nsity to justify my action. Not to defend. To
justify. Not to insist that I was right but simply to explain that there
was no perverse intention, no secret scorn for the natural sensibilities
of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.

That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to
the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested
in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile
and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious.
He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It's obvious
that I need not have written that book. I was under no necessity to deal
with that subject; using the word subject both in the sense of the tale
itself and in the larger one of a special manifestation in the life of
mankind. This I fully admit. But the thought of elaborating mere
ugliness in order to shock, or even simply to surprise my readers by a
change of front, has never entered my head. In making this statement I
expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character
but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment
of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt,
prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in
the outward circumstances of the setting.

The inception of "The Secret Agent" followed immediately on a two
years' period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote
novel, "Nostromo," with its far off Latin-American atmosphere; and the
profoundly personal "Mirror of the Sea." The first an intense creative
effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the
second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder
intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my
life-time. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of
things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional
readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made
me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst
mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior,
values.

I don't know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my
imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. I rather think that
a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I
don't remember anything definite happening. With "The Mirror of the