rtment where they were most powerfully maintained. But it seems to
me now that his abstinence has not been the fruit of timidity, but of
disdain. He has shied at the hypothesis, not at its implications. His
whole work, in truth, is a destructive criticism of the prevailing
notion that such a story is momentous and worth telling. The current
gyneolatry is as far outside his scheme of things as the current program
of rewards and punishments, sins and virtues, causes and effects. He not
only sees clearly that the destiny and soul of man are not moulded by
petty jousts of sex, as the prophets of romantic love would have us
believe; he is so impatient of the fallacy that he puts it as far behind
him as possible, and sets his conflicts amid scenes that it cannot
penetrate, save as a palpable absurdity. Love, in his stories, is either
a feeble phosphorescence or a gigantic grotesquerie. In "Heart of
Darkness," perhaps, we get his typical view of it. Over all the frenzy
and horror of the tale itself floats the irony of the trusting heart
back in Brussels. Here we have his measure of the master sentimentality
of them all....

Sec. 4

As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to
Conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write
about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form,
his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his
frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative,
sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative. "Lord Jim," for example, starts out
in the third person, presently swings into an exhaustive psychological
discussion by the mythical Marlow, then goes into a brisk narrative at
second (and sometimes at third) hand, and finally comes to a halt upon
an unresolved dissonance, a half-heard chord of the ninth: "And that's
the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten,
unforgiven, and excessively romantic." "Falk" is also a story within a
story; this time the narrator is "one who had not spoken before, a man
over fifty." In "Amy Foster" romance is filtered through the prosaic
soul of a country doctor; it is almost as if a statistician told the
tale of Horatius at the bridge. In "Under Western Eyes" the obfuscation
is achieved by "a teacher of languages," endlessly lamenting his lack of
the "high gifts of imagination and expression." In "Youth" and "Heart
of Darkness" the chronicler and speculator