rst
time and in an alien tongue, and, added to an almost abnormal power of
description, possessed the art of laying bare the human soul, not
after the meticulous manner of the modern Paul Prys of psychology, but
following the larger method of Flaubert, who believed that actions
should translate character--imagine these paradoxes and you have
partly imagined Joseph Conrad, who has so finely said that
"imagination, and not invention, is the supreme master of art as of
life."

He has taken the sea-romance of Smollett, Marryat, Melville, Dana,
Clark Russell, Stevenson, Becke, Kipling, and for its well-worn
situations has substituted not only many novel nuances, but invaded
new territory, revealed obscure atavisms and the psychology lurking
behind the mask of the savage, the transpositions of dark souls, and
shown us a world of "kings, demagogues, priests, charlatans, dukes,
giraffes, cabinet ministers, bricklayers, apostles, ants, scientists,
Kaffirs, soldiers, sailors, elephants, lawyers, dandies, microbes, and
constellations of a universe whose amazing spectacle is a moral end in
itself." In his Reminiscences Mr. Conrad has told us, with the
surface frankness of a Pole, the genesis of his literary debut of
Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fashion throws
fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character--reminding me in the
juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old
tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed
Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers,
Conrad has only given us a tantalising peep into his mental workshop.
We rise after finishing the Reminiscences realising that we have read
once more romance, in whose half-lights and modest evasions we catch
fleeting glimpses of reality. Reticence is a distinctive quality of
this author; after all, isn't truth an idea that traverses a
temperament?

That many of his stories were in the best sense "lived" there can be
no doubt--he has at odd times confessed it, confessions painfully
wrung from him, as he is no friend of the interviewer. The white-hot
sharpness of the impressions which he has projected upon paper recalls
Taine's dictum: "les sensations sont des hallucinations vraies."
Veritable hallucinations are the seascapes and landscapes in the South
Sea stories, veritable hallucinations are the quotidian gestures and
speech of his anarchists and souls sailing on the winds of noble