A friend of
mine, married to a Slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab
at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding
(so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is dangerous to
generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a
tendency to brood as a characteristic of the Slav. The Russian
novels are full of characters who brood, and of brooding upon the
characters and their fates. The structure of the Russian story is
determined not by events so much as by the results of passionate
brooding upon the situation in which the imagined characters find
themselves.
So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In "Nostromo" he
broods upon the destructive power of a fixed idea; in "The Rescue"
upon the result of flinging together elemental characters of the
kind that life keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more
real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had ever the
patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over his scene, letting his
eye fill with each slightest detail of it, feeling its contours
around and above and beneath, separating each detail of wind and
water, mood and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again and
again to the task of description, until every impression was
gathered, every strand of motive threaded to its source.
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