To any reader who cares, seriously, to study the art of Joseph Conrad, no better advice could be offered than that he should begin with the reading of the two volumes that have been omitted from the preceding list. Some Reminiscences and The Mirror of the Sea demand consideration on the threshold of any survey of this author's work, because they reveal, from a personal, wilful and completely anarchistic angle, the individuality that can only be discovered, afterwards, objectively, in the process of creation.
In both these books Conrad is, quite simply, himself for anyone who cares to read. They are books dictated by no sense of precedent nor form nor fashion. They are books of their own kind, even more than are the novels. Some Reminiscences has only Tristram Shandy for its rival in the business of getting everything done without moving a step forward. The Mirror of the Sea has no rival at all.
We may suppose that the author did really intend to write his reminiscences when he began. He found a moment that would make a good starting-point, a moment in the writing of his first book, Almayer's Folly; at the conclusion or, more truly, cessation of Some Reminiscences, that moment is still hanging in mid-air, the writing of Almayer has not proceeded two lines farther down the stage, the maid-servant is still standing in the doorway, the hands of the clock have covered five minutes of the dial. What has occurred is simply that the fascination of the subject has been too strong. It is of the very essence of Conrad's art that one thing so powerfully suggests to him another that to start him on anything at all is a tragedy, because life is so short. His reminiscences would be easy enough to command would they only not take on a life of their own and shout at their unfortunate author: "Ah! yes. I'm interesting, of course, but don't you remember...?"
The whole adventure of writing his first book is crowded with incident, not because he considers it a wonderful book or himself a marvellous figure, but simply because any incident in the world must, in his eyes, be crowded about with other incidents. There is the pen one wrote the book with, that pen that belonged to poor old Captain B—— of the Nonsuch who ... or there is the window just behind the writing-table that looked out into the river, that river that reminds one of the year '88 when ...
In the course of his thrilling voyage of discovery we are, by a kind of most blessed miracle, told something of Mr Nicholas B. and of the author's own most fascinating uncle. We even, by an extension of the miracle, learn something of Conrad as ship's officer (this the merest glimpse) and as a visitor to his uncle's house in Poland.
So by chance are these miraculous facts and glimpses that we catch at them with eager, extended hands, praying, imploring them to stay; indeed those glimpses may seem to us the more wonderful in that they have been, by us, only partially realised.
Nevertheless, in spite of its eager incoherence, at the same time both breathless, and, by the virtue of its author's style, solemn, we do obtain, in addition to our glimpses of Poland and the sea, one or two revelations of Conrad himself. Our revelations come to us partly through our impression of his own zest for life, a zest always ironical, often sceptical, but always eager and driven by a throbbing impulse of vitality. Partly also through certain deliberate utterances. He tells us:
"Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests, notably, amongst others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been revolutionary in my writings." (Page 20.)
Or again: