TO-MORROW 104

VI. FRANK WEDEKIND 121

VII. THE MAGIC VERMEER 141

VIII. RICHARD STRAUSS AT STUTTGART 153

IX. MAX LIEBERMANN AND SOME PHASES OF
MODERN GERMAN ART 173

X. A MUSICAL PRIMITIVE: MODESTE MOUSSORGSKY 190

XI. NEW PLAYS BY HAUPTMANN, SUDERMANN,
AND SCHNITZLER 203

XII. KUBIN, MUNCH, AND GAUGUIN: MASTERS OF
HALLUCINATION 222

XIII. THE CULT OF THE NUANCE: LAFCADIO HEARN 240

XIV. I. THE MELANCHOLY OF MASTERPIECES 249
II. THE ITALIAN FUTURIST PAINTERS 262

XV. IN THE WORKSHOP OF ZOLA 275

XVI. A STUDY OF DE MAUPASSANT 288

XVII. PUVIS DE CHAVANNES 301

XVIII. THREE DISAGREEABLE GIRLS 311

IVORY APES AND PEACOCKS

I

THE GENIUS OF JOSEPH CONRAD

I

In these piping days when fiction plays the handmaid or prophet to
various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove
something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums;
when the insistent drums of the Great God Reclame are bruising human
tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English
novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid
the clamour of the market-place a book of his is a sea-shell which
pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the sea; always the
sea, either as rigid as a mirror under hard, blue skies or shuddering
symphonically up some exotic beach. Conrad is a painter doubled by a
psychologist; he is the psychologist of the sea--and that is his chief
claim to originality, his Peak of Darien. He knows and records its
every pulse-beat. His genius has the rich, salty tang of an
Elizabethan adventurer and the spaciousness of those times. Imagine a
Polish sailor who read Flaubert and the English Bible, who bared his
head under equatorial few large stars and related his doings in
rhythmic, sonorous, coloured prose; imagine a man from a landlocked
country who "midway in his mortal life" began writing for the fi