and smattering as a
speech by William Jennings Bryan or a shocker by Jane Addams. Churchill,
with the late Jack London to bear him company, may stand for a large
class; in its lower ranks are such men as Reginald Wright Kauffman and
Will Levington Comfort. Still more typical of the national taste for
moral purpose and quack philosophy are the professional optimists and
eye-dimmers, with their two grand divisions, the boarding-school
romantics and the Christian Endeavor Society sentimentalists. Of the
former I give you George Barr McCutcheon, Owen Wister, the late Richard
Harding Davis, and a horde of women--most of them now humanely
translated to the moving pictures. Of the latter I give you the fair
authors of the "glad" books, so gigantically popular, so lavishly
praised in the newspapers--with the wraith of the later Howells, the
virtuous, kittenish Howells, floating about in the air above them. No
other country can parallel this literature, either in its copiousness or
in its banality. It is native and peculiar to a civilization which
erects the unshakable certainties of the misinformed and quack-ridden
into a national way of life....

Sec. 3

My business, however, is not with the culture of Anglo-Saxondom, but
only with Conrad's place therein. That place is isolated and remote; he
is neither of it nor quite in it. In the midst of a futile meliorism
which deceives the more, the more it soothes, he stands out like some
sinister skeleton at the feast, regarding the festivities with a
flickering and impenetrable grin. "To read him," says Arthur Symons, "is
to shudder on the edge of a gulf, in a silent darkness." There is no
need to be told that he is there almost by accident, that he came in a
chance passerby, a bit uncertain of the door. It was not an artistic
choice that made him write English instead of French; it was a choice
with its roots in considerations far afield. But once made, it concerned
him no further. In his first book he was plainly a stranger, and all
himself; in his last he is a stranger still--strange in his manner of
speech, strange in his view of life, strange, above all, in his glowing
and gorgeous artistry, his enthusiasm for beauty _per se_, his absolute
detachment from that heresy which would make it no more than a servant
to some bald and depressing theory of conduct, some axiom of the
uncomprehending. He is, like Dunsany, a pure artist. His work, as he
once explained, is not to edify, to