The Idiots: Gli Idioti

In the Revue des Deux Mondes of October 1st, 1919, Mr L. Gillet, in the course of an appreciation of Mr Joseph Conrad’s Arrow of Gold, writes as follows: “What is original and characteristic in the author of the Tales of Unrest, what constitutes the permanent basis of his art, what we are always brought back to, when he is under discussion, is the sense of mystery. “His characters, though quivering with life, nearly always give us the impression that they are only half known to us; now and again they surprise us by gestures, feelings, which do not agree with what we know of their personality: it is as though a second character, unknown to themselves, suddenly acted in their stead; as though in the middle of a play the prompter were suddenly moved to modify the text and to alter the parts. There is always, in Mr Conrad’s heroes, a secret, the key to which is withheld from us; they come and go, and suddenly a power different from themselves takes their place, and makes them commit strange and unlooked-for actions.... “Those beings, nearly always admirable by their energy, represent the struggle of a heroic will against an obscure and undefinable power, which is that of life, and which in a moment, like a ground-swell, lifts them off their feet, ruins and destroys them, leaves them vanquished, like flotsam after a shipwreck.” It would be difficult to give of the Tales of Unrest, and more particularly of the story which Mr Conrad has kindly allowed us to take from that volume, a more fitting appreciation. The story is not a hilarious one, but Mr Conrad is not a hilarious writer; his work has other characteristics, which H. Taine would have delighted in explaining to us as due to “the race, the environment, and the moment.” For Mr Conrad is of Polish extraction, and at Warsaw his early youth was spent amid political unrest which culminated in the rebellion of 1862, and of which the foremost victims were his parents. The latter, physically broken by imprisonment and exile, were no doubt the future writer’s first examples of those tragic heroes, struggling gloomily yet bravely against Fate, which he was to depict so often in later years.