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in others), Falk or
+      Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his lover, all those and
+      so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the world that is offered
+      to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will
+      be near to us, some more distant? It is, finally, a world that Conrad
+      offers us, not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or
+      three figures returning to us&mdash;old friends with new faces and new
+      names&mdash;but a planet that we know, even as we know the Meredith
+      planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and seas,
+      its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid hovels,
+      its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness s. Although each
+      <span class="pagenum">71</span><a name="link071" id="link071"></a>work,
+      from, the vast <i>Nostromo</i> to the minutely perfect <i>Secret Share</i>,
+      has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the swarming life that he
+      has created knows no boundary. And in this, surely, creation has
+      accomplished its noblest work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III&mdash;THE POET
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
+      class="pagenum">72</span><a name="link072" id="link072"></a>poet in Conrad
+      is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain
+      of his works, as, for example, <i>The Secret Agent</i>, and <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i>, or such short stories as <i>The Informer</i>, or <i>Il
+      Conde</i>, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument
+      of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the
+      novelist deserve consideration&mdash;style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
+      the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
+      of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works
+      and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from <span class="pagenum">73</span><a
+      name="link073" id="link073"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s second novel, <i>An Outcast of
+      the Islands</i>:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each
+      other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the
+      forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the
+      life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that
+      crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed
+      to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading
+      his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in
+      the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful
+      compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen
+      this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering
+      stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And from his latest novel, <i>Chance</i>:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in
+      the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all
+      passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick <span
+      class="pagenum">74</span><a name="link074" id="link074"></a>glance he
+      threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring
+      limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the
+      clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space
+      made visible&mdash;almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in
+      the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his
+      first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost
+      undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before
+      that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening
+      universe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of
+      Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the
+      two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first
+      piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied,
+      something of the &ldquo;purple patch.&rdquo; We feel that the prose is too dependent
+      upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly
+      affected by the author&rsquo;s <span class="pagenum">75</span><a name="link075"      id="link075"></a>determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it,
+      however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the
+      picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual
+      tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the
+      inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture.
+      Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the
+      earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly, Tales of
+      Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness,
+      Lord Jim</i>,&mdash;prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving
+      adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern
+      invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not
+      believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements
+      and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale
+      called <i>The Return</i>, there is the following passage:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed.
+      There was <span class="pagenum">76</span><a name="link076" id="link076"></a>less
+      than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very
+      edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere.
+      Then almost simultaneously he shouted, &lsquo;Come back,&rsquo; and she let go the
+      handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who
+      has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the
+      room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe&mdash;like a grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words&mdash;&ldquo;moral
+      annihilation,&rdquo; &ldquo;devouring nowhere,&rdquo; &ldquo;peaceful desperation,&rdquo; &ldquo;last chance
+      of life,&rdquo; &ldquo;terrible,&rdquo; &ldquo;like a grave.&rdquo; That he shouted gives a final touch
+      of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Often, in the earlier books, Conrad&rsquo;s style has the awkward over-emphasis
+      of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a
+      foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand
+      him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked
+      effect of <span class="pagenum">77</span><a name="link077" id="link077"></a>two
+      influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of
+      the author of <i>Madame Bovary</i>. When we recollect that Conrad
+      hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in
+      French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert&rsquo;s
+      effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of
+      Flaubert&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l&rsquo;envanouissaiont sous la
+      poésie du rôle qui l&rsquo;envahissait; et entrainée vers l&rsquo;homme par l&rsquo;illusion
+      du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante,
+      extraordinaire, splendide...&rdquo; and this a sentence of Conrad&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Her hands
+      slipped slowly off Lingard&rsquo;s shoulders and her arms tell by her side,
+      listless, discouraged, as if to her&mdash;to her, the savage, violent and
+      ignorant creature&mdash;had been revealed clearly in that moment the
+      tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and
+      transparent, elusive and everlasting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad&rsquo;s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is
+      probable, <span class="pagenum">78</span><a name="link078" id="link078"></a>however,
+      that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily
+      exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply
+      into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the
+      arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of
+      his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
+      importance&mdash;the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
+      that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his
+      remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full
+      strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the
+      sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we
+      think in many pages of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>An Outcast of the
+      Island</i>, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
+      emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
+      rapture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was under the influence of these powers <span class="pagenum">79</span><a
+      name="link079" id="link079"></a>also in that, at that time, they were too
+      strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder
+      and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style,
+      in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man
+      who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him&mdash;often
+      the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with
+      sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of
+      <i>Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Nostromo</i>, this lyrical
+      impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously,
+      with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will
+      and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from <i>Typhoon</i> with
+      that earlier one from <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i> that I quoted
+      above:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene
+      of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved
+      slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane <span
+      class="pagenum">80</span><a name="link080" id="link080"></a>the excess of
+      her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of
+      the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea
+      impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still
+      air moaned. Above Jakes&rsquo; head a few stars shone into the pit of black
+      vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the
+      patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as
+      if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem
+      on a lowering brow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That is poet&rsquo;s work, and poet&rsquo;s work at its finest. Instead of impressing
+      us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made
+      the very most of a rather thin moment&mdash;feels, indeed, himself that it
+      is thin&mdash;we are here under the influence of something that can have
+      no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though
+      it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest
+      material&mdash;and yet it remains, through all its discipline,
+      spontaneous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These three tales, <i>Typhoon, Youth</i> and <span class="pagenum">81</span><a
+      name="link081" id="link081"></a><i>Heart of Darkness</i>, stand by
+      themselves as the final expression of Conrad&rsquo;s lyrical gift. We may
+      remember such characters as M&rsquo;Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures
+      as the old seneschal in <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i> or the Ancient Mariner
+      himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and
+      finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman&rsquo;s <i>When Lilac first on
+      the Door yard bloomed</i> or Keats&rsquo; <i>Nightingale.</i> Their author was
+      never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his
+      enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the
+      things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose
+      business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is
+      conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and
+      high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them
+      that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older&mdash;he
+      must look back now on the colours of <span class="pagenum">82</span><a
+      name="link082" id="link082"></a><i>Youth</i> with an indulgent smile. And
+      when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as <i>The Secret Agent</i> and <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i>, in such a volume of stories as <i>A Set of Six</i>, the
+      lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned&mdash;we are led forward by
+      sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city
+      policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from <i>Chance</i> quoted at the
+      beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined
+      enthusiasm of <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i>, the lyrical impulse still
+      remains. Yes, it is there, but&mdash;&ldquo;Young Powell felt it.&rdquo; In that
+      magical storm that was <i>Typhoon</i> God alone can share our terror and
+      demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
+      atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in
+      the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his <span
+      class="pagenum">83</span><a name="link083" id="link083"></a>daily bread or
+      game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business.
+      He produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action
+      in the waiting-room of an English railway station. There is the novelist
+      who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it
+      and <i>does</i> produce it in thick slabs. There are the novelists whose
+      theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is
+      provided simply by that reaction&mdash;and there, finally, it is left, put
+      into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than
+      the immediate one of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists
+      and, in our own day, Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s Brighton background in <i>Hilda
+      Lessways</i> or Mrs Wharton&rsquo;s New York background in <i>The House of Mirth</i>
+      offer most successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class
+      provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in
+      relation with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly,
+      by the contemplation of some scene and is thence <span class="pagenum">84</span><a
+      name="link084" id="link084"></a>extended to the whole vista, of life, from
+      birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as
+      conlined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its
+      progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. Such a
+      moment is the death of Bazarov in <i>Fathers and Children</i>, the
+      searching of Dmitri in <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i>, the scene at the
+      theatre in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, the London meeting between
+      Beauchamp and René in <i>Beauchamp&rsquo;s Career</i>. It is not only that these
+      scenes are &ldquo;done&rdquo; to the full extent of their &ldquo;doing,&rdquo; it is also that
+      they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with all the
+      emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev, Dostoievsky,
+      Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. Conrad, at his
+      highest moments, is also of that company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
+      lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless <i>Victorian Age in Literature</i>,
+      has named this element Glamour. <span class="pagenum">85</span><a
+      name="link085" id="link085"></a>In writing of the novels by George Eliot
+      he says: &ldquo;Indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a
+      certain indescribable thing called <i>Glamour</i>, which was the whole
+      stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
+      clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
+      when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
+      Castlewood.&rdquo; Now&rsquo; this matter of <i>Glamour</i> is not all, because
+      Dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or
+      the house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit&rsquo;s escape after the murder do
+      not put us into touch with other worlds&mdash;but we may say, at any rate,
+      that when, in a novel atmosphere <i>is</i> potential it is certain also to
+      have glamour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The potential qualities of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere are amongst his very
+      strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is his
+      union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
+      important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. In
+      <i>The Outcast <span class="pagenum">86</span><a name="link086"      id="link086"></a>of the Islands</i>, when Willems is exiled by Captain
+      Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
+      terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described&mdash;it
+      has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
+      power of something stronger than ourselves. In <i>Lord Jim</i> the
+      contrast of Jim with the officers of the <i>Patna</i> is a contrast not
+      only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain&rsquo;s
+      gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
+      ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
+      degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In <i>The Nigger of the
+      Narcissus</i> the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the
+      lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
+      intimates we have become&mdash;but that shadow that traps the feet of the
+      negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
+      boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
+      that single voyage of the <i>Narcissus</i>. <span class="pagenum">87</span><a
+      name="link087" id="link087"></a>When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the
+      boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us
+      that the tears of &ldquo;that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient
+      silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace&rdquo; should move us as
+      though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous
+      journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful
+      and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite
+      indefinitely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
+      significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes
+      to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because
+      he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic
+      adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We may hear, with
+      many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another
+      nail into the framework that supports their picture. &ldquo;Now see how firmly
+      it stands,&rdquo; they say. &ldquo;That last nail settled it.&rdquo; But <span
+      class="pagenum">88</span><a name="link088" id="link088"></a>Conrad is
+      utterly unconscious as to his readers&rsquo; later credulity&mdash;he is too
+      completely held by his own amazing discoveries. Sometimes, as in <i>The
+      Return</i>, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were
+      banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should
+      perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. But, in his real
+      discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how
+      we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage,
+      finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin&rsquo;s cave! If he
+      is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its
+      natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending
+      forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply
+      disciplined realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping
+      himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes
+      buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal
+      and defies Lingard and Almayer, so <span class="pagenum">89</span><a
+      name="link089" id="link089"></a>that they are like men disheartened by
+      some tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a
+      house for Almayer&rsquo;s baby are &ldquo;a dirty double pack&rdquo; with which he used to
+      play Chinese bézique&mdash;it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted
+      in it, considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The
+      atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a
+      room in which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
+      soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of
+      books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
+      European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
+      petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender
+      book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
+      clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
+      wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
+      place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
+      blankets that <span class="pagenum">90</span><a name="link090" id="link090"></a>lay
+      in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat.... Through the half-open
+      shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room,
+      beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then,
+      travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its
+      solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm
+      of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there
+      amongst yellow papers for many a day!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this room is set in the very heart of the forests&mdash;&ldquo;the forests
+      unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven&mdash;and
+      as indifferent.&rdquo; Had I space I could multiply from every novel and tale
+      examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the
+      lyrical and the realistic&mdash;the lyrical pulse beating through
+      realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however, select one book, a
+      supreme example of this effect. What I say about <i>Nostromo</i> may be
+      proved from any other work of Conrad&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theme of <i>Nostromo</i> is the domination <span class="pagenum">91</span><a
+      name="link091" id="link091"></a>of the silver of the Sulaco mine over the
+      bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. The light of the
+      silver shines over the book. It is typified by &ldquo;the white head of
+      Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.&rdquo; Conrad, then, in choosing
+      his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver
+      treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. His
+      atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until
+      that last vision of all of &ldquo;the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a
+      big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver.&rdquo; Sulaco burns with
+      colour. We can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets
+      with the coaches, &ldquo;great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full
+      of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and
+      black,&rdquo; the houses, &ldquo;in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink,
+      pale blue,&rdquo; or, after dark, from Mrs Gould&rsquo;s balcony &ldquo;towards the plaza
+      end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women
+      cooking their <span class="pagenum">92</span><a name="link092" id="link092"></a>evening
+      meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a
+      sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
+      triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a
+      point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked
+      his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the
+      dark shape of the rider.&rdquo; Later there is that sinister glimpse of the
+      plaza, &ldquo;where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating
+      into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars
+      issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and above the roofs, next to
+      the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of
+      Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows
+      of the Intendencia.&rdquo; In its final created beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as
+      coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose
+      gates we watch Grimm&rsquo;s princes and princesses passing&mdash;but the detail
+      of it is <span class="pagenum">93</span><a name="link093" id="link093"></a>built
+      with careful realism demanded by the &ldquo;architecture of Manchester or
+      Birmingham.&rdquo; We wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its
+      cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its
+      sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not
+      created towns for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a
+      shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s Wessex map is the most fascinating
+      document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson&rsquo;s
+      chart in <i>Treasure Island</i>. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us
+      a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far
+      excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver&rsquo;s treasure. If
+      any attentive reader of <i>Nostromo</i> were put down in Sulaco tomorrow
+      he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail
+      that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but
+      never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is <span
+      class="pagenum">94</span><a name="link094" id="link094"></a>finished, to
+      any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led,
+      quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama,
+      through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in
+      retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that &ldquo;extended
+      to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic
+      quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a High official
+      of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed
+      doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in
+      the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the
+      gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard,
+      where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a
+      moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and
+      bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands
+      crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops
+      of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came
+      to your ears, and, <span class="pagenum">95</span><a name="link095"      id="link095"></a>ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first
+      steps, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé
+      moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm&rsquo;s length, through
+      an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse&mdash;a strong-hearted but
+      persevering black brute, with a hammer bead&mdash;you would have seen in
+      the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost
+      touching the curbstone of the side-walk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation
+      of some reader &ldquo;Yes&mdash;those orange-trees! It was just like that when I
+      was there!&rdquo; How convinced we are of Conrad&rsquo;s unimpeachable veracity! How
+      like him are those remembered details, &ldquo;the nailed doors,&rdquo; &ldquo;the fine stone
+      hands,&rdquo; &ldquo;at arm&rsquo;s-length&rdquo;!&mdash;and can we not sniff something of the
+      author&rsquo;s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that
+      &ldquo;hammer-headed horse&rdquo; of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember
+      enough to fill a volume!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is able, therefore, upon this foundation <span class="pagenum">96</span><a
+      name="link096" id="link096"></a>of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to
+      build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth.
+      He does not, in <i>Nostromo</i> at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but
+      he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town
+      under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as
+      beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we
+      remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near
+      to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the
+      last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding,
+      with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the
+      crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride.
+      Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy
+      story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, then, is the secret of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere. He is the poet, working
+      through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the
+      heart of his work from the first line of <i>Almayer s Folly</i> to the
+      last <span class="pagenum">97</span><a name="link097" id="link097"></a>line
+      of <i>Victory. Nostromo</i> is not simply the history of certain lives
+      that were concerned in a South American revolution. It <i>is</i> that
+      history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no
+      country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for
+      its interpretation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
+      creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain
+      limitations.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
+      that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
+      watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
+      cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
+      they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
+      <span class="pagenum">98</span><a name="link098" id="link098"></a>ambition
+      of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is
+      limitless; he can see farther than they&mdash;from his height he can
+      follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very
+      last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony
+      springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
+      it is, surely, Conrad&rsquo;s harshest limitation that he should never be free
+      from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is
+      he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his
+      faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
+      creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
+      Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s the end. He
+      passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
+      and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate
+      his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.&rdquo; <span
+      class="pagenum">99</span><a name="link099" id="link099"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s
+      ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim&rsquo;s
+      endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain&mdash;as
+      vain as Stein&rsquo;s butterflies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
+      observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
+      character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart&rsquo;s desire it is that his
+      merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
+      whom human achievements are nothing&mdash;lust of treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M&rsquo;Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous
+      of God&rsquo;s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm,
+      so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he
+      might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the
+      degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems,
+      can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in
+      the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap&mdash;the victim is always in his
+      power. <span class="pagenum">100</span><a name="link100" id="link100"></a>It
+      comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul
+      that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to
+      duty. His men of brain&mdash;Marlowe, Decoud, Stein&mdash;are melancholy
+      and ironic: &ldquo;If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle
+      is.&rdquo; The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and,
+      because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if
+      possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea
+      whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men
+      of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
+      Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc,
+      for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For
+      the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land,
+      Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but
+      they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea
+      captains. <span class="pagenum">101</span><a name="link101" id="link101"></a>This
+      then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He
+      will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw
+      the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does
+      not, tor an instant, hamper his interest&mdash;that is as keen and acute
+      as is the absorption of any collector of specimens&mdash;but at the end of
+      it all, as with his own Stein: &ldquo;He says of him that he is &lsquo;preparing to
+      leave all this: preparing to leave...&rsquo; while he waves his hand sadly at
+      his butterflies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom,
+      in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles&mdash;Robert Browning.
+      As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the
+      honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects
+      and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an
+      amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that
+      resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning&rsquo;s
+      <span class="pagenum">102</span><a name="link102" id="link102"></a>interest
+      in life was derived, on the novelist&rsquo;s side of him, from his absorption in
+      the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet&rsquo;s side,
+      in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those
+      affairs. Conrad has not Browning&rsquo;s clear-eyed realisation of the necessity
+      of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual
+      case&mdash;he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming
+      melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of
+      romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest
+      realism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Browning&rsquo;s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
+      of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in <i>Sordello</i> the most
+      romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
+      such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
+      forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is
+      not this exactly what we may say of <i>Nostromo?</i> Mr Chesterton has
+      written of <span class="pagenum">103</span><a name="link103" id="link103"></a>Browning:
+      &ldquo;He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of
+      Watteau, and the &lsquo;blue spirt of a lighted match&rsquo; for the monotony of the
+      evening star.&rdquo; Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his
+      mistress&rsquo; window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot
+      boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an
+      elderly, taciturn sea captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
+      precisely Conrad&rsquo;s characters. Is not Waring Conrad&rsquo;s man?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
+      Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in <i>The
+      Secret Agent</i>, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
+      to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
+      these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of
+      truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart,
+      it is also that the worlds of these <span class="pagenum">104</span><a
+      name="link104" id="link104"></a>two poets are the same. How deeply would
+      Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, M&rsquo;Whirr,
+      Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation
+      of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee&rsquo;s wife, of the figures in the
+      Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed&rsquo;s
+      Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these
+      discoveries!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, with its multiplied witnesses, its
+      statement as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
+      simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
+      last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of
+      that superb building&mdash;here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
+      temple that has <i>Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo</i> amongst its other
+      turrets, buttresses and towers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad is his own master&mdash;he has imitated no one, he has created, as
+      I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
+      carried Romantic-Realism showed <span class="pagenum">105</span><a
+      name="link105" id="link105"></a>the author of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> the
+      signs of the road that he was to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we
+      not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as novelist?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
+      class="pagenum">106</span><a name="link106" id="link106"></a>terms,
+      Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means
+      of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely
+      romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely
+      dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of <i>Robert Louis Stevenson</i>,
+      said: &ldquo;Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England,
+      created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
+      costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if
+      it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious
+      virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The
+      art was jaded when Reade finished his vocifer<span class="pagenum">107</span><a
+      name="link107" id="link107"></a>ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead.
+      And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his
+      estimate of Stevenson&rsquo;s present and future literary value without denying
+      that the date of the publication of <i>St Ives</i> was also the date of
+      the death of the purely romantic novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term &ldquo;Romantic&rdquo; is
+      used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular
+      idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term &ldquo;Realism&rdquo; has, recently,
+      been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern
+      use, covers everything that is removed from reality: &ldquo;I like romances,&rdquo; we
+      hear the modern reader say, &ldquo;because they take me away from real life,
+      which I desire to forget.&rdquo; In the same way Realism is defined by its
+      enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant
+      pessimist. &ldquo;I like realism,&rdquo; admirers of a certain order of novel <span
+      class="pagenum">108</span><a name="link108" id="link108"></a>exclaim,
+      &ldquo;because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day&mdash;I
+      know where I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of
+      Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
+      everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an
+      ambition&mdash;I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life
+      with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence&mdash;Romance
+      is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that
+      Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always
+      upon truth perceived and recorded&mdash;-it is the essence ol observation.
+      In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in
+      its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often
+      upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any
+      rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply
+      a necessary divorce from reality, nor does <span class="pagenum">109</span><a
+      name="link109" id="link109"></a>Realism imply a detailed and dusty
+      preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance
+      to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy
+      for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than
+      observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as
+      Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its
+      fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign
+      literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence
+      of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885
+      and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian
+      novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the
+      last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly
+      what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as <i>The Brothers
+      Karamazov</i>, such a play as <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> are there before
+      us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that <i>Karamazov</i>
+      has, in the England <span class="pagenum">110</span><a name="link110"      id="link110"></a>of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by
+      <i>Madame Bovary</i>....
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
+      development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry
+      James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic,
+      influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger
+      generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr
+      H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same
+      position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French
+      novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say
+      that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely
+      to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they
+      are, make the story of Almayer&rsquo;s degradation sufficiently realistic, when
+      it is merely <span class="pagenum">111</span><a name="link111" id="link111"></a>recorded
+      and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad&rsquo;s
+      imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked,
+      beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it
+      mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of
+      life and death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
+      often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
+      of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
+      who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by
+      his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little
+      colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad had, from the first, a poet&rsquo;s&mdash;that is to say, a romantic&mdash;mind,
+      and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
+      determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of
+      all honest men. <span class="pagenum">112</span><a name="link112"      id="link112"></a>In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not
+      abated one jot of his romance&mdash;<i>Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of
+      Darkness</i> are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature&mdash;but
+      the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification,
+      whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
+      determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by
+      his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in
+      this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue.
+      This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that
+      Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by Dostoievsky very
+      considerably, cannot be denied. <i>Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The
+      Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov</i> are romantic realism at the most
+      astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to
+      attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri
+      Karamazov, <span class="pagenum">113</span><a name="link113" id="link113"></a>Nicolas
+      Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or
+      sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic
+      passion of Dostoievsky&rsquo;s love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole
+      world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of
+      creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad.
+      Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do
+      they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as
+      &ldquo;cases&rdquo; involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He
+      feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his
+      sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his
+      scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless
+      in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
+      he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity&mdash;Conrad finds
+      humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless he has been influenced by <span class="pagenum">114</span><a
+      name="link114" id="link114"></a>the Russian writer continuously and
+      sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, <i>Under Western Eyes</i>, the
+      influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that novel is
+      the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though Dostoievsky had
+      given him Razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too
+      overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. What,
+      however, Conrad has in common with the creator of Raskolnikov is his
+      thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his
+      characters. Conrad alone of all English novelists shares this zest with
+      the great Russian. Dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his
+      fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet&rsquo;s cry for
+      colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men&mdash;and
+      they find it not as Flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art,
+      not as Turgéniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant
+      beauty, not as Tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel&mdash;simply
+      they pursue their quest <span class="pagenum">115</span><a name="link115"      id="link115"></a>because the breathless interest of the pursuit is
+      stronger than they. They have, both of them, created characters simply
+      because characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
+      dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
+      determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
+      Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M&rsquo;Whirr, demanded
+      that they should be flung upon the page.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he has
+      triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
+      through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing that
+      Conrad has done for the English novel&mdash;he has brought the zest of
+      creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their art&mdash;the
+      Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. That at
+      this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of
+      Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows exhaustion and
+      sterility <span class="pagenum">116</span><a name="link116" id="link116"></a>means
+      nothing; the stream will soon ran full again. Meanwhile we, in England,
+      know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the
+      novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of
+      romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a
+      means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many
+      adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
+      English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
+      provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it
+      does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists&mdash;in
+      the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W.
+      L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr
+      Brett Young&mdash;this influence is to be detected. <span class="pagenum">117</span><a
+      name="link117" id="link117"></a>Even with such avowed realists as Mr
+      Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very
+      different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once
+      by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton&rsquo;s <i>On the Staircase</i>
+      with Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, or Mr
+      Galsworthy&rsquo;s <i>Man of Property</i>&mdash;and Mr E. M. Forster is a
+      romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose <i>Longest Journey</i>
+      and <i>Howard&rsquo;s End</i> may possibly provide the historian of English
+      literature with dates as important as the publication of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i> in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to
+      this essay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
+      realism can return. We have been shown in <i>Nostromo</i> something that
+      has the colour of <i>Treasure Island</i> and the reality of <i>New Grub
+      Street</i>. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English
+      novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is,
+      surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who
+      believe that at few periods in <span class="pagenum">118</span><a
+      name="link118" id="link118"></a>English literature has the novel shown
+      more signs of a thrilling and original future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for
+      a moment at his last novel, <i>Victory</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and the last volume of short stories had
+      shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
+      ultimately, from reality. <i>Victory</i>, splendid tale though it is, does
+      not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost
+      helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy;
+      that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as
+      elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and
+      slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old
+      early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as
+      though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown,
+      finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that
+      eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe
+      is pre<span class="pagenum">119</span><a name="link119" id="link119"></a>vented
+      he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered
+      corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as
+      it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in
+      the whole of Conrad&mdash;the last conversation between Heyst and Lena&mdash;that
+      we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
+      more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of
+      the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the
+      same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of
+      the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its
+      austerity and truth as ever it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
+      incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline
+      and restraint that were once his law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the
+      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> of 1895 to the <i>Victory</i> of 1915, one <span
+      class="pagenum">120</span><a name="link120" id="link120"></a>realises that
+      it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that
+      brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to
+      the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of
+      character and high adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      [The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
+      signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer&rsquo;s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New editions.
+      (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Nigger of the &ldquo;Narcissus&rdquo;: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
+      edition, 1910.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer
+      (Heinemann). 1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith, Elder).
+      1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
+      Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
+      Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
+      New edition, 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
+      (Dent). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">123</span><a name="link123" id="link123"></a>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1895. New editions,
+      1912; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Outcast of the Islands (<i>Appleton</i>). 1896. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
+      1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (<i>Dodd, Mead</i>). 1897.
+      New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: &ldquo;The Nigger of the
+      &lsquo;Narcissus&rsquo;&rdquo; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tales of Unrest (<i>Scribner</i>). 1898.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Jim (<i>Doubleday</i>) 1900. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (<i>McClure Co.</i>).
+      1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Typhoon (<i>Putman</i>). 1902. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Youth, and two Other Stories (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards transferred to
+      <i>Doubleday</i>). 1903.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (<i>McClure Co.</i>). 1903. New
+      edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (<i>McClure Co</i>.
+      Afterwards transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1904.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (<i>Harper</i>), 1904. <span
+      class="pagenum">124</span><a name="link124" id="link124"></a>The Mirror of
+      the Sea: Memories and Impressions (<i>Harper</i>). 1906.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (<i>Harper</i>). 1907.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards
+      transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (<i>Harper</i>).
+      1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Personal Retold (<i>Harper</i>). 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &lsquo;Twist Land and Sea: Tales (<i>Doran</i>). 1912. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
+      1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Set of Six [Tales: one, &ldquo;The Duel.&rdquo; previously issued as &ldquo;A Point of
+      Honour&rdquo;] (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Victory: An Island Tale (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the Tides: Tales (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1916.
+    </p>
+
+<p>
+      <a name="linkindex" id="linkindex"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      INDEX
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+_Almayer&rsquo;s Folly_, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link012">12</a>, <a
+      href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
+      href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
+
+
+Bennett, Arnold, <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
+Beresford, J. D., <a href="#link116">116</a>
+_Brothers Karamazov, The_, <a href="#link109">109</a>
+Browning, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a href="#link101">101</a>, <a
+      href="#link102">102</a>, <a href="#link103">103</a>, <a href="#link104">104</a>
+
+
+_Chance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
+      href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link033">33</a>, <a
+      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
+_Cherry Orchard, The_, <a href="#link060">60</a>, <a href="#link109">109</a>
+Chesterton, G. K., <a href="#link084">84</a>
+Conrad, J., birth, <a href="#link008">8</a>, naturalised, <a href="#link008">8</a>
+Curie, R., <a href="#link099">99</a>
+
+
+Dickens, <a href="#link085">85</a>
+Dostoievsky, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
+      href="#link113">113</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+
+
+Eliot, George, <a href="#link085">85</a>
+_End of the Tether, The_, <a href="#link056">56</a>
+_Evan Harrington_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+_Eve of St Agnes, The_, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+
+
+Flaubert, <a href="#link077">77</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+Form, <a href="#link040">40</a>
+Forster, E. M., <a href="#link117">117</a>
+_Freya of the Seven Islands_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
+
+
+Galsworthy, J., <a href="#link059">59</a>
+George, W. L., <a href="#link116">116</a>
+
+
+Hardy, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+_Heart of Darkness_, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
+      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+Hueffer, F. M., <a href="#link014">14</a>
+
+
+Irony, <a href="#link055">55</a>
+
+
+James, Henry, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a
+      href="#link042">42</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+
+
+Keats, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+Kipling, R., <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+
+
+_Lord Jim_, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
+      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link073">73</a>, <a
+      href="#link080">80</a>
+Lyrical impulse, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+
+
+_Madame Bovary_, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link077">77</a>,110
+Meredith, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>
+Method in fiction, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a href="#link048">48</a>, etc.
+Mid-Victorian English novel, <a href="#link058">58</a>
+_Mirror of the Sea, The_, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a
+      href="#link027">27</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link032">32</a>
+
+
+Nature, <a href="#link078">78</a>
+_Nigger of the Narcissus_, The, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link015">15</a>. 27, <a
+      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link063">63</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a
+      href="#link086">86</a>
+_Nostrcmo_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link018">18</a>, <a
+      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link049">49</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
+      href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link090">90</a>, <a href="#link096">96</a>, <a
+      href="#link097">97</a>, <a href="#link102">102</a>
+
+
+_Outcast of the Islands, An_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
+      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
+      href="#link085">85</a>
+
+
+Philosophy, <a href="#link057">57</a>
+Poland, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link024">24</a>
+
+
+Realism. 108, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+_Return, The_, <a href="#link075">75</a>
+_Richard Feverel,_ 38
+_Romance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link070">70</a>
+Romance, <a href="#link108">108</a>. Russian influence, <a href="#link109">109</a>, <a
+      href="#link112">112</a>
+
+
+Sea, <a href="#link008">8</a>, <a href="#link028">28</a>
+_Secret Agent, The_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
+      href="#link057">57</a>, <a href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
+      href="#link103">103</a>
+_Secret Sharer, The_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
+_Set of Six, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+Shaw, Bernard. 39
+Ships, <a href="#link033">33</a>
+_Smile of Fortune, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
+_Some Réminiscences_, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
+      href="#link026">26</a>
+_Sordello_, <a href="#link102">102</a>
+_Spectator, The_, <a href="#link012">12</a>
+Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+Style, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+Swinnerton, Frink, <a href="#link106">106</a>, <a href="#link107">107</a>, <a
+      href="#link116">116</a>
+
+
+_Tales of Unrest_, <a href="#link015">15</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>
+Tchekov, <a href="#link060">60</a>
+Themes, <a href="#link054">54</a>
+Tolstoi, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+_T. P.&lsquo;s Weekly_, <a href="#link018">18</a>
+_Trtmolino_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
+Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+Turgeniev, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
+      href="#link114">114</a>
+_'Twixt Land and Sea_, <a href="#link020">20</a> 56
+_Typhoon_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a
+      href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link061">61</a>, <a
+      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
+      href="#link082">82</a>
+
+
+_Under Western Eyes_, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a href="#link057">57</a>, <a
+      href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+_Une Vie_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+
+
+_Victory_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link118">118</a>
+
+
+Wells, H. G., <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a
+      href="#link110">110</a>
+Wharton, Mrs, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
+Whitman, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+
+
+_Yellow Book, The_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+_Youth_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a
+      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
+      href="#link082">82</a>
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 52453 ***</div>
+  </body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you’ll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+Title: Joseph Conrad
+
+Author: Hugh Walpole
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
+Last Updated: November 20, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger from page images generously
+provided by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+By Hugh Walpole
+
+New York
+
+Henry Holt And Company
+
+1916
+
+[Illustration: 0001]
+
+[Illustration: 0008]
+
+[Illustration: 0009]
+
+TO
+
+SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
+
+
+
+
+I--BIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I
+
+
+|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
+plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
+very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
+an author’s artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
+his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
+with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
+again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
+reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
+creation of his characters.
+
+With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
+with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
+has been placed we have some compulsory connection.
+
+Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
+December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
+Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
+rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
+and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
+Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.
+
+Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
+1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
+In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
+at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
+joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
+Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
+naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
+nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
+writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
+With that publisher’s acceptance of _Almayer’s Folly_ the third period
+of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
+books.
+
+Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
+relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
+security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
+they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
+all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
+enough to give life and vigour to any poet’s temperament. The romantic
+melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
+deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
+
+Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
+tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
+monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
+impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
+size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
+of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
+them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
+and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
+That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
+him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
+to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
+of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
+he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
+for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
+wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
+and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
+could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
+his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
+who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
+threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
+struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
+realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
+their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
+about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
+of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
+performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
+possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
+have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
+sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
+in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
+by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
+had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
+despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
+citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
+how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
+him.
+
+Then, towards the end of his twenty years’ service of the sea, the
+creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
+of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
+and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
+confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
+his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
+_Almayer’s Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
+but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
+might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
+have been declared to the world. _Almayer’s Folly_, however, was not
+rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: “The name of
+Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
+Kipling of the Malay Archipelago.” He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
+of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
+have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The Nigger
+of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
+new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
+of his adventure.
+
+The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
+almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
+behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
+“case” of his earlier life. It was as a “case” that he saw it, a “case”
+ that was to produce all those other “cases” that were his books. This
+has been their history.
+
+II
+
+His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
+period, beginning with _Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
+Jim_ in 1900. The second contains {014}the two volumes of _Youth_ and
+_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
+Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
+period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
+receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
+and _Victory_ (1915).
+
+His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
+language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
+view of the “schools,” to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
+very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves
+upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild
+beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer’s Folly_ and _The Outcast of the
+Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in
+the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their
+world had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of
+his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and
+a new vigour. In the {015}character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of
+Bahalatchi and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of
+great things. Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with
+atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style
+a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. His vision of his background was
+pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make
+it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a
+determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else.
+
+These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
+Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad’s difficulties. One study in
+this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the
+crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds.
+It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung himself
+free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
+what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_. This {015}was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of
+a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon
+the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
+an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
+tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
+vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
+the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
+The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
+the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
+is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
+lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
+book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was to
+remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel. It
+is the story of a young Englishman’s loss of honour in a moment of panic
+and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely
+sustained development of a {016}vividly remembered scene, the second
+half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
+rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
+worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
+choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
+he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
+creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
+whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
+
+There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
+the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
+but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
+a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
+abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
+of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the forests
+that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of the
+sea. He was never, after {018}these tales, to write again of the sea
+as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
+regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
+
+This second period closed with the production of a work that was
+deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
+have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
+stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
+anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
+in many ways the greatest of all Conrad’s works, but, for the moment,
+one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
+ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.’s Weekly_--and astonished and
+bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
+and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
+its critics did not understand it, and its author’s own admirers were
+puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
+
+_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one {019}can easily imagine that
+its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
+however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
+plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of “cases” that
+interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
+heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
+Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
+but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
+so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
+accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
+artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
+_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
+the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
+Conrad’s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
+completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western Eyes_
+spoke strongly of a Russian influence {020}Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had
+too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan
+circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
+
+A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
+emphatically Conrad’s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
+chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars--_The
+Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note.
+In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _‘Twixt Land and Sea_, to unite
+some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _A
+Smile, of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of
+retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The
+sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something
+that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him
+something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless
+_The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its
+completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the {021}contrast
+between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
+of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
+finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
+wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
+_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
+popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
+the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
+and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
+prophecy.
+
+III
+
+To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
+no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
+reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
+list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
+consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author’s work,
+because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
+anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
+afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
+
+In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
+cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
+nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
+novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
+the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
+
+We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
+reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
+starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer’s
+Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
+Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
+of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
+maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
+clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
+that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
+very essence of Conrad’s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
+him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
+life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
+would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
+unfortunate author: “Ah! yes. I’m interesting, of course, but don’t you
+remember...?”
+
+The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
+not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
+figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
+be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
+book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B-------- of the
+_Nonsuch_ who... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
+that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the
+year ‘88 when...
+
+In the course of his thrilling voyage of {024}discovery we are, by a
+kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of
+the author’s own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
+miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship’s officer (this the merest
+glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle’s house in Poland.
+
+So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at
+them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed
+those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been,
+by us, only partially realised.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
+breathless, and, by the virtue of its author’s style, solemn, we do
+obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
+revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
+our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical,
+often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of
+vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells
+us: {025} “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the
+temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they
+must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the
+idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
+some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
+revolutionary in my writings.” (Page 20.)
+
+Or again:
+
+“All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+from which a philosophical mind should be free.” (Page 21.)
+
+Or again:
+
+“Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
+sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
+the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
+can be rendered without shame.” (Page 194.)
+
+This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
+self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
+implication of the colour of the work that will {026}arise from them;
+and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and
+vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that
+he was to do.
+
+It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
+detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
+of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
+Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
+to be most grievously disappointed.
+
+If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
+disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
+very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all
+their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad’s
+faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its
+honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there
+is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that
+supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any
+work of {027}art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged,
+incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent
+reminiscence poured into a friend’s ear in a moment of sudden
+confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
+reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
+enlightening introduction to its author.
+
+With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
+already said, this is Conrad’s happiest book--indeed, with the possible
+exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
+is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his
+dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself
+the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that
+enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
+variance with the distrust of his later novels.
+
+The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
+papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, {028}_Overdue
+and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_.
+No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a
+strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to
+him, mto the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she
+really is, he has been made free of a great order.
+
+The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
+power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of
+the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that
+sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life
+and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in
+exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power
+both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is
+the life of the sea.
+
+Conrad’s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
+and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
+realism, her deceits, her {029}cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
+lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
+of her like this:
+
+“The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of
+manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever
+been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
+has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much
+adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has
+remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
+men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of
+his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable
+cruelty.”
+
+Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
+he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
+cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right,
+and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In
+this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself
+a {030}lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never
+again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such free and
+spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
+
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
+to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
+confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
+devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
+element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the
+characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in
+his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to
+be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later
+analysis of Conrad’s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some
+mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions
+that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to
+be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from “poor Captain
+B--------, who used {031}to suffer from sick headaches, in his young
+days, every time he was approaching a coast,” to the dramatic Dominic
+(“from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man
+you would think he had never smiled in his life”), are silent and
+thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful,
+half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast.
+Captain B------- dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women
+sitting beside him in the quiet room, “his eyes resting fondly upon the
+faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar
+objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed
+often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea”--“poor
+P--------,” with “his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
+_Punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
+looking-glasses, for instance”--that captain who “did everything with an
+air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
+but the result somehow was always on stereotyped {032}lines,
+unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart”--that
+other captain in whom “through a touch of self-seeking that modest
+artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament”--here are little
+sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well,
+Marlowe, Captain M’Whirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many
+others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere
+enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such
+themes, such subjects, such “cases” that it is hard, almost beyond
+discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has
+obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious
+muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the
+Sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and
+his picture.
+
+Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
+soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
+that _The Mirror of The Sea_, ultimately, has most to do. {033}As other
+men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his
+ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated
+to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance,
+but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a
+technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and
+letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
+crime in speaking of “casting” an anchor when the true technicality is
+“brought up”--“to an anchor” understood. In the chapter on “Yachts” he
+provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand
+and then suddenly there come these sentences--“the art of handling
+slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.”... “A ship is a
+creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to
+keep us up to mark.”
+
+Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
+which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
+her birth, in no ordered sequence of {034}events, but admitting us ever
+more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
+more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
+appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
+Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
+new, in the dock, “her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
+seamen who were to share their life with her.”... “She looked modest to
+me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
+shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
+intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already
+familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
+men.”
+
+Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
+salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
+contrast, his companion’s “Ships are all right....”
+
+He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the
+wickedly malicious, {035}the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
+adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has
+indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be
+severe before such a world of fine spirits.
+
+Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
+that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
+Inlands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar, he
+shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
+material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of Dominic,
+the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting
+the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his
+house of romance.
+
+This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly
+of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
+creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
+
+It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
+
+
+
+
+
+II--THE NOVELIST
+
+
+I
+
+|IN {036}discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet
+or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the
+Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
+
+It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
+applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
+novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the
+novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_ bear
+witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain,
+but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
+of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
+position as novelist {037}and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in
+his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work
+will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a
+novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human
+beings, with his attitude to those histories.
+
+Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
+seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves
+but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
+deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
+story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able
+to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any
+respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was
+quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously
+abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a
+fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time
+forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties;
+{038}but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_
+was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer’s
+Folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_
+had already preceded it.
+
+With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the
+novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame
+Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew
+into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed
+how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not
+very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about
+everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard
+Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At
+the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way
+that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a bright existence,
+flamed, and died. “Art for Art’s sake” was slain by the trial of Oscar
+Wilde in 1895.
+
+{039}Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about
+shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society
+made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period
+and the Boer War completed an old one.
+
+Of the whole question of Conrad’s place in the history of the English
+novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter.
+I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the
+French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents
+in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the
+time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic reaction
+that followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed
+away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him,
+a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for
+the work that he had to do.
+
+
+II
+
+{040}The form in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is
+the question which must always come first in any consideration of him
+as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has
+been most frequently attacked.
+
+His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
+suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
+instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
+between two seamen. One has “knifed” the other, and the quarrel has been
+watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
+wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
+seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give
+us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins,
+_oratio recta_, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just
+over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man
+and the girl are. He {041}describes the little barber and is, at once,
+amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. Seen
+standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but
+once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his
+melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the
+young girl who lodges with him. That leads one back, through many years,
+to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for
+a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps
+a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This old woman, now
+so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. Once she
+was...
+
+And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
+the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
+witness to Conrad’s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
+James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses,
+says: “It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a {042}votary of the way
+to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing,” and his amazement
+at Conrad’s patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the
+stranger if we consider that in _What Maisie Knew_ and _The Awkward Age_
+he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside
+the intricate but masterly form of _The Awkward Age_ the duplicate
+narration of _Chance_ seems child’s play. Mr Henry James makes the
+mistake of speaking as though Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the
+form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun
+of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the
+easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the
+ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the Ancient Mariner
+and all the seamen before and alter him. Conrad must have his direct
+narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had
+generally come to him. He wishes to deny the effect of that direct and
+simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to {043}him. He must
+have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself
+has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth
+of it then must he have two or three.
+
+Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels:
+_Lord Jim, Nostromo_ and _Chance_. It is possible that _Lord Jim_ was
+conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
+from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
+Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others
+remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of
+the _Patna_, or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions
+waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation
+of these four men Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of
+the _Patna_: “He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
+on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a. soiled
+sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
+pair of ragged straw slippers {044}on his bare feet, and somebody’s
+cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up
+with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head.” There are also two
+other “no-account chaps with him”--a sallow faced mean little chap with
+his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat,
+as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey
+moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and,
+with these three, Jim, “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as
+promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.” Here are these four, in the
+same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That boy in the
+same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has fastened
+on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and
+discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist’s thrill. We watch
+our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
+discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go?
+We are thrilled with the suspense. {045}Conrad, having discovered his
+subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most
+deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. “I was not
+there myself,” he tells us, “but I can show you someone who was.” He
+introduces us to a first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. “Now tell
+your story.” He has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest,
+and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at
+everyone’s disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself
+go. He is bothered now by no question but the thorough investigation of
+his discovery. What had Jim done that he should be in such a case? We
+must have the story of the loss of the _Patna_, that marvellous journey
+across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain
+and Jim’s fine, chivalrous soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so
+much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. At present, so
+absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. The
+illusion is perfect. We come to the inquiry. {046}One of the judges is
+Captain Brierley. “What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah! but I must tell
+you! Most extraordinary thing!”
+
+The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the
+_Patna_, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems
+now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the
+author’s hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre
+of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry
+and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing.
+We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every
+possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
+
+There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the
+method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue
+with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again.
+But the trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth
+and {047}reality of his story. He saw--we cannot for an instant doubt
+it--that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that
+we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not
+inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on--that is the truly terrible
+thing about Marlowe--and at the moment when we question his authenticity
+we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his
+flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that
+is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he
+duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent
+raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, halts and histories. That then
+is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held,
+but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster
+is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create
+your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw
+stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe has certainly been compelled to
+{048}face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.
+
+_Nostromo_ is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the
+narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to deny
+that _Nostromo_ is extremely contused in places, but it is a
+confusion that arises rather from Conrad’s confidence in the reader’s
+fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
+narrations are sometimes complicated--old Captain Mitchell does not
+always achieve authenticity--but on the whole, the reader may be said to
+be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
+little about others.
+
+But this assurance of the author’s that we must have already learnt the
+main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
+of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. “Of course,”
+ he says to us, “you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that
+revolution that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be
+there myself. I know all {049}the people concerned, and the central
+figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor Monyngham--no, it was a man
+about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. I knew the
+man well.... He.. and there we all are.”
+
+The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
+successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning
+which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing
+at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to
+our conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal
+of _Nostromo_, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the
+silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola
+girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of
+Viola’s wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone
+on the Isabels, of Hirsch’s torture, of Captain Mitchell’s watch--here
+are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely,
+in any other hands, be fantastic {050}melodrama, and both characters and
+scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth.
+Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt
+the author’s word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because
+it is entirely convincing.
+
+Not so with the third example, _Chance_. Here, as with _Lord Jim_, we
+may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
+in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the
+_Patna_ waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over
+_Chance_ reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of
+their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps
+of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That
+desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous
+Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her
+and too double-faced for him gives the book’s theme, and never in all
+the stories that preceded Flora’s has Conrad been so {051}eager to
+afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the
+unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a
+riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain
+Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough
+to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses
+that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us,
+more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible
+narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides
+from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the
+Knight and the Maiden--as the author names them--are retiring souls,
+and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate their timid
+hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and
+the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure
+realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here
+achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half
+of {052}_Lord Jim_ and the whole of _Nostromo_. We believe most
+emphatically in that first narration of young Powell’s about his first
+chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite
+casually he talks like this: “I do not even think that there was in
+what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly
+pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or
+equivocal situations.” We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely
+drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe’s interview with Flora on the
+pavement outside Anthony’s room.
+
+We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
+are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
+it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves,
+that we resent, a little, Marlowe’s intimacy which prevents, with
+patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have
+seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
+
+But when the second half of the book {053}arrives we can be confident
+no longer. Here, as in _Lord Jim_, it is possible to feel that Conrad,
+having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not
+know how to continue it. The true thing in _Lord Jim_ is the affair of
+the _Patna_; the true thing in _Chance_ is Captain Anthony’s rescue of
+Flora after her disaster. But whereas in _Lord Jim_ the sequel to Jim’s
+cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the
+sequel to Captain Anthony’s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any
+rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter
+in _Chance_ entitled _A Moonless Night_ is, in the first half of it,
+surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early
+short story, _The Return_. The conclusion of _Chance_ and certain tales
+in his volume, _Within the Tides_, make one wonder whether that
+alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully
+maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the
+former of these two qualities.
+
+{054}It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails,
+as it must before the end of _Chance_, the form of narration in _Oratio
+Recta_ is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in
+Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony
+and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were
+so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a
+deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.
+
+I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books
+are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
+unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held
+by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to
+tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if
+his presence be not true...
+
+
+III
+
+If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad’s attention we shall
+see that {055}in almost every case his subjects are concerned with
+unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to
+the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the
+blindness that renders men’s honesty and heroism of so little account
+that gives occasion for his irony.
+
+He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
+human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
+whom he can admire. “If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
+thing up,” we can hear him say. “He can see at once that the odds are
+too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
+the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
+and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven’s bolts and lightnings
+and they will not quail.” They command his pity, his reverence, his
+tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his
+shoulders, he says: “You see. I told you so. He may even think he has
+won. We know better, you and I.” {056}The theme of _Almayer’s Folly_
+is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of
+death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against
+nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth).
+_Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which
+stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first.
+_Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against
+the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the
+very epitome of Conrad’s themes, is the struggle of M’Whirr against the
+storm (here again it is M’Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear,
+in the very last line of the book, the storm’s confident chuckle of
+ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest.
+In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad’s finest
+figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three
+tales in _‘Twixt Land, and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the
+struggle of simple, {057}unimaginative men against forces too strong
+for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character,
+finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_
+Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains
+and struggles of insignificant individuals.
+
+Of Conrad’s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
+to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
+of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them
+and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
+
+Whatever Conrad’s books are or are not, it may safely be said that
+they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
+probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
+affection, his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding
+over the inequality of life’s battle. His humour, often of a very
+fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
+light-heartedness.
+
+Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would {058}have found Marlowe, Jim and
+Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
+they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
+
+I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
+and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
+that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
+meeting a number of Conrad’s characters is that they have existences
+and histories entirely independent of their introducer’s kind offices.
+Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
+are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
+about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
+all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
+histories.
+
+One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
+mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
+the robust vitality of their {059}predecessors; the figures in the novel
+of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
+
+In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
+fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before
+an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
+wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy
+before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton
+before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy
+before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his
+inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it
+may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
+their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author’s own
+determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
+
+This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
+novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
+contemporaries--namely, the assurance that {060}his characters have
+their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that
+he is describing to us.
+
+The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
+the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
+speculating deeply upon “what happened afterwards” to Gayef or Barbara,
+to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad’s sea captains as with Tchekov’s
+Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
+incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
+from the author’s eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for
+him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
+in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
+doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
+but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
+only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
+things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
+M’Whirr that he wrote long letters home, {061}beginning always with the
+words, “My darling Wife,” and relating in minute detail each successive
+trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs M’Whirr, we learn, was “a pretentious person
+with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in
+the neighbourhood considered as ‘quite superior.’ The only secret of her
+life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
+to stay for good.” Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate “who never
+wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and
+though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with
+extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges
+of a boarding-house.” How conscious we are of Jim’s English country
+parsonage, of Captain Anthony’s loneliness, of Marlowe’s isolation. By
+this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole
+character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on
+board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing,
+{062}we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on
+board, “A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol.”... “Very soon
+the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her
+over the side. We didn’t recognise him at all....” And Mr Baker, the
+chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends
+for life?
+
+“No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
+Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
+and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
+town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
+in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady,
+he thought, sitting down for a moment’s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
+enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere.
+He didn’t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The
+darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck;
+and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom
+through many {063}long years he had given the best of a seaman’s care.
+And never a command in sight. Not once!”
+
+There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. “Donkin entered.
+They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. ‘I give you a bad
+discharge,’ he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: ‘I don’t want your
+bloomin’ discharge--keep it. I’m goin’ ter ‘ave a job hashore.’ He turned
+to us. ‘No more bloomin’ sea for me,’ he said, aloud. All looked at him.
+He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any
+of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
+declaration.”
+
+In how many novels would Donkin’s life have been limited by the part
+that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus?_ As it
+is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
+only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--“As I came up I saw a
+red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, {064}fluffy
+hair, fall on Charley’s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
+him:--‘Oh, my boy! my boy!’--‘Leggo me,’ said Charley, ‘leggo,
+mother!’ I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of
+the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic,
+courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life
+to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
+good-naturedly:--‘If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall ‘ave a bob for
+a drink out of my pay.’”
+
+But one passes from these men of the sea--from M’Whirr and Baker,
+from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
+suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
+men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About
+such men as M’Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not
+believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will,
+we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little
+details, {065}M’Whirr’s wife, Mr Baker’s proud sister, Charley’s
+mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
+world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister Nikita,
+the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
+confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
+perfect sympathy.
+
+His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
+_idée fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
+unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you.
+But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing
+finger, offer up instantly any _idée fixe_ ready to hand because
+they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the
+imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind
+upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved,
+the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough
+to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again
+{066}we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees
+him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality
+and its significance. “His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of
+having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.”
+
+With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
+character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we
+have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists’ lives
+beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
+independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
+to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
+things.
+
+Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _idée
+fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
+phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
+it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
+soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
+upon which he has {067}placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of
+an _idée fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
+other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
+tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book’s close,
+that we should have been told so much more.
+
+Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
+Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
+romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott,
+with the single exception of Thackeray’s Beatrix--and here I am not
+forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own
+immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so
+unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
+Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
+shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
+romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
+through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: “... his hat, a gay
+sombrero with {068}a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
+Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the
+embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam
+of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the
+silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when--...
+in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
+opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside
+a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his
+eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or
+moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to
+the most atrocious sufferings”--we are conscious of his superb figure;
+and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the
+book assure us--“In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to
+ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of
+solid silver, the {069}genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores
+dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
+ His genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture
+standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not
+given us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us.
+Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of
+the Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes
+might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
+truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
+our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
+not met him.
+
+Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
+basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
+so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
+daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in
+the whole of Conrad’s art--the drive in the {070}cab of old Mrs Verloc,
+Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange
+gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S------, Peter
+Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in
+_Romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in
+others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his
+lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the
+world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of
+all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is,
+finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose
+pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends
+with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know
+the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
+
+Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
+seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its
+sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness
+s. Although each {071}work, from, the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely
+perfect _Secret Share_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart,
+the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
+surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.
+
+
+
+
+III--THE POET
+
+|THE {072}poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical
+side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, _The Secret
+Agent_, and _Under Western Eyes_, or such short stories as _The
+Informer_, or _Il Conde_, but the philosophic note sounded poetically,
+as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
+
+Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad
+the novelist deserve consideration--style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
+the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
+of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier
+works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from {073}Conrad’s
+second novel, _An Outcast of the Islands_:
+
+“He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing
+each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of
+the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone
+by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies
+that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He
+seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness,
+spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to
+hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by
+the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an
+aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold
+scrutiny of glittering stars.”
+
+And from his latest novel, _Chance_:
+
+“The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there
+in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man
+from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick
+{074}glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced
+no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight,
+and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the
+immensity of space made visible--almost palpable. Young Powell felt
+it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy,
+powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something
+almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two
+feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a
+darkening universe.”
+
+It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice
+of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of
+the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The
+first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be
+denied, something of the “purple patch.” We feel that the prose is too
+dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work
+slightly affected by the author’s {075}determination that it shall be
+fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any
+poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though
+it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally,
+there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument
+to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again
+and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in _Almayer’s
+Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth,
+Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim_,--prose piled high with sonorous and
+slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds
+hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the
+suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority
+places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous.
+For instance, in the tale called _The Return_, there is the following
+passage:--
+
+“He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if
+dazed. There was {076}less than a second of suspense while they both
+felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall
+into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted,
+‘Come back,’ and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in
+peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last
+chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible,
+and dark, and safe--like a grave.”
+
+The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words--“moral
+annihilation,” “devouring nowhere,” “peaceful desperation,” “last chance
+of life,” “terrible,” “like a grave.” That he shouted gives a final
+touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
+
+Often, in the earlier books, Conrad’s style has the awkward
+over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is
+using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus
+we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier
+style, the marked effect of {077}two influences. One influence is that
+of the French language and especially of the author of _Madame Bovary_.
+When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career
+as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand
+this French inflection. Flaubert’s effect on his style is quite
+unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert’s: “Toutes ses velléités de
+dénigrement l’envanouissaiont sous la poésie du rôle qui l’envahissait;
+et entrainée vers l’homme par l’illusion du personnage elle tâcha de se
+figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide...”
+ and this a sentence of Conrad’s: “Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard’s
+shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if
+to her--to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature--had been
+revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of
+the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting.”
+
+Conrad’s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It
+is probable, {078}however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French
+language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in
+any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The
+influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and
+sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a
+crutch before he could walk alone.
+
+The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
+importance--the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
+that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for
+his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its
+full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations
+of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of
+which we think in many pages of _Almayer’s Folly_ and _An Outcast of
+the Island_, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
+emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
+rapture.
+
+He was under the influence of these powers {079}also in that, at that
+time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent
+to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately
+under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions
+and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired
+moment comes to him--often the inspiration does not come because he
+cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his
+middle period, in the period of _Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness_ and
+_Nostromo_, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating,
+steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as
+it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage
+from _Typhoon_ with that earlier one from _The Outcast of the Islands_
+that I quoted above:
+
+“He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild
+scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds.
+She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane
+{080}the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the
+deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a
+living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest.
+It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes’ head a few stars
+shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc
+frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too
+seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster
+of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow.”
+
+That is poet’s work, and poet’s work at its finest. Instead of
+impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the
+author has made the very most of a rather thin moment--feels, indeed,
+himself that it is thin--we are here under the influence of something
+that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is
+thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of
+the heart of the finest material--and yet it remains, through all its
+discipline, spontaneous.
+
+These three tales, _Typhoon, Youth_ and {081}_Heart of Darkness_, stand
+by themselves as the final expression of Conrad’s lyrical gift. We
+may remember such characters as M’Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are
+figures as the old seneschal in _The Eve of St Agnes_ or the Ancient
+Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought
+and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman’s _When Lilac
+first on the Door yard bloomed_ or Keats’ _Nightingale._ Their author
+was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of
+his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
+
+The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to
+the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist
+whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible
+way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of
+sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but
+only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed
+minister, is older--he must look back now on the colours of {082}_Youth_
+with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as
+_The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_, in such a volume of
+stories as _A Set of Six_, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly
+abandoned--we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and
+sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that
+passage from _Chance_ quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although
+we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of _An Outcast of
+the Islands_, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there,
+but--“Young Powell felt it.” In that magical storm that was _Typhoon_
+God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later
+experience young Powell is our companion.
+
+
+II.
+
+The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
+atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists
+in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his
+{083}daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such
+a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play
+the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway
+station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters
+immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick
+slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background
+react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that
+reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with
+other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of
+stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own
+day, Mr Arnold Bennett’s Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or
+Mrs Wharton’s New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most
+successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us
+with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation
+with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the
+contemplation of some scene and is thence {084}extended to the whole
+vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be
+as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits
+are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities
+of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and
+Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the
+scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting
+between Beauchamp and René in _Beauchamp’s Career_. It is not only that
+these scenes are “done” to the full extent of their “doing,” it is also
+that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with
+all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev,
+Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.
+Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
+
+But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
+lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in Literature_,
+has named this element Glamour. {085}In writing of the novels by George
+Eliot he says: “Indeed there is almost every element of literature,
+except a certain indescribable thing called _Glamour_, which was the
+whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
+clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
+when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
+Castlewood.” Now’ this matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens,
+for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the
+house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit’s escape after the murder do
+not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate,
+that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential it is certain also to
+have glamour.
+
+The potential qualities of Conrad’s atmosphere are amongst his very
+strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is
+his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
+important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.
+In _The Outcast {086}of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain
+Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
+terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it
+has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
+power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord Jim_ the contrast
+of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast not only
+immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain’s
+gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
+ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
+degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects
+the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
+intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the
+negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
+boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
+that single voyage of the _Narcissus_. {087}When Winnie Verloc, her old
+mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not
+seem ludicrous to us that the tears of “that large female in a dark,
+dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton
+lace” should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend.
+That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate
+companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples
+might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
+
+He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
+significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he
+wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather
+because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the
+most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We
+may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they
+drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. “Now
+see how firmly it stands,” they say. “That last nail settled it.”
+ But {088}Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers’ later
+credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries.
+Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is
+as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that
+no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure.
+But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around
+and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness,
+trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze
+of Aladdin’s cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer,
+a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy
+splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the
+austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba,
+asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the
+mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the
+dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so
+{089}that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the
+cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer’s baby are
+“a dirty double pack” with which he used to play Chinese bézique--it
+bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a
+remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible
+final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs
+Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
+
+“Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
+soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers
+of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
+European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
+petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a
+slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
+clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
+wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
+place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
+blankets that {090}lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat....
+Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and
+crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in
+the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the
+big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot
+brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some
+dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!”
+
+And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--“the forests
+unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of
+heaven--and as indifferent.” Had I space I could multiply from
+every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the
+juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse
+beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however,
+select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about
+_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad’s.
+
+The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination {091}of the silver of the
+Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near
+it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by “the
+white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.” Conrad,
+then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,
+the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure
+and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,
+romantic, even until that last vision of all of “the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
+silver.” Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been
+there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, “great family arks
+swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which
+the eyes looked intensely alive and black,” the houses, “in the early
+sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue,” or, after dark, from
+Mrs Gould’s balcony “towards the plaza end of the street the glowing
+coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their {092}evening
+meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without
+a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
+triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to
+a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
+walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp
+under the dark shape of the rider.” Later there is that sinister glimpse
+of the plaza, “where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without
+penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the
+strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and
+above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers
+the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue
+sky before the windows of the Intendencia.” In its final created
+beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,
+many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm’s princes and
+princesses passing--but the detail of it is {093}built with careful
+realism demanded by the “architecture of Manchester or Birmingham.” We
+wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral,
+its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its
+hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns
+for us.
+
+Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is
+a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy’s Wessex map is the most
+fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of
+Stevenson’s chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,
+gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast
+that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver’s
+treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco
+tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The
+detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book
+incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is
+{094}finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We
+have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of
+the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,
+many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the
+Aristocratic Club, that “extended to strangers the large hospitality
+of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a
+house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The
+two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
+described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio
+concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in
+from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon
+the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
+some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a
+broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
+chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
+at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and,
+{095}ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very
+stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his
+long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s length, through an old
+Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black
+brute, with a hammer bead--you would have seen in the street dozing
+motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the
+curbstone of the side-walk!”
+
+How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the
+exclamation of some reader “Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like
+that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable
+veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed
+doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!--and can we not sniff
+something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more
+about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he
+must remember enough to fill a volume!
+
+He is able, therefore, upon this foundation {096}of a minute and
+scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases
+without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate,
+choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression
+of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is
+of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or
+Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the
+life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little
+tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the
+unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons,
+catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember
+also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest
+and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
+
+Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet,
+working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is
+at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to
+the last {097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of
+certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It
+_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that
+has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or
+fable for its interpretation....
+
+When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
+creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,
+certain limitations.
+
+
+III
+
+As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
+that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
+men.
+
+It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
+watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
+cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
+they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
+{098}ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the
+horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he
+can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the
+very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but
+his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
+
+There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
+it is, surely, Conrad’s harshest limitation that he should never be free
+from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound
+is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove
+his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
+creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
+Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: “And that’s the end. He
+passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
+and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to
+celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.”
+ {099}Conrad’s ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the
+history of Jim’s endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit
+has been vain--as vain as Stein’s butterflies.
+
+And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
+observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
+character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart’s desire it is that his
+merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
+whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
+
+M’Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
+tremendous of God’s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
+from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has
+witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley,
+watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that
+nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
+degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
+leap--the victim is always in his power. {100}It comes from this
+philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most
+definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of
+brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are melancholy and ironic: “If you see
+far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is.” The only way
+to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is
+tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he
+chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he
+has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of
+the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
+Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For
+Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond
+words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women
+of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for
+them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty
+of his own sea captains. {101}This then is quite simply his philosophy.
+It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters
+to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is
+stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant,
+hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of
+any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his
+own Stein: “He says of him that he is ‘preparing to leave all
+this: preparing to leave...’ while he waves his hand sadly at his
+butterflies.”
+
+Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
+whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
+Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication,
+save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in
+their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many
+ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation
+of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here.
+Browning’s {102}interest in life was derived, on the novelist’s side of
+him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of
+men and women; on the poet’s side, in the question again spiritual
+and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning’s
+clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual
+philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately
+enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has
+exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be
+seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
+
+Browning’s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
+of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the most
+romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
+such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
+forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did.
+Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo?_ Mr Chesterton has
+written of {103}Browning: “He substituted the street with the green
+blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the ‘blue spirt of a lighted
+match’ for the monotony of the evening star.” Conrad has substituted for
+the lover serenading his mistress’ window the passion of a middle-aged,
+faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a
+fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
+
+The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
+precisely Conrad’s characters. Is not Waring Conrad’s man?
+
+And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
+Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
+Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
+to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
+these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
+of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
+heart, it is also that the worlds of these {104}two poets are the same.
+How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
+de Barrel, M’Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
+witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee’s
+wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
+ordered his tomb at St Praxed’s Church, with a strange wonder as though
+he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
+
+Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
+statement as a “case” of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
+simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
+last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
+of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
+temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
+buttresses and towers.
+
+Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as
+I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
+carried Romantic-Realism showed {105}the author of _Almayer’s Folly_ the
+signs of the road that he was to follow.
+
+If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
+may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
+novelist?
+
+
+
+
+IV--ROMANCE AND REALISM
+
+
+I
+
+|THE {106}terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years
+very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of
+character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England
+at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study
+of _Robert Louis Stevenson_, said: “Stevenson, reviving the
+never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has
+brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if
+romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
+personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
+a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade
+finished his vocifer{107}ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if
+it is dead, Stevenson killed it!”
+
+We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to
+his estimate of Stevenson’s present and future literary value without
+denying that the date of the publication of _St Ives_ was also the date
+of the death of the purely romantic novel.
+
+But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term “Romantic”
+ is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the
+popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term “Realism” has,
+recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in
+its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: “I like
+romances,” we hear the modern reader say, “because they take me away
+from real life, which I desire to forget.” In the same way Realism is
+defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant
+facts by an observant pessimist. “I like realism,” admirers of a certain
+order of novel {108}exclaim, “because it is so like life. It tells me
+just what I myself see every day--I know where I am.”
+
+Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas
+of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
+everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive
+an ambition--I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of
+life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and
+reminiscence--Romance is the study of life with the faculties of
+imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional,
+poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and
+recorded---it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance
+may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its
+spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and
+sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here
+that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary
+divorce from reality, nor does {109}Realism imply a detailed and dusty
+preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for
+Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is
+not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult
+of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as
+eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve
+eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard
+to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may
+be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its
+strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and
+that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been
+very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards
+Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by
+Romantic-Realism, such a novel as _The Brothers Karamazov_, such a
+play as _The Cherry Orchard_ are there before us, as the best possible
+examples. We might say, in a word, that _Karamazov_ has, in the England
+{110}of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _Madame
+Bovary_....
+
+
+II
+
+It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
+development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
+Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
+kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
+their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
+Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
+hold that same position.
+
+Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
+French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is
+to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for
+him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts,
+sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer’s degradation sufficiently
+realistic, when it is merely {111}recorded and perceived by any
+observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad’s imagination, without
+for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it,
+giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the
+whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
+
+As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
+often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
+of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
+who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used
+by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a
+little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the
+required ground.
+
+Conrad had, from the first, a poet’s--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
+and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
+determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
+of all honest men. {112}In that intention he has absolutely succeeded;
+he has not abated one jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart
+of Darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our
+literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is
+falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
+
+The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
+determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
+by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him
+in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his
+clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define,
+but that Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by
+Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and Punishment,
+The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are romantic realism
+at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is
+ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince
+Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, {113}Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to
+us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from
+us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky’s
+love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it,
+with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical
+as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony,
+Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the
+limitations and confinements that their presentation as “cases” involves
+on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity,
+tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes,
+never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of
+the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his
+pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
+he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--Conrad finds
+humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
+
+Nevertheless he has been influenced by {114}the Russian writer
+continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under
+Western Eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason,
+perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as
+though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of
+him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
+independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
+creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
+hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
+English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
+found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
+his love of beauty, his poet’s cry for colour, but their realism they
+find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
+that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turgéniev, that they
+may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
+they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
+{115}because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than
+they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because
+characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
+dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
+determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
+Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M’Whirr,
+demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
+
+Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
+has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
+through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing
+that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the zest of
+creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their
+art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life.
+That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the
+work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows
+exhaustion and sterility {116}means nothing; the stream will soon ran
+full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel,
+in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip
+of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that
+cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for
+form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws
+or the paradise of free love.
+
+
+III
+
+Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
+English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
+provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that
+it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English
+novelists--in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J.
+D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan,
+Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young--this influence is to be detected.
+{117}Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr
+Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism
+of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent
+a novel as Mr Swinnerton’s _On the Staircase_ with Mr Arnold Bennett’s
+_Sacred and Profane Love_, or Mr Galsworthy’s _Man of Property_--and Mr
+E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose
+_Longest Journey_ and _Howard’s End_ may possibly provide the historian
+of English literature with dates as important as the publication of
+_Almayer’s Folly_ in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly
+belong to this essay.
+
+It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
+realism can return. We have been shown in _Nostromo_ something that has
+the colour of _Treasure Island_ and the reality of _New Grub Street_.
+If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is
+dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely,
+on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that
+at few periods in {118}English literature has the novel shown more signs
+of a thrilling and original future.
+
+For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance
+for a moment at his last novel, _Victory_.
+
+The conclusion of _Chance_ and the last volume of short stories had
+shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
+ultimately, from reality. _Victory_, splendid tale though it is, does
+not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of
+almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and
+malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and
+Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as
+the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then
+returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for
+man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair
+to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He
+prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another,
+that elemental catastrophe is pre{119}vented he consoles himself
+by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his
+characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does
+immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the
+whole of Conrad--the last conversation between Heyst and Lena--that we
+see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
+more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence
+of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects.
+At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the
+boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent
+in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
+
+Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
+incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the
+discipline and restraint that were once his law.
+
+Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years,
+from the _Almayer’s Folly_ of 1895 to the _Victory_ of 1915, one
+{120}realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor
+insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our
+shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to
+enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.
+
+
+
+
+A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD’S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+
+[The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
+signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
+
+Almayer’s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New
+editions. (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
+
+The Nigger of the “Narcissus”: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
+edition, 1910.
+
+Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
+
+Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M.
+Hueffer (Heinemann). 1901.
+
+Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
+
+Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
+
+Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith,
+Elder). 1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
+Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
+Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
+
+New edition, 1914.
+
+A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
+New edition, 1915.
+
+Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
+
+Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
+(Dent). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+{123}Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (_Macmillan_). 1895.
+New editions, 1912; (_Doubleday_). 1911.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (_Appleton_). 1896. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1914.
+
+Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (_Dodd, Mead_). 1897.
+New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: “The Nigger of the
+‘Narcissus’” (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Tales of Unrest (_Scribner_). 1898.
+
+Lord Jim (_Doubleday_) 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (_McClure Co._).
+1901.
+
+Typhoon (_Putman_). 1902. New edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Youth, and two Other Stories (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred to
+_Doubleday_). 1903.
+
+Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (_McClure Co._). 1903. New
+edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (_McClure Co_.
+Afterwards transferred to _Doubleday_). 1904.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (_Harper_), 1904. {124}The Mirror of
+the Sea: Memories and Impressions (_Harper_). 1906.
+
+The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (_Harper_). 1907.
+
+A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred
+to _Doubleday_). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (_Harper_). 1911.
+
+A Personal Retold (_Harper_). 1912.
+
+‘Twist Land and Sea: Tales (_Doran_). 1912. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1911.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+A Set of Six [Tales: one, “The Duel.” previously issued as “A Point of
+Honour”] (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Within the Tides: Tales (_Doubleday_). 1916.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+Title: Joseph Conrad
+
+Author: Hugh Walpole
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger from page images generously
+provided by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+By Hugh Walpole
+
+New York
+
+Henry Holt And Company
+
+1916
+
+[Illustration: 0001]
+
+[Illustration: 0008]
+
+[Illustration: 0009]
+
+TO
+
+SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
+
+
+
+
+I--BIOGRAPHY
+
+
+I
+
+
+|TO any{001} reader of the books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once
+plain that his immediate experiences and impressions of life have gone
+very directly to the making of his art. It may happen often enough that
+an author's artistic life is of no importance to the critic and that
+his dealing with it is merely a personal impertinence and curiosity, but
+with the life of Joseph Conrad the critic has something to do, because,
+again and again, this writer deliberately evokes the power of personal
+reminiscence, charging it with the burden of his philosophy and the
+creation of his characters.
+
+With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but
+with the three backgrounds against whose form and colour {008}his art
+has been placed we have some compulsory connection.
+
+Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th
+December 1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of
+Poland. In 1862 his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish
+rebellion, was banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother
+and father there until his mother died, when he was sent back to the
+Ukraine. In 1870 his lather died.
+
+Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until
+1874, when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea.
+In the month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew
+at that time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878
+joined the _Duke of Sutherland_ as ordinary seaman. He became a
+Master in the English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was
+naturalised. In 1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for
+nearly twenty years: he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been
+writing at various periods during {009}his sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin.
+With that publisher's acceptance of _Almayer's Folly_ the third period
+of his life began. Since then his history has been the history of his
+books.
+
+Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
+relationship of these three backgrounds--Poland, the Sea, the inner
+security and tradition of an English country-side--one can realise what
+they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed through
+all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may be
+enough to give life and vigour to any poet's temperament. The romantic
+melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
+deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
+
+Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
+tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
+monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
+impulses {010}those were that drove him, he may have felt that space and
+size and the force of a power stronger than man were the only conditions
+of possible liberty. He sought those conditions, found them and clung to
+them; he found, too, an ironic pity for men who could still live slaves
+and prisoners to other men when to them also such freedom was possible.
+That ironic pity he never afterwards lost, and the romance that was in
+him received a mighty impulse from that contrast that he was always now
+to contemplate. He discovered the Sea and paid to her at once his debt
+of gratitude and obedience. He thought it no hard thing to obey her when
+he might, at the same time, so honestly admire her and she has remained
+for him, as an artist, the only personality that he has been able
+wholeheartedly to admire. He found in her something stronger than man
+and he must have triumphed in the contemplation of the dominion that she
+could exercise, if she would, over the tyrannies that he had known in
+his childhood. {011}He found, too, in her service, the type of man
+who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
+threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
+struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who
+realised so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to
+their master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said
+about it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise
+of freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
+performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
+possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
+have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
+sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force
+in nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed
+by his companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision
+had driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
+despair of {012}any possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a
+citizen of a world where freedom reigned because men could not perceive
+how it could be otherwise; the two sides of the shield were revealed to
+him.
+
+Then, towards the end of his twenty years' service of the sea, the
+creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments
+of opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure
+and diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of
+confidence in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for
+his creations, will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if
+_Almayer's Folly_ had been refused he would never have written again,
+but we may well believe that, let the fate of that book be what it
+might, the energy and surprise of his discovery of the sea must
+have been declared to the world. _Almayer's Folly_, however, was not
+rejected; its publication caused _The Spectator_ to remark: "The name of
+Mr Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the
+Kipling of the Malay Archipelago." He {013}had, therefore, encouragement
+of the most dignified kind from the beginning. He himself, however, may
+have possibly regarded that day in 1897 when Henley accepted _The Nigger
+of the Narcissus_ for _The New Review_ as a more important date in his
+new career. That date may serve for the commencement of the third period
+of his adventure.
+
+The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
+almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
+behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
+"case" of his earlier life. It was as a "case" that he saw it, a "case"
+that was to produce all those other "cases" that were his books. This
+has been their history.
+
+II
+
+His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
+period, beginning with _Almayer's Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
+Jim_ in 1900. The second contains {014}the two volumes of _Youth_ and
+_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
+Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
+period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
+receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
+and _Victory_ (1915).
+
+His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
+language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
+view of the "schools," to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
+very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves
+upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild
+beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer's Folly_ and _The Outcast of the
+Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in
+the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their
+world had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of
+his own individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and
+a new vigour. In the {015}character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of
+Bahalatchi and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of
+great things. Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with
+atmosphere, were clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style
+a sense of rhetoric and lack of ease. His vision of his background was
+pulled out beyond its natural intensity and his own desire to make
+it overwhelming was so obvious as to frighten the creature into a
+determination to be, simply out of malicious perversity, anything else.
+
+These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
+Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad's difficulties. One study in
+this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis, is the
+crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume succeeds.
+It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung himself
+free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
+what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_. This {015}was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of
+a ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon
+the human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
+an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
+tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
+vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
+the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
+The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
+the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
+is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
+lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
+book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was to
+remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel. It
+is the story of a young Englishman's loss of honour in a moment of panic
+and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a finely
+sustained development of a {016}vividly remembered scene, the second
+half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
+rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
+worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
+choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
+he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
+creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
+whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
+
+There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
+the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
+but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
+a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
+abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
+of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the forests
+that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of the
+sea. He was never, after {018}these tales, to write again of the sea
+as though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
+regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
+
+This second period closed with the production of a work that was
+deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
+have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
+stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
+anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
+in many ways the greatest of all Conrad's works, but, for the moment,
+one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
+ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.'s Weekly_--and astonished and
+bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
+and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
+its critics did not understand it, and its author's own admirers were
+puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
+
+_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one {019}can easily imagine that
+its production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
+however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
+plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of "cases" that
+interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
+heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
+Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
+but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
+so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
+accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
+artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
+_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
+the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
+Conrad's hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
+completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western Eyes_
+spoke strongly of a Russian influence {020}Turg�niev and Dostoievsky had
+too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan
+circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
+
+A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
+emphatically Conrad's new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
+chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars--_The
+Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained note.
+In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _'Twixt Land and Sea_, to unite
+some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method. _A
+Smile, of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing in the beauty of
+retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the reader. The
+sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as something
+that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken from him
+something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress. Nevertheless
+_The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous in its
+completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the {021}contrast
+between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
+of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
+finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
+wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
+_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
+popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
+the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
+and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
+prophecy.
+
+III
+
+To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad,
+no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the
+reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding
+list. _Some Reminiscences_ and _The Mirror of the Sea_ demand
+consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author's work,
+because {022}they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely
+anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered,
+afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
+
+In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who
+cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form
+nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the
+novels. _Some Reminiscences_ has only _Tristram Shandy_ for its rival in
+the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward.
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ has no rival at all.
+
+We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
+reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
+starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, _Almayer's
+Folly_, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of _Some
+Reminiscences_, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing
+of _Almayer_ has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
+maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of {023}the
+clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply
+that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the
+very essence of Conrad's art that one thing so powerfully suggests to
+him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because
+life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command
+would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their
+unfortunate author: "Ah! yes. I'm interesting, of course, but don't you
+remember...?"
+
+The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
+not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
+figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes,
+be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the
+book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B-------- of the
+_Nonsuch_ who... or there is the window just behind the writing-table
+that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the
+year '88 when...
+
+In the course of his thrilling voyage of {024}discovery we are, by a
+kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of
+the author's own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the
+miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship's officer (this the merest
+glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle's house in Poland.
+
+So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at
+them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed
+those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been,
+by us, only partially realised.
+
+Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
+breathless, and, by the virtue of its author's style, solemn, we do
+obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
+revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
+our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical,
+often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of
+vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells
+us: {025}"Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the
+temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they
+must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the
+idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in
+some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
+revolutionary in my writings." (Page 20.)
+
+Or again:
+
+"All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+from which a philosophical mind should be free." (Page 21.)
+
+Or again:
+
+"Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
+sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
+the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
+can be rendered without shame." (Page 194.)
+
+This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
+self-satisfaction, this sobriety--these qualities do give some
+implication of the colour of the work that will {026}arise from them;
+and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and
+vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that
+he was to do.
+
+It is for this that _Some Reminiscences_ is valuable. To read it as a
+detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book
+of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the _My
+Autobiography_ or _My Life_ of some eminent scientist or theologian, is
+to be most grievously disappointed.
+
+If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
+disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
+very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all
+their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad's
+faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its
+honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there
+is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that
+supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any
+work of {027}art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged,
+incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent
+reminiscence poured into a friend's ear in a moment of sudden
+confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct
+reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and
+enlightening introduction to its author.
+
+With _The Mirror of the Sea_ we are on very different ground. As I have
+already said, this is Conrad's happiest book--indeed, with the possible
+exception of _The Nigger of the Narcissus_, his only happy book. He
+is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his
+dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself
+the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that
+enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at
+variance with the distrust of his later novels.
+
+The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
+papers, with such titles as _Landfalls and Departures_, {028}_Overdue
+and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft_.
+No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a
+strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to
+him, mto the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she
+really is, he has been made free of a great order.
+
+The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources--the majesty,
+power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of
+the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that
+sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life
+and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in
+exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power
+both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is
+the life of the sea.
+
+Conrad's attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical
+and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his
+realism, her deceits, her {029}cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the
+lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write
+of her like this:
+
+"The sea--this truth must be confessed--has no generosity. No display of
+manly qualities--courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness--has ever
+been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean
+has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much
+adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has
+remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and
+men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of
+his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable
+cruelty."
+
+Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
+he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
+cruelty. She positively "brings it off," this assertion of her right,
+and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In
+this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself
+a {030}lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never
+again, not even in _Typhoon_ and _Youth_, to write with such free and
+spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the "West Wind."
+
+_The Mirror of the Sea_ forms then the best possible introduction
+to Conrad's work, because it attests, more magnificently and more
+confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his
+devotion. It presents also, however, in its treatment of the second
+element of his subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the
+characters whom he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in
+his novels. About these same men there are certain characteristics to
+be noticed, characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later
+analysis of Conrad's creative power, but that nevertheless demand some
+mention here as witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions
+that he, most naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to
+be marked that almost all the men upon the sea, from "poor Captain
+B--------, who used {031}to suffer from sick headaches, in his young
+days, every time he was approaching a coast," to the dramatic Dominic
+("from the slow, imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man
+you would think he had never smiled in his life"), are silent and
+thoughtful. Granted this silence, Conrad in his half-mournful,
+half-humorous survey, is instantly attracted by any possible contrast.
+Captain B------- dying in his home, with two grave, elderly women
+sitting beside him in the quiet room, "his eyes resting fondly upon the
+faces in the room, upon the pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar
+objects of that home whose abiding and clear image must have flashed
+often on his memory in times of stress and anxiety at sea"--"poor
+P--------," with "his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in
+_Punch_, his little oddities--like his strange passion for borrowing
+looking-glasses, for instance"--that captain who "did everything with an
+air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
+but the result somehow was always on stereotyped {032}lines,
+unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one could lay to heart"--that
+other captain in whom "through a touch of self-seeking that modest
+artist of solid merit became untrue to his temperament"--here are little
+sketches for those portraits that afterwards we are to know so well,
+Marlowe, Captain M'Whirr, Captain Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many
+others. Here we may fancy that his eye lingers as though in the mere
+enumeration of little oddities and contrasted qualities he sees such
+themes, such subjects, such "cases" that it is hard, almost beyond
+discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they have to be left. He has
+obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition of the curious
+muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august power of the
+Sea--that is all that his present subject demands, that is his theme and
+his picture.
+
+Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
+soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
+that _The Mirror of The Sea_, ultimately, has most to do. {033}As other
+men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his
+ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated
+to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance,
+but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a
+technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and
+letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their
+crime in speaking of "casting" an anchor when the true technicality is
+"brought up"--"to an anchor" understood. In the chapter on "Yachts" he
+provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand
+and then suddenly there come these sentences--"the art of handling
+slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men."... "A ship is a
+creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to
+keep us up to mark."
+
+Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of
+which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from
+her birth, in no ordered sequence of {034}events, but admitting us ever
+more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards
+more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials,
+appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour.
+Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy,
+new, in the dock, "her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the
+seamen who were to share their life with her."... "She looked modest to
+me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling
+shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines,
+intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already
+familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of
+men."
+
+Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
+salutes her grace and spirit--he echoes, with all the implied irony of
+contrast, his companion's "Ships are all right...."
+
+He explains the many kinds of ships that there are--the rogues, the
+wickedly malicious, {035}the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the
+adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has
+indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be
+severe before such a world of fine spirits.
+
+Finally, in the episode of the _Tremolino_ and her tragic end (an end
+that has in it a suggestion of that later story, _Freya of the Seven
+Inlands_), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar, he
+shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
+material. He gives us the soul of the _Tremolino_, the soul of Dominic,
+the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever deserting
+the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon it his
+house of romance.
+
+This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly
+of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
+creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
+
+It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
+
+
+
+
+
+II--THE NOVELIST
+
+
+I
+
+|IN {036}discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet
+or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask--as to the
+Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
+
+It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
+applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
+novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the
+novel, as, for instance, _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora Leigh_ bear
+witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain,
+but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
+of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
+position as novelist {037}and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in
+his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work
+will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a
+novelist--that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human
+beings, with his attitude to those histories.
+
+Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
+seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves
+but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
+deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
+story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able
+to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any
+respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was
+quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously
+abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a
+fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time
+forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties;
+{038}but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called _Evan Harrington_
+was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did _Almayer's
+Folly_ in the early nineties, although the wonderful _Richard Feverel_
+had already preceded it.
+
+With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the
+novel, springing straight from the shores of France, where _Madame
+Bovary_ and _Une Vie_ showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew
+into a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed
+how important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not
+very much to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about
+everything that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard
+Kipling showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At
+the beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way
+that things were done. _The Yellow Book_ sprang into a bright existence,
+flamed, and died. "Art for Art's sake" was slain by the trial of Oscar
+Wilde in 1895.
+
+{039}Mr Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about
+shop assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society
+made socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period
+and the Boer War completed an old one.
+
+Of the whole question of Conrad's place in the history of the English
+novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter.
+I would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the
+French influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents
+in its destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the
+time of _The Yellow Book_, passing through all the realistic reaction
+that followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed
+away by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him,
+a new stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for
+the work that he had to do.
+
+
+II
+
+{040}The form in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is
+the question which must always come first in any consideration of him
+as a novelist; the question of his form is the ground upon which he has
+been most frequently attacked.
+
+His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
+suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
+instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
+between two seamen. One has "knifed" the other, and the quarrel has been
+watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
+wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
+seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give
+us the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins,
+_oratio recta_, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just
+over the spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man
+and the girl are. He {041}describes the little barber and is, at once,
+amazed by the interesting facts that he discovers about the man. Seen
+standing in his doorway he is the most ordinary little figure, but
+once investigate his case and you find a strange contrast between his
+melancholy romanticism and the flashing fanaticism of his love for the
+young girl who lodges with him. That leads one back, through many years,
+to the moment of his first meeting with the bibulous old man, and for
+a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous old woman who keeps
+a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This old woman, now
+so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her own. Once she
+was...
+
+And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
+the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
+witness to Conrad's own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
+James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses,
+says: "It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a {042}votary of the way
+to do a thing that shall make it undergo most doing," and his amazement
+at Conrad's patient pursuit of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the
+stranger if we consider that in _What Maisie Knew_ and _The Awkward Age_
+he has practised almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside
+the intricate but masterly form of _The Awkward Age_ the duplicate
+narration of _Chance_ seems child's play. Mr Henry James makes the
+mistake of speaking as though Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the
+form of narration that was most difficult to him, simply for the fun
+of overcoming the difficulties, the truth being that he has chosen the
+easiest, the form of narration brought straight from the sea and the
+ships that he adored, the form of narration used by the Ancient Mariner
+and all the seamen before and alter him. Conrad must have his direct
+narrator, because that is the way in which stories in the past had
+generally come to him. He wishes to deny the effect of that direct and
+simple honesty that had always seemed so attractive to {043}him. He must
+have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he himself
+has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the truth
+of it then must he have two or three.
+
+Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels:
+_Lord Jim, Nostromo_ and _Chance_. It is possible that _Lord Jim_ was
+conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
+from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
+Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others
+remains with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of
+the _Patna_, or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions
+waiting outside for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation
+of these four men Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of
+the _Patna_: "He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking
+on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a. soiled
+sleeping-suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a
+pair of ragged straw slippers {044}on his bare feet, and somebody's
+cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up
+with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head." There are also two
+other "no-account chaps with him"--a sallow faced mean little chap with
+his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a blue flannel coat,
+as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with drooping grey
+moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty imbecility, and,
+with these three, Jim, "clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as
+promising a boy as the sun ever shone on." Here are these four, in the
+same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That boy in the
+same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has fastened
+on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities and
+discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist's thrill. We watch
+our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
+discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go?
+We are thrilled with the suspense. {045}Conrad, having discovered his
+subject, must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most
+deeply cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. "I was not
+there myself," he tells us, "but I can show you someone who was." He
+introduces us to a first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. "Now tell
+your story." He has at once the atmosphere in which he is happiest,
+and so, having his audience clustered about him, unlimited time at
+everyone's disposal, whiskies and cigars without stint, he lets himself
+go. He is bothered now by no question but the thorough investigation of
+his discovery. What had Jim done that he should be in such a case? We
+must have the story of the loss of the _Patna_, that marvellous journey
+across the waters, all the world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain
+and Jim's fine, chivalrous soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so
+much to say and so many fine words in which to say it. At present, so
+absorbed are we, so successful is he, that we are completely held. The
+illusion is perfect. We come to the inquiry. {046}One of the judges is
+Captain Brierley. "What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah! but I must tell
+you! Most extraordinary thing!"
+
+The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the
+_Patna_, Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems
+now so rich that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the
+author's hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre
+of the episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry
+and the Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing.
+We believe even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every
+possible probe into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
+
+There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the
+method is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue
+with him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again.
+But the trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth
+and {047}reality of his story. He saw--we cannot for an instant doubt
+it--that group on the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that
+we, breathlessly, awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not
+inventing a romantic sequel. He must go on--that is the truly terrible
+thing about Marlowe--and at the moment when we question his authenticity
+we are suspicious of his very existence, ready to be irritated by his
+flow of words demanding something more authentic than that voice that
+is now only dimly heard. The author himself perhaps feels this; he
+duplicates, he even trebles his narrators and with each fresh agent
+raises a fresh crop of facts, contrasts, halts and histories. That then
+is the peril of the method. Whilst we believe we are completely held,
+but let the authenticity waver for a moment and the danger of disaster
+is more excessive than with any other possible form of narration. Create
+your authority and we have at once someone at whom we may throw
+stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe has certainly been compelled to
+{048}face, at moments in his career, an angry, irritated audience.
