conviction of the veracity of it. No one, after a faithful perusal of Nostromo, can possibly doubt of the existence of Sulaco, of the silver mine, of Nostromo and Decoud, of Mrs Gould, Antonio, the Viola girls, of old Viola, Hirsch, Monyngham, Gould, Sotillo, of the death of Viola's wife, of the expedition at night in the painter, of Decoud alone on the Isabels, of Hirsch's torture, of Captain Mitchell's watch—here are characters the most romantic in the world, scenes that would surely, in any other hands, be fantastic melodrama, and both characters and scenes are absolutely supported on the foundation of realistic truth. Not for a moment from the first page to the last do we consciously doubt the author's word.... Here the form of narration is vindicated because it is entirely convincing.

Not so with the third example, Chance. Here, as with Lord Jim, we may find one visualised moment that stands for the whole book and as in the earlier work we look back and see the degraded officers of the Patna waiting with Jim on the Esplanade, so our glance back over Chance reveals to us that moment when the Fynes, from the security of their comfortable home, watch Flora de Barrel flying down the steps of her horrible Brighton house as though the Furies pursued her. That desperate flight is the key of the book. The moment of the chivalrous Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora from a world too villainous for her and too double-faced for him gives the book's theme, and never in all the stories that preceded Flora's has Conrad been so eager to afford us first-hand witnesses. We have, in the first place, the unquenchable Marlowe sitting, with fine phrases at his lips, in a riverside inn. To him enter Powell, who once served with Captain Anthony; to these two add the little Fynes; there surely you have enough to secure your alliance. But it is precisely the number of witnesses that frightens us. Marlowe, unaided, would have been enough for us, more than enough if we are to consider the author himself as a possible narrator. But not only does the number frighten us, it positively hides from us the figures of Captain Anthony and Flora de Barrel. Both the Knight and the Maiden—as the author names them—are retiring souls, and our hearts move in sympathy for them as we contemplate their timid hesitancy before the voluble inquisitions of Marlowe, young Powell and the Fynes. Moreover, the intention of this method that it should secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes does not here achieve its purpose, as we have seen that it did in the first half of Lord Jim and the whole of Nostromo. We believe most emphatically in that first narration of young Powell's about his first chance. We believe in the first narration of Marlowe, although quite casually he talks like this: "I do not even think that there was in what he did a conscious and lofty confidence in himself, a particularly pronounced sense of power which leads men so often into impossible or equivocal situations." We believe in the horrible governess (a fiercely drawn figure). We believe in Marlowe's interview with Flora on the pavement outside Anthony's room.

We believe in the whole of the first half of the book, but even here we are conscious that we would prefer to be closer to the whole thing, that it would be pleasant to hear Flora and Anthony speak for themselves, that we resent, a little, Marlowe's intimacy which prevents, with patronising complaisance, the intimacy that we, the readers, might have seemed. Nevertheless we are so far held, we are captured.

But when the second half of the book arrives we can be confident no longer. Here, as in Lord Jim, it is possible to feel that Conrad, having surprised, seized upon, mastered his original moment, did not know how to continue it. The true thing in Lord Jim is the affair of the Patna; the true thing in Chance is Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora after her disaster. But whereas in Lord Jim the sequel to Jim's cowardice has its own fine qualities of beauty and imagination, the sequel to Captain Anthony's rescue of Flora seems to one listener at any rate a pitiably unconvincing climax of huddled melodrama. That chapter in Chance entitled A Moonless Night is, in the first half of it, surely the worst thing that Conrad ever wrote, save only that one early short story, The Return. The conclusion of Chance and certain tales in his volume, Within the Tides, make one wonder whether that alliance between romance and realism that he has hitherto so wonderfully maintained is not breaking down before the baleful strength of the former of these two qualities.

It remains only to be said that when credence so entirely fails, as it must before the end of Chance, the form of narration in Oratio Recta is nothing less than maddening. Suddenly we do not believe in Marlowe, in Powell, in the Fynes: we do not believe even in Anthony and Flora. We are the angrier because earlier in the evening we were so completely taken in. It is as though we had given our money to a deserving cause and discovered a charlatan.

I have described at length the form in which the themes of these books are developed, because it is the form that, here extensively, here quite unobtrusively, clothes all the novels and tales. We are caught and held by the skinny finger of the Ancient Mariner. When he has a true tale to tell us his veritable presence is an added zest to our pleasure. But, if his presence be not true ...

III

If we turn to the themes that engage Joseph Conrad's attention we shall see that in almost every case his subjects are concerned with unequal combats—unequal to his own far-seeing vision, but never to the human souls engaged in them, and it is this consciousness of the blindness that renders men's honesty and heroism of so little account that gives occasion for his irony.

He chooses, in almost every case, the most solid and unimaginative of human beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men alone whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he simply gives the thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see at once that the odds are too strong for him. But these simple souls, with their consciousness of the job before them and nothing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, upon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings and they will not quail." They command his pity, his reverence, his tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with an ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: "You see. I told you so. He may even think he has won. We know better, you and I."

The theme of Almayer's Folly is a struggle of a weak man against nature, of The Nigger of the Narcissus the struggle of many simple men against the presence of death, of Lord Jim, again, the struggle of a simple man against nature (here the man wins, but only, we feel, at the cost of truth). Nostromo, the conquest of a child of nature by the silver mine which stands over him, conscious of its ultimate victory, from the very first. Chance, the struggle of an absolutely simple and upright soul against the dishonesties of a world that he does not understand. Typhoon, the very epitome of Conrad's themes, is the struggle of McWhirr against the storm (here again it is McWhirr who apparently wins, but we can hear, in the very last line of the book, the storm's confident chuckle of ultimate victory). In Heart of Darkness the victory is to the forest. In The End of the Tether