takes in East and West, smashes cities, stops everything.
And one of the young men in the story looks around rather dazed, and
says in a low voice: "I've always thought life was a lark. It isn't.
This sort of thing has always been happening, I suppose--these things,
wars and earthquakes, that sweep across all the decency of life. It's
just as though I had woke up to it all for the first time.... And it's
always been so--it's the way of life."

So that's what we need to get used to, that it's _that_ kind of a ship.
We ought to have a sense of the adventure on which we're all bound.

* * * * *

It's not only war--not by a long shot--that gives men that sense. Great
scientists have it. Great sailors. You can sort out the statesmen around
you, the writers, the poets, according to whether or not they ever have
been up on deck.

Theodore Dreiser has, for instance; Arnold Bennett has not. Charles
Dickens did not, and that's why he is ranked below Thackeray. Compare
James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist" with George Moore's
"Confessions," and if you apply this criterion, Moore takes a back seat.

* * * * *

There's one great man now living, however, who has almost too much of
this sense: this cosmic adventure emotion. And that man's Joseph Conrad.
Perhaps in his youth the sea came upon him too suddenly, or his boyhood
sea-dreams awed too deeply his then unformed mind. At all events, the
men in his stories are like lonely spirits, sailing, spellbound, through
the immense forces surrounding the world. "There they are," one of them
says, as he stands at the rail, "stars, sun, sea, light, darkness,
space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which
man seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed."

We all have that mood. But Conrad, he's given to brooding. And his habit
at night when he stands staring up at the stars is to see (or conjure up
rather) a dumb buffoon Fate, primeval, unfriendly and stupid, whom Man
must defy. And Conrad defies it, but wearily, for he feels sick at
heart,--because of his surety that Fate is ignoble, and blind.

It's as though the man told himself ghost stories about this great
universe. He feels that it ought to have a gracious and powerful master,
leading men along fiery highways to test but not crush them, and
marching them firm-eyed and glorious toward high goals. But instead
there is nothing. The gray, em