+
+_Nostromo_ is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in the
+narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to deny
+that _Nostromo_ is extremely contused in places, but it is a
+confusion that arises rather from Conrad's confidence in the reader's
+fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
+narrations are sometimes complicated--old Captain Mitchell does not
+always achieve authenticity--but on the whole, the reader may be said to
+be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
+little about others.
+
+But this assurance of the author's that we must have already learnt the
+main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
+of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. "Of course,"
+he says to us, "you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that
+revolution that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be
+there myself. I know all {049}the people concerned, and the central
+figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor Monyngham--no, it was a man
+about whom no one outside the republic was told a syllable. I knew the
+man well.... He.. and there we all are."
+
+The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
+successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning
+which we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing
+at all, but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to
+our conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal
+of _Nostromo_, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the
+silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola
+girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of
+Viola's wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone
+on the Isabels, of Hirsch's torture, of Captain Mitchell's watch--here
+are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely,
+in any other hands, be fantastic {050}melodrama, and both characters and
+scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth.
+Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt
+the author's word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because
+it is entirely convincing.
+
+Not so with the third example, _Chance_. Here, as with _Lord Jim_, we
+may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
+in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the
+_Patna_ waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over
+_Chance_ reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of
+their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps
+of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That
+desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous
+Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her
+and too double-faced for him gives the book's theme, and never in all
+the stories that preceded Flora's has Conrad been so {051}eager to
+afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the
+unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a
+riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain
+Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough
+to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses
+that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us,
+more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible
+narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides
+from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the
+Knight and the Maiden--as the author names them--are retiring souls,
+and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate their timid
+hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and
+the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure
+realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here
+achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half
+of {052}_Lord Jim_ and the whole of _Nostromo_. We believe most
+emphatically in that first narration of young Powell's about his first
+chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite
+casually he talks like this: "I do not even think that there was in
+what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly
+pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or
+equivocal situations." We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely
+drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe's interview with Flora on the
+pavement outside Anthony's room.
+
+We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
+are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
+it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves,
+that we resent, a little, Marlowe's intimacy which prevents, with
+patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have
+seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
+
+But when the second half of the book {053}arrives we can be confident
+no longer. Here, as in _Lord Jim_, it is possible to feel that Conrad,
+having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not
+know how to continue it. The true thing in _Lord Jim_ is the affair of
+the _Patna_; the true thing in _Chance_ is Captain Anthony's rescue of
+Flora after her disaster. But whereas in _Lord Jim_ the sequel to Jim's
+cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the
+sequel to Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any
+rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter
+in _Chance_ entitled _A Moonless Night_ is, in the first half of it,
+surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early
+short story, _The Return_. The conclusion of _Chance_ and certain tales
+in his volume, _Within the Tides_, make one wonder whether that
+alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully
+maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the
+former of these two qualities.
+
+{054}It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails,
+as it must before the end of _Chance_, the form of narration in _Oratio
+Recta_ is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in
+Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony
+and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were
+so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a
+deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.
+
+I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books
+are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
+unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held
+by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to
+tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if
+his presence be not true...
+
+
+III
+
+If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad's attention we shall
+see that {055}in almost every case his subjects are concerned with
+unequal combats--unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to
+the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the
+blindness that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account
+that gives occasion for his irony.
+
+He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
+human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone
+whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he simply gives the
+thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see at once that the odds are
+too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of
+the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour
+and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings
+and they will not quail." They command his pity, his reverence, his
+tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his
+shoulders, he says: "You see. I told you so. He may even think he has
+won. We know better, you and I." {056}The theme of _Almayer's Folly_
+is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the struggle of many simple men against the presence of
+death, of _Lord Jim_, again, the struggle of a simple man against
+nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth).
+_Nostromo_, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which
+stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first.
+_Chance_, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against
+the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. _Typhoon_, the
+very epitome of Conrad's themes, is the struggle of M'Whirr against the
+storm (here again it is M'Whirr who apparently wins, but we can hear,
+in the very last line of the book, the storm's confident chuckle of
+ultimate victory). In _Heart of Darkness_ the victory is to the forest.
+In _The End of the Tether_ Captain Whalley, one of Conrad's finest
+figures, is beaten by the very loftiness of his character. The three
+tales in _'Twixt Land, and Sea_ are all themes of this kind--the
+struggle of simple, {057}unimaginative men against forces too strong
+for them. In _The Secret Agent_ Winnie Verloc, another simple character,
+finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In _Under Western Eyes_
+Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs at the pains
+and struggles of insignificant individuals.
+
+Of Conrad's philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough
+to say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character
+of a story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them
+and leave defeat or victory to the stars.
+
+Whatever Conrad's books are or are not, it may safely be said that
+they are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all
+probability, resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler
+affection, his art, nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding
+over the inequality of life's battle. His humour, often of a very
+fine kind, is always sinister, because his choice of theme forbids
+light-heartedness.
+
+Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would {058}have found Marlowe, Jim and
+Captain Anthony quite impossibly solemn company--but I do not deny that
+they might not have been something the better for a little of it.
+
+I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple
+and unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple
+that there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in
+meeting a number of Conrad's characters is that they have existences
+and histories entirely independent of their introducer's kind offices.
+Conrad has met them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we
+are sure not only that there is very much more that he could tell us
+about them if he had time and space, but that even when he had told us
+all that he knew he would only have touched on the fringe of their real
+histories.
+
+One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
+mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
+the robust vitality of their {059}predecessors; the figures in the novel
+of to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
+
+In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters
+fade before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before
+an idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
+wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy
+before the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton
+before the shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy
+before the omnipotence of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his
+inevitability, Mr Hardy himself is arranging in the background; it
+may be claimed for the characters of Mr Conrad that they yield
+their solidity to no force, no power, not even to their author's own
+determination that they are doomed, in the end, to defeat.
+
+This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer
+novelist than these others, but this quality he has beyond his
+contemporaries--namely, the assurance that {060}his characters have
+their lives and adventures both before and after the especial cases that
+he is describing to us.
+
+The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at
+the close of _The Three Sisters_ or _The Cherry Orchard_ we are left
+speculating deeply upon "what happened afterwards" to Gayef or Barbara,
+to Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad's sea captains as with Tchekov's
+Russians we see at once that they are entirely independent of the
+incidents that we are told about them. This independence springs partly
+from the author's eager, almost na�ve curiosity. It is impossible for
+him to introduce us to any officer on his ship without whispering to us
+in an aside details about his life, his wife and family on shore. By so
+doing he forges an extra link in his chain of circumstantial evidence,
+but we do not feel that here he is deliberately serving his art--it is
+only that quality already mentioned, his own astonished delight at the
+things that he is discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain
+M'Whirr that he wrote long letters home, {061}beginning always with the
+words, "My darling Wife," and relating in minute detail each successive
+trip of the _Nan-Shan_. Mrs M'Whirr, we learn, was "a pretentious person
+with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in
+the neighbourhood considered as 'quite superior.' The only secret of her
+life was her abject terror of the time when her husband would come home
+to stay for good." Also in _Typhoon_ there is the second mate "who never
+wrote any letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and
+though he had been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with
+extreme bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges
+of a boarding-house." How conscious we are of Jim's English country
+parsonage, of Captain Anthony's loneliness, of Marlowe's isolation. By
+this simple thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole
+character stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on
+board the _Narcissus_ there is not one about whom, after his landing,
+{062}we are not curious. There is the skipper, whose wife comes on
+board, "A real lady, in a black dress and with a parasol."... "Very soon
+the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white shirt, went with her
+over the side. We didn't recognise him at all...." And Mr Baker, the
+chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make us his friends
+for life?
+
+"No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
+Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
+and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
+town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
+in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady,
+he thought, sitting down for a moment's rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
+enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere.
+He didn't like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The
+darkness of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck;
+and Mr Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom
+through many {063}long years he had given the best of a seaman's care.
+And never a command in sight. Not once!"
+
+There are others--the abominable Donkin for instance. "Donkin entered.
+They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. 'I give you a bad
+discharge,' he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: 'I don't want your
+bloomin' discharge--keep it. I'm goin' ter 'ave a job hashore.' He turned
+to us. 'No more bloomin' sea for me,' he said, aloud. All looked at him.
+He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than any
+of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
+declaration."
+
+In how many novels would Donkin's life have been limited by the part
+that he was required to play in the adventures of the _Narcissus?_ As it
+is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue
+only. Or there is Charley, the boy of the crew--"As I came up I saw a
+red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, {064}fluffy
+hair, fall on Charley's neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over
+him:--'Oh, my boy! my boy!'--'Leggo me,' said Charley, 'leggo,
+mother!' I was passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of
+the blubbering woman he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic,
+courageous, and profound, that seemed to put all my knowledge of life
+to shame. I nodded and passed on, but heard him say again,
+good-naturedly:--'If you leggo of me this minyt--ye shall 'ave a bob for
+a drink out of my pay.'"
+
+But one passes from these men of the sea--from M'Whirr and Baker,
+from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
+suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
+men of the land--and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed. About
+such men as M'Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will not
+believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they will,
+we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets--those little
+details, {065}M'Whirr's wife, Mr Baker's proud sister, Charley's
+mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
+world--with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister Nikita,
+the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself--we cannot be so
+confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that same
+perfect sympathy.
+
+His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an
+_id�e fixe_, that you must search for this patiently, honestly,
+unsparingly--having found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you.
+But is it? Is it not possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing
+finger, offer up instantly any _id�e fixe_ ready to hand because
+they wish to be left alone? Decoud himself, for instance--Decoud, the
+imaginative journalist in _Nostromo_, speculating with his ironic mind
+upon romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved,
+the burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough
+to suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again
+{066}we have a quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees
+him. That first description of him is wonderful, both in its reality
+and its significance. "His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of
+having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed."
+
+With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
+character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we
+have the convictions of the extension of the protagonists' lives
+beyond the stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives
+independent of the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end
+to the things that we should be told about them, and they must be true
+things.
+
+Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his _id�e
+fixe_--namely, that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his
+phlegmatic state of self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of
+it. At the first sign of threatened change he is terrified to his very
+soul. Conrad never, for an instant, allows him to leave this ground
+upon which he has {067}placed him. We see the man tied to his rock of
+an _id�e fixe_, but he has, nevertheless, we are assured, another life,
+other motives, other humours, other terrors. It is perhaps a direct
+tribute to the authors reserve power that we feel, at the book's close,
+that we should have been told so much more.
+
+Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
+Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
+romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott,
+with the single exception of Thackeray's Beatrix--and here I am not
+forgetting Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own
+immediate time, young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so
+unjustly obscure fiction, _The Shadow of a Titan_. As a picture,
+Nostromo shines with a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel
+shines, with a glow that is flung by the contrasted balance of its
+romance and realism. From that first vision of him as he rides slowly
+through the crowds, in his magnificent dress: "... his hat, a gay
+sombrero with {068}a silver cord and tassels. The bright colours of a
+Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver buttons on the
+embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons down the seam
+of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the
+silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that last moment when--...
+in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head slowly on the pillow and
+opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure perched by his bedside
+a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his head rolled back, his
+eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died without a word or
+moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short shudders testifying to
+the most atrocious sufferings"--we are conscious of his superb figure;
+and after his death we do, indeed, believe what the last lines of the
+book assure us--"In that true cry of love and grief that seemed to
+ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of
+solid silver, the {069}genius of the magnificent Capatuz de Cargadores
+dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love."
+His genius dominates, yes--but it is the genius of a magnificent picture
+standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul. And that soul is not
+given us--Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses to surrender it to us.
+Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton in _The Nigger of
+the Narcissus_ gives us the very heart of the man, so that volumes
+might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender him to us more
+truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves him beyond
+our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him--we have
+not met him.
+
+Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
+basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
+so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
+daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in
+the whole of Conrad's art--the drive in the {070}cab of old Mrs Verloc,
+Winnie and Stevie--compels, additionally, our gratitude) or that strange
+gathering, the Haldins, Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S------, Peter
+Ivanovitch, Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in
+_Romance_ (a book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in
+others), Falk or Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his
+lover, all those and so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the
+world that is offered to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of
+all these figures, some will be near to us, some more distant? It is,
+finally, a world that Conrad offers us, not a series of novels in whose
+pages we find the same two or three figures returning to us--old friends
+with new faces and new names--but a planet that we know, even as we know
+the Meredith planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
+
+Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and
+seas, its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its
+sordid hovels, its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness
+s. Although each {071}work, from, the vast _Nostromo_ to the minutely
+perfect _Secret Share_, has its new theme, its form, its separate heart,
+the swarming life that he has created knows no boundary. And in this,
+surely, creation has accomplished its noblest work.
+
+
+
+
+III--THE POET
+
+|THE {072}poet in Conrad is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical
+side is absent in certain of his works, as, for example, _The Secret
+Agent_, and _Under Western Eyes_, or such short stories as _The
+Informer_, or _Il Conde_, but the philosophic note sounded poetically,
+as an instrument of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
+
+Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad
+the novelist deserve consideration--style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
+the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
+of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier
+works and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from {073}Conrad's
+second novel, _An Outcast of the Islands_:
+
+"He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing
+each other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of
+the forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone
+by the life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies
+that crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He
+seemed to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness,
+spreading his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to
+hide them in the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by
+the disdainful compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an
+aged giant, to screen this struggle of two human hearts from the cold
+scrutiny of glittering stars."
+
+And from his latest novel, _Chance_:
+
+"The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there
+in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man
+from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick
+{074}glance he threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced
+no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight,
+and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the
+immensity of space made visible--almost palpable. Young Powell felt
+it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy,
+powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something
+almost undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two
+feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a
+darkening universe."
+
+It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice
+of Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of
+the two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The
+first piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be
+denied, something of the "purple patch." We feel that the prose is too
+dependent upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work
+slightly affected by the author's {075}determination that it shall be
+fine. The rhythm in it, however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any
+poem in English, the picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though
+it were, in actual tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally,
+there is the inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument
+to the picture. Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again
+and again in the earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in _Almayer's
+Folly, Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth,
+Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim_,--prose piled high with sonorous and
+slow-moving adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds
+hike an Eastern invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the
+suppliant does not believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority
+places upon movements and objects of no importance is disastrous.
+For instance, in the tale called _The Return_, there is the following
+passage:--
+
+"He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if
+dazed. There was {076}less than a second of suspense while they both
+felt as if poised on the very edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall
+into some devouring nowhere. Then almost simultaneously he shouted,
+'Come back,' and she let go the handle of the door. She turned round in
+peaceful desperation like one who has deliberately thrown away the last
+chance of life; and for a moment the room she faced appeared terrible,
+and dark, and safe--like a grave."
+
+The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words--"moral
+annihilation," "devouring nowhere," "peaceful desperation," "last chance
+of life," "terrible," "like a grave." That he shouted gives a final
+touch of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
+
+Often, in the earlier books, Conrad's style has the awkward
+over-emphasis of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is
+using, like a foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus
+we shall understand him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier
+style, the marked effect of {077}two influences. One influence is that
+of the French language and especially of the author of _Madame Bovary_.
+When we recollect that Conrad hesitated at the beginning of his career
+as to whether he would write in French or English, we can understand
+this French inflection. Flaubert's effect on his style is quite
+unmistakable. This is a sentence of Flaubert's: "Toutes ses vell�it�s de
+d�nigrement l'envanouissaiont sous la po�sie du r�le qui l'envahissait;
+et entrain�e vers l'homme par l'illusion du personnage elle t�cha de se
+figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante, extraordinaire, splendide..."
+and this a sentence of Conrad's: "Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard's
+shoulders and her arms tell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if
+to her--to her, the savage, violent and ignorant creature--had been
+revealed clearly in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of
+the loneliness, impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlasting."
+
+Conrad's sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It
+is probable, {078}however, that his debt to Flaubert and the French
+language can be very easily exaggerated, and it does not seem, in
+any case, to have driven very deeply into the heart of his form. The
+influence is mainly to be detected in the arrangement of words and
+sentences as though he had in the first years of his work, used it as a
+crutch before he could walk alone.
+
+The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
+importance--the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
+that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for
+his remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its
+full strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations
+of the sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of
+which we think in many pages of _Almayer's Folly_ and _An Outcast of
+the Island_, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
+emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
+rapture.
+
+He was under the influence of these powers {079}also in that, at that
+time, they were too strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent
+to express his wonder and praise because he is still so immediately
+under their sway. His style, in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions
+and extended phrases of a man who is marking time before the inspired
+moment comes to him--often the inspiration does not come because he
+cannot detach himselt with sufficient pause and balance. But in his
+middle period, in the period of _Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness_ and
+_Nostromo_, this lyrical impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating,
+steadily, spontaneously, with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as
+it were, by its own will and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage
+from _Typhoon_ with that earlier one from _The Outcast of the Islands_
+that I quoted above:
+
+"He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild
+scene of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds.
+She moved slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane
+{080}the excess of her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the
+deep-toned vibration of the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a
+living creature of the sea impatient for the renewal of the contest.
+It ceased suddenly. The still air moaned. Above Jakes' head a few stars
+shone into the pit of black vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc
+frowned upon the ship under the patch of glittering sky. The stars too
+seemed to look at her intently, as if for the last time, and the cluster
+of their splendour sat like a diadem on a lowering brow."
+
+That is poet's work, and poet's work at its finest. Instead of
+impressing us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the
+author has made the very most of a rather thin moment--feels, indeed,
+himself that it is thin--we are here under the influence of something
+that can have no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is
+thick, as though it had been wrought by the finest workman out of
+the heart of the finest material--and yet it remains, through all its
+discipline, spontaneous.
+
+These three tales, _Typhoon, Youth_ and {081}_Heart of Darkness_, stand
+by themselves as the final expression of Conrad's lyrical gift. We
+may remember such characters as M'Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are
+figures as the old seneschal in _The Eve of St Agnes_ or the Ancient
+Mariner himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought
+and finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman's _When Lilac
+first on the Door yard bloomed_ or Keats' _Nightingale._ Their author
+was never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of
+his enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
+
+The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to
+the things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist
+whose business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible
+way. He is conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of
+sonorous and high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but
+only to show them that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed
+minister, is older--he must look back now on the colours of {082}_Youth_
+with an indulgent smile. And when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as
+_The Secret Agent_ and _Under Western Eyes_, in such a volume of
+stories as _A Set of Six_, the lyrical beat in the style is utterly
+abandoned--we are led forward by sentences as grave, as assured, and
+sometimes as ponderous as a city policeman. Nevertheless, in that
+passage from _Chance_ quoted at the beginning of the chapter, although
+we may be far from the undisciplined enthusiasm of _An Outcast of
+the Islands_, the lyrical impulse still remains. Yes, it is there,
+but--"Young Powell felt it." In that magical storm that was _Typhoon_
+God alone can share our terror and demand our courage; in the later
+experience young Powell is our companion.
+
+
+II.
+
+The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
+atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists
+in the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his
+{083}daily bread or game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such
+a perplexing business. He produces stories that might without loss play
+the whole of their action in the waiting-room of an English railway
+station. There is the novelist who thinks that atmosphere matters
+immensely, who works hard to produce it and _does_ produce it in thick
+slabs. There are the novelists whose theme, characters and background
+react so admirably that the atmosphere is provided simply by that
+reaction--and there, finally, it is left, put into no relation with
+other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than the immediate one of
+stating the facts. Of this school are the realists and, in our own
+day, Mr Arnold Bennett's Brighton background in _Hilda Lessways_ or
+Mrs Wharton's New York background in _The House of Mirth_ offer most
+successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class provides us
+with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in relation
+with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly, by the
+contemplation of some scene and is thence {084}extended to the whole
+vista, of life, from birth to death; although the scene may actually be
+as remote or as conlined as space can make it, its potential limits
+are boundless, its progression is extended beyond all possibilities
+of definition. Such a moment is the death of Bazarov in _Fathers and
+Children_, the searching of Dmitri in _The Brothers Karamazov_, the
+scene at the theatre in _The Ring and the Book_, the London meeting
+between Beauchamp and Ren� in _Beauchamp's Career_. It is not only that
+these scenes are "done" to the full extent of their "doing," it is also
+that they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with
+all the emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev,
+Dostoievsky, Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets.
+Conrad, at his highest moments, is also of that company.
+
+But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
+lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless _Victorian Age in Literature_,
+has named this element Glamour. {085}In writing of the novels by George
+Eliot he says: "Indeed there is almost every element of literature,
+except a certain indescribable thing called _Glamour_, which was the
+whole stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
+clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
+when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
+Castlewood." Now' this matter of _Glamour_ is not all, because Dickens,
+for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or the
+house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit's escape after the murder do
+not put us into touch with other worlds--but we may say, at any rate,
+that when, in a novel atmosphere _is_ potential it is certain also to
+have glamour.
+
+The potential qualities of Conrad's atmosphere are amongst his very
+strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is
+his union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
+important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries.
+In _The Outcast {086}of the Islands_, when Willems is exiled by Captain
+Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
+terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described--it
+has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
+power of something stronger than ourselves. In _Lord Jim_ the contrast
+of Jim with the officers of the _Patna_ is a contrast not only
+immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain's
+gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
+ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
+degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In _The Nigger of the
+Narcissus_ the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects
+the lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
+intimates we have become--but that shadow that traps the feet of the
+negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
+boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
+that single voyage of the _Narcissus_. {087}When Winnie Verloc, her old
+mother and the boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not
+seem ludicrous to us that the tears of "that large female in a dark,
+dusty wig, and ancient silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton
+lace" should move us as though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend.
+That mournful but courageous journey remains in our mind as an intimate
+companion of our own mournful and courageous experiences. Such examples
+might be multiplied quite indefinitely.
+
+He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
+significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he
+wishes to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather
+because he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the
+most romantic adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We
+may hear, with many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they
+drive another nail into the framework that supports their picture. "Now
+see how firmly it stands," they say. "That last nail settled it."
+But {088}Conrad is utterly unconscious as to his readers' later
+credulity--he is too completely held by his own amazing discoveries.
+Sometimes, as in _The Return_, when no vision is granted to him, it is
+as though he were banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that
+no one should perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure.
+But, in his real discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around
+and about him, how we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness,
+trusting to his courage, finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze
+of Aladdin's cave! If he is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer,
+a tragedy that has for its natural background the gorgeous, heavy
+splendour of those unending forests, he sees details that belong to the
+austerest and most sharply disciplined realism. We see Lakamba,
+asleep under the moon, slapping himself in his dreams to keep off the
+mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes buzzing into the verandah above the
+dirty plates of a half-finished meal and defies Lingard and Almayer, so
+{089}that they are like men disheartened by some tremendous failure; the
+cards with which Lingard tries to build a house for Almayer's baby are
+"a dirty double pack" with which he used to play Chinese b�zique--it
+bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted in it, considering it a
+remarkable product of Chinese genius. The atmosphere of the terrible
+final chapters is set against this picture of a room in which Mrs
+Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
+
+"Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
+soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers
+of books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
+European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
+petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a
+slender book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
+clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
+wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
+place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
+blankets that {090}lay in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat....
+Through the half-open shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and
+crude, came into the room, beat in the early morning upon the safe in
+the far-off corner, then, travelling against the sun, cut at midday the
+big desk in two with its solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot
+brilliance in which a swarm of flies hovered in dancing flight over some
+dirty plate forgotten there amongst yellow papers for many a day!"
+
+And this room is set in the very heart of the forests--"the forests
+unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of
+heaven--and as indifferent." Had I space I could multiply from
+every novel and tale examples of this creation of atmosphere by the
+juxtaposition of the lyrical and the realistic--the lyrical pulse
+beating through realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however,
+select one book, a supreme example of this effect. What I say about
+_Nostromo_ may be proved from any other work of Conrad's.
+
+The theme of _Nostromo_ is the domination {091}of the silver of the
+Sulaco mine over the bodies and souls of the human beings who live near
+it. The light of the silver shines over the book. It is typified by "the
+white head of Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue." Conrad,
+then, in choosing his theme, has selected the most romantic possible,
+the spirit of silver treasure luring men on desperately to adventure
+and to death. His atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights,
+romantic, even until that last vision of all of "the bright line of
+the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid
+silver." Sulaco burns with colour. We can see, as though we had been
+there yesterday, those streets with the coaches, "great family arks
+swayed on high leathern springs full of pretty powdered faces in which
+the eyes looked intensely alive and black," the houses, "in the early
+sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink, pale blue," or, after dark, from
+Mrs Gould's balcony "towards the plaza end of the street the glowing
+coals in the hazeros of the market women cooking their {092}evening
+meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without
+a sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
+triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to
+a point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman
+walked his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp
+under the dark shape of the rider." Later there is that sinister glimpse
+of the plaza, "where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without
+penetrating into the streets which resounded with shouts and the
+strumming of guitars issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and
+above the roofs, next to the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers
+the snowy curve of Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue
+sky before the windows of the Intendencia." In its final created
+beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as coloured as one of those cloud-topped,
+many-towered towns under whose gates we watch Grimm's princes and
+princesses passing--but the detail of it is {093}built with careful
+realism demanded by the "architecture of Manchester or Birmingham." We
+wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its cathedral,
+its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its sea, its
+hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not created towns
+for us.
+
+Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is
+a shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy's Wessex map is the most
+fascinating document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of
+Stevenson's chart in _Treasure Island_. Conrad, without any map at all,
+gives us a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast
+that far excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver's
+treasure. If any attentive reader of _Nostromo_ were put down in Sulaco
+tomorrow he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The
+detail that provides this final picture is throughout the book
+incessant but never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is
+{094}finished, to any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We
+have been led, quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of
+the deepest drama, through rooms and passages that are only remembered,
+many hours later, in retrospect. There is, for instance, the
+Aristocratic Club, that "extended to strangers the large hospitality
+of the cool, big rooms of its historic quarters in the front part of a
+house, once a residence of a High official of the Holy Office. The
+two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed doors, and what may be
+described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in the unpaved patio
+concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the gate. You turned in
+from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard, where you came upon
+the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a moss-stained effigy of
+some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and bearing the indignity of a
+broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands crossed on his breast. The
+chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped
+at you from above; the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and,
+{095}ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first steps, very
+stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don P�p� moving his
+long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm's length, through an old
+Sta Marta newspaper. His horse--a strong-hearted but persevering black
+brute, with a hammer bead--you would have seen in the street dozing
+motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the
+curbstone of the side-walk!"
+
+How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the
+exclamation of some reader "Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like
+that when I was there!" How convinced we are of Conrad's unimpeachable
+veracity! How like him are those remembered details, "the nailed
+doors," "the fine stone hands," "at arm's-length"!--and can we not sniff
+something of the author's impatience to let himself go and tell us more
+about that "hammer-headed horse" of whose adventures with Don P�p� he
+must remember enough to fill a volume!
+
+He is able, therefore, upon this foundation {096}of a minute and
+scrupulous r�alisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases
+without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate,
+choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression
+of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is
+of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or
+Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the
+life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little
+tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the
+unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons,
+catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember
+also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest
+and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
+
+Here, then, is the secret of Conrad's atmosphere. He is the poet,
+working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is
+at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to
+the last {097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of
+certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It
+_is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that
+has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or
+fable for its interpretation....
+
+When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
+creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question,
+certain limitations.
+
+
+III
+
+As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
+that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
+men.
+
+It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
+watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
+cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
+they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
+{098}ambition of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the
+horizon is limitless; he can see farther than they--from his height he
+can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the
+very last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but
+his irony springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
+
+There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
+it is, surely, Conrad's harshest limitation that he should never be free
+from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound
+is he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove
+his faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
+creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
+Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: "And that's the end. He
+passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
+and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to
+celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct."
+{099}Conrad's ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the
+history of Jim's endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit
+has been vain--as vain as Stein's butterflies.
+
+And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
+observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
+character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart's desire it is that his
+merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
+whom human achievements are nothing--lust of treasure.
+
+M'Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most
+tremendous of God's splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship
+from the storm, so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has
+witnessed that he might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley,
+watching the degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that
+nothing, it seems, can threaten, is himself caught by that very
+degradation.... The Beast in the Jungle is waiting ever ready to
+leap--the victim is always in his power. {100}It comes from this
+philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul that Conrad most
+definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to duty. His men of
+brain--Marlowe, Decoud, Stein--are melancholy and ironic: "If you see
+far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle is." The only way
+to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and, because Conrad is
+tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if possible, he
+chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea whom he
+has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men of
+the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
+Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For
+Verloc, for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond
+words. For the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women
+of the land, Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for
+them alone, but they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty
+of his own sea captains. {101}This then is quite simply his philosophy.
+It has no variation or relief. He will not permit his characters
+to escape, he will not himself try to draw the soul of a man who is
+stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does not, tor an instant,
+hamper his interest--that is as keen and acute as is the absorption of
+any collector of specimens--but at the end of it all, as with his
+own Stein: "He says of him that he is 'preparing to leave all
+this: preparing to leave...' while he waves his hand sadly at his
+butterflies."
+
+Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer
+whom, in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles--Robert
+Browning. As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication,
+save in the honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in
+their subjects and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many
+ways, of an amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation
+of that resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here.
+Browning's {102}interest in life was derived, on the novelist's side of
+him, from his absorption in the affairs, spiritual and physical, of
+men and women; on the poet's side, in the question again spiritual
+and physical, that arose from those affairs. Conrad has not Browning's
+clear-eyed realisation of the necessity of discovering the individual
+philosophy that belongs to every individual case--he is too immediately
+enveloped in his one overwhelming melancholy analysis. But he has
+exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of romance, a romance to be
+seized only through the most accurate and honest realism.
+
+Browning's realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
+of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in _Sordello_ the most
+romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
+such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
+forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did.
+Is not this exactly what we may say of _Nostromo?_ Mr Chesterton has
+written of {103}Browning: "He substituted the street with the green
+blind for the faded garden of Watteau, and the 'blue spirt of a lighted
+match' for the monotony of the evening star." Conrad has substituted for
+the lover serenading his mistress' window the passion of a middle-aged,
+faded woman for her idiot boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a
+fraudulent speculator with an elderly, taciturn sea captain.
+
+The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
+precisely Conrad's characters. Is not Waring Conrad's man?
