em so carefully, so
scrupulously laid side by side, each with its own burden of
intellectual perfume, like precious vases full of incense on the steps
of a marble altar. To write as delicately, as laboriously, as
exquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murder
and suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; to
write as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wild
secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-bestial
savages, is great mastery. And it is more than mastery. It is a
spiritual triumph. It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting the
worst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning all
things into grist for its mill.

For Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless and
purposeless chance in the ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendid
tenacity of courage in resisting any desperate betrayal of human joy.

Like that amazing character in "Lord Jim," who collects butterflies
and keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedy
upon tragedy, he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woeful
stories, that since there is no help in heaven or earth for the
persecuted child of man, it is the more necessary that in defiance of
the elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself,
man should sink into his own soul and find in the strength of his
own isolated and exiled spirit a courage equal to all that can be laid
upon it. Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we found
when we sank down thus into ourselves were courage, and courage
only. What one comes to feel from the reading of Conrad is that
there is nothing in the world which has enduring value--nothing in
the world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind of
dignity or beauty--except only love. And love like this, which is the
forlorn hope of the race, is as far from lust as it is far from sentiment
or indolent pity. It is the "high old Roman virtue." It is the spirit of
comradeship defiant still, under the tottering pillars of a shaken earth.

"Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither.
Ripeness is all."

. . . . .

"Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense."

HENRY JAMES

The greatness of a writer can be estimated by the gap which would
yawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment the
expurgation of his whole body o