University of Virginia Library

REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH STORY TELLERS
I—JOSEPH CONRAD

BY FREDERIC TABER COOPER

WITH the possible exception of Mr. Henry James, there is no living writer of fiction in English whom it behooves the critic to approach with more modesty and self-mistrust than Joseph Conrad. There is no other writer of similar magnitude whose treatment in the past has been so inadequate, so prejudiced, so blindly narrow and one-sided. From the time when one of his earliest book notices bore the caption, "A Puzzle for Reviewers," his detractors have never become tired of insisting that he does not know how to construct a story; and his admirers have expended their energies in explaining and apologising for him—whereas, as a matter of fact, he needs neither apology nor explanation, but merely a far heartier recognition than he has yet received. The attitude of criticism toward him has not seriously troubled Mr. Conrad. As he himself writes, in A Personal Record—a unique human document, which is just appearing, and from which it will be profitable to draw freely in this article—"fifteen years of unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters." But, though the author himself can afford to be tolerant of miscomprehension and undervaluation, the serious student of modern tendencies in fiction cannot afford to overlook the fact that Conrad is one of the very few who have added something absolutely new to the art and the technique of his vocation.

1. I. HIS METHODS

It is worth while before passing on to examine more specifically the qualities of Conrad's fiction, to take up for a moment a couple of special articles of comparatively recent date, that of Mr. John A. Macy in the Atlantic Monthly and of John Galsworthy in the Contemporary Review. These articles are singled out from a number of others because, while fairly representative in tone, they were put forth with the semblance of special authority and finality. Mr. Macy, while questioning the greatness of modern writers in general, somewhat dubiously suggests Mr. Conrad as the one possible claimant. He extols Mr. Conrad's lofty ideals, and then, on the ground that a writer of such lofty standards must be judged with exceptional rigidity, proceeds to devote a large part of his article to picking flaws in the construction of his author's several stories, as measured by the pocket rule of cut-and-dried technique. The sum and substance of what he has to say is to blame Conrad for not having done as other and lesser writers were contented to do before him—instead of seeking to discover how and why he has succeeded in being splendidly and triumphantly himself.

Mr. Galsworthy's article deserves a brief word for quite a different reason. Here we have a cordial appreciation by a fellow-craftsman who already occupies as dignified a position in his own generation as Mr. Conrad does in his. That Mr. Galsworthy's lack of critical balance is equal to his possession of creative power becomes apparent long before we reach the following paragraph, so extravagant that it largely discounts its own value:

The technical side of Joseph Conrad's work does not especially interest Mr. Galsworthy. He is mainly concerned with the attempt to sum up the essential spirit of Conrad in some epigrammatic, easily portable form, in finding some catch-phrase that sounds like an explanation, and which really is as futile as an attempt to reduce a myriad-sided solid to a plane surface. The Universe, in the words of Mr. Galsworthy, "is always saying: The little part called man is always smaller than the whole!"—the writer who recognises the truth of this possesses, according to him, the cosmic spirit. Mr. Conrad's claim to recognition rests upon the fact that he is unique among novelists in possessing this spirit:

Now, if this were literally true, if Mr. Conrad really believed that a rainbow or a water-spout were of more importance to mankind than man himself: then, instead of proving his claim to greatness by pointing out this fact, Mr. Galsworthy would simply have knocked the idol from his pedestal and proved him to be stuffed with straw. It is all very well to have enough of the cosmic spirit to recognise that in the ultimate scheme of things the part is always smaller than the whole, and that, as a rudimentary principle of physics, a mountain contains more molecules than a man. But Mr. Conrad is not writing for an audience of mountains, but for his fellow-men—and no really good work can be done by any living creature, man, beast or bird, whose chief concern is not with his own species. A member of a beehive would make a pretty poor bee if he were not convinced of the supreme importance of bees.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Conrad's books leave no such impression on the mind of the average reader as they seem to have left upon Mr. Galsworthy. It is almost incredible that any one could read them without feeling, above all else, their vital and tremendous human interest. It is perfectly true that he deals by preference with titanic forces: the unbridled rage of the ocean, the invincible sweep of a wind-driven storm, the unmeasured and impenetrable depths of a tropic forest. But everywhere and always his unit of measurement is man; man measuring his puny strength against the universe, and foredoomed to defeat; yet in his defeat remaining always the focal point of interest.

