al
striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has
found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of the
Narcissus," and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea," a poetic
evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside
the ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill
that is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorial
vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and
surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he
gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which
they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of that
inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself. The sea to
him is a living thing, an omnipotent and unfathomable thing, almost a
god. He sees it as the Eternal Enemy, deceitful in its caresses, sudden
in its rages, relentless in its enmities, and forever a mystery.

Sec. 6

Conrad's first novel, "Almayer's Folly," was printed in 1895. He tells
us in "A Personal Record" that it took him seven years to write
it--seven years of pertinacious effort, of trial and error, of learning
how to write. He was, at this time thirty-eight years old. Seventeen
years before, landing in England to fit himself for the British merchant
service, he had made his first acquaintance with the English language.
The interval had been spent almost continuously at sea--in the Eastern
islands, along the China coast, on the Congo and in the South Atlantic.
That he hesitated between French and English is a story often told, but
he himself is authority for the statement that it is more symbolical
than true. Flaubert, in those days, was his idol, as we know, but the
speech of his daily business won, and English literature reaped the
greatest of all its usufructs from English sea power. To this day there
are marks of his origins in his style. His periods, more than once, have
an inept and foreign smack. In fishing for the right phrase one
sometimes feels that he finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase,
and that it loses something by being done into English.

The credit for discovering "Almayer's Folly," as the publishers say,
belongs to Edward Garnett, then a reader for T. Fisher Unwin. The book
was brought out modestly and seems to have received little attention.
The first edition, it would appear, ran to no more than a thousand
copies; at all eve