Westerners term "exotic atmosphere." The Malay coasts and rivers of "Almayer's Folly," "An Outcast of the Islands" and the first pages of "The Rescue"; the Congo of "Heart of Darkness"; the Central Southern America of "Nostromo," with many other land and sea scapes, are bits of atmospheric painting "in excelsis." Only one expression adequately describes the sensations of us who read "Almayer's Folly" in 1894. We rubbed our eyes. Conrad was critically accepted from the very start; he never published a book that did not rouse a chorus of praise; but it was twenty years before he was welcomed by the public with sufficient warmth to give him a decent income.

"Chance," in 1914-an indifferent Conrad at last brought him fortune. From that year on to the end his books sold well; yet, with the exception of "The Secret Sharer" and some parts of "Victory," none of his work in that late period was quite up to his own exalted mark. Was it natural that popular success should have coincided with the lesser excellence; or was it simply an example of how long the strange takes to pierce the pickled hide of the reader of fiction?

It does disservice to Conrad's memory to be indiscriminate in praise of his work. Already, in reaction from this wholesale laudation, one notices a tendency in the younger generation to tilt the nose skyward and talk of his "parade." The shining work of his great period was before their time; it places him among the finest writers of all ages. Conrad's work, from "An Outcast of the Islands" to "The Secret Agent," his work in "The Secret Sharer," in the first chapters of "The Rescue" (written in 1898), and in some portions of "Victory," are to his work in "The Arrow of Gold" and the last part of "The Rescue," as the value of pearl to that of mother-of-pearl. He was very tired toward the end; he wore himself clean out. To judge him by tired work is absurd; to lump all his work together, as if he were always the same Conrad, imperils a just estimate of his great

ness.

I first re-encountered Conrad some months after that voyage when we paid a visit together to "Carmen" at Covent

Garden Opera. with us both. It was already his fourteenth time of seeing that really dramatic opera. The blare of Wagner left him as cold as it leaves me; but he had a curious fancy for Meyerbeer. In June 1910 he wrote: "I suppose I am now the only human being in these islands who thinks Meyerbeer a great composer; and I am an alien at that, and not to be wholly trusted." But music, fond though he was of it, could play no great part in a life spent at sea, and, after his marriage in 1895, in the country. He went up to town but seldom. He wrote always with blood and tears and needed seclusion for it. A letter to me, from Pent Farm in July 1900, thus describes the finish of "Lord Jim." "The end of 'Lord Jim' has been pulled off with a steady drag of twentyone hours. I sent wife and child out of the house (to London) and sat down at 9 A. M. with a desperate resolve to be done with it. Now and then I took a walk round the house, out at one door, in at the other. Ten-minute meals a great hush. Cigarette ends growing into a mound similar to a cairn over a dead hero. Moon rose over the barn, looked in at the window and climbed out of sight. Dawn broke, brightened. I put the lamp out, and went on with the morning breeze blowing the sheets of MS. all over the room. Sun rose. I wrote the last word and went into the dining-room. Six o'clock. I shared a piece of cold chicken with Escamillo" (his dog), "who was very miserable and in want of sympathy, having missed the child dreadfully all day. Felt very well, only sleepy; had a bath at seven, and at 8:30 was on my way to London."

"Carmen" was a vice

I find another letter, on the finish of "Nostromo."

PENT FARM,

1st September, 1904.

"Finished! Finished on the 30th, in Hope's house in Stanford in Essex, to which I had to take my brain that seemed to turn to water. For a solid fortnight I've been sitting up. And all the time horrible toothache. On the 27th had to wire for dentist (couldn't leave the work), who came at 2 and dragged at the infernal thing, which seemed rooted in my very soul. The horror came away at last,

leaving, however, one root in the gum. Then he grabbed for that till I leapt out of the chair. Thereupon he said: 'Don't think your nerves will stand any more of this.' I went back to my MS. at 6 P. M. At 11:30 something happened-what, I don't know. I was writing, and raised my eyes to look at the clock. The next thing I knew, I was sitting (not lying), sitting on the concrete outside the door. When I crawled in I found it was nearly one. I managed to get up-stairs and said to Jessie" (his wife): "We must be off tomorrow.' I took thirty drops of chlorodyne and slept till 7. At 10 the motorcar from Ashford was in the yard, a 12 h. p. Darracq. I sat by the man's side like a corpse. Between Canterbury and Faversham he said to me, 'You look ill, Sir. Shall I stop?' Sittingbourne I remember as a brandy and soda. Good road, twenty-four miles an hour. In Chatham street crowded, packed. Going dead slow. Knocked down a man-old chap, apparently a bricklayer. Crowd around, cursing and howling. Helped him to my front seat, and I, standing on the step, got him to the hospital. No harm, only shaken. Got to Hope's at 5. That night I slept. Worked all day. In the evening Mrs. Hope gave me four candles, and on I went. Finished at 3.'