In order to understand how Mr. Conrad has formed his style and built up his literary creed, it is necessary to keep in mind just a few biographical details. Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski—to give him his full original name—was born in the Ukraine in about the year 1857. He comes of an old and illustrious family, distinguished for many services in peace and in war. His father was a poet and critic, and a translator of many English books. When he was still a little lad, he shared the exile of his father and mother, following upon the political disturbances of the early sixties—and it was a result of this exile that his mother lost her life, through the callous refusal of the Russian authorities to allow her time to recover from a dangerous illness. The last thing on earth that his family dreamed of for Conrad was a sea career, and his choice, when announced, aroused much astonishment and some characteristically mild opposition. He has recorded the happenings of a certain day spent with his tutor in the Alps, as being one of the great turning points in his life. "He had long been trying to crush my will," he relates in substance, "and I felt that before we reached the summit of that pass he would succeed." But this was not to be; a chance meeting with others on the way and a sudden turn which the careless talk assumed, touched a certain chord in Conrad; and when they reached the summit, the tutor said to him kindly, "Go your way, I am beaten; you have too much of Don Quixote in you for me to help you." For twenty years, Conrad sailed the waters of the globe, working his way upward in the English merchant-marine service, through all the grades, until he won his Master's certificate and took chief command. There is every reason to believe

that he was as painstaking and admirable a seaman in those days as he now is an author. But he was unique among seamen for his love of reading—for his choice of books and his understanding grasp of them. No one can study Conrad profitably without keeping these all-important formative years in mind; years spent in the unconscious amassing of infinite and priceless material, in the slow absorption of strange and alien personages, exotic and picturesque cities and harbours, fierce and undisciplined regions on the edge of the world; all the stage-settings and raw materials for human drama in the bulk. And all the while that he was unconsciously assimilating his material, Conrad was, with equal unconsciousness, learning how best to use it, by his tireless and voracious reading,—reading of books which some inborn instinct led him to choose with wonderful wisdom. The French writers were his favourites, and he learned his respect of the mot juste from Flaubert, and something of construction from Maupassant. In English, his tastes were similarly healthy. Dickens naturally appealed to him in a mild degree, for he shares with Dickens the love of drawing straight from life odd, grotesque, oftentimes misshapen oddities of humanity, and slightly caricatures them in doing so. But Trollope is an author whose name crops up more frequently in Conrad's autobiographical pages,—and another whose influence is even more potent is Henry James,—Henry James, who, with all his mannerisms, has done more, than any other living master of fiction, to teach those who read him understandingly, the sheer craft of story writing.

These facts: twenty years face to face with hardship and heroism; twenty years of leisure and isolation in which to grow up slowly to a knowledge of precisely how he could make the best use of his material; twenty years to drill himself in a language to which he was a total stranger up to his twentieth year, are a sufficient answer to those critics who were at one time too ready to dismiss Conrad's work lightly, as that of a man who had not learned his craft. The simple truth is that he had learned it with a thoroughness such as is hard to duplicate; that he knows his own reason for every episode, every paragraph, every separate word; that if he makes a mistake, if there are better ways for doing any one particular thing, his fault is at least committed with his eyes open, and in an honest belief that, for him at least, it is the one and only way.

