hich go with the
invention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented
snarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of anarchists are to be
found in "The Secret Agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, of
late, to so-called Reds. "Youth," as a story, is no more than an
orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell contrived better ones. In
"Chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory"
there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melodramas of the Spanish
Main. In "Nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of Richard
Harding Davis and O. Henry. And in "Under Western Eyes" the protagonist
is one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situation
at the heart of all the military melodramas ever written.

But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbish
from the lumber room of the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under
Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories. The plot is that of
"Shenandoah" and "Held by the Enemy"--but how brilliantly it is endowed
with a new significance, how penetratingly its remotest currents are
followed out, how magnificently it is made to fit into that colossal
panorama of Holy Russia! It is always this background, this complex of
obscure and baffling influences, this drama under the drama, that Conrad
spends his skill upon, and not the obvious commerce of the actual stage.
It is not the special effect that he seeks, but the general effect. It
is not so much man the individual that interests him, as the shadowy
accumulation of traditions, instincts and blind chances which shapes the
individual's destiny. Here, true enough, we have a full-length portrait
of Razumov, glowing with life. But here, far more importantly, we also
have an amazingly meticulous and illuminating study of the Russian
character, with all its confused mingling of Western realism and
Oriental fogginess, its crazy tendency to go shooting off into the
spaces of an incomprehensible metaphysic, its general transcendence of
all that we Celts and Saxons and Latins hold to be true of human motive
and human act. Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of
the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of
the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea
stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast
and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's etern