[Illustration: JOSEPH CONRAD.]
At thirty-seven, needing a little rest, he settled in England and began to write. Short stories, novels, and an interesting autobiographical volume, A Personal Record (1912), represent Conrad's production. Among his ablest books are Tales of Unrest (1898), a volume of sea stories, and Lord Jim (1900), a novel full of the fascination of strange seas and shores, but still more remarkable for its searching analysis of a man's recovery of self-respect after a long period of remorse for failure to meet a momentary crisis. Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Tales (1902), contains one of Conrad's strongest stories, The End of the Tether. This is a tender story of an old sea captain, who for the sake of a cherished daughter holds his post against terrific odds, including blindness and disgrace. Typhoon (1903) is an almost unrivaled account of a ship's fight against mad hurricanes and raging seas.
One of Conrad's prime distinctions is his power to visualize scenes. The terror, beauty, caprice, and mercilessness of the sea; the silence and strangeness of the impenetrable tropical forest; atmospheres tense with storm or brilliant with sunshine,—these he records with strong effect. But though he has gained his fame largely as a chronicler of remote seas and shores, his handling of the human element is but little less impressive.
Conrad's method is unusual. Though his sentences are sufficiently direct and terse, his general order of narration is not straightforward. He often seems to progress slowly at the start, but after the characters have been made familiar, the story proceeds to its powerful and logical conclusion.
Arnold Bennett.—Bennett was born in Hanley, North Staffordshire, in 1867. He studied law, but abandoned it to become for seven years an editor of Woman, a London periodical. In 1900 he resigned this position to devote himself entirely to literature. He went to France to live, and began to write novels under the influence of the French and Russian realistic novelists.
[Illustration: ARNOLD BENNETT.]
Bennett is the author of many works of uneven merit. Some of these were written merely to strike the popular taste and to sell. His serious, careful work is seen at its best in his stories of the Five Towns, so called from the small towns of his native Staffordshire. One of the best of these novels, The Old Wives' Tale (1908), is a painstaking record of the different temperaments and experiences of two sisters, from their happy childhood to a pathetic, disillusioned old age. The intimate, homely revelations and the literal fidelity to life in The Old Wives' Tale give it a high rank among twentieth-century English novels.
Clayhanger (1910) is another strong story of life in the "Five Towns" pottery district of Staffordshire. Although the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is not a strong personality, Bennett's art makes us keenly interested in Edwin's simple, impressionable nature, in his eagerness for life, and in his experiences as a young dreamer, lover, son, and brother. Hilda Lessways (1911), a companion volume to Clayhanger, but a story of less power, continues the history of the same characters. Bennett reveals in these novels one of his prime gifts,—the skill to paint domestic pictures vividly and to invest them with a distinct local atmosphere. His art has won a signal triumph in arousing interest in simple scenes and average characters. He can present the romance of the commonplace,—of gray, dull monotonous, almost negative existence.
He has enlivened the contemporary stage with a few brisk comedies. Milestones was written in collaboration with Edward Knoblauch, an American author. Its characters, representing three generations, illustrate humorously the truth that what is to-day's innovation becomes to-morrow's August convention. The Honeymoon (1911) is a farce of misunderstandings adroitly handled.
Although Bennett has shown great versatility, yet his individual, strong, and vital work is found in the one field where he brings us face to face with the circumscribed, but appealing life of the "Five Towns" district of his youth.