Joseph Conrad
Chance. Lord Jim. Victory.
Youth. Almayer's Folly. Published by Doubleday Page & Co. with a critical monograph, so admirably written (it is given gratis) by Wilson Follet that one longs to see more criticism from such an accomplished hand.
Conrad's work - and, considering his foreign origin and his late choice of English as a medium of expression, it is no less than an astounding achievement-is work of the very highest literary and " psychological value. It is, indeed, as Mr. Follet says, only such criticism as is passionately anxious to prove for itself the true romance of the intellect" that can hope to deal adequately with such an output. The background of Conrad's books is primarily the sea itself; and after the sea, ships. No one has indicated the extraordinary romance of ships in the way he has done - of ships in the open sea, in the harbour, at the wharf, or driven far up some perilous tropical river.
But it is neither the sea nor the tropical recesses nor the sun-scorched river-edges of his backgrounds that make up the essence of romance in the Conrad books. This is found in nothing less than the mysterious potencies for courage and for fear, for good and for evil, of human beings themselves - of human beings isolated by some external "diablerie " which throws every feature of them into terrible and baffling relief.
The finest and deepest effects of Conrad's art are always found when, in the process of the story, some solitary man and woman encounter each other, far from civilization, and tearing off, as it were, the mask of one another's souls, are confronted by a deeper and more inveterate mystery - the eternal mystery of difference, which separates all men born into the world and keeps us perpetually alone. In the case of Heyst and Lena - of Flora de Barral and her Captain Anthony - of Charles and Mrs.
Gould- of Aissa and Willems - of Almayer's daughter and her Malay lover, Mr. Conrad takes up the ancient planetary theme of the loves of men and women and throws upon it a sudden, original, and singularly stimulating light; a light, that like a lantern carried down into the very Cave of the "Mothers," throws its flickering and ambiguous rays over the large, dumb, formless shapes - the primordial motives of human hearts - which grope and fumble in that thick darkness.
The style of Conrad, simpler than that of James, less monumental than that of Hardy, has nevertheless a certain forward-driving impetus hardly less effective than these more famous mediums of expression. "Lord Jim" is perhaps his masterpiece and may be regarded as the most interesting book written recently in our language with the exception of Henry James' "Golden Bowl." For sheer excitement and the thrilling sensation of delayed dénouement it must be conceded that not one of our classical novelists can touch Conrad. "Victory" remains an absorbing evidence of his power of concentrating at one and the same moment our dramatic and our psychological interest.