Accordingly, it is well to take up the two reproaches most frequently made against him, and to consider to what extent they are justified. As a matter of fact, it would be easy to take up a hundred apparent faults instead of two, because there is hardly any known rule of technique that Mr. Conrad does not deliberately break when he chooses,—for of what good are rules based on the practice of the older writers save to be broken by the new writer who happens to be big and strong enough to justify his iconoclasm? But the two reproaches in question are: first, that he follows no logical development of a story, but goes zigzagging back and forth, from east to west, from past to future, apparently quite without purpose or orientation. And, secondly, that he has no sense of proportion, that some parts of his stories are inordinately long, and others absurdly short; that he will squander a full length plot on a short story, and amplify a mere episode into four hundred pages. Both these charges are true,—a fact that does not matter in itself, but that does vitally matter if he fails to prove that for his specific purpose his way is the one and only way to get the best result.

Did you ever watch a common garden spider preparing to spin its web? From some apparently irrelevant point on a leaf or branch, it suddenly drops a number of inches to some other equally irrelevant point; then it proceeds at a tangent to a new point of departure, hesitates, retraces its steps, picks up some lost thread, crosses and recrosses its path, pausing to tie a knot here and there,—and all of a sudden this apparently aimless zigzagging takes on a definite design, of perfect and marvelous symmetry. Now, it may be cheerfully granted that this would not be the approved method of knitting stockings or weaving calico; there are some purposes, and worthy ones, where the conventional, straight-ahead method is

praiseworthy. But there are certain types of genius that must work according to their inborn nature: and it happens that Mr. Conrad shares with the spider the genius of the zigzag method, and by the help of it spins fabrics quite as marvellous and inimitable. He cannot help himself; his mind works in that way. When, in Almayer's Folly, he tells us the story of the degeneration of a white man exiled in the heart of the Malay Peninsula, and of his crushing disappointment at the marriage of his half-caste daughter with a native, it is characteristic of him that the story should open when the end is already in sight, and that a majority of the chapters should be concerned with filling in the missing links; still more characteristic that a subsequent volume, The Outcast of the Island, announced as a sequel, should go back to the earlier days of Almayer's prosperity and his daughter's infancy. A still more convincing proof that this is the way in which Mr. Conrad sees a story is that he adopts the same identical method for telling his own biography. A Personal Record is an exceptionally frank and self-revealing document covering Mr. Conrad's entire life, from his earliest recollections down to the present day; but the first of its eight chapters opens during the winter in the early nineties, when he was icebound in the river harbour of Rouen, when he was engaged in writing the tenth chapter of Almayer's Folly,—and no two chapters and scarcely two pages are consecutive in point of time. And the reason for this is so palpable that even a dunce could hardly miss it. The greatest adventure that Mr. Conrad's soul ever underwent was his first experiment in fiction: and accordingly his biography is built up with the deliberate intent of making the genesis of Almayer's Folly, from its inception to its final publication, the one triumphant leitmotiv of his whole life history.

In precisely the same way we may explain the indirect and zigzag progress of his other writings. Your cut-and-dried critic, who insists on measuring a mountain with a footrule and quarrels with it for daring to be out of line, insists also on labelling a certain character hero and another heroine. And, naturally, when this critic notes that his so-called hero drops out of sight for a considerable number of chapters, and, it may be, the heroine vanishes altogether in mid-channel, he feels himself aggrieved and says that the author does not know how to construct. The truth about Mr. Conrad is simply this: he is more likely than not to take some force of nature as his protagonist; in Typhoon, the leading part is taken, not by Captain MacWhirr, nor his under-officer, nor by any one of the two hundred coolies between decks, but by the typhoon itself. And, similarly, in The Nigger of the Narcissus, the leading part is not taken by any one of the officers or crew,—not even by the Nigger of the title,—indeed, like Vanity Fair, it might be called A Novel Without a Hero, and with only one heroine, the treacherous, implacable sea.

