forlorn hopes to playing
Chopin the Poles are unequalled. Mr. Conrad has returned to his old
habitat in fiction. An ingenious map shows the reader precisely where
his tragic tale is enacted. It may not be his most artistic, but it is
an engrossing story. Compared with Chance, it seems a cast-back to
primitive souls; but as no man after writing such an extraordinary
book as Chance will ever escape its influence (after his Golden Bowl,
Mr. James was quite another James), so Joseph Conrad's firmer grasp on
the burin of psychology shows very plainly in Victory; that is, he
deals with elemental causes, but the effects are given in a subtle
series of reactions. He never drew a girl but once like Flora de
Barral; and, till now, never a man like the Swede, Axel Heyst, who
has been called, most appropriately, "a South Sea Hamlet." He has a
Hamletic soul, this attractive young man, born with a metaphysical
caul, which eventually strangles him. No one but Conrad would dare the
mingling of such two dissociated genres as the romantic and the
analytic, and if, here and there, the bleak rites of the one, and the
lush sentiment of the other, fail to modulate, it is because the
artistic undertaking is a well-nigh impossible one. Briefly, Victory
relates the adventures of a gentleman and scholar in the Antipodes. He
meets a girl, a fiddler in a "Ladies' Orchestra," falls in love, as do
men of lofty ideals and no sense of the practical, goes off with her
to a lonely island, there to fight for her possession and his own
life. The stage-setting is magnificent; even a volcano lights the
scene. But the clear, hard-blue sky is quite o'erspread by the black
bat Melancholia, and the silence is indeed "dazzling." The villains
are melodramatic enough in their behaviour, but, as portraits, they
are artfully different from the conventional bad men of fiction. The
thin chap, Mr. Jones, is truly sinister, and there is a horrid
implication in his woman-hating, which vaguely peeps out in the bloody
finale. The hairy servant might be a graduate from The Island of
Doctor Moreau of Mr. Wells--one of the beast folk; while the murderous
henchman, Ricardo, is unpleasantly put before us. I like the girl; it
would have been so easy to spoil her with moralising; but the Baron
is the magnet, and, as a counterfoil, the diabolical German hotel
keeper. There is too much arbitrary handling at the close for my
taste. Only in the opening chapters of Victory does Mr. Co