d tells us that his own acquaintance with
English literature began at the age of eight with _The Two Gentlemen of
Verona_, which his father had translated into Polish. He has given us a
picture of the child he then was (dressed in a black blouse with a white
border in mourning for his mother) as he knelt in his father's study
chair, "with my elbows on the table and my head held in both hands over
the pile of loose pages." While he was still a boy he read Hugo and _Don
Quixote_ and Dickens, and a great deal of history, poetry, and travel.
He had also been fascinated by the map. It may be said of him even in
his childhood, as Sir Thomas Browne has said in general of every human
being, that Africa and all her prodigies were within him. No passage in
his autobiography suggests the first prophecy of his career so markedly
as that in which he writes: "It was in 1868, when nine years old or
thereabouts, that while looking at a map of Africa of the time and
putting my finger on the blank space then representing the unsolved
mystery of that continent, I said to myself with absolute assurance and
an amazing audacity which are no longer in my character now: 'When I
grow up I shall go _there_.'" Mr. Conrad's genius, his consciousness of
his destiny, may be said to have come to birth in that hour. What but
the second sight of genius could have told this inland child that he
would one day escape from the torturing round of rebellion in which the
soul of his people was imprisoned to the sunless jungles and secret
rivers of Africa, where he would find an imperishable booty of wonder
and monstrous fear? Many people regard _Heart of Darkness_ as his
greatest story. _Heart of Darkness_ surely began to be written on the
day on which the boy of nine "or thereabouts" put his finger on the
blank space of the map of Africa and prophesied.

He was in no hurry, however, to accomplish his destiny. Mr. Conrad has
never been in a hurry, even in telling a story. He has waited on fate
rather than run to meet it. "I was never," he declares, "one of those
wonderful fellows that would go afloat in a washtub for the sake of the
fun." On the other hand, he seems always to have followed in his own
determined fashion certain sudden intuitions, much as great generals and
saints do. Alexander or Napoleon could not have seized the future with a
more splendid defiance of reason than did Mr. Conrad, when, though he
did not yet know six words of English, he came t