What I once wrote of Henry James might be said of Joseph Conrad: "He is exquisitely aware of the presence of others." And this awareness is illustrated in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo--the latter that astonishing rehabilitation of the humming life on a South American seaboard. For Nostromo nothing is lost save honour; he goes to his death loving insensately; for Razumov his honour endures till the pressure put upon it by his love for Haldin's sister cracks it, and cracks, too, his reason. For once the novelist seems cruel to the pathological point--I mean in the punishment of Razumov by the hideous spy. I hope this does not betray parvitude of view-point. I am not thin-skinned, and Under Western Eyes is my favourite novel, but the closing section is lacerating music for the nerves. And what a chapter!--that thunder-storm driving down the valley of the Rhône, the haggard, haunted face of the Russian student forced, despite his convictions, to become an informer and a supposed anarchist (curious students will find the first hint of the leitmotiv of this monumental book in An Anarchist--A Set of Six; as Gaspar Ruiz may be looked on as a pendant to Nostromo). Under Western Eyes is a masterpiece of irony, observation, and pity. I once described it as being as powerful as Dostoïevsky and as well written as Turgenieff. The truth is that it is Conrad at his best, although I know that I may seem to slight the Eastern tales. It has the colour and shape and gait of the marvellous stories of Dostoïevsky and Turgenieff--with an absolutely original motive, and more modern. A magical canvas!
Its type of narrative is in the later style of the writer. The events are related by an English teacher of languages in Geneva, based on the diary of Razumov. It is a favourite device of Conrad's which might be described as, structurally progressing from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. His novel, Chance, is a specific instance of his intricate and elliptical method. Several personages of the story relate in almost fugal manner, the heroine appearing to us in flashes as if reflected by some revolving mirror. It is a difficult and elusive method, but it presents us with many facets of character and is swift and secular. If Flaubert in Sentimental Education originated a novel structure in fiction, Conrad may claim the same honour; his edifice, in its contrapuntal presentation of character and chapter suspensions, is new, tantalisingly, bewilderingly, refreshingly, new. The colour is toned down, is more sober than the prose of the Eastern stories. Sometimes he employs the personal pronoun, and with what piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This contains three tales, the first, which gives the title-key, has been called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and blood-lust) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic--a pathos which recalls Balzac's Père Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding--than The End of the Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among the immortals.