destiny in a sort of
vacuum and constantly illumined by infallible revelations of his duty,
and expose him as he is in fact: an organism infinitely more sensitive
and responsive than other organisms, but still a mere organism in the
end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa, swayed by the same
inscrutable fortunes, condemned to the same inchoate errors and
irresolutions, and surrounded by the same terror and darkness....

But is the Conrad I here describe simply a new variety of moralist,
differing from the general only in the drift of the doctrine he
preaches? Surely not. He is no more a moralist than an atheist is a
theologian. His attitude toward all moral systems and axioms is that of
a skeptic who rejects them unanimously, even including, and perhaps
especially including, those to which, in moments of aesthetic detachment,
he seems to give a formal and resigned sort of assent. It is this
constant falling back upon "I do not know," this incessant conversion of
the easy logic of romance into the harsh and dismaying logic of fact,
that explains his failure to succeed as a popular novelist, despite his
skill at evoking emotion, his towering artistic passion, his power to
tell a thumping tale. He is talked of, he brings forth a mass of
punditic criticism, he becomes in a sense the fashion; but it would be
absurd to say that he has made the same profound impression upon the
great class of normal novel-readers that Arnold Bennett once made, or H.
G. Wells, or William de Morgan in his brief day, or even such
cheap-jacks as Anthony Hope Hawkins and William J. Locke. His show
fascinates, but his philosophy, in the last analysis, is unbearable. And
in particular it is unbearable to women. One rarely meets a woman who,
stripped of affection, shows any genuine enthusiasm for a Conrad book,
or, indeed, any genuine comprehension of it. The feminine mind, which
rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves
inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad
has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects
itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that
all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them
afresh, that a few simple principles suffice to dispose of them. Women,
one may say, have to subscribe to absurdities in order to account for
themselves at all; it is the instinct of self-preservation which sends
them to priests