This superiority is only the more vividly revealed by the shop-worn
shoddiness of most of his materials. He takes whatever is nearest to
hand, out of his own rich experience or out of the common store of
romance. He seems to disdain the petty advantages which go with the
invention of novel plots, extravagant characters and unprecedented
snarls of circumstance. All the classical doings of anarchists are to be
found in "The Secret Agent"; one has heard them copiously credited, of
late, to so-called Reds. "Youth," as a story, is no more than an
orthodox sea story, and W. Clark Russell contrived better ones. In
"Chance" we have a stern father at his immemorial tricks. In "Victory"
there are villains worthy of Jack B. Yeats' melodramas of the Spanish
Main. In "Nostromo" we encounter the whole stock company of Richard
Harding Davis and O. Henry. And in "Under Western Eyes" the protagonist
is one who finds his love among the women of his enemies--a situation
at the heart of all the military melodramas ever written.
But what Conrad makes of that ancient and fly-blown stuff, that rubbish
from the lumber room of the imagination! Consider, for example, "Under
Western Eyes," by no means the best of his stories.
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