ver, Mr. Conrad takes up the ancient planetary theme
of the loves of men and women and throws upon it a sudden, original,
and singularly stimulating light; a light, that like a lantern carried
down into the very Cave of the "Mothers," throws its flickering and
ambiguous rays over the large, dumb, formless shapes--the primordial
motives of human hearts--which grope and fumble in that thick
darkness.

The style of Conrad, simpler than that of James, less monumental than
that of Hardy, has nevertheless a certain forward-driving impetus
hardly less effective than these more famous mediums of expression.
"Lord Jim" is perhaps his masterpiece and may be regarded as the most
interesting book written recently in our language with the exception
of Henry James' "Golden Bowl." For sheer excitement and the thrilling
sensation of delayed denouement it must be conceded that not one of
our classical novelists can touch Conrad. "Victory" remains an
absorbing evidence of his power of concentrating at one and the same
moment our dramatic and our psychological interest.

80. WALTER PATER. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. STUDIES IN THE RENAISSANCE.
IMAGINARY PORTRAITS. PLATO AND PLATONISM. GASTON DE LATOUR.

Walter Pater's writings are more capable than any in our list of
offering, if approached at the suitable hour and moment, new vistas
and possibilities both intellectual and emotional. That wise and
massive egoism taught by Goethe, that impassioned "living to oneself"
indicated by Stendhal, find in Walter Pater a new qualification and a
new sanction.

Himself a supreme master of the rare and exquisite in style, he
becomes, for those who really understand him, something more
penetrating and insidious than a mere personality. He becomes an
atmosphere, an attitude, a tone, a temper--and one too which may serve
us to most rich and recondite purpose, as we wander through the world
seeking the excitement and consecration of impassioned cults and
organized discriminations.

For this austere and elaborately constructed style of his is nothing
less than the palpable expression of his own discriminating days; the
wayfaring, so self-consciously and scrupulously guarded, of his own
fastidious "hedonism," seeking its elaborate satisfactions among the
chance-offered occasions of hour, or person or of place.

Walter Pater remains, for those who are permitted to feel these
things, the one who above all others has the subtlest and most
stimulating met