, as to other quacks. This is not because they are
unintelligent, but rather because they have that sharp and sure sort of
intelligence which is instinctive, and which passes under the name of
intuition. It teaches them that the taboos which surround them, however
absurd at bottom, nevertheless penalize their courage and curiosity with
unescapable dudgeon, and so they become partisans of the existing order,
and, per corollary, of the existing ethic. They may be menaced by
phantoms, but at all events these phantoms really menace them. A woman
who reacted otherwise than with distrust to such a book as "Victory"
would be as abnormal as a woman who embraced "Jenseits von Gut und Boese"
or "The Inestimable Life of the Great Gargantua."

As for Conrad, he retaliates by approaching the sex somewhat gingerly.
His women, in the main, are no more than soiled and tattered cards in a
game played by the gods. The effort to erect them into the customary
"sympathetic" heroines of fiction always breaks down under the drum fire
of the plain facts. He sees quite accurately, it seems to me, how
vastly the role of women has been exaggerated, how little they amount to
in the authentic struggle of man. His heroes are moved by avarice, by
ambition, by rebellion, by fear, by that "obscure inner necessity" which
passes for nobility or the sense of duty--never by that puerile passion
which is the mainspring of all masculine acts and aspirations in popular
novels and on the stage. If they yield to amour at all, it is only at
the urging of some more powerful and characteristic impulse, _e.g._, a
fantastic notion of chivalry, as in the case of Heyst, or the thirst for
dominion, as in the case of Kurtz. The one exception is offered by
Razumov--and Razumov is Conrad's picture of a flabby fool, of a
sentimentalist destroyed by his sentimentality. Dreiser has shown much
the same process in Witla and Cowperwood, but he is less free from the
conventional obsession than Conrad; he takes a love affair far more
naively, and hence far more seriously.

I used to wonder why Conrad never tackled a straight-out story of
adultery under Christianity, the standard matter of all our more
pretentious fiction and drama. I was curious to see what his ethical
agnosticism would make of it. The conclusion I came to at first was that
his failure marked the limitations of his courage--in brief, that he
hesitated to go against the orthodox axioms and assumptions in the
depa