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Mr. Conrad is not the kind of author whose work one is content to meet only in fugitive form, etc.
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Those who appreciate fine craftsmanship in fiction, etc. But there is worse than clichés. For example:
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It is too studiously chiselled and hammered-out for that. (God alone knows for what.) Imagine the effect of studiously chiselling a work and then hammering it out! Useful process! I wonder the _Athenæum_ did not suggest that Mr. Conrad, having written a story, took it to Brooklands to get it run over by a motor-car. Again:
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His effects are studiously wrought, _although_--such is his mastery of literary art--they produce a swift and penetrating impression. Impossible not to recall the weighty judgment of one of Stevenson's characters upon the _Athenæum_:
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Golly, what a paper!
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His is not at all the impressionistic method. Probably the impressionistic method is merely any method that the _Athenæum_ doesn't like. But one would ask: Has it ever read the opening paragraph of
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The Return, perhaps the most dazzling feat of impressionism in modern English? The _Athenæum_ says also:
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Upon the whole, we do not think the short story represents Mr. Conrad's true _métier_ It may be that Mr. Conrad's true _métier_ was, after all, that of an auctioneer; but, after
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Youth,
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To-morrow,
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Typhoon,
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Karain,
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The End of the Tether, and half a dozen other mere masterpieces, he may congratulate himself on having made a fairly successful hobby of the short story. The most extraordinary of all the _Athenæum's_ remarks is this:
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The one ship story here, 'The Brute,' makes us regret that the author does not give us more of the sea in his work. Well, considering that about two-thirds of Mr. Conrad's work deals with the sea, considering that he has written
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Lord Jim,
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The Nigger of the _Narcissus_
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Typhoon,
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Nostromo, and
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The Mirror of the Sea, this regret shall be awarded the gold medal of the silly season. If the _Athenæum_ were a silly paper, like the _Academy_, I should have kept an august silence on this ineptitude. But the _Athenæum_ has my respect. It ought to remember the responsibilities of its position, and ought not to entrust an important work of letters to some one whose most obvious characteristic is an exquisite and profound incompetence for criticism. The explanation that occurs to me is that
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A Set of Six and
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Diana Mallory
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A Set of Six will not count among Mr. Conrad's major works. But in the mere use of English it shows an advance upon all his previous books. In some of his finest chapters there is scarcely a page without a phrase that no Englishman would have written, and in nearly every one of his books slight positive errors in the use of English are fairly common. In
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A Set of Six I have detected no error and extremely few questionable terms. The influence of his deep acquaintance with French is shown in the position of the adverb in
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I saw again somebody in the porch. It cannot be called bad English, but it is queer.
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Inasmuch that could certainly be defended (compare
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), but an Englishman would not, I think, have written it. Nor would an Englishman be likely to write
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Gaspar Ruiz, is a striking instance of complicated narrative machinery. This peculiarity also detracts from the realistic authority of the work. For by the time you have got to the end of
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A Set of Six