And, secondly, as regards the question of sheer material length in story writing. It is a deep-rooted fallacy that there are some themes suitable for a full length novel and others fit only for a short story. As a matter of fact, such a distinction is disastrously misleading. There are some minds who see in a battlefield a long volume epic, a Peace and War, a Débâcle; there are others who, like Browning, see only an "Incident of the French Camp," material at most for a dozen lines of verse. The difference does not lie in the theme, but in the temperament of the individual, the fashion in which he looks upon life in general and upon some specific story in particular. In the whole range of contemporary fiction it would be difficult to find this truth better exemplified than it is in the work of Conrad. In all of his writings he has set his own pace, fallen into his own particular stride, so to speak, ignoring all precedents regarding a conventional proportion between subject and space, crumpling up a world-wide theme into the narrow limits of a few pages, and stretching out some transitory incident into the bulk of a portly volume,—and yet the very last objection which a critic, who has learned to read understandingly and recognises genius in unfamiliar garb, would dream of making, is that certain of his stories are too short and certain others too long. Take, for

instance, his Nigger of the Narcissus—one of the many English stories whose titles have suffered an unfortunate sea-change during their passage into an American edition. Let any other writer submit the synopsis of the plot to his publisher, and if that publisher knows his business, he will tell the author frankly that there is barely enough plot in it for a Sunday special, to say nothing of a book. Yet Mr. Conrad wove out of it a magic volume, full of the life and breadth and infinite variety of the sea; and, in the centre of the picture, the inert figure of a sickly, malingering negro stands out as clear-cut as an ebony idol against a background of ivory, mysterious, foreboding, the embodiment of fate. Or again, take The Heart of Darkness, one of the shortest stories Mr. Conrad has written, and at the same time containing one of the biggest, most suggestive of his themes. It is nothing less than a presentment of the clashing of two continents, a symbolic picture of the inborn antagonism of two races, the white and the black. It pictures

Joseph Conrad

[Description: Black and white sketch of Joseph Conrad. From a drawing by Will Rothenstein. ]

the subtle disintegration of a white man's moral stamina and the stress of the darkness, the isolation, the immensity of the African jungle, the loss of dignity and courage and self-respect through daily contact with the native man and the native woman. The whole thing is a matter of a few score pages, and yet, such is its strength coupled with a certain indescribable trick of verbal foreshortening, that it gives the impression of measureless time and distance. We feel that we have spent years in his company, roaming through the murky atmosphere of physical and moral darkness—and still beyond stretch unexplored vistas, measureless, forbidding, unspeakable.

It must be conceded that Mr. Conrad's style, unique and finished as it is, does not make easy reading. It resembles nothing so much as the depth, the mystery, the riotous luxuriance of those tropical forests wherein so many of his earlier stories were laid. There are whole pages and chapters where you are forced to move forward gropingly, with the caution of a pioneer, peering ahead at the vague forms of thought that you see suggested; and then, suddenly, there comes an open spot, illuminated with the sunshine of perfectly clear mental pictures, crowding tumultuously upon you; a flash and flare of rainbow colouring seems to streak the page with scarlet and purple and gold. That, in brief, is an epitome of Conrad's art; to keep you at one time groping in the dark, shrinking from unguessed horrors, dimly seen through the fog and mist; and the next moment to blind you with the unexpected flood of mental light. And back of his method lies a vein of unguessed richness, an inexhaustible mine of untold stories. He gives you the impression that, instead of pouring out all that he knows of strange lands and alien races, he is holding himself severely in check,—sketching in here and there one face and form out of the hundreds that elbow themselves forward in his memory; condensing these sketches down to the fewest possible, strong, impressionistic strokes, so as to leave space on his crowded canvas for other importunate memories constantly clamouring for recognition. Other writers before Conrad have possessed the art of painting crowds, jostling throngs in the street, armies of men on the march and in the heat of action; but they have produced their effects by a flood of detail poured out upon the page with the reckless lavishness of one who paints with a palette knife. Conrad's distinction lies in the power of suggestion, the ability to make you feel that, however much he shows you of life, there is vastly more that he leaves untold.

