His books, also, find naturally a division into three parts; the first
period, beginning with _Almayer's Folly_ in 1895, ended with _Lord
Jim_ in 1900. The second contains the two volumes of _Youth_ and
_Typhoon_, the novel _Romance_ that he wrote in collaboration with Ford
Madox Hueffer, and ends with _Nostromo_, published in 1903. The third
period begins, after a long pause, in 1907 with _The Secret Agent_, and
receives its climax with the remarkable popularity of _Chance_ in 1914,
and _Victory_ (1915).
His first period was a period of struggle, struggle with a foreign
language, struggle with a technique that was always, from the point
of view of the "schools," to remain too strong for him, struggles
with the very force and power of his reminiscences that were urging
themselves upon him, now at the moment of their contemplated freedom,
like wild beasts behind iron bars. _Almayer's Folly_ and _The Outcast
of the Islands_ (the first of these is sequel to the second) were
remarkable in the freshness of their discovery of a new world. It
was not that their world had not been found before, but rather that
Conrad, by the force of his own individual discovery, proclaimed
his find with a new voice and a new vigour. In the character of
Almayer, of Aissa, of Willems, of Babalatchi and Abdulla there was a
new psychology that gave promise of great things. Nevertheless these
early stories were overcharged with atmosphere, were clumsy in their
development and conveyed in their style a sense of rhetoric and lack of
ease. His vision of his background was pulled out beyond its natural
intensity and his own desire to make it overwhelming was so obvious
as to frighten the creature into a determination to be, simply out of
malicious perversity, anything else.
These two novels were followed by a volume of short stories, _Tales of
Unrest_, that reveal, quite nakedly, Conrad's difficulties. One study
in this book, _The Return_, with its redundancies and overemphasis,
is the cruelest parody on its author and no single tale in the volume
succeeds. It was, however, as though, with these efforts, Conrad flung
himself free, for ever, from his apprenticeship; there appeared in 1898
what remains perhaps still his most perfect work, _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_. This was a story entirely of the sea, of the voyage of a
ship from port to port and of the influence upon that ship and upon the
human souls that she contained, of the approaching shadow of death,
an influence ironical, melancholy, never quite horrible, and always
tender and humorous. Conrad must himself have loved, beyond all other
vessels, the _Narcissus_. Never again, except perhaps in _The Mirror of
the Sea_, was he to be so happily at his ease with any of his subjects.
The book is a gallery of remarkably distinct and authentic portraits,
the atmosphere is held in perfect restraint, and the overhanging theme
is never, for an instant, abandoned. It is, above all, a record of
lovingly cherished reminiscence. Of cherished reminiscence also was the
book that closed the first period of his work, _Lord Jim_. This was
to remain, until the publication of _Chance_, his most popular novel.
It is the story of a young Englishman's loss of honour in a moment of
panic and his victorious recovery. The first half of the book is a
finely sustained development of a vividly remembered scene, the second
half has the inevitability of a moral idea pursued to its romantic end
rather than the inevitability of life. Here then in 1900 Conrad had
worked himself free of the underground of the jungle and was able to
choose his path. His choice was still dictated by the subjects that
he remembered most vividly, but upon these rewards of observation his
creative genius was working. James Wait, Donkin, Jim, Marlowe were men
whom he had known, but men also to whom he had given a new birth.
There appeared now in _Youth, Heart of Darkness_ and _Typhoon_ three of
the finest short stories in the English language, work of reminiscence,
but glowing at its heart with all the lyrical exultation and flame of
a passion that had been the ruling power of a life that was now to be
abandoned. That salutation of farewell is in _Youth_ and its evocation
of the East, in _The Heart of Darkness_ and its evocation of the
forests that are beyond civilisation, in _Typhoon_ and its evocation of
the sea. He was never, after these tales, to write again of the sea as
though he were still sailing on it. From this time he belonged, with
regret and with some ironic contempt, to the land.
This second period closed with the production of a work that was
deliberately created rather than reminiscent, _Nostromo_. Conrad may
have known Dr Monyngham, Decoud, Mrs Gould, old Viola; but they became
stronger than he and, in their completed personalities, owed no man
anything for their creation. There is much to be said about _Nostromo_,
in many ways the greatest of all Conrad's works, but, for the moment,
one would only say that its appearance (it appeared first, of all
ironical births, in a journal--_T.P.'s Weekly_--and astonished and
bewildered its readers week by week, by its determination not to finish
and yield place to something simpler) caused no comment whatever, that
its critics did not understand it, and its author's own admirers were
puzzled by its unlikeness to the earlier sea stories.
_Nostromo_ was followed by a pause--one can easily imagine that its
production did, for a moment, utterly exhaust its creator. When,
however, in 1907 appeared _The Secret Agent_, a new attitude was most
plainly visible. He was suddenly detached, writing now of "cases" that
interested him as an investigator of human life, but called from his
heart no burning participation of experience. He is tender towards
Winnie Verloc and her old mother, the two women in _The Secret Agent_,
but he studies them quite dispassionately. That love that clothed Jim
so radiantly, that fierce contempt that in _An Outcast of the Islands_
accompanied Willems to his degraded death, is gone. We have the finer
artist, but we have lost something of that earlier compelling interest.
_The Secret Agent_ is a tale of secret service in London; it contains
the wonderfully created figure of Verloc and it expresses, to the full,
Conrad's hatred of those rows and rows of bricks and mortar that are
so completely accepted by unimaginative men. In 1911 _Under Western
Eyes_ spoke strongly of a Russian influence. Turgéniev and Dostoievsky
had too markedly their share in the creation of Razumov and the
cosmopolitan circle in Geneva. Moreover, it is a book whose heart is
cold.
A volume of short stories, _A Set of Six_, illustrating still more
emphatically Conrad's new detachment, appeared in 1908 and is
remarkable chiefly for an ironically humorous story of the Napoleonic
wars--_The Duel_--a tale too long, perhaps, but admirable for its
sustained note. In 1912 he seemed, in another volume, _'Twixt Land and
Sea_, to unite some of his earlier glow with all his later mastery of
his method. _A Smile of Fortune_ and _The Secret Sharer_ are amazing
in the beauty of retrospect that they leave behind them in the soul of
the reader. The sea is once more revealed to us, but it is revealed now
as something that Conrad has conquered. His contact with the land has
taken from him something of his earlier intimacy with his old mistress.
Nevertheless _The Secret Sharer_ is a most marvellous story, marvellous
in its completeness of theme and treatment, marvellous in the contrast
between the confined limitations of its stage and the vast implications
of its moral idea. Finally in 1914 appeared _Chance_, by no means the
finest of his books, but catching the attention and admiration of that
wider audience who had remained indifferent to the force and beauty of
_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, of _Lord Jim_, of _Nostromo_. With the
popular success of _Chance_ the first period of his work is closed. On
the possible results of that popularity, their effect on the artist
and on the whole world of men, one must offer, here at any rate, no
prophecy.