ABSTRACT
The early ones were given, part of a common stock; the later memories tell something about the particular individual who has retained them, planted them in the memory when so much else has fallen; they tell, no less than the homelier echoes, about hopes and fears and all sorts of hang-ups. The twentieth-century writer in English who is most preoccupied with and most brings home the sense of social fragility is Conrad; in book after book and especially in Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent. In the first the fragility is seen to arise from a compound of the evils of capitalism and a more fundamental disposition to evil in the heart of man.
