Conrad there is no such sweet bait for
the fair and sentimental. The sedentary multipara, curled up in her
boudoir on a rainy afternoon, finds nothing to her taste in his grim
tales. The Conrad philosophy is harsh, unyielding, repellent. The Conrad
heroes are nearly all boors and ruffians. Their very love-making has
something sinister and abhorrent in it; one cannot imagine them in the
moving pictures, played by tailored beauties with long eye-lashes. More,
I venture that the censors would object to them, even disguised as
floor-walkers. Surely that would be a besotted board which would pass
the irregular amours of Lord Jim, the domestic brawls of Almayer, the
revolting devil's mass of Kurtz, Falk's disgusting feeding in the
Southern Ocean, or the butchery on Heyst's island. Stevenson's "Treasure
Island" has been put upon the stage, but "An Outcast of the Islands"
would be as impossible there as "Barry Lyndon" or "La Terre." The world
fails to breed actors for such roles, or stage managers to penetrate
such travails of the spirit, or audiences for the revelation thereof.

With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo,
there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quite
valueless. Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,"[9] gets
little beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of the
English Novel," achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] Frederic Taber
Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The Secret Agent" and "Under
Western Eyes" in terms of the Harvard enlightenment;[11] John Galsworthy
wastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even Sir Hugh Clifford, for
all his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to Conrad's
principles of Malay psychology.[13] Who cares? Conrad is his own God,
and creates his own Malay! The best of the existing studies of Conrad,
despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, is
in the book of Wilson Follett, before mentioned. The worst is in the
official biography by Richard Curle,[14] for which Conrad himself
obtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumed
to lie. If it does, then its absurdities are nothing new, for we all
know what a botch Ibsen made of accounting for himself. But, even so,
the assumption stretches the probabilities more than once. Surely it is
hard to think of Conrad putting "Lord Jim" below "Chance" and "The
Secret Agent" on the ground that it "raises a fierce mor