nt," he calls it--in his literary work as at sea. He has been
compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of
Dostoevsky--an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently. At
the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky
did for strange demons and goblins--that population of grotesque
characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale. His
tales are tales of wonder. He is not only a philosopher of the bold
heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature.
That is why one reads the volume called _Youth_ for the third and fourth
time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.

2. TALES OF MYSTERY

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure. Every novelist of genius is
that, of course, to some extent. But Mr. Conrad is more than most. He
has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics. He compels to adventure.
There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the
same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth. Every man who
breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows,
every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is
for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light--a little
light in an immense darkness. Or perhaps it is more subtle than that.
With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people
and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling
communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad
communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so
doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us
puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the
presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain
as of some noise that we have heard at night. It is like the "mana"
which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects. It is
unlike "mana," however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but
of romance. It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited
every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being. His
function in literature is the announcement of this ghost. In all his
work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a
kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read. His ships and men are, in an
old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad