The Secret Agent - Page 2

simply to surprise my readers by a
change of front, has never entered my head. In making this statement I
expect to be believed, not only on the evidence of my general character
but also for the reason, which anybody can see, that the whole treatment
of the tale, its inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt,
prove my detachment from the squalor and sordidness which lie simply in
the outward circumstances of the setting.

The inception of "The Secret Agent" followed immediately on a two
years' period of intense absorption in the task of writing that remote
novel, "Nostromo," with its far off Latin-American atmosphere; and the
profoundly personal "Mirror of the Sea." The first an intense creative
effort on what I suppose will always remain my largest canvas, the
second an unreserved attempt to unveil for a moment the profounder
intimacies of the sea and the formative influences of nearly half my
life-time. It was a period, too, in which my sense of the truth of
things was attended by a very intense imaginative and emotional
readiness which, all genuine and faithful to facts as it was, yet made
me feel (the task once done) as if I were left behind, aimless amongst
mere husks of sensations and lost in a world of other, of inferior,
values.

I don't know whether I really felt that I wanted a change, change in my
imagination, in my vision and in my mental attitude. I rather think that
a change in the fundamental mood had already stolen over me unawares. I
don't remember anything definite happening. With "The Mirror of the Sea"
finished in the full consciousness that I had dealt honestly with myself
and my readers in every line of that book, I gave myself up to a not
unhappy pause. Then, while I was yet standing still, as it were, and
certainly not thinking of going out of my way to look for anything ugly,
the subject of "The Secret Agent"--I mean the tale--came to me in the
shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about
anarchists or rather anarchist activities; how brought about I don't
remember now.

I remember, however, remarking on the criminal futility of the whole
thing, doctrine, action, mentality; and on the contemptible aspect of
the half-crazy pose as of a brazen cheat exploiting the poignant
miseries and passionate credulities of a mankind always so tragically
eager for self-destruction. That was what made for me its philosophical
pretences so unpardonable. Presently, passing to particular instances,
we recalled the already old story of the attempt to blow up the
Greenwich Observatory; a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that
it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even