§ 7
There is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. They are bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective, mob emotion, error. The question whether this or that man is great or small is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of the question, for doesn’t posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare’s ghost has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, it must notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade of Milton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann Sebastian Bach’s. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry—and now Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the shadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now. Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine.
My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I know, is that Conrad’s figure stands out from the field like the Alps from the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he has scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France—old men both, their work behind them. But who else? James is dead. Meredith is dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on. So are all the Russians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are light cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of very high calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? Clara Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As for the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd harlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would pass for geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volume here and there, one can discern only Dreiser—and of Dreiser’s limitations I shall discourse anon. There remains England. England has the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman novelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford, George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and company. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say, Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary grande passion is simply not in them. They get nowhere with their suave and interminable volumes. Their view of the world and its wonders is narrow and superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than clever mechanicians.
As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them all. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into cant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures up the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in his books is not merely this man’s aspiration or that woman’s destiny, but the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene joking of the gods. “In the novels of Conrad,” says Galsworthy, “nature is first, man is second.” But not a mute, a docile second! He may think, as Walpole argues, that “life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of men,” but he does not think that they are too weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the challenging that engrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder. It is as futile, in the end, as Hamlet’s or Faust’s—but still a gallant and a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, an enterprise “inscrutable... and excessively romantic.”...
If you want to get his measure, read “Youth” or “Falk” or “Heart of Darkness,” and then try to read the best of Kipling. I think you will come to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the difference between an adroit artisan’s bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity and passion of a first-rate artist.
Footnotes
1 Joseph Conrad: A short study of his intellectual and emotional attitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels, by Wilson Follett; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co. (1915).
2 The Advance of the English Novel. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, p. 215.
3 Conrad, in the Forum, May, 1915.
4 New York and London. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907.
5 The Intelligence of Woman. Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1916, p. 6-7.
6 In The New Review, Dec., 1897.
7 Printed in the United States as Children of the Sea, but now restored to its original title.
8 Here are some actual prices from booksellers’ catalogues:
| 1914 | 1916 | 1920 | |
| Almayer’s Folly (1895) | $12. | $24. | $40. |
| An Outcast of the Islands (1896) | 11.50 | 20. | 35. |
| The Nigger of the Narcissus (1898) | 7.50 | 20. | 35. |
| Tales of Unrest (1898) | 12.50 | 20. | 35. |
| Lord Jim (1900) | 7.50 | 22.50 | 25. |
| The Inheritors (1901) | 12. | 20. | 30. |
| Youth (1902) | 5. | 7.50 | 25. |
| Typhoon (1903) | 4. | 5.50 | 16. |
| Romance (1903) | 5. | 7.50 | 9. |
| Nostromo (1904) | 2.50 | 4.50 | 7.50 |
| The Mirror of the Sea (1906) | 5. | 11. | 15. |
| A Set of Six (1908) | 3. | 7.50 | 10. |
| Under Western Eyes (1911) | 4.50 | 4.50 | 6. |
| Some Reminiscences (1912) | 4.50 | 9. | 15. |
| Chance (1913) | 2. | 5. | 15. |
| Victory (1915) | 2. | 2.50 | 4.25 |
9 New York, Chas. Scribner’s Sons, 1915, pp. 1-21.
10 New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916, pp. 192-217.
11 Some English Story Tellers: A Book of the Younger Novelists; New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1912, pp. 1-30.
12 A Disquisition on Conrad, Fortnightly Review, April, 1908.
13 The Genius of Mr. Joseph Conrad, North American Review, June, 1904.
14 Joseph Conrad: A Study; New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1914.
15 Joseph Conrad; London, Nisbet & Co. (1916).