To produce these effects, it is not enough merely to will to do so. It is necessary above all to be a consummate master of words, and at the same time to have a profound reverence for them. It is not too much to say that Mr. Conrad is in this respect the peer of Rudyard Kipling,—with this difference: that being an alien by birth, he does, in a deliberate and highly sophisticated way, what the author of Kim does by instinct. In this connection, it is profitable to take two extracts from Conrad's own avowal, the first dating back to the beginning of his career as an artist, in about 1897; the second representing his latest utterance. The first appeared in a most interesting personal foot-note in the New Review:

The second will be found in "A Familiar Preface," which forms the introduction to A Personal Record:

2. II. HIS WORKS

Mr. Conrad is not one of the authors whom it is profitable to study book by book. In spite of a few dissenting opinions, he has not greatly grown in the course of years. He is one of those rare Minervas of literature who issued in the first instance of full stature. Almayer's Folly, his first volume, the product of five years of intermittent and laborious, although loving work, has remained, there is reason to suspect, the favourite child of his brain. The theme already mentioned,—that of the disintegration of the European amid the debasing surroundings of Eastern barbarism, is one to which he reverts again and again, in his later works. But coming first, it had, not only the glamour of a maiden effort, but, what was infinitely more important to the author, the nostalgia of vanished days, the fascination of une chose vécue. The Nigger of the Narcissus is almost equally a personal document. It represents a composite picture of the types of officers and seamen grown familiar through a score of years. It is impossible to appreciate even remotely the personal element of this book without having read a volume which followed it a decade later, The Mirror of the Sea. In reading that storehouse of personal reminiscences, one guesses between the lines how much heart-ache, how much lost friendships, what a host of vanished memories went into the making of that wonderful verbal mosaic which American readers know under the name of Children of the Sea.

Close upon its heels followed a volume of short stories,—really short stories, in the accepted sense,—entitled Tales of Unrest. This is worth an additional emphasis, because it called forth the first big public recognition that Conrad received. Together with Hewlett's Forest Lovers and Sidney Lee's Life of William Shakespeare, it completed the trio of volumes which at that time the London Academy was in the habit of "crowning" each year and rewarding with a prize of fifty guineas. Most of the stories in this volume are wrought from his familiar material of Malays, half-castes, and degenerate Europeans; but there is just one story, "The Return," which is worth signalling, because it is his first, last, and only attempt to do the familiar French analytical story of married incompatibility. It is memorable because it comes so exasperatingly near being a tremendously big story,—and instead, speaking frankly, it is a failure. The scene is London, the chief actors are an average business man and his still more average wife. He thinks he understands her. As a matter of fact, they have through five years been imperceptibly drifting apart. One day he comes home as usual, to find awaiting him a letter from her telling him that she has eloped with another man. His surprise, his conventional dismay, his whole cut-and-dried attitude of mind are interpreted with a skill that baffles praise. But, because she is the hopelessly average woman, she lacks the courage of her revolt; she comes back. And here comes the part that spoils the story. Throughout a dialogue that drifts on endlessly, the woman remains a living, throbbing bundle of nerves, and the man becomes a stilted, unreal mouthpiece of Mr. Conrad's vain imaginings. Mr. Galsworthy was absolutely right when he said that the hero of this story was one of the few instances in which Conrad had

drawn a character that was hopelessly wooden.

