Mr. Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad, written in a manner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one reads it one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, could not possibly have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad's complicated and elaborate manner of building up his stories.
Mr. Follet points out, for instance, how in "Chance" we have one layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more underscored and overscored with interesting personal values.
This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of all attention.
But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the art of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quite direct and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting, between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story.
I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Lenas, are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation. I think he is always at his best when two passionate and troubled natures--not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a man and man, like Lingard and Willem--are brought together in direct and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that true authentic thrill of immemorial romance--romance as old as the first stories ever told or sung--of the encounter of protagonist and antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and terrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.
But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated passionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet in treasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all those elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which give to the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a background.
Except for a few insignificant passages when that sly old mariner Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his pipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and overlappings of his inverted method of narration--of those rambling "advances," as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated "conclusions." In the few occasional passages where Marlowe assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded, worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to the Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully and pathetically English.