+
+And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
+Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in _The
+Secret Agent_, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
+to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
+these characters with the same determination to extract the last word
+of truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the
+heart, it is also that the worlds of these {104}two poets are the same.
+How deeply would Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora
+de Barrel, M'Whirr, Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has
+witnessed the revelation of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee's
+wife, of the figures in the Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who
+ordered his tomb at St Praxed's Church, with a strange wonder as though
+he himself had assisted at these discoveries!
+
+Finally, _The Ring and the Book_, with its multiplied witnesses, its
+statement as a "case" of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
+simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
+last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls
+of that superb building--here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
+temple that has _Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo_ amongst its other turrets,
+buttresses and towers.
+
+Conrad is his own master--he has imitated no one, he has created, as
+I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
+carried Romantic-Realism showed {105}the author of _Almayer's Folly_ the
+signs of the road that he was to follow.
+
+If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet,
+may we not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as
+novelist?
+
+
+
+
+IV--ROMANCE AND REALISM
+
+
+I
+
+|THE {106}terms, Romance and Realism, have been used of late years
+very largely as a means of escape from this business of the creation of
+character. The purely romantic novel may now be said to be, in England
+at any rate, absolutely dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study
+of _Robert Louis Stevenson_, said: "Stevenson, reviving the
+never-very-prosperous romance of England, created a school which has
+brought romance to be the sweepings of an old costume-chest;... if
+romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if it spring not from a
+personal vision of life, but is only a tedious virtuosity, a pretence,
+a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The art was jaded when Reade
+finished his vocifer{107}ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead. And if
+it is dead, Stevenson killed it!"
+
+We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to
+his estimate of Stevenson's present and future literary value without
+denying that the date of the publication of _St Ives_ was also the date
+of the death of the purely romantic novel.
+
+But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term "Romantic"
+is used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the
+popular idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term "Realism" has,
+recently, been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in
+its modern use, covers everything that is removed from reality: "I like
+romances," we hear the modern reader say, "because they take me away
+from real life, which I desire to forget." In the same way Realism is
+defined by its enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant
+facts by an observant pessimist. "I like realism," admirers of a certain
+order of novel {108}exclaim, "because it is so like life. It tells me
+just what I myself see every day--I know where I am."
+
+Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas
+of Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
+everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive
+an ambition--I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of
+life with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and
+reminiscence--Romance is the study of life with the faculties of
+imagination. I do not mean that Realism may not be emotional,
+poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always upon truth perceived and
+recorded---it is the essence ol observation. In the same way Romance
+may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in its own world, but its
+spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often upon observation and
+sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any rate, understood here
+that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply a necessary
+divorce from reality, nor does {109}Realism imply a detailed and dusty
+preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for
+Romance to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is
+not so easy for it to be so because imagination is more difficult
+of discipline than observation. It is possible for Realism to be as
+eloquent and potential as Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve
+eloquence because of its fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard
+to the influence of foreign literature upon the English novel, it may
+be suggested that the influence of the French novel, which was at its
+strongest between the years of 1885 and 1895, was towards Realism, and
+that the influence of the Russian novel, which has certainly been
+very strongly marked in England during the last years, is all towards
+Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly what is meant by
+Romantic-Realism, such a novel as _The Brothers Karamazov_, such a
+play as _The Cherry Orchard_ are there before us, as the best possible
+examples. We might say, in a word, that _Karamazov_ has, in the England
+{110}of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by _Madame
+Bovary_....
+
+
+II
+
+It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
+development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties,
+Mr Henry James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other
+kinetic, influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of
+their younger generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr
+Joseph Conrad and Mr H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic,
+hold that same position.
+
+Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the
+French novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is
+to say that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for
+him merely to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts,
+sordid as they are, make the story of Almayer's degradation sufficiently
+realistic, when it is merely {111}recorded and perceived by any
+observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad's imagination, without
+for a moment deserting the truth, worked, beautifying, ennobling it,
+giving it pity and terror, above all putting it mto relation with the
+whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of life and death.
+
+As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
+often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
+of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
+who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used
+by his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a
+little colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the
+required ground.
+
+Conrad had, from the first, a poet's--that is to say, a romantic--mind,
+and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
+determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes
+of all honest men. {112}In that intention he has absolutely succeeded;
+he has not abated one jot of his romance--_Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart
+of Darkness_ are amongst the most romantic things in all our
+literature--but the last charge that any critic can make against him is
+falsification, whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
+
+The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
+determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality
+by his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him
+in this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his
+clue. This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define,
+but that Conrad has been influenced by Turg�niev a little and by
+Dostoievsky very considerably, cannot be denied. _Crime and Punishment,
+The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov_ are romantic realism
+at the most astonishing heights that this development of the novel is
+ever likely to attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince
+Myshkin, Dmitri Karamazov, {113}Nicolas Stavrogin build, men so real to
+us that no change of time or place, age or sickness can take them from
+us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic passion of Dostoievsky's
+love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole world, as we know it,
+with the fire of their charity. That power of creating figures typical
+as well as individual has been denied to Conrad. Captain Anthony,
+Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do they escape the
+limitations and confinements that their presentation as "cases" involves
+on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He feels pity,
+tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his sea heroes,
+never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his scorn of
+the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless in his
+pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
+he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity--Conrad finds
+humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
+
+Nevertheless he has been influenced by {114}the Russian writer
+continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, _Under
+Western Eyes_, the influence has led to imitation. For that reason,
+perhaps, that novel is the least vital of all his books, and we feel as
+though Dostoievsky had given him Razumov to see what he could make of
+him, and had remained too overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow
+independent creation. What, however, Conrad has in common with the
+creator of Raskolnikov is his thrilling pursuit of the lives, the
+hearts, the minutest details of his characters. Conrad alone of all
+English novelists shares this zest with the great Russian. Dostoievsky
+found his romance in his love of his fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in
+his love of beauty, his poet's cry for colour, but their realism they
+find together in the hearts of men--and they find it not as Flaubert,
+that they make of it a perfect work of art, not as Turg�niev, that they
+may extract from it a flower of poignant beauty, not as Tolstoi, that
+they may, from it, found a gospel--simply they pursue their quest
+{115}because the breathless interest of the pursuit is stronger than
+they. They have, both of them, created characters simply because
+characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
+dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
+determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
+Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M'Whirr,
+demanded that they should be flung upon the page.
+
+Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he
+has triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
+through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing
+that Conrad has done for the English novel--he has brought the zest of
+creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their
+art--the Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life.
+That at this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the
+work of Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows
+exhaustion and sterility {116}means nothing; the stream will soon ran
+full again. Meanwhile we, in England, know once more what it is to feel,
+in the novel, the power behind the novelist, to be ourselves in the grip
+of a force that is not afraid of romance nor ashamed of realism, that
+cares for life as life and not as a means of proving the necessity for
+form, the danger of too many adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws
+or the paradise of free love.
+
+
+III
+
+Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
+English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
+provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that
+it does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English
+novelists--in the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J.
+D. Beresford, Mr W. L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan,
+Miss Viola Meynell, Mr Brett Young--this influence is to be detected.
+{117}Even with such avowed realists as Mr Beresford, Mr George and Mr
+Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very different from the realism
+of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once by comparing so recent
+a novel as Mr Swinnerton's _On the Staircase_ with Mr Arnold Bennett's
+_Sacred and Profane Love_, or Mr Galsworthy's _Man of Property_--and Mr
+E. M. Forster is a romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose
+_Longest Journey_ and _Howard's End_ may possibly provide the historian
+of English literature with dates as important as the publication of
+_Almayer's Folly_ in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly
+belong to this essay.
+
+It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
+realism can return. We have been shown in _Nostromo_ something that has
+the colour of _Treasure Island_ and the reality of _New Grub Street_.
+If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English novel is
+dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is, surely,
+on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who believe that
+at few periods in {118}English literature has the novel shown more signs
+of a thrilling and original future.
+
+For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance
+for a moment at his last novel, _Victory_.
+
+The conclusion of _Chance_ and the last volume of short stories had
+shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
+ultimately, from reality. _Victory_, splendid tale though it is, does
+not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of
+almost helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and
+malignancy; that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and
+Lena are as elemental and independent of human will and effort as
+the villainy and slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then
+returned to his old early demonstration that nature is too strong for
+man and I feel as though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair
+to be blown, finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He
+prepares for that eruption and when, for some reason or another,
+that elemental catastrophe is pre{119}vented he consoles himself
+by strewing the beach of his island with the battered corpses of his
+characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as it does
+immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in the
+whole of Conrad--the last conversation between Heyst and Lena--that we
+see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
+more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence
+of the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects.
+At the same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the
+boat of the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent
+in its austerity and truth as ever it was.
+
+Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
+incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the
+discipline and restraint that were once his law.
+
+Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years,
+from the _Almayer's Folly_ of 1895 to the _Victory_ of 1915, one
+{120}realises that it was, for the English novel, no mean nor
+insignificant fortune that brought the author of those books to our
+shores to give a fresh impetus to the progress of our literature and to
+enrich our lives with a new world of character and high adventure.
+
+
+
+
+A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD'S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+
+[The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
+signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
+
+Almayer's Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New
+editions. (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
+
+The Nigger of the "Narcissus": A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
+edition, 1910.
+
+Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
+
+Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M.
+Hueffer (Heinemann). 1901.
+
+Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
+
+Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
+
+Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith,
+Elder). 1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
+Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
+Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
+
+New edition, 1914.
+
+A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
+New edition, 1915.
+
+Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
+
+Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
+(Dent). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+{123}Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (_Macmillan_). 1895.
+New editions, 1912; (_Doubleday_). 1911.
+
+An Outcast of the Islands (_Appleton_). 1896. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1914.
+
+Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (_Dodd, Mead_). 1897.
+New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: "The Nigger of the
+'Narcissus'" (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Tales of Unrest (_Scribner_). 1898.
+
+Lord Jim (_Doubleday_) 1900. New edition, 1914.
+
+The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (_McClure Co._).
+1901.
+
+Typhoon (_Putman_). 1902. New edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Youth, and two Other Stories (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred to
+_Doubleday_). 1903.
+
+Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (_McClure Co._). 1903. New
+edition (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (_McClure Co_.
+Afterwards transferred to _Doubleday_). 1904.
+
+Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (_Harper_), 1904. {124}The Mirror of
+the Sea: Memories and Impressions (_Harper_). 1906.
+
+The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (_Harper_). 1907.
+
+A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (_McClure Co_. Afterwards transferred
+to _Doubleday_). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (_Harper_). 1911.
+
+A Personal Retold (_Harper_). 1912.
+
+'Twist Land and Sea: Tales (_Doran_). 1912. New edition (_Doubleday_).
+1911.
+
+Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (_Doubleday_). 1914.
+
+A Set of Six [Tales: one, "The Duel." previously issued as "A Point of
+Honour"] (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Victory: An Island Tale (_Doubleday_). 1915.
+
+Within the Tides: Tales (_Doubleday_). 1916.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
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+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
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+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
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+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+Title: Joseph Conrad
+
+Author: Hugh Walpole
+
+Release Date: June 30, 2016 [EBook #52453]
+Last Updated: November 20, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger from page images generously
+provided by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      JOSEPH CONRAD
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Hugh Walpole
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      New York: Henry Holt And Company
+    </h4>
+    <h3>
+      1916
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0001.jpg" alt="0001 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0001.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0008.jpg" alt="0008 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0009.jpg" alt="0009 " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      TO
+    </h3>
+    <h3>
+      SIR SIDNEY COLVIN
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II&mdash;THE NOVELIST </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III&mdash;THE POET </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S
+      PRINCIPAL WRITINGS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY </a>
+    </p>
+   <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#linkindex"> INDEX </a>
+    </p>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I&mdash;BIOGRAPHY
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>O any<span
+      class="pagenum">7</span><a name="link007" id="link007"></a> reader of the
+      books of Joseph Conrad it must be at once plain that his immediate
+      experiences and impressions of life have gone very directly to the making
+      of his art. It may happen often enough that an author&rsquo;s artistic life is
+      of no importance to the critic and that his dealing with it is merely a
+      personal impertinence and curiosity, but with the life of Joseph Conrad
+      the critic has something to do, because, again and again, this writer
+      deliberately evokes the power of personal reminiscence, charging it with
+      the burden of his philosophy and the creation of his characters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the details of his life we cannot, in any way, be concerned, but with
+      the three backgrounds against whose form and colour <span class="pagenum">8</span><a
+      name="link008" id="link008"></a>his art has been placed we have some
+      compulsory connection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Conrad (Teodor Josef Konrad Karzeriowski) was born on 6th December
+      1857, and his birthplace was the Ukraine in the south of Poland. In 1862
+      his father, who had been concerned in the last Polish rebellion, was
+      banished to Vologda. The boy lived with his mother and father there until
+      his mother died, when he was sent back to the Ukraine. In 1870 his lather
+      died.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad was then sent to school in Cracow and there he remained until 1874,
+      when, following an absolutely compelling impulse, he went to sea. In the
+      month of May, 1878, he first landed on English ground; he knew at that
+      time no English but learnt rapidly, and in the autumn of 1878 joined the
+      <i>Duke of Sutherland</i> as ordinary seaman. He became a Master in the
+      English Merchant Service in 1884, in which year he was naturalised. In
+      1894 he left the sea, whose servant he had been for nearly twenty years:
+      he sent the manuscript of a novel that he had been writing at various
+      periods during <span class="pagenum">9</span><a name="link009" id="link009"></a>his
+      sea life to Mr Fisher Unwin. With that publisher&rsquo;s acceptance of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i> the third period of his life began. Since then his history has
+      been the history of his books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking for an instant at the dramatic contrast and almost ironical
+      relationship of these three backgrounds&mdash;Poland, the Sea, the inner
+      security and tradition of an English country-side&mdash;one can realise
+      what they may make of an artist. That early Polish atmosphere, viewed
+      through all the deep light and high shade of a remembered childhood, may
+      be enough to give life and vigour to any poet&rsquo;s temperament. The romantic
+      melancholy born of early years in such an atmosphere might well plant
+      deeply in any soul the ironic contemplation of an impossible freedom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Growing into youth in a land whose farthest bounds were held by unlawful
+      tyranny, Conrad may well have contemplated the sea as the one unlimited
+      monarchy of freedom and, even although he were too young to realise what
+      impulses <span class="pagenum">10</span><a name="link010" id="link010"></a>those
+      were that drove him, he may have felt that space and size and the force of
+      a power stronger than man were the only conditions of possible liberty. He
+      sought those conditions, found them and clung to them; he found, too, an
+      ironic pity for men who could still live slaves and prisoners to other men
+      when to them also such freedom was possible. That ironic pity he never
+      afterwards lost, and the romance that was in him received a mighty impulse
+      from that contrast that he was always now to contemplate. He discovered
+      the Sea and paid to her at once his debt of gratitude and obedience. He
+      thought it no hard thing to obey her when he might, at the same time, so
+      honestly admire her and she has remained for him, as an artist, the only
+      personality that he has been able wholeheartedly to admire. He found in
+      her something stronger than man and he must have triumphed in the
+      contemplation of the dominion that she could exercise, if she would, over
+      the tyrannies that he had known in his childhood. <span class="pagenum">11</span><a
+      name="link011" id="link011"></a>He found, too, in her service, the type of
+      man who, most strongly, appealed to him. He had known a world composed of
+      threats, fugitive rebellions, wild outbursts of defiance, inefficient
+      struggles against tyranny, he was in the company now of those who realised
+      so completely the relationship of themselves and their duty to their
+      master and their service that there was simply nothing to be said about
+      it. England had, perhaps, long ago called to him with her promise of
+      freedom, and now on an English ship he realised the practice and
+      performance of that freedom, indulged in, as it was, with the fewest
+      possible words. Moreover, with his fund of romantic imagination, he must
+      have been pleased by the contrast of his present company, men who, by
+      sheer lack of imagination, ruled and served the most imaginative force in
+      nature. The wonders of the sea, by day and by night, were unnoticed by his
+      companions, and he admired their lack of vision. Too much vision had
+      driven his country under the heel of Tyranny, had bred in himself a
+      despair of <span class="pagenum">12</span><a name="link012" id="link012"></a>any
+      possible freedom for far-seeing men; now he was a citizen of a world where
+      freedom reigned because men could not perceive how it could be otherwise;
+      the two sides of the shield were revealed to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, towards the end of his twenty years&rsquo; service of the sea, the
+      creative impulse in him demanded an outlet. He wrote, at stray moments of
+      opportunity during several years, a novel, wrote it for his pleasure and
+      diversion, sent it finally to a publisher with all that lack of confidence
+      in posts and publishers that every author, who cares for his creations,
+      will feel to the end of his days. He has said that if <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>
+      had been refused he would never have written again, but we may well
+      believe that, let the fate of that book be what it might, the energy and
+      surprise of his discovery of the sea must have been declared to the world.
+      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i>, however, was not rejected; its publication caused
+      <i>The Spectator</i> to remark: &ldquo;The name of Mr Conrad is new to us, but
+      it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay
+      Archipelago.&rdquo; He <span class="pagenum">13</span><a name="link013"      id="link013"></a>had, therefore, encouragement of the most dignified kind
+      from the beginning. He himself, however, may have possibly regarded that
+      day in 1897 when Henley accepted <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> for <i>The
+      New Review</i> as a more important date in his new career. That date may
+      serve for the commencement of the third period of his adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The quiet atmosphere of the England that he had adopted made the final,
+      almost inevitable contrast with the earlier periods. With such a country
+      behind him it was possible for him to contemplate in peace the whole
+      &ldquo;case&rdquo; of his earlier life. It was as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; that he saw it, a &ldquo;case&rdquo;
+       that was to produce all those other &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that were his books. This has
+      been their history.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
+      period, beginning with <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in 1895, ended with <i>Lord
+      Jim</i> in 1900. The second contains <span class="pagenum">14</span><a
+      name="link014" id="link014"></a>the two volumes of <i>Youth</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>,
+      the novel <i>Romance</i> that he wrote in collaboration with Ford Madox
+      Hueffer, and ends with <i>Nostromo</i>, published in 1903. The third
+      period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with <i>The Secret Agent</i>,
+      and receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of <i>Chance</i> in
+      1914, and <i>Victory</i> (1915).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
+      language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point of
+      view of the &ldquo;schools,&rdquo; to remain too strong for him, struggles with the
+      very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging themselves upon
+      him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom, like wild beasts
+      behind iron bars. <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i>
+      (the first of these is sequel to the second) were remarkable in the
+      freshness of their discovery of a new world. It was not that their world
+      had not been found before, but rather that Conrad, by the force of his own
+      individual discovery, proclaimed his find with a new voice and a new
+      vigour. In the <span class="pagenum">15</span><a name="link015"      id="link015"></a>character of Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Bahalatchi
+      and Abdulla there was a new psychology that gave promise of great things.
+      Nevertheless these early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were
+      clumsy in their development and conveyed in then style a sense of rhetoric
+      and lack of ease. His vision of his background was pulled out beyond its
+      natural intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so
+      obvious as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out
+      of malicious perversity, anything else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, <i>Tales of
+      Unrest</i>, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad&rsquo;s difficulties. One study
+      in this book, <i>The Return</i>, with its redundancies and overemphasis,
+      is the crudest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume
+      succeeds. It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung
+      himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
+      what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, <i>The Nigger of the
+      Narcissus</i>. This <span class="pagenum">16</span><a name="link016"      id="link016"></a>was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a ship
+      from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the human
+      souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death, an influence
+      ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always tender and
+      humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other vessels, the <i>Narcissus</i>.
+      Never again, except perhaps in <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i>, was he to be
+      so happily at his ease with any of his subjects. The book is a gallery of
+      remarkably distinct and authentic portraits, the atmosphere is held in
+      perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme is never, for an instant,
+      abandoned. It is, above all, a record of lovingly cherished reminiscence.
+      Of cherished reminiscence also was the book that closed the first period
+      of his work, <i>Lord Jim</i>. This was to remain, until the publication of
+      <i>Chance</i>, his most popular novel. It is the story of a young
+      Englishman&rsquo;s loss of honour in a moment of panic and his victorious
+      recovery. The first half of the book is a finely sustained development of
+      a <span class="pagenum">17</span><a name="link017" id="link017"></a>vividly
+      remembered scene, the second half has the inevitability of a moral idea
+      pursued to its romantic end rather than the inevitability of life. Here
+      then in 1900 Conrad had worked himself free of the underground of the
+      jungle and was able to choose his path. His choice was still dictated by
+      the subjects that he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of
+      observation his creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim,
+      Marlowe were men whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a
+      new birth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appeared now in <i>Youth, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Typhoon</i>
+      three of the finest short stories in the English language, work of
+      reminiscence, but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and
+      flame of a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now
+      to be abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in <i>Youth</i> and its
+      evocation of the East, in <i>The Heart of Darkness</i> and its evocation
+      of the forests that are beyond civilisation, in <i>Typhoon</i> and its
+      evocation of the sea. He was never, after <span class="pagenum">18</span><a
+      name="link018" id="link018"></a>these tales, to write again of the sea as
+      though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
+      regret, and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This second period closed with the production of a work that was
+      deliberately created rather than reminiscent, <i>Nostromo</i>. Conrad may
+      have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Could, old Viola; but; they became
+      stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
+      anything for their creation. There is much to be said about <i>Nostromo</i>,
+      in many ways the greatest of all Conrad&rsquo;s works, but, for the moment, one
+      would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all ironical
+      births, in a journal&mdash;<i>T.P.&lsquo;s Weekly</i>&mdash;and astonished and
+      bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
+      and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that its
+      critics did not understand it, and its author&rsquo;s own admirers were puzzled
+      by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Nostromo</i> was followed by a pause&mdash;one <span class="pagenum">19</span><a
+      name="link019" id="link019"></a>can easily imagine that its production
+      did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When, however, in 1907
+      appeared <i>The Secret Agent</i>, a new attitude was most plainly visible.
+      He was suddenly detached, writing now of &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that interested him as an
+      investigator of human life, but called from his heart no burning
+      participation of experience. He is tender towards Winnie Verloc and her
+      old mother, the two women in <i>The Secret Agent</i>, but he studies them
+      quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim so radiantly, that
+      fierce contempt that in <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i> accompanied
+      Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer artist, but we
+      have lost something of that earlier compelling interest. <i>The Secret
+      Agent</i> is a tale of secret service in London; it contains the
+      wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
+      Conrad&rsquo;s hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are so
+      completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 <i>Under Western Eyes</i>
+      spoke strongly of a Russian influence <span class="pagenum">20</span><a
+      name="link020" id="link020"></a>Turgéniev and Dostoievsky had too markedly
+      their share in the creation of Razumov and the cosmopolitan circle in
+      Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A volume of short stories, <i>A Set of Six</i>, illustrating still more
+      emphatically Conrad&rsquo;s new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is remarkable
+      chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic wars&mdash;<i>The
+      Duel</i>&mdash;a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its sustained
+      note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land and Sea</i>, to
+      unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of his method.
+      <i>A Smile, of Fortune</i> and <i>The Secret Sharer</i> are amazing in the
+      beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of the
+      reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now as
+      something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has taken
+      from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress.
+      Nevertheless <i>The Secret Sharer</i> is a most marvellous story,
+      marvellous in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the
+      <span class="pagenum">21</span><a name="link021" id="link021"></a>contrast
+      between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications of
+      its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared <i>Chance</i>, by no means the
+      finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
+      wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of <i>The
+      Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, of <i>Nostromo</i>. With
+      the popular success of <i>Chance</i> the first period of his work is
+      closed. On the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the
+      artist and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
+      prophecy.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad, no
+      better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading
+      of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. <i>Some
+      Reminiscences</i> and <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> demand consideration on
+      the threshold of any survey of this author&rsquo;s work, because <span
+      class="pagenum">22</span><a name="link022" id="link022"></a>they reveal,
+      from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the
+      individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the
+      process of creation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares
+      to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor
+      fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels.
+      <i>Some Reminiscences</i> has only <i>Tristram Shandy</i> for its rival in
+      the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. <i>The
+      Mirror of the Sea</i> has no rival at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his
+      reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make, a good
+      starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i>, at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of <i>Some
+      Reminiscences</i>, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of
+      <i>Almayer</i> has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the
+      maid-servant, is still standing in the doorway, the hands of <span
+      class="pagenum">23</span><a name="link023" id="link023"></a>the clock have
+      covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply that the
+      fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the very essence
+      of Conrad&rsquo;s art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that
+      to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short.
+      His reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take
+      on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: &ldquo;Ah! yes.
+      I&rsquo;m interesting, of course, but don&rsquo;t you remember...?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident,
+      not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous
+      figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be
+      crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the book
+      with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;
+      of the <i>Nonsuch</i> who... or there is the window just behind the
+      writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one
+      of the year &lsquo;88 when...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the course of his thrilling voyage of <span class="pagenum">24</span><a
+      name="link024" id="link024"></a>discovery we are, by a kind of most
+      blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the author&rsquo;s own
+      most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the miracle, learn
+      something of Conrad as ship&rsquo;s officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a
+      visitor to his uncle&rsquo;s house in Poland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them
+      with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those
+      glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us,
+      only partially realised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both
+      breathless, and, by the virtue of its author&rsquo;s style, solemn, we do
+      obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two
+      revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through
+      our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often
+      sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality.
+      Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells us: <span
+      class="pagenum">25</span><a name="link025" id="link025"></a>"Those who
+      read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a
+      few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It
+      rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when
+      nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to
+      attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings.&rdquo;
+       (Page 20.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger
+      from which a philosophical mind should be free.&rdquo; (Page 21.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that
+      sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone
+      the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it,
+      can be rendered without shame.&rdquo; (Page 194.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and
+      self-satisfaction, this sobriety&mdash;these qualities do give some
+      implication of the colour of the work that will <span class="pagenum">26</span><a
+      name="link026" id="link026"></a>arise from them; and when to these
+      qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we must have some
+      true conception of the nature of the work that he was to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is for this that <i>Some Reminiscences</i> is valuable. To read it as a
+      detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book of
+      modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the <i>My
+      Autobiography</i> or <i>My Life</i> of some eminent scientist or
+      theologian, is to be most grievously disappointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding,
+      disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the
+      very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all their
+      own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad&rsquo;s faults and
+      of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and
+      simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there is almost
+      everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift
+      that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of <span
+      class="pagenum">27</span><a name="link027" id="link027"></a>art,
+      overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged, incoherent,
+      inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured
+      into a friend&rsquo;s ear in a moment of sudden confidence. That may or may not
+      be the best way to conduct reminiscences; the book remains a supremely
+      intimate, engaging and enlightening introduction to its author.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> we are on very different ground. As I
+      have already said, this is Conrad&rsquo;s happiest book&mdash;indeed, with the
+      possible exception of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i>, his only happy
+      book. He is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his
+      distrust, his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here
+      permitting himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and
+      behind that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely
+      at variance with the distrust of his later novels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard
+      papers, with such titles as <i>Landfalls and Departures</i>, <span
+      class="pagenum">28</span><a name="link028" id="link028"></a><i>Overdue and
+      Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft</i>. No reader
+      however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely
+      binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to him, mto the
+      very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she really is, he
+      has been made free of a great order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources&mdash;the
+      majesty, power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the
+      lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships
+      that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole
+      life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements
+      in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its
+      power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which
+      is the life of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad&rsquo;s attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and
+      passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism,
+      her deceits, her <span class="pagenum">29</span><a name="link029"      id="link029"></a>cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men,
+      but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The sea&mdash;this truth must be confessed&mdash;has no generosity. No
+      display of manly qualities&mdash;courage, hardihood, endurance,
+      faithfulness&mdash;has ever been known to touch its irresponsible
+      consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a
+      savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest
+      appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships
+      and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat
+      together in the face of his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep
+      is its unfathomable cruelty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because
+      he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this
+      cruelty. She positively &ldquo;brings it off,&rdquo; this assertion of her right, and
+      once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In this
+      worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a <span
+      class="pagenum">30</span><a name="link030" id="link030"></a>lyrical
+      freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never again, not even in
+      <i>Typhoon</i> and <i>Youth</i>, to write with such free and spontaneous
+      lyricism as in his famous passage about the &ldquo;West Wind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>The Mirror of the Sea</i> forms then the best possible introduction to
+      Conrad&rsquo;s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently
+      than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion. It
+      presents also, however, in its treatment of the second element of his
+      subject, the men on the ships, many early sketches of the characters whom
+      he, both before and afterwards, developed so fully in his novels. About
+      these same men there are certain characteristics to be noticed,
+      characteristics that must be treated more fully in a later analysis of
+      Conrad&rsquo;s creative power, but that nevertheless demand some mention here as
+      witnesses of the emotions, the humours, the passions that he, most
+      naturally, observes. It is, in the first place, to be marked that almost
+      all the men upon the sea, from &ldquo;poor Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,
+      who used <span class="pagenum">31</span><a name="link031" id="link031"></a>to
+      suffer from sick headaches, in his young days, every time he was
+      approaching a coast,&rdquo; to the dramatic Dominic (&ldquo;from the slow,
+      imperturbable gravity of that broad-chested man you would think he had
+      never smiled in his life&rdquo;), are silent and thoughtful. Granted this
+      silence, Conrad in his half-mournful, half-humorous survey, is instantly
+      attracted by any possible contrast. Captain B&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;- dying
+      in his home, with two grave, elderly women sitting beside him in the quiet
+      room, &ldquo;his eyes resting fondly upon the faces in the room, upon the
+      pictures on the wall, upon all the familiar objects of that home whose
+      abiding and clear image must have flashed often on his memory in times of
+      stress and anxiety at sea&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;poor P&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;,&rdquo;
+       with &ldquo;his cheery temper, his admiration for the jokes in <i>Punch</i>, his
+      little oddities&mdash;like his strange passion for borrowing
+      looking-glasses, for instance&rdquo;&mdash;that captain who &ldquo;did everything with
+      an air which put your attention on the alert and raised your expectations,
+      but the result somehow was always on stereotyped <span class="pagenum">32</span><a
+      name="link032" id="link032"></a>lines, unsuggestive, empty of any lesson
+      that one could lay to heart&rdquo;&mdash;that other captain in whom &ldquo;through a
+      touch of self-seeking that modest artist of solid merit became untrue to
+      his temperament&rdquo;&mdash;here are little sketches for those portraits that
+      afterwards we are to know so well, Marlowe, Captain M&rsquo;Whirr, Captain
+      Lingard, Captain Mitchell and many others. Here we may fancy that his eye
+      lingers as though in the mere enumeration of little oddities and
+      contrasted qualities he sees such themes, such subjects, such &ldquo;cases&rdquo; that
+      it is hard, almost beyond discipline, to leave them. Nevertheless they
+      have to be left. He has obtained his broader contrast by his juxtaposition
+      of the curious muddled jumble of the human life against the broad, august
+      power of the Sea&mdash;that is all that his present subject demands, that
+      is his theme and his picture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the
+      soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship
+      that <i>The Mirror of The Sea</i>, ultimately, has most to do. <span
+      class="pagenum">33</span><a name="link033" id="link033"></a>As other men
+      write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his ships. He
+      sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and
+      beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises
+      them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft.
