and
sinister passions. For Conrad is on one side an implacable realist....
Unforgetable are his delineations of sudden little rivers never
charted and their shallow, turbid waters, the sombre flux of
immemorial forests under the crescent cone of night, and undergrowth
overlapping the banks, the tragic chaos of rising storms, hordes of
clouds sailing low on the horizon, the silhouettes of lazy, majestic
mountains, the lugubrious magic of the tropical night, the mysterious
drums of the natives, and the darkness that one can feel, taste,
smell. What a gulf of incertitudes for white men is evoked for us in
vivid, concrete terms. Unforgetable, too, the hallucinated actions of
the student Razumov the night Victor Haldin, after launching the fatal
bomb, seeks his room, his assistance, in that masterpiece, Under
Western Eyes. But realist as Conrad is, he is also a poet who knows,
as he says himself, that "the power of sound has always been greater
than the power of sense." (Reason is a poor halter with which to lead
mankind to drink at the well of truth.) He woos the ear with his
singing prose as he ravishes the eye with his pictures. In his
little-known study of Henry James he wrote: "All creative art is
magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening,
familiar, and surprising," and finally, "Fiction is history, human
history, or it is nothing." Often a writer tells us more of himself in
criticising a fellow craftsman than in any formal aesthetic
pronunciamiento. We soon find out the likes and dislikes of Mr. Conrad
in this particular essay, and also what might be described as the
keelson of his workaday philosophy: "All adventure, all love, every
success, is resumed in the supreme energy of renunciation. It is the
utmost limit of our power." No wonder his tutor, half in anger, half
in sorrow, exclaimed: "You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote."

I suppose a long list might be made of foreigners who have mastered
the English language and written it with ease and elegance, yet I
cannot recall one who has so completely absorbed native idioms, who
has made for himself an English mind (without losing his profound and
supersubtle Slavic soul), as has Joseph Conrad. He is unique as
stylist. He first read English literature in Polish translations, then
in the original; he read not only the Bible and Shakespeare, but
Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, and Thackeray; above all, Dickens. He
followed no regular course