This book remains by far the easiest, the kindest, the most friendly of all his books. He has been troubled here by no questions of form, of creation, of development, whether of character or of incident.
It is the best of all possible prologues to his more creative work.
[II]
THE NOVELIST
I
In discussing the art of any novelist as distinct from the poet or essayist there are three special questions that we may ask—as to the Theme, as to the Form, as to the creation of Character.
It is possible to discuss these three questions in terms that can be applied, in no fashion whatever, to the poem or the essay, although the novel may often more truly belong to the essay or the poem to the novel, as, for instance, The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh bear witness. All such questions of ultimate classes and divisions are vain, but these three divisions of Theme, Form and Character do cover many of the questions that are to be asked about any novelist simply in his position as novelist and nothing else. That Joseph Conrad is, in his art, most truly poet as well as novelist no reader of his work will deny. I wish, in this chapter, to consider him simply as a novelist—that is, as a narrator of the histories of certain human beings, with his attitude to those histories.
Concerning the form of the novel the English novelists, until the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century, worried themselves but slightly. If they considered the matter they chuckled over their deliberate freedom, as did Sterne and Fielding. Scott considered story-telling a jolly business in which one was, also, happily able to make a fine living, but he never contemplated the matter with any respect. Jane Austen, who had as much form as any modern novelist, was quite unaware of her happy possession. The mid-Victorians gloriously abandoned themselves to the rich independence of shilling numbers, a fashion which forbade Form as completely as the manners of the time forbade frankness. A new period began at the end of the fifties; but no one in 1861 was aware that a novel called Evan Harrington was of any special importance; it made no more stir than did Almayer's Folly in the early nineties, although the wonderful Richard Feverel had already preceded it.