As already suggested, there is no purpose in analysing one by one all of Conrad's stories. Because of his peculiar trick of foreshortening, many of his longest books may be summed up in a dozen words. Lord Jim, which many competent judges regard as his masterpiece, is simply the epic of a man's rehabilitation after being proved a coward. Typhoon is an allegory, half epic, half satiric, of the impotence of physical life before the blind, unchained forces of nature,—a fable told with all the forceful brevity of Le Chène et le Roseau of La Fontaine. Nostromo belongs to a different category. From whatever side you view it, it is too big, too complex, too full of dim, unfathomed places, to be easily or briefly epitomised. More than one critic has openly avowed his preference for this book, and the present writer owns his personal predilection for it. It has, probably, more actual story to it, of a dramatic sort, more of the greed and sordidness and knavery of human nature, than any of his previous books. Primarily, it is the story of a silver mine and a buried treasure, in a little South American republic, where the people, like the republic itself, are volcanic. It is a kaleidoscopic picture of a grasping, rapacious conflict between a government, on the one hand, ever tottering on the brink of revolution; and the private owners of the mine, on the other, for such mutual concessions and privileges as would convert that mine from the white elephant it has always been into a profitable investment. More specifically, it is the story of the life of an exceptional man. Nostromo, as he is called by his English employers, the officials of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company,—who coin the name out of the Italian words which they misunderstand and mispronounce,—is a Genoese sailor, who decides to remain at Sulaco, in the capacity of Capataz de Cargadores, captain of the company's lightermen and caretaker of the jetty. Now, the keynote of Nostromo's character is a curious sort of pride, a love of self-importance. By day and by night, sleepless, vigilant, alert, he is ever at the service of the entire population, native and foreign. Of infinite resource and magnetic temperament, he has worked his way into the confidence and esteem of Spanish officials, English agents, and the scum and rabble of the foreign quarters; and none in Sulaco is too low or too high to touch hat to him and exchange cordial words of greeting. Perhaps the nearest approach to a brief analysis of the complex web of this book is to say that it tells how this Nostromo, whose pride and joy, whose whole stock-in-trade in life is his integrity, his unblemished reputation, becomes a thief,—it is a study of the curse which may come from the secret knowledge of a buried treasure.

Next in importance to the two novels, Nostromo and Lord Jim, come a number of mid-length stories, including Heart of Darkness, already alluded to; and Typhoon, that unequalled picture of the titanic warfare between sea and sky, in which a vessel laden with human freight is made the colossal joke of the elements, and we are shown the inimitable sight of two hundred Chinese coolies, together with their sundered chests, hurtling back and forth between decks, clawing and snarling like so many cats, in their vain pursuit of an infinite number of fugitive silver dollars.

Two or three more of these middle-distance stories deserve mention. To-morrow pictures a father who has disinherited his son, driven him from home, and later repented of the act. Through long, lonely years he has comforted himself with the belief that the son will some day return, perhaps to-morrow—and he has brooded upon this hope until it has become a fixed idea, an obsession, that the son will come to-morrow. At last the son does come, but since things in this mtaerial, work-a-day world necessarily happen in the present, and not in the future, the father's clouded brain refuses to recognise him, because he has come to-day, when he should have come to-morrow,—the morrow which must always remain in the future. Equally simple is the structure of Amy Foster, the story, of a mute, inglorious tragedy. It pictures the fate of a young, slavonic emigrant, driven, together with hordes of his kind, on board an ocean liner, tossed for days in a watery prison, and

then cast by night upon the English coast, the sole survivor of a whole ship's company. Ignorant of his whereabouts, speaking an outlandish tongue, hounded, penniless and hungry, from door to door, a terror to women and children, who think him a madman, he dies at last in destitution, like a homeless dog, having awakened a passing compassion in just one heart, the Amy Foster of the title. In reducing these crowded, concentrated stories of Conrad's to a mere skeleton, it is so easy to over-reach one's self. It is only fair to say, by way of postscript, that there is a second interest in this story. Amy Foster, caught, like many another woman before her, by sheer novelty, marries the refugee, and then, strangely enough, and yet as the doctor says, not without parallel, after her child is born, she conceives growing dislike for him. There is, perhaps, in all of Mr. Conrad's writings, no single scene more poignant than that in which the dying Slav, delirious from fever, forgets his few words of English, and, in his frantic supplications for water, which might have saved his life, frightens out of the house the woman who has vowed to love, honour and obey, and who leaves him to die in agony.

