e bald and
shocking sort of drama has an obviously autobiographical basis. His own
road ran into strange places in the days of his youth. He moved among
men who were menaced by all the terrestrial cruelties, and by the almost
unchecked rivalry and rapacity of their fellow men, without any
appreciable barriers, whether of law, of convention or of
sentimentality, to shield them. The struggle for existence, as he saw
it, was well nigh as purely physical among human beings as among the
carnivora of the jungle. Some of his stories, and among them his very
best, are plainly little more than transcripts of his own experience. He
himself is the enchanted boy of "Youth"; he is the ship-master of "Heart
of Darkness"; he hovers in the background of all the island books and is
visibly present in most of the tales of the sea.

And what he got out of that early experience was more than a mere body
of reminiscence; it was a scheme of valuations. He came to his writing
years with a sailor's disdain for the trifling hazards and emprises of
market places and drawing rooms, and it shows itself whenever he sets
pen to paper. A conflict, it would seem, can make no impression upon him
save it be colossal. When his men combat, not nature, but other men,
they carry over into the business the gigantic method of sailors
battling with a tempest. "The Secret Agent" and "Under Western Eyes"
fill the dull back streets of London and Geneva with pursuits, homicides
and dynamitings. "Nostromo" is a long record of treacheries, butcheries
and carnalities. "A Point of Honor" is coloured by the senseless,
insatiable ferocity of Gobineau's "Renaissance." "Victory" ends with a
massacre of all the chief personages, a veritable catastrophe of blood.
Whenever he turns from the starker lusts to the pale passions of man
under civilization, Conrad fails. "The Return" is a thoroughly infirm
piece of writing--a second rate magazine story. One concludes at once
that the author himself does not believe in it. "The Inheritors" is
worse; it becomes, after the first few pages, a flaccid artificiality, a
bore. It is impossible to imagine the chief characters of the Conrad
gallery in such scenes. Think of Captain MacWhirr reacting to social
tradition, Lord Jim immersed in the class war, Lena Hermann seduced by
the fashions, Almayer a candidate for office! As well think of
Huckleberry Finn at Harvard, or Tom Jones practising law.

These things do not interest Conrad, chief