change.

I heard a story, a crazy and tiresome myth.

Listen! Behind the twilight a deep, low sound
Like the constant shutting of very distant doors.

Doors that are letting people over there
Out to some other place beyond the end of the sky.

The contrast between the beauty of the stillness of the moonlit world
and the insane intrusion of the war into it has not, I think, been
suggested so expressively in any other poem.

Now that these poems have been collected into a single volume it is
possible to measure the author's stature. His book will, I believe, come
as a revelation to the majority of readers. A poet of original music,
of an original mind, of an original imagination, Mr. Squire has now
taken a secure place among the men of genius of to-day. _Poems: First
Series_, is literary treasure so novel and so abundant that I can no
longer regret, as I once did, that Mr. Squire has said farewell to the
brilliant lighter-hearted moods of _Steps to Parnassus_ and _Tricks of
the Trade._ He has brought us gifts better even than those.

XXV

R. JOSEPH CONRAD

1. THE MAKING OF AN AUTHOR

Mr. Joseph Conrad is one of the strangest figures in literature. He has
called himself "the most unliterary of writers." He did not even begin
to write till he was half-way between thirty and forty. I do not like to
be more precise about the date, because there seems to be some doubt as
to the year in which Mr. Conrad was born. Mr. Hugh Walpole, in his brief
critical study of Mr. Conrad, gives the date as the 6th of December,
1857; the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says 1856; Mr. Conrad himself
declares in his reminiscences that he was "nine years old or
thereabouts" in 1868, which would bring the year of his birth nearer
1859. Of one thing, however, there is no question. He grew up without
any impulse to be a writer. He apparently never even wrote bad verse in
his teens. Before he began to write _Almayer's Folly_ he "had written
nothing but letters and not very many of these." "I never," he declares,
"made a note of a fact, of an impression, or of an anecdote in my life.
The ambition of being an author had never turned up among those precious
imaginary existences one creates fondly for oneself in the stillness and
immobility of a daydream."

At the same time, Mr. Conrad's is not a genius without parentage or
pedigree. His father was not only a revolutionary, but in some degree a
man of letters. Mr. Conra