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Between
his craftsman's conscience, which imposes on him a certain detachment from the
dramas he conceives and elaborates, Conrad seems to be driven just after the
beginning of his career as a writer, when he was forty, to the ideal of art for
art's sake.
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C H A P T E R # 9
Joseph
Conrad: A Romantic Artist
Romantic-Realist
The life-story of
Conrad - and this includes the spiritual autobiography traced out by his
fiction - is an extraordinarily apt example of the typical artist's triumphant
passive resistance to the world. Does not the very date of Conrad's death, the 3rd
of August, seem to signify something relating to his artistic personality? It
is an entry in the calendar between Shelley's birthday and Marryat's death,
between the anniversary of the birth of a romantic singer who was a highly
intelligent poet, and that of the death of superbly matter-of-fact writer of
sea stories, whose realism won the admiring regard of Conrad, who was born
romantic and made realist.
Conrad's literary
character, which has been labelled, perhaps owing to a slight twisting of
Conrad's own statements, as romantic-realist, by Miss Ruth M. Stauffer. For the
psychology of the artist explains his "romantic-realism". Some such an explanation is a necessity of criticism, for Conrad's 'realism' is rather like
quicksilver in the eager hands of thought, apt to escape when grasped too
closely, it is Conrad's sense of reality that makes him great, not his realism,
though he is notable among impressionists.
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