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ROBERT M. ADAMS
self, or a more perfect communion with his first command, through
his contact with Leggatt. In fact, says Mr. Baines, the story is "in–
tensely dramatic but, on the psychological and moral level, rather
slight." Reduced to these dimensions, "The Secret Sharer" appears
ripe for adaptation as a Hitchcock movie or an episode of "Gun–
smoke." Yet Mr. Baines concludes that "it is undoubtedly one of his
best short stories"- a judgment which promptly forces us back on
the preliminary question of whether we should be judging Conrad
in the company of Maupassant and Flau'bert or in that of Zane
Grey and Edgar Wallace.
There is, in fact, a rather disturbing tendency for the critics of
Conrad to cancel one another out, even when they don't cancel
themselves, as above. They do this in their judgments of the later
novels primarily, but sometimes of the earlier ones too. Hewitt,
Moser, and Guerard generally agree in dismissing
Victory
from the
canon of worthy Conrad, along with all the novels after
Chance
except possibly
The Shadow-Line.
F. R. Leavis and Edward Crank–
shaw defend
Chance,
Hewitt and Warner actively dislike it, and
Guerard says without much enthusiasm that it is the best of an in·
ferior lot. Warner, Leavis, and Miss Bradbrook think
Victory
is a
major novel. M. D. Zabel includes both
Victory
and
Chance
among
the great novels, but assures us that
Lord Jim
is
too dilated to be.a
I
masterpiece. Pretty much everyone respects
Nostromo,
but most
critics give the impression of having survived rather than enjoyed it,
and Guerard finds the last 200 pages deserving of the wastebasket.
This is the novel which Mr. Baines puts into competition with
WaT
and Peace;
apparently a third of it is not worth reading.
Novelists who appeal to us on generally recognized and, one
might say, conventional grounds (through social comment, for ex–
ample, psychological subtlety, structural vigor, or imaginative pene–
tration), are not usually subject to such violent fluctuations. Conrad
appeals, it is evident, in a special, almost a unique way; he writes,
at his most characteristic, a sort of ballad-novel of which the best
previous example is
Wuthering Heights.
Critics disagree about him
because there is so much puffy clutter to disregard even in the best
Conrad, and rhetoric comes so close to substituting for poetry in the
worst, that the discriminations :are difficult.
Suppose we take
Lord Jim, The Nigger, Heart of Darkness,
and