+      You may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell
+      the journalists of their crime in speaking of &ldquo;casting&rdquo; an anchor when the
+      true technicality is &ldquo;brought up&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;to an anchor&rdquo; understood. In the
+      chapter on &ldquo;Yachts&rdquo; he provides as much technical detail as any book of
+      instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences&mdash;&ldquo;the
+      art of handling slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men.&rdquo;...
+      &ldquo;A ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on
+      purpose to keep us up to mark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which
+      I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from her birth,
+      in no ordered sequence of <span class="pagenum">34</span><a name="link034"      id="link034"></a>events, but admitting us ever more closely into her
+      intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little
+      things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to
+      our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. Conrad is tender to her as
+      he is to nothing human. He watches her shy, new, in the dock, &ldquo;her
+      reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share
+      their life with her.&rdquo;... &ldquo;She looked modest to me. I imagined her
+      diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the
+      wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the
+      company of her tried and experienced bisters already familiar with all the
+      violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he
+      salutes her grace and spirit&mdash;he echoes, with all the implied irony
+      of contrast, his companion&rsquo;s &ldquo;Ships are all right....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He explains the many kinds of ships that there are&mdash;the rogues, the
+      wickedly malicious, <span class="pagenum">35</span><a name="link035"      id="link035"></a>the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the
+      staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has indulgences that
+      he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be severe before such a
+      world of fine spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, in the episode of the <i>Tremolino</i> and her tragic end (an end
+      that has in it a suggestion of that later story, <i>Freya of the Seven
+      Inlands</i>), in that sinister adventure of Dominic and the vile Caesar,
+      he shows us, in miniature, what it is that he intends to do with all this
+      material. He gives us the soul of the <i>Tremolino</i>, the soul of
+      Dominic, the soul of the sea upon which they are voyaging. Without ever
+      deserting the realism upon which he builds his foundations he raises upon
+      it his house of romance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of
+      all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of
+      creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II&mdash;THE NOVELIST
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>N <span
+      class="pagenum">36</span><a name="link036" id="link036"></a>discussing the
+      art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three
+      special questions that we may ask&mdash;as to the Theme, as to the Form,
+      as to the creation of Character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be
+      applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the
+      novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel,
+      as, for instance, <i>The Ring and the Book</i> and <i>Aurora Leigh</i>
+      bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are
+      vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many
+      of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his
+      position as novelist <span class="pagenum">37</span><a name="link037"      id="link037"></a>and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most
+      truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in
+      this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist&mdash;that is, as a
+      narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to
+      those histories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the
+      seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but
+      slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their
+      deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered
+      story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to
+      make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect.
+      Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite
+      unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned
+      themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which
+      forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A
+      new period began at the end of the fifties; <span class="pagenum">38</span><a
+      name="link038" id="link038"></a>but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel
+      called <i>Evan Harrington</i> was of any special importance; it made no
+      more stir than did <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> in the early nineties, although
+      the wonderful <i>Richard Feverel</i> had already preceded it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With the coming of George Meredith and Thomas Hardy the Form of the novel,
+      springing straight from the shores of France, where <i>Madame Bovary</i>
+      and <i>Une Vie</i> showed what might be done by taking trouble, grew into
+      a question of considerable import. Robert Louis Stevenson showed how
+      important it was to say things agreeably, even when you had not very much
+      to say. Henry James showed that there was so much to say about everything
+      that you could not possibly get to the end of it, and Rudyard Kipling
+      showed that the great thing was to see things as they were. At the
+      beginning of the nineties everyone was immensely busied over the way that
+      things were done. <i>The Yellow Book</i> sprang into a bright existence,
+      flamed, and died. &ldquo;Art for Art&rsquo;s sake&rdquo; was slain by the trial of Oscar
+      Wilde in 1895.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">39</span><a name="link039" id="link039"></a>Mr
+      Wells, in addition to fantastic romances, wrote stories about shop
+      assistants and knew something about biology. The Fabian Society made
+      socialism entertaining. Mr Bernard Shaw foreshadowed a new period and the
+      Boer War completed an old one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of the whole question of Conrad&rsquo;s place in the history of the English
+      novel and his influence upon it I wish to speak in a later chapter. I
+      would simply say here that if he was borne in upon the wind of the French
+      influence he was himself, in later years, one of the chief agents in its
+      destruction, but, beginning to write in English as he did in the time of
+      <i>The Yellow Book</i>, passing through all the realistic reaction that
+      followed the collapse of aestheticism, seeing the old period washed away
+      by the storm of the Boer War, he had, especially prepared for him, a new
+      stage upon which to labour. The time and the season were ideal for the
+      work that he had to do.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">40</span><a name="link040" id="link040"></a>The form
+      in which Conrad has chosen to develop his narratives is the question which
+      must always come first in any consideration of him as a novelist; the
+      question of his form is the ground upon which he has been most frequently
+      attacked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His difficulties in this matter have all arisen, as I have already
+      suggested, from his absorbing interest in life. Let us imagine, for an
+      instant, an imaginary case. He has teen in some foreign port a quarrel
+      between two seamen. One has &ldquo;knifed&rdquo; the other, and the quarrel has been
+      watched, with complete indifference, by a young girl and a bibulous old
+      wastrel who is obviously a relation both of hers and of the stricken
+      seaman. The author sees here a case for his art and, wishing to give us
+      the matter with the greatest possible truth and accuracy, he begins, <i>oratio
+      recta</i>, by the narration of a little barber whose shop is just over the
+      spot where the quarrel took place and whose lodgers the old man and the
+      girl are. He <span class="pagenum">41</span><a name="link041" id="link041"></a>describes
+      the little barber and is, at once, amazed by the interesting facts that he
+      discovers about the man. Seen standing in his doorway he is the most
+      ordinary little figure, but once investigate his case and you find a
+      strange contrast between his melancholy romanticism and the flashing
+      fanaticism of his love for the young girl who lodges with him. That leads
+      one back, through many years, to the moment of his first meeting with the
+      bibulous old man, and for a witness of that wo must hunt out a villainous
+      old woman who keeps a drinking saloon in another part of the town. This
+      old woman, now so drink-sodden and degraded, had once a history of her
+      own. Once she was...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so the matter continues. It is not so much a deliberate evocation of
+      the most difficult of methods, this maimer of narration, as a poignant
+      witness to Conrad&rsquo;s own breathless surprise at his discoveries. Mr Henry
+      James, speaking of this enforced collection of oratorical witnesses, says:
+      &ldquo;It places Mr Conrad absolutely alone as a <span class="pagenum">42</span><a
+      name="link042" id="link042"></a>votary of the way to do a thing that shall
+      make it undergo most doing,&rdquo; and his amazement at Conrad&rsquo;s patient pursuit
+      of unneeded difficulties may seem to us the stranger if we consider that
+      in <i>What Maisie Knew</i> and <i>The Awkward Age</i> he has practised
+      almost precisely the same form himself. Indeed beside the intricate but
+      masterly form of <i>The Awkward Age</i> the duplicate narration of <i>Chance</i>
+      seems child&rsquo;s play. Mr Henry James makes the mistake of speaking as though
+      Conrad had quite deliberately chosen the form of narration that was most
+      difficult to him, simply for the fun of overcoming the difficulties, the
+      truth being that he has chosen the easiest, the form of narration brought
+      straight from the sea and the ships that he adored, the form of narration
+      used by the Ancient Mariner and all the seamen before and alter him.
+      Conrad must have his direct narrator, because that is the way in which
+      stories in the past had generally come to him. He wishes to deny the
+      effect of that direct and simple honesty that had always seemed so
+      attractive to <span class="pagenum">43</span><a name="link043" id="link043"></a>him.
+      He must have it by word of mouth, because it is by word of mouth that he
+      himself has always demanded it, and if one witness is not enough for the
+      truth of it then must he have two or three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider for a moment the form of three of his most important novels: <i>Lord
+      Jim, Nostromo</i> and <i>Chance</i>. It is possible that <i>Lord Jim</i>
+      was conceived originally as a sketch of character, derived by the author
+      from one scene that was, in all probability, an actual reminiscence.
+      Certainly, when the book is finished, one scene beyond all others remains
+      with the reader; the scene of the inquiry into the loss of the <i>Patna</i>,
+      or rather the vision of Jim and his appalling companions waiting outside
+      for the inquiry to begin. Simply in the contemplation of these four men
+      Conrad has his desired contrast; the skipper of the <i>Patna</i>: &ldquo;He made
+      me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was
+      extravagantly gorgeous too&mdash;got up in a. soiled sleeping-suit, bright
+      green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw
+      slippers <span class="pagenum">44</span><a name="link044" id="link044"></a>on
+      his bare feet, and somebody&rsquo;s cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes
+      too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big
+      head.&rdquo; There are also two other &ldquo;no-account chaps with him&rdquo;&mdash;a sallow
+      faced mean little chap with his arm in a sling, and a long individual in a
+      blue flannel coat, as dry as a chip and no stouter than a broomstick, with
+      drooping grey moustaches, who looked about him with an air of jaunty
+      imbecility, and, with these three, Jim, &ldquo;clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm
+      on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on.&rdquo; Here are these
+      four, in the same box, condemned for ever by all right-thinking men. That
+      boy in the same box as those obscene scoundrels! At once the artist has
+      fastened on to his subject, it bristles with active, vital possibilities
+      and discoveries. We, the observers, share the artist&rsquo;s thrill. We watch
+      our author dart upon a subject with the excitement of adventurers
+      discovering a gold mine. How much will it yield? How deep will it go? We
+      are thrilled with the suspense. <span class="pagenum">45</span><a
+      name="link045" id="link045"></a>Conrad, having discovered his subject,
+      must, for the satisfaction of that honour which is his most deeply
+      cherished virtue, prove to us his authenticity. &ldquo;I was not there myself,&rdquo;
+       he tells us, &ldquo;but I can show you someone who was.&rdquo; He introduces us to a
+      first-hand witness, Marlowe or another. &ldquo;Now tell your story.&rdquo; He has at
+      once the atmosphere in which he is happiest, and so, having his audience
+      clustered about him, unlimited time at everyone&rsquo;s disposal, whiskies and
+      cigars without stint, he lets himself go. He is bothered now by no
+      question but the thorough investigation of his discovery. What had Jim
+      done that he should be in such a case? We must have the story of the loss
+      of the <i>Patna</i>, that marvellous journey across the waters, all the
+      world of the pilgrims, the obscene captain and Jim&rsquo;s fine, chivalrous
+      soul. Marlowe is inexhaustible. He has so much to say and so many fine
+      words in which to say it. At present, so absorbed are we, so successful is
+      he, that we are completely held. The illusion is perfect. We come to the
+      inquiry. <span class="pagenum">46</span><a name="link046" id="link046"></a>One
+      of the judges is Captain Brierley. &ldquo;What! not know Captain Brierley! Ah!
+      but I must tell you! Most extraordinary thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The world grows around us; a world that can contain the captain of the <i>Patna</i>,
+      Brierley and Jim at the same time! The subject before us seems now so rich
+      that we are expecting to see it burst, at any moment, in the author&rsquo;s
+      hands, but so long as that first visualised scene is the centre of the
+      episode, so long as the experience hovers round that inquiry and the
+      Esplanade outside it, we are held, breathless and believing. We believe
+      even in the eloquent Marlowe. Then the moment passes. Every possible probe
+      into its heart has been made. We are satisfied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There follows then the sequel, and here at once the weakness of the method
+      is apparent. The author having created his narrator must continue with
+      him. Marlowe is there, untired, eager, waiting to begin again. But the
+      trouble is that we are do longer assured now of the truth and <span
+      class="pagenum">47</span><a name="link047" id="link047"></a>reality of his
+      story. He saw&mdash;we cannot for an instant doubt it&mdash;that group on
+      the Esplanade; all that he could tell us about that we, breathlessly,
+      awaited. But now we are uncertain whether he is not inventing a romantic
+      sequel. He must go on&mdash;that is the truly terrible thing about Marlowe&mdash;and
+      at the moment when we question his authenticity we are suspicious of his
+      very existence, ready to be irritated by his flow of words demanding
+      something more authentic than that voice that is now only dimly heard. The
+      author himself perhaps feels this; he duplicates, he even trebles his
+      narrators and with each fresh agent raises a fresh crop of facts,
+      contrasts, halts and histories. That then is the peril of the method.
+      Whilst we believe we are completely held, but let the authenticity waver
+      for a moment and the danger of disaster is more excessive than with any
+      other possible form of narration. Create your authority and we have at
+      once someone at whom we may throw stones if we are not beguiled, Marlowe
+      has certainly been compelled to <span class="pagenum">48</span><a
+      name="link048" id="link048"></a>face, at moments in his career, an angry,
+      irritated audience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>Nostromo</i> is, for the reason that we never lose our confidence in
+      the narrator, a triumphant vindication of these methods. That is not to
+      deny that <i>Nostromo</i> is extremely contused in places, but it is a
+      confusion that arises rather from Conrad&rsquo;s confidence in the reader&rsquo;s
+      fore-knowledge of the facts than in a complication of narrations. The
+      narrations are sometimes complicated&mdash;old Captain Mitchell does not
+      always achieve authenticity&mdash;but on the whole, the reader may be said
+      to be puzzled, simply because he is told so much about some things and so
+      little about others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this assurance of the author&rsquo;s that we must have already learnt the
+      main facts of the case comes from his own convinced sense of the reality
+      of it. This time he has no Marlowe. He was there himself. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he
+      says to us, &ldquo;you know all about that revolution in Sulaco, that revolution
+      that the Goulds were mixed up with. Well, I happened to be there myself. I
+      know all <span class="pagenum">49</span><a name="link049" id="link049"></a>the
+      people concerned, and the central figure was not Gould, nor Mitchell, nor
+      Monyngham&mdash;no, it was a man about whom no one outside the republic
+      was told a syllable. I knew the man well.... He.. and there we all are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The method is, in this case, as I have already said, completely
+      successful. There may be confusions, there may be scenes concerning which
+      we may be expected to be told much and are, in truth, told nothing at all,
+      but these confusions and omissions do, in the end, only add to our
+      conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of <i>Nostromo</i>,
+      can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of
+      Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola,
+      Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola&rsquo;s wife, of the
+      expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of
+      Hirsch&rsquo;s torture, of Captain Mitchell&rsquo;s watch&mdash;here are characters
+      the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other
+      hands, be fantastic <span class="pagenum">50</span><a name="link050"      id="link050"></a>melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely
+      supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the
+      first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author&rsquo;s word.... Here
+      the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not so with the third example, <i>Chance</i>. Here, as with <i>Lord Jim</i>,
+      we may find one, visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as
+      in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the <i>Patna</i>
+      waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over <i>Chance</i>
+      reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their
+      comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her
+      horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate
+      flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain
+      Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too
+      double-faced for him gives the book&rsquo;s theme, and never in all the stories
+      that preceded Flora&rsquo;s has Conrad been so <span class="pagenum">51</span><a
+      name="link051" id="link051"></a>eager to afford us first-hand witnesses.
+      We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine
+      phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once
+      served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there
+      surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the
+      number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been
+      enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself
+      as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it
+      positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de
+      Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden&mdash;as the author names them&mdash;are
+      retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy fin them as we contemplate
+      their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young
+      Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it
+      should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not
+      here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of
+      <span class="pagenum">52</span><a name="link052" id="link052"></a><i>Lord
+      Jim</i> and the whole of <i>Nostromo</i>. We believe most emphatically in
+      that first narration of young Powell&rsquo;s about his first chance. We believe
+      in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like
+      this: &ldquo;I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and
+      lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power
+      which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations.&rdquo; We
+      believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in
+      Marlowe&rsquo;s interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony&rsquo;s room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we
+      are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that
+      it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that
+      we resent, a little, Marlowe&rsquo;s intimacy which prevents, with patronising
+      complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed.
+      Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when the second half of the book <span class="pagenum">53</span><a
+      name="link053" id="link053"></a>arrives we can be confident no longer.
+      Here, as in <i>Lord Jim</i>, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having
+      surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to
+      continue it. The true thing in <i>Lord Jim</i> is the affair of the <i>Patna</i>;
+      the true thing in <i>Chance</i> is Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora after
+      her disaster. But whereas in <i>Lord Jim</i> the sequel to Jim&rsquo;s cowardice
+      has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to
+      Captain Anthony&rsquo;s rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a
+      pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in <i>Chance</i>
+      entitled <i>A Moonless Night</i> is, in the first half of it, surely the
+      worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story,
+      <i>The Return</i>. The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and certain tales in
+      his volume, <i>Within the Tides</i>, make one wonder whether that alliance
+      between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained
+      is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these
+      two qualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">54</span><a name="link054" id="link054"></a>It
+      remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must
+      before the end of <i>Chance</i>, the form of narration in <i>Oratio Recta</i>
+      is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in
+      Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are
+      the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in.
+      It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered
+      a charlatan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are
+      developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite
+      unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by
+      the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell
+      us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his
+      presence be not true...
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad&rsquo;s attention we shall
+      see that <span class="pagenum">55</span><a name="link055" id="link055"></a>in
+      almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats&mdash;unequal
+      to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in
+      them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men&rsquo;s
+      honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his
+      irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of
+      human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom
+      he can admire. &ldquo;If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up,&rdquo;
+       we can hear him say. &ldquo;He can see at once that the odds are too strong for
+      him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before
+      them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon
+      them you may loosen all heaven&rsquo;s bolts and lightnings and they will not
+      quail.&rdquo; They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his
+      love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: &ldquo;You
+      see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and
+      I.&rdquo; <span class="pagenum">56</span><a name="link056" id="link056"></a>The
+      theme of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> is a struggle of a weak man against
+      nature, of <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> the struggle of many simple
+      men against the presence of death, of <i>Lord Jim</i>, again, the struggle
+      of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at
+      the cost of truth). <i>Nostromo</i>, the conquest of a child of nature by
+      the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory,
+      from the very first. <i>Chance</i>, the struggle of an absolutely simple
+      and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not
+      understand. <i>Typhoon</i>, the very epitome of Conrad&rsquo;s themes, is the
+      struggle of M&rsquo;Whirr against the storm (here again it is M&rsquo;Whirr who
+      apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the
+      storm&rsquo;s confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In <i>Heart of Darkness</i>
+      the victory is to the forest. In <i>The End of the Tether</i> Captain
+      Whalley, one of Conrad&rsquo;s finest figures, is beaten by the very loftiness
+      of his character. The three tales in <i>&lsquo;Twixt Land, and Sea</i> are all
+      themes of this kind&mdash;the struggle of simple, <span class="pagenum">57</span><a
+      name="link057" id="link057"></a>unimaginative men against forces too
+      strong for them. In <i>The Secret Agent</i> Winnie Verloc, another simple
+      character, finds life too much for her and commits suicide. In <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i> Razumov, the dreamer, is destroyed by a world that laughs
+      at the pains and struggles of insignificant individuals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of Conrad&rsquo;s philosophy I must speak in another place: here it is enough to
+      say that it is impossible to imagine him choosing as the character of a
+      story jolly, independent souls who take life for what it gives them and
+      leave defeat or victory to the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whatever Conrad&rsquo;s books are or are not, it may safely be said that they
+      are never jolly, and his most devoted disciple would, in all probability,
+      resent any suggestion of a lighter hand or a gentler affection, his art,
+      nevertheless, is limited by this persistent brooding over the inequality
+      of life&rsquo;s battle. His humour, often of a very fine kind, is always
+      sinister, because his choice of theme forbids light-heartedness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy would <span class="pagenum">58</span><a
+      name="link058" id="link058"></a>have found Marlowe, Jim and Captain
+      Anthony quite impossibly solemn company&mdash;but I do not deny that they
+      might not have been something the better for a little of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have already said that his characters are, for the most part, simple and
+      unimaginative men, but that does not mean that they are so simple that
+      there is nothing in them. The first thing of which one is sure in meeting
+      a number of Conrad&rsquo;s characters is that they have existences and histories
+      entirely independent of their introducer&rsquo;s kind offices. Conrad has met
+      them, has talked to them, has come to know them, but we are sure not only
+      that there is very much more that he could tell us about them if he had
+      time and space, but that even when he had told us all that he knew he
+      would only have touched on the fringe of their real histories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the distinctions between the modern English novel and the
+      mid-Victorian English novel is that modern characters have but little of
+      the robust vitality of their <span class="pagenum">59</span><a
+      name="link059" id="link059"></a>predecessors; the figures in the novel of
+      to-day fade so easily from the page that endeavours to keep them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the novels of Mr Henry James we feel at times that the characters fade
+      before the motives attributed to them, in those of Mr Wells before an
+      idea, a curse, or a remedy, in those of Mr Bennett before a creeping
+      wilderness of important insignificances, in those of Mr Galsworthy before
+      the oppression of social inequalities, in those of Mrs Wharton before the
+      shadow of Mr Henry James, even in those of Mr Hardy before the omnipotence
+      of an inevitable God whom, in spite of his inevitability, Mr Hardy himself
+      is arranging in the background; it may be claimed for the characters of Mr
+      Conrad that they yield their solidity to no force, no power, not even to
+      their author&rsquo;s own determination that they are doomed, in the end, to
+      defeat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not for a moment to say that Joseph Conrad is a finer novelist
+      than these others, but this quality he has beyond his contemporaries&mdash;namely,
+      the assurance that <span class="pagenum">60</span><a name="link060"      id="link060"></a>his characters have their lives and adventures both
+      before and after the especial cases that he is describing to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Russian Tchekov has, in his plays, this gift supremely, so that at the
+      close of <i>The Three Sisters</i> or <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> we are left
+      speculating deeply upon &ldquo;what happened afterwards&rdquo; to Gayef or Barbara, to
+      Masha or Epikhadov; with Conrad&rsquo;s sea captains as with Tchekov&rsquo;s Russians
+      we see at once that they are entirely independent of the incidents that we
+      are told about them. This independence springs partly from the author&rsquo;s
+      eager, almost naïve curiosity. It is impossible for him to introduce us to
+      any officer on his ship without whispering to us in an aside details about
+      his life, his wife and family on shore. By so doing he forges an extra
+      link in his chain of circumstantial evidence, but we do not feel that here
+      he is deliberately serving his art&mdash;it is only that quality already
+      mentioned, his own astonished delight at the things that he is
+      discovering. We learn, for instance, about Captain M&rsquo;Whirr that he wrote
+      long letters home, <span class="pagenum">61</span><a name="link061"      id="link061"></a>beginning always with the words, &ldquo;My darling Wife,&rdquo; and
+      relating in minute detail each successive trip of the <i>Nan-Shan</i>. Mrs
+      M&rsquo;Whirr, we learn, was &ldquo;a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a
+      disdainful manner, admittedly lady-like and in the neighbourhood
+      considered as &lsquo;quite superior.&rsquo; The only secret of her life was her abject
+      terror of the time when her husband would come home to stay for good.&rdquo;
+       Also in <i>Typhoon</i> there is the second mate &ldquo;who never wrote any
+      letters, did not seem to hope for news from anywhere; and though he had
+      been heard once to mention West Hartlepool, it was with extreme
+      bitterness, and only in connection with the extortionate charges of a
+      boarding-house.&rdquo; How conscious we are of Jim&rsquo;s English country parsonage,
+      of Captain Anthony&rsquo;s loneliness, of Marlowe&rsquo;s isolation. By this simple
+      thread of connection between the land and the ship the whole character
+      stands, human and convincing, before us. Of the sailors on board the <i>Narcissus</i>
+      there is not one about whom, after his landing, <span class="pagenum">62</span><a
+      name="link062" id="link062"></a>we are not curious. There is the skipper,
+      whose wife comes on board, &ldquo;A real lady, in a black dress and with a
+      parasol.&rdquo;... &ldquo;Very soon the captain, dressed very smartly and in a white
+      shirt, went with her over the side. We didn&rsquo;t recognise him at all....&rdquo;
+       And Mr Baker, the chief mate! Is not this little farewell enough to make
+      us his friends for life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No one waited for him ashore. Mother died; father and two brothers,
+      Yarmouth fishermen, drowned together on the Dogger Bank; sister married
+      and unfriendly. Quite a lady, married to the leading tailor of a little
+      town, and its leading politician, who did not think his sailor brother
+      in-law quite respectable enough for him. Quite a lady, quite a lady, he
+      thought, sitting down for a moment&rsquo;s rest on the quarter-hatch. Time
+      enough to go ashore and get a bite, and sup, and a bed somewhere. He
+      didn&rsquo;t like to part with a ship. No one to think about then. The darkness
+      of a misty evening fell, cold and damp, upon the deserted deck; and Mr
+      Baker sat smoking, thinking of all the successive ships to whom through
+      many <span class="pagenum">63</span><a name="link063" id="link063"></a>long
+      years he had given the best of a seaman&rsquo;s care. And never a command in
+      sight. Not once!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There are others&mdash;the abominable Donkin for instance. &ldquo;Donkin
+      entered. They discussed the account... Captain Allistoun said. &lsquo;I give you
+      a bad discharge,&rsquo; he said quietly. Donkin raised his voice: &lsquo;I don&rsquo;t want
+      your bloomin&rsquo; discharge&mdash;keep it. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; ter &lsquo;ave a job hashore.&rsquo;
+      He turned to us. &lsquo;No more bloomin&rsquo; sea for me,&rsquo; he said, aloud. All looked
+      at him. He had better clothes, had an easy air, appeared more at home than
+      any of us; he stared with assurance, enjoying the effect of his
+      declaration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In how many novels would Donkin&rsquo;s life have been limited by the part that
+      he was required to play in the adventures of the <i>Narcissus?</i> As it
+      is our interest in his progress has been satisfied by a prologue only. Or
+      there is Charley, the boy of the crew&mdash;&ldquo;As I came up I saw a
+      red-faced, blowzy woman, in a grey shawl, and with dusty, <span
+      class="pagenum">64</span><a name="link064" id="link064"></a>fluffy hair,
+      fall on Charley&rsquo;s neck. It was his mother. She slobbered over him:&mdash;&lsquo;Oh,
+      my boy! my boy!&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Leggo me,&rsquo; said Charley, &lsquo;leggo, mother!&rsquo; I was
+      passing him at the time, and over the untidy head of the blubbering woman
+      he gave me a humorous smile and a glance ironic, courageous, and profound,
+      that seemed to put all my knowledge of life to shame. I nodded and passed
+      on, but heard him say again, good-naturedly:&mdash;&lsquo;If you leggo of me
+      this minyt&mdash;ye shall &lsquo;ave a bob for a drink out of my pay.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But one passes from these men of the sea&mdash;from M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker,
+      from Lingard and Captain Whalley, from Captain Anthony and Jim, with a
+      suspicion that the author will not convince us quite so readily with his
+      men of the land&mdash;and that suspicion is never entirely dismissed.
+      About such men as M&rsquo;Whirr and Baker he can tell us nothing that we will
+      not believe. He has such sympathy and understanding for them that they
+      will, we are assured, deliver up to him their dearest secrets&mdash;those
+      little details, <span class="pagenum">65</span><a name="link065"      id="link065"></a>M&rsquo;Whirr&rsquo;s wife, Mr Baker&rsquo;s proud sister, Charley&rsquo;s
+      mother, are their dearest secrets. But with the citizens of the other
+      world&mdash;with Stein, Decoud, Gould, Verloc, Razumov, the sinister
+      Nikita, the little Fynes, even the great Nostromo himself&mdash;we cannot
+      be so confident, simply because their discoverer cannot yield them that
+      same perfect sympathy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His theory about these men is that they have, all of them, an <i>idée fixe</i>,
+      that you must search for this patiently, honestly, unsparingly&mdash;having
+      found it, the soul of the man is revealed to you. But is it? Is it not
+      possible that Decoud or Verloc, feeling the probing finger, offer up
+      instantly any <i>idée fixe</i> ready to hand because they wish to be left
+      alone? Decoud himself, for instance&mdash;Decoud, the imaginative
+      journalist in <i>Nostromo</i>, speculating with his ironic mind upon
+      romantic features, at his heart, apparently cynical and reserved, the
+      burning passion for the beautiful Antonia. He has yielded enough to
+      suggest the truth, but the truth itself eludes us. With Verloc again <span
+      class="pagenum">66</span><a name="link066" id="link066"></a>we have a
+      quite masterly presentation of the man as Conrad sees him. That first
+      description of him is wonderful, both in its reality and its significance.
