nts, specimens of it are now very hard to find, and
collectors pay high prices for them. When "An Outcast of the Islands"
followed, a year later, a few alert readers began to take notice of the
author, and one of them was Sir (then Mr.) Hugh Clifford, a former
Governor of the Federated Malay States and himself the author of several
excellent books upon the Malay. Clifford gave Conrad encouragement
privately and talked him up in literary circles, but the majority of
English critics remained unaware of him. After an interval of two years,
during which he struggled between his desire to write and the temptation
to return to the sea, he published "The Nigger of the Narcissus."[7] It
made a fair success of esteem, but still there was no recognition of the
author's true stature. Then followed "Tales of Unrest" and "Lord Jim,"
and after them the feeblest of all the Conrad books, "The Inheritors,"
written in collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer. It is easy to see in
this collaboration, and no less in the character of the book, an
indication of irresolution, and perhaps even of downright loss of hope.
But success, in fact, was just around the corner. In 1902 came "Youth,"
and straightway Conrad was the lion of literary London. The chorus of
approval that greeted it was almost a roar; all sorts of critics and
reviewers, from H. G. Wells to W. L. Courtney, and from John Galsworthy
to W. Robertson Nicoll, took a hand. Writing home to the _New York
Times_, W. L. Alden reported that he had "not heard one dissenting voice
in regard to the book," but that the praise it received "was unanimous,"
and that the newspapers and literary weeklies rivalled one another "in
their efforts to express their admiration for it."

This benign whooping, however, failed to awaken the enthusiasm of the
mass of novel-readers and brought but meagre orders from the circulating
libraries. "Typhoon" came upon the heels of "Youth," but still the sales
of the Conrad books continued small and the author remained in very
uncomfortable circumstances. Even after four or five years he was still
so poor that he was glad to accept a modest pension from the British
Civil List. This official recognition of his genius, when it came at
last, seems to have impressed the public, characteristically enough, far
more than his books themselves had done, and the foundations were thus
laid for that wider recognition of his genius which now prevails. But
getting him on his legs wa