d," in which the Conradean metaphysic is condensed from the novels
even better than Conrad has done it himself: at once you will see how
the two novelists, each a worker in the elemental emotions, each a rebel
against the current assurance and superficiality, each an alien to his
place and time, touch each other in a hundred ways.

"Conrad," says Walpole, "is of the firm and resolute conviction that
life is too strong, too clever and too remorseless for the sons of
men." And then, in amplification: "It is as though, from some high
window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose
security men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a
limitless and angry sea.... From his height he can follow their
fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. He
admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony
springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end."...

Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad, and you will have to
change scarcely a word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that
Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it
"stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as
he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless.
There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means
to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe.
He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder.
The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every
instant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably
fortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars....

So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily, of course, is
almost beyond the endurance of man. In the very moment that its
impenetrability is grasped the imagination begins attacking it with pale
beams of false light. All religions, I daresay, are thus projected from
the questioning soul of man, and not only all religious, but also all
great agnosticisms. Nietzsche, shrinking from the horror of that abyss
of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of _der ewigen
Wiederkunft_--a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a
while, he added explanations almost Christian--a whole repertoire of
whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. The
late Mark Twain, in an unpublished work, toyed with an equally daring