"At the centre of his web," says
Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with
a calm and cynical ferocity.... He calls up all the dreams and illusions
by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly
naked.... He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of
every vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices that have
come to birth out of ignorance and self-love.... And in all this there
is no judgment, only an implacable comprehension, as of one outside
nature, to whom joy and sorrow, right and wrong, savagery and
civilization, are equal and indifferent...."[3]
Obviously, no Englishman! No need to explain (with something akin to
apology) that his name is really not Joseph Conrad at all, but Teodor
Josef Konrad Karzeniowski, and that he is a Pole of noble lineage, with
a vague touch of the Asiatic in him. The Anglo-Saxon mind, in these
later days, becomes increasingly incapable of his whole point of view.
Put into plain language, his doctrine can only fill it with wonder and
fury.
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