+      &ldquo;His eyes were naturally heavy, he had an air of having wallowed, fully
+      dressed, all day on an unmade bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With many novelists that would be quite enough, that we should see the
+      character as the author sees him, but because, in these histories, we have
+      the convictions of the extension of the protagonists&rsquo; lives beyond the
+      stated episodes, it is not enough. Because they have lives independent of
+      the covers of the book we feel that there can be no end to the things that
+      we should be told about them, and they must be true things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Verloc, for instance, is attached from the first to his <i>idée fixe</i>&mdash;namely,
+      that he should be able to retain, at all costs, his phlegmatic state of
+      self-indulgence and should not be jockeyed out of it. At the first sign of
+      threatened change he is terrified to his very soul. Conrad never, for an
+      instant, allows him to leave this ground upon which he has <span
+      class="pagenum">67</span><a name="link067" id="link067"></a>placed him. We
+      see the man tied to his rock of an <i>idée fixe</i>, but he has,
+      nevertheless, we are assured, another life, other motives, other humours,
+      other terrors. It is perhaps a direct tribute to the authors reserve power
+      that we feel, at the book&rsquo;s close, that we should have been told so much
+      more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even with the great Nostromo himself we are not satisfied as we are with
+      Captain Whalley or Mr Kates. Nostromo is surely, as a picture, the moat
+      romantically satisfying figure in the English novel since Scott, with the
+      single exception of Thackeray&rsquo;s Beatrix&mdash;and here I am not forgetting
+      Captain Silver, David Balfour, Catriona, nor, in our own immediate time,
+      young Beauchamp or the hero of that amazing and so unjustly obscure
+      fiction, <i>The Shadow of a Titan</i>. As a picture, Nostromo shines with
+      a flaming colour, shines, as the whole novel shines, with a glow that is
+      flung by the contrasted balance of its romance and realism. From that
+      first vision of him as he rides slowly through the crowds, in his
+      magnificent dress: &ldquo;... his hat, a gay sombrero with <span class="pagenum">68</span><a
+      name="link068" id="link068"></a>a silver cord and tassels. The bright
+      colours of a Mexican scrape twisted on the mantle, the enormous silver
+      buttons on the embroidered leather jacket, the row of tiny silver buttons
+      down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with
+      embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle... to that
+      last moment when&mdash;... in the dimly lit room Nostromo rolled his head
+      slowly on the pillow and opened his eyes, directing at the weird figure
+      perched by his bedside a glance of enigmatic and mocking scorn. Then his
+      head rolled back, his eyelids fell, and the Capatos of the Cargadores died
+      without a word or moan after an hour of immobility, broken by short
+      shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings&rdquo;&mdash;we are
+      conscious of his superb figure; and after his death we do, indeed, believe
+      what the last lines of the book assure us&mdash;&ldquo;In that true cry of love
+      and grief that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to
+      the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like
+      a mass of solid silver, the <span class="pagenum">69</span><a
+      name="link069" id="link069"></a>genius of the magnificent Capatuz de
+      Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure
+      and love.&rdquo; His genius dominates, yes&mdash;but it is the genius of a
+      magnificent picture standing as a frontispiece to the book of his soul.
+      And that soul is not given us&mdash;Nostromo, proud to the last, refuses
+      to surrender it to us. Why is it that the slender sketch of old Singleton
+      in <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i> gives us the very heart of the man,
+      so that volumes might tell us more of him indeed, but could not surrender
+      him to us more truly, and all the fine summoning of Nostromo only leaves
+      him beyond our grasp? We believe in Nostromo, but we are told about him&mdash;we
+      have not met him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, at another turn of the road, this criticism must seem the
+      basest ingratitude. When we look back and survey that crowd, so various,
+      so distinct whether it be they who are busied, before our eyes, with the
+      daily life of Sulaoo, or the Verloc family (the most poignant scene in the
+      whole of Conrad&rsquo;s art&mdash;the drive in the <span class="pagenum">70</span><a
+      name="link070" id="link070"></a>cab of old Mrs Verloc, Winnie and Stevie&mdash;compels,
+      additionally, our gratitude) or that strange gathering, the Haldins,
+      Nikita, Laspara, Madame de S&mdash;&mdash;&mdash;, Peter Ivanovitch,
+      Raznmov, at Geneva, or the highly coloured figures in <i>Romance</i> (a
+      book fine in some places, astonishingly second-rate in others), Falk or
+      Amy Foster, Jacobus and his daughter, Jasper and his lover, all those and
+      so many, many more, what can we do but embrace the world that is offered
+      to us, accept it as an axiom of life that, of all these figures, some will
+      be near to us, some more distant? It is, finally, a world that Conrad
+      offers us, not a series of novels in whose pages we find the same two or
+      three figures returning to us&mdash;old friends with new faces and new
+      names&mdash;but a planet that we know, even as we know the Meredith
+      planet, the Hardy planet, the James planet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Looking back, we may trace its towns and rivers, its continents and seas,
+      its mean streets and deep valleys, its country houses, its sordid hovels,
+      its vast, untamed forests, its deserts and wilderness s. Although each
+      <span class="pagenum">71</span><a name="link071" id="link071"></a>work,
+      from, the vast <i>Nostromo</i> to the minutely perfect <i>Secret Share</i>,
+      has its new theme, its form, its separate heart, the swarming life that he
+      has created knows no boundary. And in this, surely, creation has
+      accomplished its noblest work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III&mdash;THE POET
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
+      class="pagenum">72</span><a name="link072" id="link072"></a>poet in Conrad
+      is lyrical as well as philosophic. The lyrical side is absent in certain
+      of his works, as, for example, <i>The Secret Agent</i>, and <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i>, or such short stories as <i>The Informer</i>, or <i>Il
+      Conde</i>, but the philosophic note sounded poetically, as an instrument
+      of music as well as a philosophy, is never absent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Three elements in the work of Conrad the poet as distinct from Conrad the
+      novelist deserve consideration&mdash;style, atmosphere and philosophy. In
+      the matter of style the first point that must strike any constant reader
+      of the novels is the change that is to be marked between the earlier works
+      and the later. Here is a descriptive passage from <span class="pagenum">73</span><a
+      name="link073" id="link073"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s second novel, <i>An Outcast of
+      the Islands</i>:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He followed her step by step till at last they both stopped, facing each
+      other under the big tree of the enclosure. The solitary exile of the
+      forests great, motionless and solemn in his abandonment, left alone by the
+      life of ages that had been pushed away from him by those pigmies that
+      crept at his foot, towered high and straight above their leader. He seemed
+      to look on, dispassionate and imposing in his lonely greatness, spreading
+      his branches wide in a gesture of lofty protection, as if to hide them in
+      the sombre shelter of innumerable leaves; as if moved by the disdainful
+      compassion of the strong, by the scornful pity of an aged giant, to screen
+      this struggle of two human hearts from the cold scrutiny of glittering
+      stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And from his latest novel, <i>Chance</i>:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in
+      the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all
+      passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick <span
+      class="pagenum">74</span><a name="link074" id="link074"></a>glance he
+      threw to windward when the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring
+      limit to the eye. In the expiring diffused twilight, and before the
+      clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space
+      made visible&mdash;almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in
+      the sudden sense of his isolation; the trustworthy, powerful ship of his
+      first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost
+      undistinguishable. The mere support for the soles of his two feet before
+      that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening
+      universe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It must be remembered that the second of these quotations is the voice of
+      Marlowe and that therefore it should, in necessity, be the simpler of the
+      two. Nevertheless, the distinction can very clearly be observed. The first
+      piece of prose is quite definitely lyrical: it has, it cannot be denied,
+      something of the &ldquo;purple patch.&rdquo; We feel that the prose is too dependent
+      upon sonorous adjectives, that it has the deliberation of work slightly
+      affected by the author&rsquo;s <span class="pagenum">75</span><a name="link075"      id="link075"></a>determination that it shall be fine. The rhythm in it,
+      however, is as deliberate as the rhythm of any poem in English, the
+      picture evoked as distinct and clear-cut as though it were, in actual
+      tact, a poem detached from all context and, finally, there is the
+      inevitable philosophical implication to give the argument to the picture.
+      Such passages of descriptive prose may be found again and again in the
+      earlier novels and tales of Conrad, in <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly, Tales of
+      Unrest, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness,
+      Lord Jim</i>,&mdash;prose piled high with sonorous and slow-moving
+      adjectives, three adjectives to a noun, prose that sounds hike an Eastern
+      invocation to a deity in whom, nevertheless, the suppliant does not
+      believe. At its worst, the strain that its sonority places upon movements
+      and objects of no importance is disastrous. For instance, in the tale
+      called <i>The Return</i>, there is the following passage:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He saw her shoulder touch the lintel of the door. She swayed as if dazed.
+      There was <span class="pagenum">76</span><a name="link076" id="link076"></a>less
+      than a second of suspense while they both felt as if poised on the very
+      edge of moral annihilation, ready to fall into some devouring nowhere.
+      Then almost simultaneously he shouted, &lsquo;Come back,&rsquo; and she let go the
+      handle of the door. She turned round in peaceful desperation like one who
+      has deliberately thrown away the last chance of life; and for a moment the
+      room she faced appeared terrible, and dark, and safe&mdash;like a grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation here simply will not bear the weight of the words&mdash;&ldquo;moral
+      annihilation,&rdquo; &ldquo;devouring nowhere,&rdquo; &ldquo;peaceful desperation,&rdquo; &ldquo;last chance
+      of life,&rdquo; &ldquo;terrible,&rdquo; &ldquo;like a grave.&rdquo; That he shouted gives a final touch
+      of ludicrous exaggeration to the whole passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Often, in the earlier books, Conrad&rsquo;s style has the awkward over-emphasis
+      of a writer who is still acquiring the language that he is using, like a
+      foreigner who shouts to us because he thinks that thus we shall understand
+      him more easily. But there is also, in this earlier style, the marked
+      effect of <span class="pagenum">77</span><a name="link077" id="link077"></a>two
+      influences. One influence is that of the French language and especially of
+      the author of <i>Madame Bovary</i>. When we recollect that Conrad
+      hesitated at the beginning of his career as to whether he would write in
+      French or English, we can understand this French inflection. Flaubert&rsquo;s
+      effect on his style is quite unmistakable. This is a sentence of
+      Flaubert&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Toutes ses velléités de dénigrement l&rsquo;envanouissaiont sous la
+      poésie du rôle qui l&rsquo;envahissait; et entrainée vers l&rsquo;homme par l&rsquo;illusion
+      du personnage elle tâcha de se figurer sa vie, cette vie retentissante,
+      extraordinaire, splendide...&rdquo; and this a sentence of Conrad&rsquo;s: &ldquo;Her hands
+      slipped slowly off Lingard&rsquo;s shoulders and her arms tell by her side,
+      listless, discouraged, as if to her&mdash;to her, the savage, violent and
+      ignorant creature&mdash;had been revealed clearly in that moment the
+      tremendous fact of our isolation, of the loneliness, impenetrable and
+      transparent, elusive and everlasting.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad&rsquo;s sentence reads like a direct translation from the French, It is
+      probable, <span class="pagenum">78</span><a name="link078" id="link078"></a>however,
+      that his debt to Flaubert and the French language can be very easily
+      exaggerated, and it does not seem, in any case, to have driven very deeply
+      into the heart of his form. The influence is mainly to be detected in the
+      arrangement of words and sentences as though he had in the first years of
+      his work, used it as a crutch before he could walk alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second of the early influences upon his style is of far greater
+      importance&mdash;the influence of the vast, unfettered elements of nature
+      that he had, for so many years, so directly served. If it were not for his
+      remarkable creative gift that had been, from the very first, at its full
+      strength, his early books would stand as purely lyrical evocations of the
+      sea and the forest. It is the poetry of the Old Testament of which we
+      think in many pages of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> and <i>An Outcast of the
+      Island</i>, a poetry that has the rhythm and metre of a spontaneous
+      emotion. He was never again to catch quite the spirit of that first
+      rapture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was under the influence of these powers <span class="pagenum">79</span><a
+      name="link079" id="link079"></a>also in that, at that time, they were too
+      strong for him. We feel with him that he is impotent to express his wonder
+      and praise because he is still so immediately under their sway. His style,
+      in these earlier hooks, has the repetitions and extended phrases of a man
+      who is marking time before the inspired moment comes to him&mdash;often
+      the inspiration does not come because he cannot detach himselt with
+      sufficient pause and balance. But in his middle period, in the period of
+      <i>Youth, Typhoon, Heart of Darkness</i> and <i>Nostromo</i>, this lyrical
+      impulse can be seen at its perfection, beating, steadily, spontaneously,
+      with the finest freedom and yet disciplined, as it were, by its own will
+      and desire. Compare, for a moment, this passage from <i>Typhoon</i> with
+      that earlier one from <i>The Outcast of the Islands</i> that I quoted
+      above:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He watched her, battered and solitary, labouring heavily in a wild scene
+      of mountainous black waters lit by the gleam of distant worlds. She moved
+      slowly, breathing into the still core of the hurricane <span
+      class="pagenum">80</span><a name="link080" id="link080"></a>the excess of
+      her strength in a white cloud of steam, and the deep-toned vibration of
+      the escape was like the defiant trumpeting of a living creature of the sea
+      impatient for the renewal of the contest. It ceased suddenly. The still
+      air moaned. Above Jakes&rsquo; head a few stars shone into the pit of black
+      vapours. The inky edge of the cloud-disc frowned upon the ship under the
+      patch of glittering sky. The stars too seemed to look at her intently, as
+      if for the last time, and the cluster of their splendour sat like a diadem
+      on a lowering brow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That is poet&rsquo;s work, and poet&rsquo;s work at its finest. Instead of impressing
+      us, as the earlier piece of prose, with the fact that the author has made
+      the very most of a rather thin moment&mdash;feels, indeed, himself that it
+      is thin&mdash;we are here under the influence of something that can have
+      no limits to the splendours that it contains. The work is thick, as though
+      it had been wrought by the finest workman out of the heart of the finest
+      material&mdash;and yet it remains, through all its discipline,
+      spontaneous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These three tales, <i>Typhoon, Youth</i> and <span class="pagenum">81</span><a
+      name="link081" id="link081"></a><i>Heart of Darkness</i>, stand by
+      themselves as the final expression of Conrad&rsquo;s lyrical gift. We may
+      remember such characters as M&rsquo;Whirr, Kurtz, Marlowe, but they are figures
+      as the old seneschal in <i>The Eve of St Agnes</i> or the Ancient Mariner
+      himself are figures. They are as surely complete poems, wrought and
+      finished in the true spirit of poetry, as Whitman&rsquo;s <i>When Lilac first on
+      the Door yard bloomed</i> or Keats&rsquo; <i>Nightingale.</i> Their author was
+      never again to succeed so completely in combining the free spirit of his
+      enthusiasm with the disciplined restraint of the true artist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The third period of his style shows him cool and clear-headed as to the
+      things that he intends to do. He is now the slightly ironic, artist whose
+      business is to get things on to paper in the clearest possible way. He is
+      conscious that in the past he has been at the mercy of sonorous and
+      high-sounding adjectives. He will use them still, but only to show them
+      that they are at his mercy. Marlowe, his appointed minister, is older&mdash;he
+      must look back now on the colours of <span class="pagenum">82</span><a
+      name="link082" id="link082"></a><i>Youth</i> with an indulgent smile. And
+      when Marlowe is absent, in such novels as <i>The Secret Agent</i> and <i>Under
+      Western Eyes</i>, in such a volume of stories as <i>A Set of Six</i>, the
+      lyrical beat in the style is utterly abandoned&mdash;we are led forward by
+      sentences as grave, as assured, and sometimes as ponderous as a city
+      policeman. Nevertheless, in that passage from <i>Chance</i> quoted at the
+      beginning of the chapter, although we may be far from the undisciplined
+      enthusiasm of <i>An Outcast of the Islands</i>, the lyrical impulse still
+      remains. Yes, it is there, but&mdash;&ldquo;Young Powell felt it.&rdquo; In that
+      magical storm that was <i>Typhoon</i> God alone can share our terror and
+      demand our courage; in the later experience young Powell is our companion.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II.
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The question of style devolves here directly into the question of
+      atmosphere. There may roughly be said to be four classes of novelists in
+      the matter of atmosphere. There is the novelist who, intent upon his <span
+      class="pagenum">83</span><a name="link083" id="link083"></a>daily bread or
+      game of golf, has no desire to be worried by such a perplexing business.
+      He produces stories that might without loss play the whole of their action
+      in the waiting-room of an English railway station. There is the novelist
+      who thinks that atmosphere matters immensely, who works hard to produce it
+      and <i>does</i> produce it in thick slabs. There are the novelists whose
+      theme, characters and background react so admirably that the atmosphere is
+      provided simply by that reaction&mdash;and there, finally, it is left, put
+      into no relation with other atmospheres, serving no further purpose than
+      the immediate one of stating the facts. Of this school are the realists
+      and, in our own day, Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s Brighton background in <i>Hilda
+      Lessways</i> or Mrs Wharton&rsquo;s New York background in <i>The House of Mirth</i>
+      offer most successful examples of such realistic work. The fourth class
+      provides us with the novelists who wish to place their atmosphere in
+      relation with the rest of life. Our imagination is awakened, insensibly,
+      by the contemplation of some scene and is thence <span class="pagenum">84</span><a
+      name="link084" id="link084"></a>extended to the whole vista, of life, from
+      birth to death; although the scene may actually be as remote or as
+      conlined as space can make it, its potential limits are boundless, its
+      progression is extended beyond all possibilities of definition. Such a
+      moment is the death of Bazarov in <i>Fathers and Children</i>, the
+      searching of Dmitri in <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i>, the scene at the
+      theatre in <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, the London meeting between
+      Beauchamp and René in <i>Beauchamp&rsquo;s Career</i>. It is not only that these
+      scenes are &ldquo;done&rdquo; to the full extent of their &ldquo;doing,&rdquo; it is also that
+      they have behind them the lyrical impulse that ignites them with all the
+      emotion and beauty in the history of the world; Turgeniev, Dostoievsky,
+      Browning, Meredith were amongst the greatest of the poets. Conrad, at his
+      highest moments, is also of that company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is not enough to say that this potential atmosphere is simply
+      lyrical. Mr Chesterton, in his breathless <i>Victorian Age in Literature</i>,
+      has named this element Glamour. <span class="pagenum">85</span><a
+      name="link085" id="link085"></a>In writing of the novels by George Eliot
+      he says: &ldquo;Indeed there is almost every element of literature, except a
+      certain indescribable thing called <i>Glamour</i>, which was the whole
+      stock-in-trade of the Brontes, which we feel in Dickens when Quilp
+      clambers, and rotten wood by the desolate river; and even in Thackeray,
+      when Edmond wanders like some swarthy crow about the dismal avenues of
+      Castlewood.&rdquo; Now&rsquo; this matter of <i>Glamour</i> is not all, because
+      Dickens, for instance, is not at all potential. His pictures of Quilp or
+      the house of the Dedloeks or Jonas Chuzzlewit&rsquo;s escape after the murder do
+      not put us into touch with other worlds&mdash;but we may say, at any rate,
+      that when, in a novel atmosphere <i>is</i> potential it is certain also to
+      have glamour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The potential qualities of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere are amongst his very
+      strongest gifts and, it we investigate the matter, we see that it is his
+      union of Romance and Realism that gives such results. Of almost no
+      important scene in his novels is it possible to define the boundaries. In
+      <i>The Outcast <span class="pagenum">86</span><a name="link086"      id="link086"></a>of the Islands</i>, when Willems is exiled by Captain
+      Lingard, the terror of that forest has at its heart not only the actual
+      terror of that immediate scene, minutely and realistically described&mdash;it
+      has also the terror of all our knowledge of loneliness, desolation, the
+      power of something stronger than ourselves. In <i>Lord Jim</i> the
+      contrast of Jim with the officers of the <i>Patna</i> is a contrast not
+      only immediately vital and realised to the very fringe of the captain&rsquo;s
+      gay and soiled pyjamas, but also potential to the very limits of our
+      ultimate conception of the eternal contrast between good and evil,
+      degradation and vigour, ugliness and beauty. In <i>The Nigger of the
+      Narcissus</i> the death of the negro, James Wait, immediately affects the
+      lives of a number of very ordinary human beings whose friends and
+      intimates we have become&mdash;but that shadow that traps the feet of the
+      negro, that alarms the souls of Donkin, of Belfast, of Singleton, of the
+      boy Charlie, creeps also to our sides and envelops for us far more than
+      that single voyage of the <i>Narcissus</i>. <span class="pagenum">87</span><a
+      name="link087" id="link087"></a>When Winnie Verloc, her old mother and the
+      boy Stevie, take their journey in the cab it does not seem ludicrous to us
+      that the tears of &ldquo;that large female in a dark, dusty wig, and ancient
+      silk dress festooned with dingy white cotton lace&rdquo; should move us as
+      though Mrs Verloc were our nearest friend. That mournful but courageous
+      journey remains in our mind as an intimate companion of our own mournful
+      and courageous experiences. Such examples might be multiplied quite
+      indefinitely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He has always secured his atmosphere by his own eager curiosity about
+      significant detail, but his detail is significant, not because he wishes
+      to impress his reader with the realism of his picture, but rather because
+      he s, like a very small boy in a strange house, pursuing the most romantic
+      adventures for his own pleasure and excitement only. We may hear, with
+      many novelists, the click of satisfaction with which they drive another
+      nail into the framework that supports their picture. &ldquo;Now see how firmly
+      it stands,&rdquo; they say. &ldquo;That last nail settled it.&rdquo; But <span
+      class="pagenum">88</span><a name="link088" id="link088"></a>Conrad is
+      utterly unconscious as to his readers&rsquo; later credulity&mdash;he is too
+      completely held by his own amazing discoveries. Sometimes, as in <i>The
+      Return</i>, when no vision is granted to him, it is as though he were
+      banging on a brass tray with all his strength so that no one should
+      perceive his own grievous disappointment at his failure. But, in his real
+      discoveries, how the atmosphere piles itself up, around and about him, how
+      we follow at his heels, penetrating the darkness, trusting to his courage,
+      finding ourselves suddenly blinded by the blaze of Aladdin&rsquo;s cave! If he
+      is tracing the tragedy of Willems and Almayer, a tragedy that has for its
+      natural background the gorgeous, heavy splendour of those unending
+      forests, he sees details that belong to the austerest and most sharply
+      disciplined realism. We see Lakamba, asleep under the moon, slapping
+      himself in his dreams to keep off the mosquitoes; a bluebottle comes
+      buzzing into the verandah above the dirty plates of a half-finished meal
+      and defies Lingard and Almayer, so <span class="pagenum">89</span><a
+      name="link089" id="link089"></a>that they are like men disheartened by
+      some tremendous failure; the cards with which Lingard tries to build a
+      house for Almayer&rsquo;s baby are &ldquo;a dirty double pack&rdquo; with which he used to
+      play Chinese bézique&mdash;it bored Almayer but the old seaman delighted
+      in it, considering it a remarkable product of Chinese genius. The
+      atmosphere of the terrible final chapters is set against this picture of a
+      room in which Mrs Willems is waiting for her abominable husband:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Bits of white stuff; rags yellow, pink, blue; rags limp, brilliant and
+      soiled, trailed on the floor, lay on the desk amongst the sombre covers of
+      books soiled, greasy, but stiff-backed in virtue, perhaps, of their
+      European origin. The biggest set of bookshelves was partly hidden by a
+      petticoat, the waistband of which was caught upon the back of a slender
+      book pulled a little out of the row so as to make an improvised
+      clothes-peg. The folding canvas bedstead stood anyhow, parallel to no
+      wall, as if it had been, in the process of transportation to some remote
+      place, dropped casually there by tired bearers. And on the tumbled
+      blankets that <span class="pagenum">90</span><a name="link090" id="link090"></a>lay
+      in a disordered heap on its edge, Joanna sat.... Through the half-open
+      shutter a ray of sunlight, a ray merciless and crude, came into the room,
+      beat in the early morning upon the safe in the far-off corner, then,
+      travelling against the sun, cut at midday the big desk in two with its
+      solid and clean-edged brilliance; with its hot brilliance in which a swarm
+      of flies hovered in dancing flight over some dirty plate forgotten there
+      amongst yellow papers for many a day!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And this room is set in the very heart of the forests&mdash;&ldquo;the forests
+      unattainable, enigmatical, for ever beyond reach like the stars of heaven&mdash;and
+      as indifferent.&rdquo; Had I space I could multiply from every novel and tale
+      examples of this creation of atmosphere by the juxtaposition of the
+      lyrical and the realistic&mdash;the lyrical pulse beating through
+      realistic detail ami transforming it. I will, however, select one book, a
+      supreme example of this effect. What I say about <i>Nostromo</i> may be
+      proved from any other work of Conrad&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The theme of <i>Nostromo</i> is the domination <span class="pagenum">91</span><a
+      name="link091" id="link091"></a>of the silver of the Sulaco mine over the
+      bodies and souls of the human beings who live near it. The light of the
+      silver shines over the book. It is typified by &ldquo;the white head of
+      Iliguerota rising majestically upon the blue.&rdquo; Conrad, then, in choosing
+      his theme, has selected the most romantic possible, the spirit of silver
+      treasure luring men on desperately to adventure and to death. His
+      atmosphere, therefore, is, in its highest lights, romantic, even until
+      that last vision of all of &ldquo;the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a
+      big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver.&rdquo; Sulaco burns with
+      colour. We can see, as though we had been there yesterday, those streets
+      with the coaches, &ldquo;great family arks swayed on high leathern springs full
+      of pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and
+      black,&rdquo; the houses, &ldquo;in the early sunshine, delicate primrose, pale pink,
+      pale blue,&rdquo; or, after dark, from Mrs Gould&rsquo;s balcony &ldquo;towards the plaza
+      end of the street the glowing coals in the hazeros of the market women
+      cooking their <span class="pagenum">92</span><a name="link092" id="link092"></a>evening
+      meal glowed red along the edge of the pavement. A man appeared without a
+      sound in the light of a street lamp, showing the coloured inverted
+      triangle of his broidered poncho, square on his shoulders, hanging to a
+      point below his knees. From the harbour end of the Calle a horseman walked
+      his soft-stepping mount, gleaming silver-grey abreast each lamp under the
+      dark shape of the rider.&rdquo; Later there is that sinister glimpse of the
+      plaza, &ldquo;where a patrol of cavalry rode round and round without penetrating
+      into the streets which resounded with shouts and the strumming of guitars
+      issuing from the open doors of pulperias... and above the roofs, next to
+      the perpendicular lines of the cathedral towers the snowy curve of
+      Higuerota blocked a large space of darkening blue sky before the windows
+      of the Intendencia.&rdquo; In its final created beauty Sulaco is as romantic, as
+      coloured as one of those cloud-topped, many-towered towns under whose
+      gates we watch Grimm&rsquo;s princes and princesses passing&mdash;but the detail
+      of it is <span class="pagenum">93</span><a name="link093" id="link093"></a>built
+      with careful realism demanded by the &ldquo;architecture of Manchester or
+      Birmingham.&rdquo; We wonder, as Sulaco grows familiar to us, as we realise its
+      cathedral, its squares and streets and houses, its slums, its wharves, its
+      sea, its hills and forests, why it is that other novelists have not
+      created towns for us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Anthony Trollope did, indeed, give us Barchester, but Barchester is a
+      shadow beside Sulaco. Mr Thomas Hardy&rsquo;s Wessex map is the most fascinating
+      document in modern fiction, with the possible exception of Stevenson&rsquo;s
+      chart in <i>Treasure Island</i>. Conrad, without any map at all, gives us
+      a familiarity with a small town on the South American coast that far
+      excels our knowledge of Barsetshire, Wessex and John Silver&rsquo;s treasure. If
+      any attentive reader of <i>Nostromo</i> were put down in Sulaco tomorrow
+      he would feel as though he had returned to his native town. The detail
+      that provides this final picture is throughout the book incessant but
+      never intruding. We do not look back, when the novel is <span
+      class="pagenum">94</span><a name="link094" id="link094"></a>finished, to
+      any especial moment of explanation or introduction. We have been led,
+      quite unconsciously, forward. We are led, at moments of the deepest drama,
+      through rooms and passages that are only remembered, many hours later, in
+      retrospect. There is, for instance, the Aristocratic Club, that &ldquo;extended
+      to strangers the large hospitality of the cool, big rooms of its historic
+      quarters in the front part of a house, once a residence of a High official
+      of the Holy Office. The two wings, shut up, crumbled behind the nailed
+      doors, and what may be described as a grove of young orange-trees grown in
+      the unpaved patio concealed the utter ruin of the back part facing the
+      gate. You turned in from the street, as if entering a secluded orchard,
+      where you came upon the foot of a disjointed staircase, guarded by a
+      moss-stained effigy of some saintly bishop, mitred and stalled, and
+      bearing the indignity of a broken nose meekly, with his fine stone hands
+      crossed on his breast. The chocolate-coloured faces of servants with mops
+      of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard balls came
+      to your ears, and, <span class="pagenum">95</span><a name="link095"      id="link095"></a>ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first
+      steps, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé
+      moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm&rsquo;s length, through
+      an old Sta Marta newspaper. His horse&mdash;a strong-hearted but
+      persevering black brute, with a hammer bead&mdash;you would have seen in
+      the street dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost
+      touching the curbstone of the side-walk!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation
+      of some reader &ldquo;Yes&mdash;those orange-trees! It was just like that when I
+      was there!&rdquo; How convinced we are of Conrad&rsquo;s unimpeachable veracity! How
+      like him are those remembered details, &ldquo;the nailed doors,&rdquo; &ldquo;the fine stone
+      hands,&rdquo; &ldquo;at arm&rsquo;s-length&rdquo;!&mdash;and can we not sniff something of the
+      author&rsquo;s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that
+      &ldquo;hammer-headed horse&rdquo; of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember
+      enough to fill a volume!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He is able, therefore, upon this foundation <span class="pagenum">96</span><a
+      name="link096" id="link096"></a>of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to
+      build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth.
+      He does not, in <i>Nostromo</i> at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but
+      he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town
+      under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as
+      beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we
+      remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near
+      to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the
+      last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding,
+      with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the
+      crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride.
+      Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy
+      story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here, then, is the secret of Conrad&rsquo;s atmosphere. He is the poet, working
+      through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the
+      heart of his work from the first line of <i>Almayer s Folly</i> to the
+      last <span class="pagenum">97</span><a name="link097" id="link097"></a>line
+      of <i>Victory. Nostromo</i> is not simply the history of certain lives
+      that were concerned in a South American revolution. It <i>is</i> that
+      history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no
+      country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for
+      its interpretation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this
+      creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain
+      limitations.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction
+      that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is as though, from some high window, looking down, he were able to
+      watch some shore, from whose security men were for ever launching little
+      cockle-shell boats upon a limitless and angry sea. He observes them, as
+      they advance with confidence, with determination, each with his own sure
+      <span class="pagenum">98</span><a name="link098" id="link098"></a>ambition
+      of nailing victory to his mast; he alone can see that the horizon is
+      limitless; he can see farther than they&mdash;from his height he can
+      follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very
+      last. He admires that courage, the simplicity of that faith, but his irony
+      springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are, we may thankfully maintain, other possible views of life, and
+      it is, surely, Conrad&rsquo;s harshest limitation that he should never be free
+      from this certain obsession of the vanity of human struggle. So bound is
+      he by this that he is driven to choose characters who will prove his
+      faith. We can remember many fine and courageous characters of his
+      creation, we can remember no single one who is not foredoomed to defeat.
