eft wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt
at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser,
more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort
of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to
last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact. His stories are
not chronicles of men who conquer fate, nor of men who are unbent and
undaunted by fate, but of men who are conquered and undone. Each
protagonist is a new Prometheus, with a sardonic ignominy piled upon his
helplessness. Each goes down a Greek route to defeat and disaster,
leaving nothing behind him save an unanswered question. I can scarcely
recall an exception. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Razumov, Nostromo, Captain
Whalley, Yanko Goorall, Verloc, Heyst, Gaspar Ruiz, Almayer: one and all
they are destroyed and made a mock of by the blind, incomprehensible
forces that beset them.

Even in "Youth," "Typhoon," and "The Shadow Line," superficially stories
of the indomitable, that same consuming melancholy, that same pressing
sense of the irresistible and inexplicable, is always just beneath the
surface. Captain Mac Whirr gets the _Nan-Shan_ to port at last, but it
is a victory that stands quite outside the man himself; he is no more
than a marker in the unfathomable game; the elemental forces, fighting
one another, almost disregard him; the view of him that we get is one
of disdain, almost one of contempt. So, too, in "Youth." A tale of the
spirit's triumph, of youth besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me
its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it
is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years
have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods
have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The
whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an
incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic
record of heroic and yet bootless effort, that matchless picture, in
microcosm, of the relentlessly cruel revolutions in the macrocosm!

Mr. Follett, perhaps with too much critical facility, finds the cause of
Conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life--his
double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is
surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must
be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been ba