NOVELS.
THE SECRET AGENT.*
MR. JOSEPH CONRAD on the few occasions hitherto when he has laid his scene in England has failed to exert the sombre fascination which marks his pictures of the unchanging East and the changeless ocean. There is something about his genius that ill accords with the amenities and actualities of a normal humdrum home-keeping existence. But London is a microcosm, a colluvies gentian, and there are phases and aspects of London life mysterious and unfamiliar enough to appeal to his exotic imagination. It was a sure instinct that guided him in the present instance to choose for his milieu the colony of Anarchists and revolutionists who find asylum in our midst, and the result is a psychological romance of terrorism at once so subtle and yet so engrossing as to maintain, and even advance, his reputation as a literary sorcerer of the first rank.
When Mr. Conrad calls his story a "simple tale" he is perhaps overestimating the intelligence of the average reader. But allowing for his occasional disregard of chronological order, and for certain characteristic perversities of method, the main motive of the book is clear enough, and the narrative tolerably easy to follow. The central figure is a Mr. Verloc, a man of uncertain foreign extraction and dubious antecedents, who has for many years been settled in London, and employed as a salaried spy by a foreign Embassy. He is known to, and unofficially recognised by, the detective police, who in return for his information overlook the illicit character of the trade in which he is engaged ; and, on the other hand, be has contrived to retain the confidence of the colony of Anarchists and revolutionaries who use his shop as a house of call. He is married to an English wife, and provides quarters for her invalid mother and half-witted brother. On his domestic, as opposed to his professional, side Mr. Verloc is a humane and kindly man. But at the opening of the story his position is suddenly imperilled by the altered attitude of his principal employers. The old Ambassador, an extremely timid man with a high opinion of Verloc's abilities, has been replaced, and the new regime are dissatisfied with negative results and mere warnings. Mr. Verloc is accordingly summoned to the Embassy and informed in so many words that his salary will cease unless he can stimulate the British Government to adopt sterner measures against Anarchist refugees. In other words, he is bidden to justify his existence by fulfilling the function of the agent-provocateur in its crudest form,—that of
• The Secret Agent. By Joseph Conrad. London: Methuen and Co. [6is]
organising bogus outrages. More than that, M. Vladimir— who is the real villain of the plot—throws out a fantastic sug- gestion as to the lines on which the outrage might be carried out. It is with the effects of this suggestion on an essen- tially stupid man, panic-stricken by the prospect of ruin, and with the means of literally carrying out this wild hint placed at his disposal, that the tragic and terrible sequel is concerned. But while the secret agent is in a sense the central figure, he is less interesting and less convincing than many other personages, mostly sinister, whose portraits are drawn in these intricate, yet absorbing, pages. There are the group of Anarchists, mainly dominated by vanity,—the visionary Michaelis, the venomous Karl Tundt, Comrade Ossipon, bilker of confiding servant-girls, and, above all, the little Professor, the really dangerous, because absolutely fearless, apostle of destruction, whose sudden meeting with the Inspector after the bomb outrage is perhaps the most-striking scene in the book. Then we have the noble patroness of Michaelis, the incarnation of detached curiosity ; Chief Inspector Heat, able and efficient, but " thinking of his superiors, of his reputation, of the Law Courts, of his salary, of newspapers" ; his official chief, the Assistant-Commissioner, a man of real detective genius, but hampered by departmental
conventions and personal obligations. And as a background to this sombre drama of the conflict between the conservators and the enemies of the social system there is London in its immensity and mystery, enveloped in the strange atmosphere diffused by the sardonic genius of Mr. Conrad.
Mr. Conrad's knowledge and appreciation of London—not only the subterranean London of the refugee—is as remark- able as his penetrating insight into the psychology of the monstrous brood of enigmatical persons which it harbours. Take, for example, the passage in which he describes Mr. Verloc's progress to the Embassy on the occasion of his eventful visit:— "Before reaching Knightsbridge, Mr. Verloc took a turn to the left out of the busy main thoroughfare, uproarious with the traffic of swaying omnibuses and trotting vans, in the almost silent, swift flow of hansoms. Under his hat, worn with a slight backward tilt, his hair has been carefully brushed into respectful sleekness; for his business was with an Embassy. And Mr. Yerloc, steady like a rock—a soft kind of rock—marched now along a street which could with every propriety be described as private. In its breadth, emptiness, and extent it had the majesty of inorganic nature, of matter that never dies. The only reminder of mortality was a doctor's brougham arrested in august soli- tude close to the curbstone. The polished knockers of the doors gleamed as far as the eye could reach, the clean windows shone with a dark opaque lustre. And all was still. But a milk cart rattled noisily across the distant perspective ; a butcher boy, driving with the noble recklessness of a charioteer at Olympic Games, dashed round the corner sitting high above a pair of red wheels. A guilty-looking cat issuing from under the stones ran for a while in front of Mr. Yerloc, then dived into another basement; and a thick police constable, looking a stranger to every emotion, as if he too were part of inorganic nature, surging apparently out of a lamp-post, took not the slightest notice of Mr. Verloc. With a turn to the left Mr. Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a yellow -wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. 1 Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards away, and Mr. Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London's topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered' 7; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by -whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London's strayed houses. Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short act would do) for compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration."
In another vein, and as illustrating Mr. Conrad's gift for richly suggestive characterisation, we may quote his striking picture of the lady patroness of Michaelis, "the ticket-of-leave apostle of humanitarian hopes" :—
" Married young and splendidly at some remote epoch of the past, she had had for a time a close view of great affairs and even of some great men. She herself was a great lady. Old now in the number of her years, she had that sort of exceptional tempera- ment which defies time with scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind. Many other conventions easier to set aside, alas ! failed to obtain her recognition, also on temperamental grounds—either because they bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and sympathies. Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her (it was one of the secret griefs of her most noble husband against her)—flrst, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next as being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly inconceivable to her nature. To be fearlessly outspoken in her opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely from the standpoint of her social position. She was equally untrammelled in her actions ; and as her tactful- ness proceeded from genuine humanity, her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority was serene and cordial, three generations had admired her infinitely, and the last she was likely to see had pronounced her a wonderful woman. Meantime intelligent, with a sort of lofty simplicity, and curious at heart, but not like many women merely of social gossip, she amused her age by attracting within her ken through the power of her great, almost historical, social prestige everything that rose above the dead level of mankind, lawfully or unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or misfortune. Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen, and charlatans of all ages and con- ditions, who, unsubstantial and light, bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the surface currents, had been welcomed in that house, listened to, penetrated, understood, appraised, for her own edification. In her own words, she liked to watch what the world was coming to. And as she had a practical mind her judgment of men and things, though based on special prejudices, was seldom totally wrong, and almost never wrong-headed. Her drawing-room was probably the only place in the wide world where an Assistant Commissioner of Police could meet a convict liberated on a ticket-of-leave on other than professional and official ground."
There are certain obvious blemishes in this book. There is a murder which we cannot regard as justifiable either by logic or art. There is inconsistency in the development of the character of Mr. Verloc, and grave improbability in the immunity from police interference so long enjoyed by the Professor. There are digressions, admirable in themselves, which interrupt the march of the narrative in a. tantalising manner. Fastidious readers, again, may be repelled by certain gruesome details given in the pages describing the results of the explosion. But, to tp?.ak truly, such criticism, though legitimate, is largely disarmed in presence of a work so rich in surprise and suspense, so
original in conception and treatment,—so lavishly endowed, in fine, with the singular qualities which have won for Mr. Conrad a unique position amongst the British novelists of
to-day.
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