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diff --git a/old/52453-0.txt b/old/52453-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 8f371de..0000000 --- a/old/52453-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,2421 +0,0 @@ -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 - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOSEPH CONRAD *** - -***** This file should be named 52453-0.txt or 52453-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/2/4/5/52453/ - -Produced by David Widger from page images generously -provided by the Internet Archive - - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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