Russia is a world apart: that is the sum and substance of
the tale. In the island stories we have the same elaborate projection of
the East, of its fantastic barbarism, of brooding Asia. And in the sea
stories we have, perhaps for the first time in English fiction, a vast
and adequate picture of the sea, the symbol at once of man's eternal
striving and of his eternal impotence. Here, at last, the colossus has
found its interpreter. There is in "Typhoon" and "The Nigger of the
Narcissus," and, above all, in "The Mirror of the Sea," a poetic
evocation of the sea's stupendous majesty that is unparalleled outside
the ancient sagas. Conrad describes it with a degree of graphic skill
that is superb and incomparable. He challenges at once the pictorial
vigour of Hugo and the aesthetic sensitiveness of Lafcadio Hearn, and
surpasses them both. And beyond this mere dazzling visualization, he
gets into his pictures an overwhelming sense of that vast drama of which
they are no more than the flat, lifeless representation--of that
inexorable and uncompassionate struggle which is life itself.
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