o the resolve: "If a
seaman, then an English seaman." He has always been obedient to a star.
He likes to picture himself as a lazy creature, but he is really one of
the most dogged day-labourers who have ever served literature. In
_Typhoon_ and _Youth_ he has written of the triumph of the spirit of man
over tempest and fire. We may see in these stories not only the record
of Mr. Conrad's twenty years' toil as a seaman, but the image of his
desperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue. "Line by
line," he writes, "rather than page by page, was the growth of
_Almayer's Folly_." He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow. He
speaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginative
writer even more than of the manual labourer. "I have," he adds,
"carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship's
deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the evening (with an
hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know." He declares,
indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative
writing is "something for which a material parallel can only be found in
the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape
Horn." This is to make the profession of literature a branch of the
heroic life. And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as a
Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one
who had added to the literature of despair. He is a tragic writer, it is
true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand
tragic sense. He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the
mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the
noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice. In
_The End of the Tether_, in _Freya of the Seven Isles_, in _Victory_, it
is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the
ruin of great spirits governed events. On the other hand, as in _Samson
Agonistes_, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the
curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us
utterly to despair. Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man's weakness;
Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man's strength "with courage never
to submit or yield." Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a
degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living
rivals