stern
stories. Sometimes he employs the personal pronoun, and with what
piquancy as well as poignancy may be noted in the volume Youth. This
contains three tales, the first, which gives the title-key, has been
called the finest short story in English, although it is difficult to
discriminate. What could be more thrilling, with a well-nigh
supernatural thrill (and the colouring of Baudelairian cruelty and
blood-lust) than The Heart of Darkness, or what more pathetic--a
pathos which recalls Balzac's Pere Goriot and Turgenieff's A Lear of
the Steppe, withal still more pity-breeding--than The End of the
Tether? This volume alone should place Conrad among the immortals.

That he must have had a "long foreground" we find after studying the
man. Sailing a ship is no sinecure, and for Conrad a ship is something
with human attributes. Like a woman, it must be lived with to be
understood, and it has its ways and whims and has to be petted or
humoured, as in The Brute--that monstrous personification of the
treacherous sea's victim. Like all true artists, Conrad never
preaches. His moral is in suffusion, and who runs may read. We
recognise his emotional calibre, which is of a dramatic intensity,
though never over-emphasising the morbid. Of his intellectual grasp
there is no question. He possesses pathos, passion, sincerity, and
humour. Wide knowledge of mankind and nature he has, and in the field
of moral power we need but ask if he is a Yes-Sayer or a No-Sayer, as
the Nietzschians have it. He says Yes! to the universe and of the
eternal verities he is cognisant. For him there is no "other side of
good and evil." No writers of fiction, save the very greatest,
Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky, or Turgenieff, have so exposed the
soul of man under the stress of sorrow, passion, anger, or as
swimming, a midget, in the immensities of sky, or burrowing, a
fugitive, in suffocating virgin forests. The soul and the sea--they
are the beloved provinces of this sailor and psychologue. But he also
recognises the relativity of things. The ineluctable vastness and
sadness of life oppress him. In Karain we read: "Nothing could happen
to him unless what happens to all--failure and death." His heroes are
failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their
failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism of
the Slavic temperament must be reckoned with. But this pessimism is
implied, and life has its large as well as its