I put this letter on record to show the painful and hectic conditions under which the end of "Nostromo" was written, because the melodramatic finish of that great book is the weakness thereof.

This spurt was characteristic of Conrad's endings; he finished most of his books in that way-his vivid nature instinctively staged itself with dramatic rushes. Moreover, all those long early years he worked under the whip-lash of sheer necessity. In 1909, writing to my wife, he says: "Excuse this discordant strain, but the fact is that I've just received the accounts of all my publishers, from which I perceive that all my immortal works (13 in all) have brought me last year something under five pounds in royalties. That sort of thing quenches that joie de vivre which should burn like a flame in an author's breast and, in the manner of an explosive engine, drive his pen onwards at thirty pages an hour."

A sailor and an artist, he had little sense of money. He was not of those who can budget exactly and keep within it; and anyway he had too little, however neatly budgeted. It is true that his dramatic instinct and his subtlety would take a sort of pleasure in plotting against the lack of money, but it was at best a lugubrious amusement for one who had to whip his brain along when he was tired, when he was ill, when he was almost desperate. Letter after letter, talk after talk, unfolded to me the travail of those years. He needed to be the Stoic he really

was.

I used to stay with him a good deal from 1895-1905, first at Stanford in Essex, and then at Stanford in Kent. He was indefatigably good to me while my own puppy's eyes were opening to literature. In 1901, when I was still in the early stages of that struggle with his craft which a writer worth his salt never quite abandons, he could write thus: "That the man who has written once the 'Four Winds,' has written now the 'Man of Devon' volume, is a source of infinite gratification to me. It vindicates my insight, my opinion, my judgment, and it satisfies my affection for you-in whom I believed and am believing. Because that is the point: I am believing. You've gone now beyond the point when I could be of use to you otherwise than just by my belief.”

His affectionate interest was always wholly generous like that. In his letters to me, two to three hundred, there is not a sentence which breaks, or even jars, the feeling that he cared that one should do good work. There is some valuable criticism, but never any impatience, and no stinting of appreciation or encouragement. He never went back on friendship. He never went back on anything, I think. The word "loyalty" has been much used by those who write or speak of him. It has been well used. He was always loyal to what he had at heart-to his philosophy, to his work, and to his friends; he was loyal even to his dislikes (not few) and to his scorn. People talk of Conrad as an aristocrat; I think it rather a silly word to apply to him. His mother's family, the Bebrowskis, were Polish landowners; the Korzeniowskis, too, his

father's family, came, I think, of landowning stock; but the word aristocrat is much too dry to fit Conrad; he had no touch with "ruling," no feeling for it, except, maybe, such as is necessary to sail a ship; he was first and last the rover and the artist, with such a first-hand knowledge of men and things that he was habitually impatient with labels and pigeonholes, with cheap theorizing and word debauchery. He stared life very much in the face, and distrusted those who don't. Above all, he had the keen humor which spifflicates all class and catalogues, and all ideals and aspirations that are not grounded in the simplest springs of human nature. He laughed at the clichés of socalled civilization. His sense of humor, indeed, was far greater than one might think from his work. He had an almost ferocious enjoyment of the absurd. Writing seemed to dry or sardonize his sense of fun. "Borys" (his eldest son, then very small) "wants to know whether you are related to Jack the Giant-Killer-otherwise he is well." In a letter to my wife he thus describes the advent of his second son, who happened to be born in our house. "He arrived here to-day at 9:30 A. M. in a modest and unassuming manner which struck me very favorably. His manner is quiet-somnolent, his eyes contemplative, his forehead noble, his stature short, his nose pug, his countenance ruddy and weather-beaten." Referring to a little harmless carriage accident we had at Charing Cross, he writes: "I always feel that the bit of Strand in front of Charing Cross Station is about as near Eternity as any spot on earth." But in conversation his sense of fun was much more vivid; it would leap up in the midst of gloom or worry, and take charge with a shout.

Conrad had six country homes after his marriage, besides two temporary abodes. He wrote jestingly to my wife: "Houses are naturally rebellious and inimical to And, perhaps, having lived so much on ships, he really had a feeling of that sort. He certainly grew tired of them after a time.

