Mn. CONEAD . S new book shows in the highest relief the
characteristic merits and defects of his work. He has a. greater range of knowledge—subtle idiomatic knowledge— of the strange ways of the world than any contemporary writer. He has an imaginative force which at times can only be paralleled among the greatest ; be has a profound sense of drama, and the logic of events which lesser people call fate; and he has a style which is often careless, involved, and harsh, but, like all true style, has moments of superb inspiration. On the other hand, he is burdened with the wealth of his equip- ment. A slender talent finds it easy to be lucid and orderly; but Mr. Conrad, seeing his people before him with such tremendous clearness, and entering into their loves and hates. with such gusto, does not know where to begin or to end their tale. His characters crowd upon him, demanding that each, have his story told with the same patient realism, ti1 the great motive is so overlaid with minor dramas that it loses. much of its appeal. His books, in zonsequence, tend to be a series of brilliant episodes connected by a trickle of narrative,. rather than romance with the stream of story running strongly to the close. And the misfortune is that the. drama which is pushed into the background is nearly always of exceptional power, capable, were the rest only- duly subordinated to it, of raising the work to the highest level of art. In the book before us the story, which gives the title to the whole, is of one Nostromo,. an Italian sailor, who becomes Capataz de Cargadores- in the service of a steamboat company at a port in &- South American Republic. He is the masterly egotist,. the leader among his own class, trusted and used by his masters, happy in his second-rate greatness. But there coma events which show, or seem to show, that be is a tool rather than a principaL His pride takes fire, he is all but in revolt,. but his egotism comforts itself, and be does heroic work for his masters. And then somewhow the story ebbs away. We • Nostromo: a Tale of the Seaboard, By Joseph Conrad. London: Harper and Brothers. 168.] see Nostromo an embryo revolutionary, spending himself in amours and a hurry to get rich, and killed at last by an accident. And the reason is that another and stronger drama comes athwart his. An Englishman and his wife have taken upon themselves the regeneration of the Republic of Cos- taguana by means of the silver industry which they control. The story of the regeneration, the revolution, and the creation of the Occidental Republic is the compelling interest of the book, and Nostromo comes in only as a handy dew ex tnachinci in the greater story. The true story ends with the remi- niscences of old Captain Mitchell, and the bitter reflection of Dr. Monygham that some day it would have to be done all over again,—the justification of the moral on the title-page : " So foul a sky clears not without a storm." The last two chapters belong to Nostromo's story alone, and are therefore irrelevant to the main drama, and a narrative which at times is profoundly moving and inspired with a kind of cosmic dignity ends bewilderingly with a mishap to a minor character. Either the politics of Sulaco should have been a mere back- ground to Nostromo's tragedy, or his career should have been merely an episode in the story of the Republic. The separate interests are too potent to harmonise within one romance.
But though the construction of the book is topsy-turvy, beginning in the middle and finishing at the start, the story, considered even as narrative, is of surpassing interest Mr. Conrad has flung around his work the mystery of a cloud- covered sea and high remote mountains. All his characters, in spite of the close realism of his method, are invested with the glamour of romance. No one is perfunctorily treated ; each is a living man or woman, adequately under- stood, drawn with firm, clean strokes. He has gone for many to the backways of life, but, strange as some are, the human blood of each is unmistakable. The most elaborate study is Nostromo, who misses being a masterpiece because of his habit of suddenly becoming a puppet in the development of another tale. But in the scene where he is adrift alone with Decond and the treasure, in the fog, listening to the beat of the enemy's screws, there comes one of those intense moments of natural self-revelation which are the triumph of the pyschologist. Mrs. Gould is an exquisite figure, the good angel of a troubled time ; and if any one desires proofs of Mr. Conrad's genius, let him turn to those wonderful scenes during the Revolution when she sees for the first time the defects of her husband's regenerating policy, and shuts her lips to accept the second-best. But the greatest achieve- ments are in the minor personages,—Decoud, the cynical and belated nationalist; Antonia; Hernandez, the brigand; the old Garibaldist Viola and his daughter; and the amazing crowd of schemers and swaggerers who play at politics in those Republics. We have said that every character is an adequate portrait. But Mr. Conrad's achievement is still greater, for he has managed to make clear the strife of ideals in a sordid warfare, and to show the core of seriousness in mock-heroics. It is not a book which the casual reader will appreciate. The sequence of events has to be sought painfully through the mazes of irrelevancy with which the author tries to mislead us. But it is a book which will well repay those who give it the close attention which it deserves. It shows signs of haste both in style and construction, and we trust that this may be the explanation of the main defects. It would be a thousand pities if an author who has few equals in talent should habitually spoil his work by an inability to do the pruning and selecting which his art demands.
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