erage human nature is
itself so hurting and rending a thing to the poignant susceptibilities
of a noble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate revenge upon it, it
goes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-Tamberlaines
Tamberlaine in bloody massacre.

What, however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not the
melodramatic violence of these tempestuous scenes, but the remote
psychological impulses at work behind them.

Where, in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from his
world-deep revelations of direct human feeling, is in his imaginative
fusion of some particular spiritual or material motif through the whole
fabric of a story.

Thus the desolate "hope against hope" of poor Almayer becomes a
thing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up,
fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness of
his surroundings, out of the debris and litter of his half-ruined
dwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out of
the stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mud
of his melancholy river.

Thus the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst's father--that
fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity--overshadows, like a
ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill
twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so
ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic
son. It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the final
issue, really and truly counts. For it is a matter of small significance
whether the scene of a writer's choice be the uplands of Wessex or
the jungles of the tropics, as long as that ironic and passionate
consciousness of the astounding drama--of men and women being
the baffled and broken things they are--rises into unmitigated
relief and holds us spell-bound. And beyond and above this
overshadowing in his stories of man's fate by some particular burden
of symbolic implication, Conrad flings the passionate flame of his
imagination into the words of every single sentence.

That is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction. That is
why it has such sudden surprises for us, such sharp revelations, such
rare undertones. That is why after reading Conrad it is difficult to
return to the younger English writers of the realistic school.

One enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishing
thrill in the mere look of the words, as we see th