I best remember Pent Farm-that little, very old, charming, if inconvenient, farmhouse, with its great barn beyond the yard, under the lee of the almost overhanging Pent. It was a friendly dwelling

where you had to mind your head in connection with beams; and from whose windows you watched ducks and cats and lambs in the meadows beyond. He liked those quiet fields and that sheltering hill. Though he was not what we should call a "lover of nature" in the sense of one who spends long hours lost in the life of birds and flowers, of animals and trees, he could be vividly impressed by the charm and the variety of such things. He was fond, too, of Hudson's books; and no lover of Hudson's work is insensible to nature.

66

In Conrad's study at the Pent, we burned together many midnight candles, much tobacco. In that house was written some of the "Youth" volume, "Lord Jim," most of the "Typhoon" volume, 'Nostromo," "The Mirror of the Sea," "The Secret Agent," and other of Conrad's best work. Save that "The Nigger of the Narcissus" and the story "Youth" were written just before, at Stanford in Essex, the Pent may be said to synchronize with Conrad's best period. Kent was undoubtedly the county of his adoption, and this was the first of his four Kentish homes. Many might suppose that Conrad would naturally settle by the sea. He never did. He had seen too much of it; like the sailor, who when he turns into his bunk takes care that no sea air shall come in, he lived always well inland. The sea was no friend of one too familiar with its moods. He disliked being labelled a novelist of the sea. He wrote of the sea, as perhaps no one, not even Herman Melville, has written; but dominant in all his writing of the sea is the note of struggle and escape. His hero is not the sea, but man in conflict with that cruel and treacherous element. Ships he loved, but the sea-no. Not that he ever abused it, or talked of it with aversion; he accepted it as he accepted all the inscrutable remorselessness of Nature. It was man's job to confront Nature with a loyal and steady heart-that was Conrad's creed, his contribution to the dignity of life. Is there a better? First and last he was interested in men, fascinated by the terrific spectacle of their struggles in a cosmos about which he had no illusions. He was sardonic, but he had none of the cynicism characteristic of small, cold-hearted beings.

He customarily labored in the morning, and often would sit long hours over a single page. In 1906, when he was staying in our London house, he wrote to my wife: "I don't know that I am writing much in the little wooden house" (out in the garden), "but I smoke there religiously for 31⁄2 hours every morning, with a sheet of paper before me and an American fountain pen in my hand. What more could be expected from a conscientious author, I can't imagine."

In later years, when his enemy, gout, often attacked his writing hand, he was obliged to resort a good deal to dictation of first drafts. I cannot but believe that his work suffered from that necessity. But there were other and increasing handicaps the war, which he felt keenly, and those constant bouts of ill-health which dragged at his marvellous natural vitality. I think I never saw Conrad quite in repose. His hands, his feet; his knees, his lips-sensitive, expressive, and ironical-something was always in motion, the dynamo never quite at rest within him. His mind was extraordinarily active and his memory most retentive, so that he stored with wonderful accuracy all the observations of his darkbrown eyes, that were so piercing and yet could be so soft. He had the precious faculty of interest in detail. To that we owe his pictures of scenes and life long past-their compelling verisimilitude, the intensely vivid variety of their composition. The storehouse of his subconscious self was probably as interesting and comprehensive a museum as any, in the world. It is from the material in our subconscious minds that we create. Conrad's eyes never ceased snapshotting; and the millions of photographs they took were laid away by him to draw on. Besides, he was not hampered in his natural watchfulness by the preoccupation of an egoistic personality. He was not an egoist; he had far too much curiosity and genuine interest in things and people to be that. I don't mean to say that he had not an interest in himself and a belief in his own powers. His allusions to his work are generally disparaging; but at heart he knew the value of his gifts; and he liked appreciation, especially from those (not many) in whose judgment he had faith. He re

ceived more praise, probably, than any other writer of our time; but he never suffered from that parvenu disease, swelled head; and “I,” “I,” “I," played no part in his talk.

