He is a Slav who broods by racial
habit as well as by necessity of his theme. He is a modern who
accepts the growing control of physical forces by the intellect
and turns from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality.
From this personality he makes his stories. External nature bulks
large in them, because it is when beat upon by adversity, brought
face to face with the elemental powers, and driven into strange
efforts of will by the storms without that man's personality
reaches the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad
and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories of his
longer novels. His characters are concrete. They are not symbols
of the moral nature, like Melville's men, but they are
nevertheless phases of personality and therefore they shift and
dim from story to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their
hearts to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one nevertheless
forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which they come, the
tales in which they appear. The same phase, indeed, appears under
different names in several stories.
Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of the secret of
man's relation to the universe; only magnificent fragments of his
imagination were salvaged for his books.
Pages:
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313