idea of eternal recurrence: it forced
itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?"
In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts to a veritable
obsession. And what else is there in Balzac, Goethe, Swift, Moliere,
Turgenev, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Romain Rolland, Anatole France? Or in the
Zola of "L'Assomoir," "Germinal," "La Debacle," the whole
Rougon-Macquart series? (The Zola of "Les Quatres Evangiles," and
particularly of "Fecondite," turned meliorist and idealist, and became
ludicrous.) Or in the Hauptmann of "Fuhrmann Henschel," or in Hardy, or
in Sudermann? (I mean, of course, Sudermann the novelist. Sudermann the
dramatist is a mere mechanician.)... The younger men in all countries,
in so far as they challenge the current sentimentality at all, seem to
move irresistibly toward the same disdainful skepticism. Consider the
last words of "Riders to the Sea." Or Gorky's "Nachtasyl." Or Frank
Norris' "McTeague." Or Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel." Or the ironical
fables of Dunsany. Or Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt." Or George Moore's
"Sister Teresa."

Conrad, more than any of the other men I have mentioned, grounds his
work firmly upon this sense of cosmic implacability, this confession of
unintelligibility. The exact point of the story of Kurtz, in "Heart of
Darkness," is that it is pointless, that Kurtz's death is as meaningless
as his life, that the moral of such a sordid tragedy is a wholesale
negation of all morals. And this, no less, is the point of the story of
Falk, and of that of Almayer, and of that of Jim. Mr. Follett (he must
be a forward-looker in his heart!) finds himself, in the end, unable to
accept so profound a determinism unadulterated, and so he injects a
gratuitous and mythical romanticism into it, and hymns Conrad "as a
comrade, one of a company gathered under the ensign of hope for common
war on despair." With even greater error, William Lyon Phelps argues
that his books "are based on the axiom of the moral law."[2] The one
notion is as unsound as the other. Conrad makes war on nothing; he is
pre-eminently _not_ a moralist. He swings, indeed, as far from revolt
and moralizing as is possible, for he does not even criticize God. His
undoubted comradeship, his plain kindliness toward the soul he
vivisects, is not the fruit of moral certainty, but of moral
agnosticism. He neither protests nor punishes; he merely smiles and
pities. Like Mark Twain he might well say: "The