fire.  We may see in these stories not only the record of Mr. Conrad’s twenty years’ toil as a seaman, but the image of his desperate doggedness as an author writing in a foreign tongue.  “Line by line,” he writes, “rather than page by page, was the growth of Almayer’s Folly.”  He has earned his fame in the sweat of his brow.  He speaks of the terrible bodily fatigue that is the lot of the imaginative writer even more than of the manual labourer.  “I have,” he adds, “carried bags of wheat on my back, bent almost double under a ship’s deck-beams, from six in the morning till six in the evening (with an hour and a half off for meals), so I ought to know.”  He declares, indeed, that the strain of creative effort necessary in imaginative writing is “something for which a material parallel can only be found in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage round Cape Horn.”  This is to make the profession of literature a branch of the heroic life.  And that, for all his smiling disparagement of himself as a Sybarite, is what Mr. Conrad has done.

It is all the more curious that he should ever have been regarded as one who had added to the literature of despair.  He is a tragic writer, it is true; he is the only novelist now writing in English with the grand tragic sense.  He is nearer Webster than Shakespeare, perhaps, in the mood of his tragedy; he lifts the curtain upon a world in which the noble and the beautiful go down before an almost meaningless malice.  In The End of the Tether, in Freya of the Seven Isles, in Victory, it is as though a very Nero of malice who took a special delight in the ruin of great spirits governed events.  On the other hand, as in Samson Agonistes, so in the stories of Mr. Conrad we are confronted with the curious paradox that some deathless quality in the dying hero forbids us utterly to despair.  Mr. Hardy has written the tragedy of man’s weakness; Mr. Conrad has written the tragedy of man’s strength “with courage never to submit or yield.”  Though Mr. Conrad possesses the tragic sense in a degree that puts him among the great poets, and above any of his living rivals, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. Youth, Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line—­are not all these fables of conquest and redemption?  Man in Mr. Conrad’s stories is always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley.  Had it not been so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home.  As it is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.