People have speculated on the literary influences that for him were formative. Flaubert and Henry James have been cited as his spiritual fathers. It won't do. Conrad was a most voracious reader, and he was trilingual. A Slav temperament, a life of duty and adventure, vast varied reading, and the English language

those were the elements from which his highly individual work emerged. Not I, who have so often heard him speak of them, will deny his admiration for Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgenev, and Henry James: but one has only to read Conrad's first book, "Almayer's Folly," to perceive that he started out on a path of his own, with a method quite peculiar to himself, involuted to a dangerous degree, perhaps; and I can trace no definite influence on him by any writer. He was as different from Henry James as East from West. Both had a certain natural intricacy and a super-psychological bent, but there the likeness stops. As for Flaubert-whom he read with constancy

that conscientious Frenchman and determined stylist could do nothing for Conrad except give him pleasure. No one could help Conrad. He had to subdue to the purposes of his imagination a language that was not native to him; to work in a medium that was not the natural clothing of his Polish temperament. There were no guides to the desert that he crossed. I think perhaps he most delighted in the writings of Turgenev, but there is not the slightest evidence that he was influenced by him. He loved Turgenev's personality, and disliked Tolstoi's. The name Dostoievski was in the nature of a red rag to him. I am told that he once admitted that Dostoievski was "deep as the sea." Perhaps that was why he could not bear him, or possibly it was that Dostoievski was too imbued with Russian essence for Polish appetite. In any case, his riderless extremisms offended something deep in Conrad.

I have spoken of his affection for Dickens. Trollope he liked. Thackeray I think not over much, though he had a

due regard for such creations as Major Pendennis. Meredith's characters to him were "seven feet high," and his style too inflated. He admired Hardy's poetry. He always spoke with appreciation of Howells, especially of the admirable "Rise of Silas Lapham." His affectionate admiration for Stephen Crane we know from his introduction to Thomas Beers's biography of that gifted writer. Henry James in his middle period-the Henry James of "Daisy Miller," "The Madonna of the Future," "Greville Fane," "The Real Thing," "The Pension Beaurepas" -was precious to him. But of his feeling for that delicate master, for Anatole France, De Maupassant, Daudet, and Turgenev, he has written in his "Notes on Life and Letters." I remember he had a great liking for those two very different writers Balzac and Merimée.

Of philosophy he had read a good deal, but on the whole spoke little. Schopenhauer used to give him satisfaction twenty years and more ago, and he liked both the personality and the writings of William James.

I saw little of Conrad during the war. Of whom did one see much? He was caught in Poland at the opening of that business, and it was some months before he succeeded in getting home. Tall words such as "War to end War" left him, a Continental and a realist, appropriately cold. When it was over he wrote: "So I send these few lines to convey to you both all possible good wishes for unbroken felicity in your new home and many years of peace. At the same time I'll confess that neither felicity nor peace inspire me with much confidence. There is an air of 'the packed valise' about these two divine but unfashionable figures. I suppose the North Pole would be the only place for them, where there is neither thought nor heat, where the very water is stable, and the democratic bawlings of the virtuous leaders of mankind die out into a frozen, unsympathetic silence." Conrad had always a great regard for men of action, for workmen who stuck to their last and did their own jobs well; he had a corresponding distrust of amateur omniscience and handy wiseacres; he curled his lip at political and journalistic protestation; cheap-jackery and clap-trap of all sorts VOL. LXXVII.-2

drew from him a somewhat violently expressed detestation. I suppose what he most despised in life was ill-educated theory, and what he most hated, blatancy and pretence. He smelled it coming round the corner and at once his bristles would rise. He was an extremely quick judge of a man. I remember a dinner convoked by me, that he might meet a compatriot of his own married to one who was not a compatriot. The instant dislike he took to that individual was so full of electricity that we did not dine in comfort. The dislike was entirely merited. This quick instinct for character and types inimical to him was balanced by equally sure predilections, so that his friendships were always, or nearly always, lasting-I can think of only one exception. He illustrated vividly the profound truth that friendship is very much an affair of nerves, grounded in instinct rather than in reason or in circumstance, the outcome of a sort of deep affinity which prevents jarring. His Preface to the "Life of Stephen Crane" supplies all the evidence we need of Conrad's instantaneous yet lasting sympathy with certain people, and of his instant antipathy to others. It contains also the assurance that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook"-a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit. "Genius" has somewhere been defined as the power to make much out of little. In "Nostromo" Conrad made a continent out of a few casual sailors' landings on the Central American coast twenty years before. In "The Secret Agent" he created an underworld out of probably as little actual experience. On the other hand, we have in "The Nigger," in "Youth" and "Heart of Darkness" the raw material of his own life transmuted into the gold of fine art. People, and there are such, who think that writers like Conrad, if there be any, can shake things from their sleeve, would be staggered if they could have watched the pain and stress of his writing life. In his last letter to me but one, February 1924, speaking of "The Rover," he says: "I have wanted for a long time to do a seaman's 'return' (before my own departure), and this seemed a possible peg to