A writer with ideals so high and strongly felt commits himself for trial by exacting standards. It is necessary to remind Mr. Conrad that if a reader is to feel, he must first understand; if he is to hear, he must hear distinctly; and if he is to see, his eye must be drawn by interest in the object, and it can look only in one direction at once. "Nostromo" is told forward and backward in the first half of the book, and the preliminary history of the silver mine is out of all proportion to the story of Nostromo, the alleged hero of the book. "Lord Jim" is confused.[4] The first few chapters are narrated in the third person by the author. Then for three hundred pages Marlow, a more or less intimate spectator of Jim's career, tells the story as an after-dinner yarn. It would have taken three evenings for Marlow to get through the talk, and that talk in print involves quotation within quotation beyond the legitimate uses of punctuation marks. In other stories the point of view fails. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus" are conferences between two people in private which no third person could overhear, yet the narrative seems to be told in the first person by one of the crew. In "Typhoon," where a steamer with deck almost vertical is plunging through a storm, we are on the bridge beside the simple dogged captain while he shouts orders down to the engine-room through the tube. Without warning we are down in the engine-room, hearing the captain's voice from above, and as suddenly we are back on the bridge again. A man crawls across the deck in a tempest so black that he cannot see whose legs he is groping at. We are immediately informed that he is a man of fifty, with coarse hair, of immense strength, with great lumpy hands, a hoarse voice, easy-going and good-natured,--as if the man were visible at all, except as a blot in the darkness! [4] No, it is not. It is clear as daylight. Conrad has a mania for description. When anything is mentioned in the course of narrative, though it be a thousand miles from the present scene, it must be described. Each description creates a new scene, and when descriptions of different and separated places appear on the same page, the illusion of events happening before the eye is destroyed. If a writer is to transport us instantaneously from one quarter of the globe to another he should at least apprise us that we are on the magic rug, and even then the space-o'erleaping imagination resents being bundled off on hurried and inconsequential journeys. Often when Conrad's descriptions are logically in course, they are too long; the current of narrative vanishes under a mountain (a mountain of gold, perhaps, but difficult to the feet of him who would follow the stream); and when the subterranean river emerges again, it is frequently obstructed by inopportune, though subtle, exposition.