al issue."
Nothing, indeed, could be worse nonsense--save it be an American
critic's doctrine that "Conrad denounces pessimism." "Lord Jim" no more
raises a moral issue than "The Titan." It is, if anything, a devastating
exposure of a moral issue. Its villain is almost heroic; its hero,
judged by his peers, is a scoundrel....

Hugh Walpole, himself a competent novelist, does far better in his
little volume, "Joseph Conrad."[15] In its brief space he is unable to
examine all of the books in detail, but he at least manages to get
through a careful study of Conrad's method, and his professional skill
and interest make it valuable.

Sec. 7

There is a notion that judgments of living artists are impossible. They
are bound to be corrupted, we are told, by prejudice, false perspective,
mob emotion, error. The question whether this or that man is great or
small is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of the
question, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare's ghost
has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, it
must notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade of
Milton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann Sebastian
Bach's. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry--and now
Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the
shadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now.
Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine.

My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I
know, is that Conrad's figure stands out from the field like the Alps
from the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he has
scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France--old
men both, their work behind them. But who else? James is dead. Meredith
is dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on. So are all the
Russians of the first rank; Andrieff, Gorki and their like are light
cavalry. In Sudermann, Germany has a writer of short stories of very
high calibre, but where is the German novelist to match Conrad? Clara
Viebig? Thomas Mann? Gustav Frenssen? Arthur Schnitzler? Surely not! As
for the Italians, they are either absurd tear-squeezers or more absurd
harlequins. As for the Spaniards and the Scandinavians, they would pass
for geniuses only in Suburbia. In America, setting aside an odd volume
here and there, one can discern only Dreiser--and of Dreiser's
li