is the shadowy Marlow, a
"cloak to goe inbisabell" for Conrad himself. In "Chance" there are two
separate stories, imperfectly welded together. Elsewhere there are
hesitations, goings back, interpolations, interludes in the Socratic
manner. And almost always there is heaviness in the getting under weigh.
In "Heart of Darkness" we are on the twentieth page before we see the
mouth of the great river, and in "Falk" we are on the twenty-fourth
before we get a glimpse of Falk. "Chance" is nearly half done before the
drift of the action is clearly apparent. In "Almayer's Folly" we are
thrown into the middle of a story, and do not discover its beginning
until we come to "An Outcast of the Islands," a later book. As in
structure, so in detail. Conrad pauses to explain, to speculate, to look
about. Whole chapters concern themselves with detailed discussions of
motives, with exchanges of views, with generalizations abandoned as soon
as they are made. Even the author's own story, "A Personal Record" (in
the English edition, "Some Reminiscences") starts near the end, and then
goes back, halting tortuously, to the beginning.

In the eyes of orthodox criticism, of course, this is a grave fault.
The Kipling-Wells style of swift, shouldering, button-holing writing has
accustomed readers and critics alike to a straight course and a rapid
tempo. Moreover, it has accustomed them to a forthright certainty and
directness of statement; they expect an author to account for his
characters at once, and on grounds instantly comprehensible. This
omniscience is a part of the prodigality of moral theory that I have
been discussing. An author who knows just what is the matter with the
world may be quite reasonably expected to know just what is the matter
with his hero. Neither sort of assurance, I need not say, is to be found
in Conrad. He is an inquirer, not a law-giver; an experimentalist, not a
doctor. One constantly derives from his stories the notion that he is as
much puzzled by his characters as the reader is--that he, too, is
feeling his way among shadowy evidences. The discoveries that we make,
about Lord Jim, about Nostromo or about Kurtz, come as fortuitously and
as unexpectedly as the discoveries we make about the real figures of our
world. The picture is built up bit by bit; it is never flashed suddenly
and completely as by best-seller calciums; it remains a bit dim at the
end. But in that very dimness, so tantalizing and yet so revealin