How perfectly recollected is that passage! Can we not hear the exclamation of some reader “Yes--those orange-trees! It was just like that when I was there!” How convinced we are of Conrad’s unimpeachable veracity! How like him are those remembered details, “the nailed doors,” “the fine stone hands,” “at arm’s-length”!--and can we not sniff something of the author’s impatience to let himself go and tell us more about that “hammer-headed horse” of whose adventures with Don Pépé he must remember enough to fill a volume!
He is able, therefore, upon this foundation { 096}of a minute and scrupulous réalisai to build as fantastic a building as he pleases without fear of denying Truth. He does not, in _Nostromo_ at any rate, choose to be fantastic, but he is romantic, and our final impression of the silver mine and the town under its white shining shadow is of something both as real and as beautiful as any vision of Keats or Shelley. But with the colour we remember also the grim tragedy of the life that has been shown to us. Near to the cathedral and the little tinkering streets of the guitars were the last awful struggles of the unhappy Hirsch. We remember Nostromo riding, with his silver buttons, catching the red flower flung to him out of the crowd, but we remember also his death and the agony of his defeated pride. Sotillo, the vainest and most sordid of bandits, is no figure for a fairy story.
Here, then, is the secret of Conrad’s atmosphere. He is the poet, working through realism, to the poetic vision of life. That intention is at the heart of his work from the first line of _Almayer s Folly_ to the last { 097}line of _Victory. Nostromo_ is not simply the history of certain lives that were concerned in a South American revolution. It _is_ that history, but it is also a vision, a statement of beauty that has no country, nor period, and sets no barrier of immediate history or fable for its interpretation....
When, however, we come finally to the philosophy that lies behind this creation of character and atmosphere we perceive, beyond question, certain limitations.
As we have already seen, Conrad is of the firm and resolute conviction that life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men.