"little ironies." In
Chance, which describes the hypertrophy of a dolorous soul, he writes:

"It was one of those dewy, starry nights, oppressing our spirit,
crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness,
of the hopeless, obscure magnificence of our globe lost in the
splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.... Daylight is
friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy,
soft nights are more kindly to our littleness."

To match that one must go to Thomas Hardy, to the eloquent passage
describing the terrors of infinite space in Two on a Tower. However,
Conrad is not often given to such Hamlet-like moods. The shock and
recoil of circumstances, the fatalities of chance, and the vagaries of
human conduct intrigue his intention more than the night side of the
soul. Yet, how well he has observed the paralysis of will caused by
fear. In An Outpost of Progress is the following: "Fear always
remains. A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate
and belief, and even doubt; but as he clings to life he cannot destroy
fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible that pervades his
being, that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle
of his last breath...."

III

It has been said that women do not read him, but according to my
limited experience I believe the contrary. (Where, indeed, would any
novelist be if it were not for women?) He has said of Woman: "She is
the active partner in the great adventure of humanity on earth and
feels an interest in all its episodes." He does not idealise the sex,
like George Meredith, nor yet does he describe the baseness of the
Eternal Simpleton, as do so many French novelists. He is not always
complimentary: witness the portrait of Mrs. Fyne in Chance, or the
mosaic of anti-feminist opinions to be found in that story. That he
succeeded better with his men is a commonplace of all masculine
writers, not that women always succeed with their sex, but to many
masters of imaginative literature woman is usually a poet's evocation,
not the creature of flesh and blood and bones, of sense and sentiment,
that she is in real life. Conrad opens no new windows in her soul, but
he has painted some full-length portraits and made many lifelike
sketches, which are inevitable. From the shining presence of his
mother, the assemblage of a few traits in his Reminiscences, to Flora
d