more I see of men, the
more they amuse me--and the more I pity them." He is _simpatico_
precisely because of this ironical commiseration, this infinite
disillusionment, this sharp understanding of the narrow limits of human
volition and responsibility.... I have said that he does not criticize
God. One may even imagine him pitying God....

Sec. 2

But in this pity, I need not add, there is no touch of sentimentality.
No man could be less the romantic, blubbering over the sorrows of his
own Werthers. No novelist could have smaller likeness to the brummagem
emotion-squeezers of the Kipling type, with their playhouse fustian and
their naive ethical cocksureness. The thing that sets off Conrad from
these facile fellows, and from the shallow pseudo-realists who so often
coalesce with them and become indistinguishable from them, is precisely
his quality of irony, and that irony is no more than a proof of the
greater maturity of his personal culture, his essential superiority as a
civilized man. It is the old difference between a Huxley and a
Gladstone, a philosophy that is profound and a philosophy that is merely
comfortable, "_Quid est veritas?_" and "Thus saith the Lord!" He brings
into the English fiction of the day, not only an artistry that is vastly
more fluent and delicate than the general, but also a highly unusual
sophistication, a quite extraordinary detachment from all petty rages
and puerile certainties. The winds of doctrine, howling all about him,
leave him absolutely unmoved. He belongs to no party and has nothing to
teach, save only a mystery as old as man. In the midst of the hysterical
splutterings and battle-cries of the Kiplings and Chestertons, the
booming pedagogics of the Wellses and Shaws, and the smirking at
key-holes of the Bennetts and de Morgans, he stands apart and almost
alone, observing the sardonic comedy of man with an eye that sees every
point and significance of it, but vouchsafing none of that sophomoric
indignation, that Hyde Park wisdom, that flabby moralizing which freight
and swamp the modern English novel. "At the centre of his web," says
Arthur Symons, "sits an elemental sarcasm discussing human affairs with
a calm and cynical ferocity.... He calls up all the dreams and illusions
by which men have been destroyed and saved, and lays them mockingly
naked.... He shows the bare side of every virtue, the hidden heroism of
every vice and crime. He summons before him all the injustices t