 a
propensity to justify my action. Not to defend. To justify. Not to insist that I
was right but simply to explain that there was no perverse intention, no secret
scorn for the natural sensibilities of mankind at the bottom of my impulses.
    That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the
risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the
motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he
is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from
explanations. Yet I will go on with mine. It's obvious that I need not have
written that book. I was under no necessity to deal with that subject; using the
word subject both in the sense of the tale itself and in the larger one of a
special manifestation in the life of mankind. This I fully admit. But the
thought of elaborating mere ugliness in order to shock, or even 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 »
