mitations I shall discourse anon. There remains England. England has
the best second-raters in the world; nowhere else is the general level
of novel writing so high; nowhere else is there a corps of journeyman
novelists comparable to Wells, Bennett, Benson, Walpole, Beresford,
George, Galsworthy, Hichens, De Morgan, Miss Sinclair, Hewlett and
company. They have a prodigious facility; they know how to write; even
the least of them is, at all events, a more competent artisan than, say,
Dickens, or Bulwer-Lytton, or Sienkiewicz, or Zola. But the literary
_grande passion_ is simply not in them. They get nowhere with their
suave and interminable volumes. Their view of the world and its wonders
is narrow and superficial. They are, at bottom, no more than clever
mechanicians.

As Galsworthy has said, Conrad lifts himself immeasurably above them
all. One might well call him, if the term had not been cheapened into
cant, a cosmic artist. His mind works upon a colossal scale; he conjures
up the general out of the particular. What he sees and describes in his
books is not merely this man's aspiration or that woman's destiny, but
the overwhelming sweep and devastation of universal forces, the great
central drama that is at the heart of all other dramas, the tragic
struggles of the soul of man under the gross stupidity and obscene
joking of the gods. "In the novels of Conrad," says Galsworthy, "nature
is first, man is second." But not a mute, a docile second! He may think,
as Walpole argues, that "life is too strong, too clever and too
remorseless for the sons of men," but he does not think that they are
too weak and poor in spirit to challenge it. It is the challenging that
engrosses him, and enchants him, and raises up the magic of his wonder.
It is as futile, in the end, as Hamlet's or Faust's--but still a gallant
and a gorgeous adventure, a game uproariously worth the playing, an
enterprise "inscrutable ... and excessively romantic."...

If you want to get his measure, read "Youth" or "Falk" or "Heart of
Darkness," and then try to read the best of Kipling. I think you will
come to some understanding, by that simple experiment, of the difference
between an adroit artisan's bag of tricks and the lofty sincerity and
passion of a first-rate artist.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Joseph Conrad: A short study of his intellectual and emotional
attitude toward his work and of the chief characteristics of his novels,
by Wilson Follett; New York, D