+      Jim wins, indeed, his victory, but at the close: &ldquo;And that&rsquo;s the end. He
+      passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven,
+      and excessively romantic.... He goes away from a living woman to celebrate
+      his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.&rdquo; <span
+      class="pagenum">99</span><a name="link099" id="link099"></a>Conrad&rsquo;s
+      ironical smile that has watched with tenderness the history of Jim&rsquo;s
+      endeavours, proclaims, at the last, that that pursuit has been vain&mdash;as
+      vain as Stein&rsquo;s butterflies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, for the rest, as Mr Curle in his study of Conrad has admirably
+      observed, every character is faced with the enemy for whom he is, by
+      character, least fitted. Nostromo, whose heart&rsquo;s desire it is that his
+      merits should be acclaimed before men, is devoured by the one dragon to
+      whom human achievements are nothing&mdash;lust of treasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      M&rsquo;Whirr, the most unimaginative of men, is opposed by the most tremendous
+      of God&rsquo;s splendid terrors and, although he saves his ship from the storm,
+      so blind is he to the meaning of the things that he has witnessed that he
+      might as well have never been born. Captain Brierley, watching the
+      degradation of a fellow-creature from a security that nothing, it seems,
+      can threaten, is himself caught by that very degradation.... The Beast in
+      the Jungle is waiting ever ready to leap&mdash;the victim is always in his
+      power. <span class="pagenum">100</span><a name="link100" id="link100"></a>It
+      comes from this philosophy of life that the qualities in the human soul
+      that Conrad most definitely admires are blind courage and obedience to
+      duty. His men of brain&mdash;Marlowe, Decoud, Stein&mdash;are melancholy
+      and ironic: &ldquo;If you see far enough you must see how hopeless the struggle
+      is.&rdquo; The only way to be honestly happy is to have no imagination and,
+      because Conrad is tender at heart and would have his characters happy, if
+      possible, he chooses men without imagination. Those are the men of the sea
+      whom he has known and loved. The men of the land see farther than the men
+      of the sea and must, therefore, be either fools or knaves. Towards Captain
+      Anthony, towards Captain Lingard he extends his love and pity. For Verloc,
+      for Ossipon, for old De Barral he has a disgust that is beyond words. For
+      the Fynes and their brethren he has contempt. For two women of the land,
+      Winnie Verloc and Mrs Gould, he reserves his love, and for them alone, but
+      they have, in their hearts, the simplicity, the honesty of his own sea
+      captains. <span class="pagenum">101</span><a name="link101" id="link101"></a>This
+      then is quite simply his philosophy. It has no variation or relief. He
+      will not permit his characters to escape, he will not himself try to draw
+      the soul of a man who is stronger than Fate. His ironic melancholy does
+      not, tor an instant, hamper his interest&mdash;that is as keen and acute
+      as is the absorption of any collector of specimens&mdash;but at the end of
+      it all, as with his own Stein: &ldquo;He says of him that he is &lsquo;preparing to
+      leave all this: preparing to leave...&rsquo; while he waves his hand sadly at
+      his butterflies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Utterly opposed is it from the philosophy of the one English writer whom,
+      in all other ways, Conrad most obviously resembles&mdash;Robert Browning.
+      As philosophers they have no possible ground of communication, save in the
+      honesty that is common to both of them. As artists, both in their subjects
+      and their treatment of their subjects, they are, in many ways, of an
+      amazing resemblance, although the thorough investigation of that
+      resemblance would need far more space than I can give it here. Browning&rsquo;s
+      <span class="pagenum">102</span><a name="link102" id="link102"></a>interest
+      in life was derived, on the novelist&rsquo;s side of him, from his absorption in
+      the affairs, spiritual and physical, of men and women; on the poet&rsquo;s side,
+      in the question again spiritual and physical, that arose from those
+      affairs. Conrad has not Browning&rsquo;s clear-eyed realisation of the necessity
+      of discovering the individual philosophy that belongs to every individual
+      case&mdash;he is too immediately enveloped in his one overwhelming
+      melancholy analysis. But he has exactly that eager, passionate pursuit of
+      romance, a romance to be seized only through the most accurate and honest
+      realism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Browning&rsquo;s realism was born of his excitement at the number and interest
+      of his discoveries; he chose, for instance, in <i>Sordello</i> the most
+      romantic of subjects, and, having made his choice, found that there was
+      such a world of realistic detail in the case that, in his excitement, he
+      forgot that the rest of the world did not know quite as much as he did. Is
+      not this exactly what we may say of <i>Nostromo?</i> Mr Chesterton has
+      written of <span class="pagenum">103</span><a name="link103" id="link103"></a>Browning:
+      &ldquo;He substituted the street with the green blind for the faded garden of
+      Watteau, and the &lsquo;blue spirt of a lighted match&rsquo; for the monotony of the
+      evening star.&rdquo; Conrad has substituted for the lover serenading his
+      mistress&rsquo; window the passion of a middle-aged, faded woman for her idiot
+      boy, or the elopement of the daughter of a fraudulent speculator with an
+      elderly, taciturn sea captain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The characters upon whom Robert Browning lavished his affection are
+      precisely Conrad&rsquo;s characters. Is not Waring Conrad&rsquo;s man?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the rest, is not Mr Sludge own brother to Verloc and old De
+      Barrel? Bishop Blougram first cousin to the great Personage in <i>The
+      Secret Agent</i>, Captain Anthony brother to Caponsacchi, Mrs Gould sister
+      to Pompilia? It is not only that Browning and Conrad both investigate
+      these characters with the same determination to extract the last word of
+      truth from the matter, not grimly, but with a thrilling beat of the heart,
+      it is also that the worlds of these <span class="pagenum">104</span><a
+      name="link104" id="link104"></a>two poets are the same. How deeply would
+      Nostromo, Decoud, Gould, Monyngham, the Verlocs, Flora de Barrel, M&rsquo;Whirr,
+      Jim have interested Browning! Surely Conrad has witnessed the revelation
+      of Caliban, of Childe Roland, of James Lee&rsquo;s wife, of the figures in the
+      Arezzo tragedy, even of that bishop who ordered his tomb at St Praxed&rsquo;s
+      Church, with a strange wonder as though he himself had assisted at these
+      discoveries!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Finally, <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, with its multiplied witnesses, its
+      statement as a &ldquo;case&rdquo; of life, its pursuit of beauty through truth, the
+      simplicity of the characters of Pompilia, Caponsacchi and the Pope, the
+      last frantic appeal of Guido, the detail, encrusted thick in the walls of
+      that superb building&mdash;here we can see the highest pinnacle of that
+      temple that has <i>Chance, Lord Jim, Nostromo</i> amongst its other
+      turrets, buttresses and towers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad is his own master&mdash;he has imitated no one, he has created, as
+      I have already said, his own planet, but the heights to which Browning
+      carried Romantic-Realism showed <span class="pagenum">105</span><a
+      name="link105" id="link105"></a>the author of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> the
+      signs of the road that he was to follow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, as has often been said, Browning was as truly novelist as poet, may we
+      not now say with equal justice that Conrad is as truly poet as novelist?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV&mdash;ROMANCE AND REALISM
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>HE <span
+      class="pagenum">106</span><a name="link106" id="link106"></a>terms,
+      Romance and Realism, have been used of late years very largely as a means
+      of escape from this business of the creation of character. The purely
+      romantic novel may now be said to be, in England at any rate, absolutely
+      dead. Mr Frank Swinnerton, in his study of <i>Robert Louis Stevenson</i>,
+      said: &ldquo;Stevenson, reviving the never-very-prosperous romance of England,
+      created a school which has brought romance to be the sweepings of an old
+      costume-chest;... if romance is to be conventional in a double sense, if
+      it spring not from a personal vision of life, but is only a tedious
+      virtuosity, a pretence, a conscious toy, romance as an art is dead. The
+      art was jaded when Reade finished his vocifer<span class="pagenum">107</span><a
+      name="link107" id="link107"></a>ous carpet-beating; but it was not dead.
+      And if it is dead, Stevenson killed it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We may differ very considerably from Mr Swinnerton with regard to his
+      estimate of Stevenson&rsquo;s present and future literary value without denying
+      that the date of the publication of <i>St Ives</i> was also the date of
+      the death of the purely romantic novel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, surely, here, as Mr Swinnerton himself infers, the term &ldquo;Romantic&rdquo; is
+      used in the limited and truncated idea that has formed, lately the popular
+      idea of Romance. In exactly the same way the term &ldquo;Realism&rdquo; has, recently,
+      been most foolishly and uncritically handicapped. Romance, in its modern
+      use, covers everything that is removed from reality: &ldquo;I like romances,&rdquo; we
+      hear the modern reader say, &ldquo;because they take me away from real life,
+      which I desire to forget.&rdquo; In the same way Realism is defined by its
+      enemies as a photographic enumeration of unimportant facts by an observant
+      pessimist. &ldquo;I like realism,&rdquo; admirers of a certain order of novel <span
+      class="pagenum">108</span><a name="link108" id="link108"></a>exclaim,
+      &ldquo;because it is so like life. It tells me just what I myself see every day&mdash;I
+      know where I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, impatient though we may be of these utterly false ideas of
+      Romance and Realism, a definition of those terms that will satisfy
+      everyone is almost impossible. I cannot hope to achieve so exclusive an
+      ambition&mdash;I can only say that to myself Realism is the study of life
+      with all the rational faculties of observation, reason and reminiscence&mdash;Romance
+      is the study of life with the faculties of imagination. I do not mean that
+      Realism may not be emotional, poetic, even lyrical, but it is based always
+      upon truth perceived and recorded&mdash;-it is the essence ol observation.
+      In the same way Romance may be, indeed must be, accurate and defined in
+      its own world, but its spirit is the spirit of imagination, working often
+      upon observation and sometimes simply upon inspiration. It is, at any
+      rate, understood here that the word Romance does not, for a moment, imply
+      a necessary divorce from reality, nor does <span class="pagenum">109</span><a
+      name="link109" id="link109"></a>Realism imply a detailed and dusty
+      preference for morbid and unagreeable subjects. It is possible for Romance
+      to be as honestly and clearly perceptive as Realism, but it is not so easy
+      for it to be so because imagination is more difficult of discipline than
+      observation. It is possible for Realism to be as eloquent and potential as
+      Romance, although it cannot so easily achieve eloquence because of its
+      fear of deserting truth. Moreover, with regard to the influence of foreign
+      literature upon the English novel, it may be suggested that the influence
+      of the French novel, which was at its strongest between the years of 1885
+      and 1895, was towards Realism, and that the influence of the Russian
+      novel, which has certainly been very strongly marked in England during the
+      last years, is all towards Romantic-Realism. If we wished to know exactly
+      what is meant by Romantic-Realism, such a novel as <i>The Brothers
+      Karamazov</i>, such a play as <i>The Cherry Orchard</i> are there before
+      us, as the best possible examples. We might say, in a word, that <i>Karamazov</i>
+      has, in the England <span class="pagenum">110</span><a name="link110"      id="link110"></a>of 1915, taken the place that was occupied, in 1890, by
+      <i>Madame Bovary</i>....
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is Joseph Conrad whose influence is chiefly responsible for this
+      development in the English novel. Just as, in the early nineties, Mr Henry
+      James and Mr Rudyard Kipling, the one potential, the other kinetic,
+      influenced, beyond all contemporary novelists, the minds of their younger
+      generation, so to-day, twenty-five years later, do Mr Joseph Conrad and Mr
+      H. G. Wells, the one potential, the other kinetic, hold that same
+      position.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Joseph Conrad, from the very first, influenced though he was by the French
+      novel, showed that Realism alone was not enough for him. That is to say
+      that, in presenting the case of Almayer, it was not enough for him merely
+      to state as truthfully as possible the facts. Those facts, sordid as they
+      are, make the story of Almayer&rsquo;s degradation sufficiently realistic, when
+      it is merely <span class="pagenum">111</span><a name="link111" id="link111"></a>recorded
+      and perceived by any observer. But upon these recorded facts Conrad&rsquo;s
+      imagination, without for a moment deserting the truth, worked,
+      beautifying, ennobling it, giving it pity and terror, above all putting it
+      mto relation with the whole universe, the whole history of the cycle of
+      life and death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I have said, the Romantic novel, in its simplest form, was used, very
+      often, by writers who wished to escape from the business of the creation
+      of character. It had not been used for that purpose by Sir Walter Scott,
+      who was, indeed, the first English Romantic-Realist, but it was so used by
+      his successors, who found a little optimism, a little adventure, a little
+      colour and a little tradition go a long way towards covering the required
+      ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Conrad had, from the first, a poet&rsquo;s&mdash;that is to say, a romantic&mdash;mind,
+      and his determination to use that romance realistically was simply his
+      determination to justify the full play of his romantic mind in the eyes of
+      all honest men. <span class="pagenum">112</span><a name="link112"      id="link112"></a>In that intention he has absolutely succeeded; he has not
+      abated one jot of his romance&mdash;<i>Nostromo, Lord Jim, Heart of
+      Darkness</i> are amongst the most romantic things in all our literature&mdash;but
+      the last charge that any critic can make against him is falsification,
+      whether of facts, of inference or of consequences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole history of his development has for its key-stone this
+      determination to save his romance by his reality, to extend his reality by
+      his romance. He found in English fiction little that could assist him in
+      this development; the Russian novelists were to supply him with his clue.
+      This whole question of Russian influence is difficult to define, but that
+      Conrad has been influenced by Turgéniev a little and by Dostoievsky very
+      considerably, cannot be denied. <i>Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The
+      Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov</i> are romantic realism at the most
+      astonishing heights that this development of the novel is ever likely to
+      attain. We will never see again heroes of the Prince Myshkin, Dmitri
+      Karamazov, <span class="pagenum">113</span><a name="link113" id="link113"></a>Nicolas
+      Stavrogin build, men so real to us that no change of time or place, age or
+      sickness can take them from us, men so beautifully lit with the romantic
+      passion of Dostoievsky&rsquo;s love of humanity that they seem to warm the whole
+      world, as we know it, with the fire of their charity. That power of
+      creating figures typical as well as individual has been denied to Conrad.
+      Captain Anthony, Nostromo, Jim do not belong to the whole world, nor do
+      they escape the limitations and confinements that their presentation as
+      &ldquo;cases&rdquo; involves on them. Moreover, Conrad does not love humanity. He
+      feels pity, tenderness, admiration, but love, except for certain of his
+      sea heroes, never, and even with his sea heroes it is love built on his
+      scorn of the land. Dostoievsky scorned no one and nothing; as relentless
+      in his pursuit of the truth as Stendhal or Flaubert, he found humanity, as
+      he investigated it, beautiful because of its humanity&mdash;Conrad finds
+      humanity pitiable because of its humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless he has been influenced by <span class="pagenum">114</span><a
+      name="link114" id="link114"></a>the Russian writer continuously and
+      sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, <i>Under Western Eyes</i>, the
+      influence has led to imitation. For that reason, perhaps, that novel is
+      the least vital of all his books, and we feel as though Dostoievsky had
+      given him Razumov to see what he could make of him, and had remained too
+      overwhelmingly curious an onlooker to allow independent creation. What,
+      however, Conrad has in common with the creator of Raskolnikov is his
+      thrilling pursuit of the lives, the hearts, the minutest details of his
+      characters. Conrad alone of all English novelists shares this zest with
+      the great Russian. Dostoievsky found his romance in his love of his
+      fellow-beings, Conrad finds his in his love of beauty, his poet&rsquo;s cry for
+      colour, but their realism they find together in the hearts of men&mdash;and
+      they find it not as Flaubert, that they make of it a perfect work of art,
+      not as Turgéniev, that they may extract from it a flower of poignant
+      beauty, not as Tolstoi, that they may, from it, found a gospel&mdash;simply
+      they pursue their quest <span class="pagenum">115</span><a name="link115"      id="link115"></a>because the breathless interest of the pursuit is
+      stronger than they. They have, both of them, created characters simply
+      because characters demanded to be created. We feel that Emma Bovary was
+      dragged, painfully, arduously, against all the strength of her
+      determination, out of the shades where she was lurking. Myshkin, the
+      Karamazovs, and, in their own degree, Nostromo, Almayer, M&rsquo;Whirr, demanded
+      that they should be flung upon the page.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of seizing upon Romance as a means of avoiding character, he has
+      triumphantly forced it to aid him in the creation of the lives that,
+      through him, demand existence. This may be said to be the great thing that
+      Conrad has done for the English novel&mdash;he has brought the zest of
+      creation back into it; the French novelists used life to perfect their art&mdash;the
+      Russian novelists used art to liberate their passion for life. That at
+      this moment in Russia the novel has lost that zest, that the work of
+      Kouprin, Artzybashev, Sologub, Merejkovsky, Andreiev, shows exhaustion and
+      sterility <span class="pagenum">116</span><a name="link116" id="link116"></a>means
+      nothing; the stream will soon ran full again. Meanwhile we, in England,
+      know once more what it is to feel, in the novel, the power behind the
+      novelist, to be ourselves in the grip of a force that is not afraid of
+      romance nor ashamed of realism, that cares for life as life and not as a
+      means of proving the necessity for form, the danger of too many
+      adjectives, the virtues of the divorce laws or the paradise of free love.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Finally, what will be the effect of the work of Joseph Conrad upon the
+      English novel of the future? Does this Romantic-Realism that he has
+      provided for us show any signs of influencing that future? I think that it
+      does. In the work of all of the more interesting younger English novelists&mdash;in
+      the work of Mr E. M. Forster, Mr D. H. Lawrence, Mr J. D. Beresford, Mr W.
+      L. George, Mr Frank Swinnerton, Air Gilbert Gannan, Miss Viola Meynell, Mr
+      Brett Young&mdash;this influence is to be detected. <span class="pagenum">117</span><a
+      name="link117" id="link117"></a>Even with such avowed realists as Mr
+      Beresford, Mr George and Mr Swinnerton the realism is of a nature very
+      different from the realism of even ten years ago, as can be seen at once
+      by comparing so recent a novel as Mr Swinnerton&rsquo;s <i>On the Staircase</i>
+      with Mr Arnold Bennett&rsquo;s <i>Sacred and Profane Love</i>, or Mr
+      Galsworthy&rsquo;s <i>Man of Property</i>&mdash;and Mr E. M. Forster is a
+      romantic-realist of most curious originality, whose <i>Longest Journey</i>
+      and <i>Howard&rsquo;s End</i> may possibly provide the historian of English
+      literature with dates as important as the publication of <i>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly</i> in 1895. The answer to this question does not properly belong to
+      this essay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, at any rate, certain that neither the old romance nor the old
+      realism can return. We have been shown in <i>Nostromo</i> something that
+      has the colour of <i>Treasure Island</i> and the reality of <i>New Grub
+      Street</i>. If, on the one hand, the pessimists lament that the English
+      novel is dead, that everything that can be done has been done, there is,
+      surely, on the other hand, some justification for the optimists who
+      believe that at few periods in <span class="pagenum">118</span><a
+      name="link118" id="link118"></a>English literature has the novel shown
+      more signs of a thrilling and original future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For signs of the possible development of Conrad himselt one may glance for
+      a moment at his last novel, <i>Victory</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conclusion of <i>Chance</i> and the last volume of short stories had
+      shown that there was some danger lest romance should divorce him,
+      ultimately, from reality. <i>Victory</i>, splendid tale though it is, does
+      not entirely reassure us. The theme of the book is the pursuit of almost
+      helpless uprightness and innocence by almost helpless evil and malignancy;
+      that is to say that the strength and virtue of Heyst and Lena are as
+      elemental and independent of human will and effort as the villainy and
+      slime of Mr Jones and Ricardo. Conrad has here then returned to his old
+      early demonstration that nature is too strong for man and I feel as
+      though, in this book, he had intended the whole affair to be blown,
+      finally, sky-high by some natural volcanic eruption. He prepares for that
+      eruption and when, for some reason or another, that elemental catastrophe
+      is pre<span class="pagenum">119</span><a name="link119" id="link119"></a>vented
+      he consoles himself by strewing the beach of his island with the battered
+      corpses of his characters. It is in such a wanton conclusion, following as
+      it does immediately upon the finest, strongest and most beautiful thing in
+      the whole of Conrad&mdash;the last conversation between Heyst and Lena&mdash;that
+      we see this above-mentioned divorce from reality. We see it again in the
+      more fantastic characteristics of Mr Jones and Ricardo, in the presence of
+      the Orang Outang, and in other smaller and less important effects. At the
+      same time his realism, when he pleases, as in the arrival of the boat of
+      the thirst maddened trio on the island beach, is as magnificent in its
+      austerity and truth as ever it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Will he allow his imagination to carry him wildly into fantasy and
+      incredibility? He has not, during these last years, exerted the discipline
+      and restraint that were once his law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, at the last, when one looks back over twenty years, from the
+      <i>Almayer&rsquo;s Folly</i> of 1895 to the <i>Victory</i> of 1915, one <span
+      class="pagenum">120</span><a name="link120" id="link120"></a>realises that
+      it was, for the English novel, no mean nor insignificant fortune that
+      brought the author of those books to our shores to give a fresh impetus to
+      the progress of our literature and to enrich our lives with a new world of
+      character and high adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH CONRAD&rsquo;S PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      [The date is given of the first edition of each hook. New edition
+      signifies a change of format or transference to a different publisher.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Almayer&rsquo;s Folly. A Story of an Eastern River (Unwin). 1895. New editions.
+      (Nash). 1904; (Unwin). 1909, 1914, 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Outcast of the Islands (Unwin). 1896, New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Nigger of the &ldquo;Narcissus&rdquo;: A Tale of the Sea (Heinemann). 1897. New
+      edition, 1910.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tales of Unrest (Unwin). 1898. New edition, 1909.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Jim: A Tale (Blackwood). 1900. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer
+      (Heinemann). 1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories (Black wood). 1902.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Typhoon and Other Stories (Heinemann). 1903. New edition, 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Romance: A Novel. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (Smith, Elder).
+      1903. New edition (Aelson). 1909.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Harder). 1904. The Mirror of the Sea:
+      Memories and Impressions (Methuen). 1903. New editions, 1913, 1915. The
+      Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Methuen). 1907.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Set of Six: Tales (Methuen). 1908 Under Western Eyes (Methuen). 1911.
+      New edition, 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some Reminiscences (Nash). 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Twixt Land and Sea: Tales (Dent). 1912. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (Methuen). 1914. Within the Tides: Tales
+      (Dent). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Victory: An Island Tale (Methuen). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <span class="pagenum">123</span><a name="link123" id="link123"></a>Almayer&rsquo;s
+      Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (<i>Macmillan</i>). 1895. New editions,
+      1912; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An Outcast of the Islands (<i>Appleton</i>). 1896. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
+      1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle (<i>Dodd, Mead</i>). 1897.
+      New edition, 1912. New edition under English title: &ldquo;The Nigger of the
+      &lsquo;Narcissus&rsquo;&rdquo; (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tales of Unrest (<i>Scribner</i>). 1898.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Jim (<i>Doubleday</i>) 1900. New edition, 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Inheritors. By Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer (<i>McClure Co.</i>).
+      1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Typhoon (<i>Putman</i>). 1902. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Youth, and two Other Stories (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards transferred to
+      <i>Doubleday</i>). 1903.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Falk: Amy Foster: Tomorrow [Three Stories] (<i>McClure Co.</i>). 1903. New
+      edition (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Romance. By Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Hueffer (<i>McClure Co</i>.
+      Afterwards transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1904.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (<i>Harper</i>), 1904. <span
+      class="pagenum">124</span><a name="link124" id="link124"></a>The Mirror of
+      the Sea: Memories and Impressions (<i>Harper</i>). 1906.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (<i>Harper</i>). 1907.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Point of Honour: A Military Tale (<i>McClure Co</i>. Afterwards
+      transferred to <i>Doubleday</i>). 1908. Under Western Eyes: A Novel (<i>Harper</i>).
+      1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Personal Retold (<i>Harper</i>). 1912.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &lsquo;Twist Land and Sea: Tales (<i>Doran</i>). 1912. New edition (<i>Doubleday</i>).
+      1911.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chance: A Tale in Two Parts (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1914.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A Set of Six [Tales: one, &ldquo;The Duel.&rdquo; previously issued as &ldquo;A Point of
+      Honour&rdquo;] (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Victory: An Island Tale (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1915.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within the Tides: Tales (<i>Doubleday</i>). 1916.
+    </p>
+
+<p>
+      <a name="linkindex" id="linkindex"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      INDEX
+    </h2>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+_Almayer&rsquo;s Folly_, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link012">12</a>, <a
+      href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
+      href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
+
+
+Bennett, Arnold, <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
+Beresford, J. D., <a href="#link116">116</a>
+_Brothers Karamazov, The_, <a href="#link109">109</a>
+Browning, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a href="#link101">101</a>, <a
+      href="#link102">102</a>, <a href="#link103">103</a>, <a href="#link104">104</a>
+
+
+_Chance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
+      href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link033">33</a>, <a
+      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link119">119</a>
+_Cherry Orchard, The_, <a href="#link060">60</a>, <a href="#link109">109</a>
+Chesterton, G. K., <a href="#link084">84</a>
+Conrad, J., birth, <a href="#link008">8</a>, naturalised, <a href="#link008">8</a>
+Curie, R., <a href="#link099">99</a>
+
+
+Dickens, <a href="#link085">85</a>
+Dostoievsky, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
+      href="#link113">113</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+
+
+Eliot, George, <a href="#link085">85</a>
+_End of the Tether, The_, <a href="#link056">56</a>
+_Evan Harrington_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+_Eve of St Agnes, The_, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+
+
+Flaubert, <a href="#link077">77</a>, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+Form, <a href="#link040">40</a>
+Forster, E. M., <a href="#link117">117</a>
+_Freya of the Seven Islands_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
+
+
+Galsworthy, J., <a href="#link059">59</a>
+George, W. L., <a href="#link116">116</a>
+
+
+Hardy, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+_Heart of Darkness_, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
+      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+Hueffer, F. M., <a href="#link014">14</a>
+
+
+Irony, <a href="#link055">55</a>
+
+
+James, Henry, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a
+      href="#link042">42</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+
+
+Keats, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+Kipling, R., <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+
+
+_Lord Jim_, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a
+      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link073">73</a>, <a
+      href="#link080">80</a>
+Lyrical impulse, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+
+
+_Madame Bovary_, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link077">77</a>,110
+Meredith, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>
+Method in fiction, <a href="#link041">41</a>, <a href="#link048">48</a>, etc.
+Mid-Victorian English novel, <a href="#link058">58</a>
+_Mirror of the Sea, The_, <a href="#link016">16</a>, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a
+      href="#link027">27</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link032">32</a>
+
+
+Nature, <a href="#link078">78</a>
+_Nigger of the Narcissus_, The, <a href="#link013">13</a>, <a href="#link015">15</a>. 27, <a
+      href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link063">63</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>, <a
+      href="#link086">86</a>
+_Nostrcmo_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link018">18</a>, <a
+      href="#link043">43</a>, <a href="#link049">49</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a
+      href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link090">90</a>, <a href="#link096">96</a>, <a
+      href="#link097">97</a>, <a href="#link102">102</a>
+
+
+_Outcast of the Islands, An_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
+      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
+      href="#link085">85</a>
+
+
+Philosophy, <a href="#link057">57</a>
+Poland, <a href="#link009">9</a>, <a href="#link024">24</a>
+
+
+Realism. 108, <a href="#link110">110</a>
+_Return, The_, <a href="#link075">75</a>
+_Richard Feverel,_ 38
+_Romance_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link070">70</a>
+Romance, <a href="#link108">108</a>. Russian influence, <a href="#link109">109</a>, <a
+      href="#link112">112</a>
+
+
+Sea, <a href="#link008">8</a>, <a href="#link028">28</a>
+_Secret Agent, The_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a
+      href="#link057">57</a>, <a href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>, <a
+      href="#link103">103</a>
+_Secret Sharer, The_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
+_Set of Six, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+Shaw, Bernard. 39
+Ships, <a href="#link033">33</a>
+_Smile of Fortune, A_, <a href="#link020">20</a>
+_Some Réminiscences_, <a href="#link021">21</a>, <a href="#link022">22</a>, <a
+      href="#link026">26</a>
+_Sordello_, <a href="#link102">102</a>
+_Spectator, The_, <a href="#link012">12</a>
+Stevenson, Robert Louis, <a href="#link038">38</a>, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+Style, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+Swinnerton, Frink, <a href="#link106">106</a>, <a href="#link107">107</a>, <a
+      href="#link116">116</a>
+
+
+_Tales of Unrest_, <a href="#link015">15</a>, <a href="#link075">75</a>
+Tchekov, <a href="#link060">60</a>
+Themes, <a href="#link054">54</a>
+Tolstoi, <a href="#link114">114</a>
+_T. P.&lsquo;s Weekly_, <a href="#link018">18</a>
+_Trtmolino_, <a href="#link035">35</a>
+Trollope, Anthony, <a href="#link093">93</a>
+Turgeniev, <a href="#link020">20</a>, <a href="#link084">84</a>, <a
+      href="#link114">114</a>
+_'Twixt Land and Sea_, <a href="#link020">20</a> 56
+_Typhoon_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a
+      href="#link030">30</a>, <a href="#link056">56</a>, <a href="#link061">61</a>, <a
+      href="#link075">75</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
+      href="#link082">82</a>
+
+
+_Under Western Eyes_, <a href="#link019">19</a>, <a href="#link057">57</a>, <a
+      href="#link072">72</a>, <a href="#link082">82</a>
+_Une Vie_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+
+
+_Victory_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link118">118</a>
+
+
+Wells, H. G., <a href="#link039">39</a>, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a
+      href="#link110">110</a>
+Wharton, Mrs, <a href="#link059">59</a>, <a href="#link083">83</a>
+Whitman, <a href="#link081">81</a>
+
+
+_Yellow Book, The_, <a href="#link038">38</a>
+_Youth_, <a href="#link014">14</a>, <a href="#link017">17</a>, <a href="#link030">30</a>, <a
+      href="#link073">73</a>, <a href="#link079">79</a>, <a href="#link080">80</a>, <a
+      href="#link082">82</a>
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Joseph Conrad, by Hugh Walpole
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diff --git a/old/52453-h.htm.2021-01-24 b/old/old/52453-h.htm.2021-01-24
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--- a/old/52453-h.htm.2021-01-24
+++ b/old/old/52453-h.htm.2021-01-24
author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-06 01:15:34 -0800
committer	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-06 01:15:34 -0800
commit	6da98f5a023bd26e75f2caa68b7dd70ed79af0b0 (patch)
tree	ee8e8e294c5885729990acf54f048fcdd1dac467
parent	f565b11b310861318be8618a945d8ce213eeedaa (diff)