But one of the finest and most characteristic stories that Mr. Conrad ever wrote is Falk. Curiously enough, it is drawn in a measure, from a memory of his childhood. There was a family legend of a great-uncle who served under Napoleon, and who, during the retreat from Moscow, owed his life to the capture and utilisation for culinary purposes, of a very old, very mangy, Lithuanian dog. In his childhood, Mr. Conrad underwent innumerable pleasurable shudders over the story of the cooking and consumption of that dog. He confesses that, in sober middle-age, he still can shudder over the memory of that story. He does not admit any connection between this incident and Falk. Nevertheless, it takes no special discernment to realise that without that childhood thrill, something would have been missing from the tale. On the surface, Falk gives promise of pure comedy,—a trick not without precedent in Mr. Conrad's method of work. It opens with a grotesque wooing of a Dutch girl, phlegmatic, florid, and opulent of physique, by a thin, taciturn Scandinavian pilot, on board her uncle's vessel in the harbour of a Chinese river port. But Falk is a man haunted by the memory of a revolting deed; he shows it in his face, sombre, taciturn, sinister, and in his manner, his trick of periodically covering his features with both hands, and then drawing them downwards with a slow, shuddering movement, as though to wipe away the vision of a waking nightmare. The truth is that, once under the dire stress of shipwreck and starvation it had become evident that human flesh alone stood between a whole ship's crew and death. In the face of this horror, they had not drawn lots, but had fallen upon one another like wild beasts, and Falk, in whom the lust for life had been strongest, was the sole survivor. For six years this memory has haunted him; and now his suffering is doubled, because he has at last found a woman "generous of form, Olympian and simple, indeed the siren to fascinate the dark navigator," and he is confronted with the question whether any woman could knowingly wed a man who has been guilty of cannibalism.

Of Mr. Conrad's more recent books it is not necessary to speak at this time and in this place. Whatever he does, whether alone or in collaboration, whether in the form of fiction or personal reminiscence, is all essentially imbued with the same spirit, and stamped with the same careful and deliberate workmanship, the same daring originality of style. But the true, the unadulterated soul of Conrad is in the books of his middle period, in the shorter stories, such as Typhoon and Heart of Darkness, in novels like Nostromo and Lord Jim. To spend time analysing his tales of anarchists, whether in London, as in The Secret Agent, or in Russia, as in Under Western Eyes, would be for the present purpose an anticlimax. It is true that Mr. Conrad is a sort of literary amphibian; he is almost as much at home when writing of the land as of the sea. None the less, the latter is his true abode, and his best pages are those that deal with ships and harbours, docks and quays, sluggish tropical rivers, swarming water fronts, and

all the motley crowds, the flaring colours, the babel of speech, the unnumbered and indistinguishable mixture of racial types and nationalities, to be found nowhere on earth save where land and sea touch shoulders. Yet, if one were making a prediction, it would be safest to say that Mr. Conrad will live longest in his pages of the life on ships in mid-ocean. In certain unforgettable pages in The Mirror of the Sea, he tells us of a first mate under whom he once sailed, and who, during the long weeks spent in an Australian port, habitually returned from shore intoxicated, in the mid watches of the night. And one night, when more unsteady than usual, the mate lingered on deck a moment, swaying heavily and supporting himself on his companion's arm, and voiced his wish that he were out at sea: "Ports are no good; ships rot, men go to the devil!" And that one sentence sums up the difference between Conrad's stories of the sea and of the harbour. They are equally good, equally poignant with truth; but on the one hand, they breathe freely of ozone and clean salt spray, and simple faith and bravery; and on the other, they are redolent of physical and moral decay: "Ships rot, men go to the devil." Throughout Conrad's stories, he shows us man fighting a losing fight; but at sea it is a physical fight, and on land it is a moral one. In either case, his workmanship remains, as it always has been, very nearly flawless.