The finest and deepest effects of Conrad’s art are always found when, in the process of the story, some solitary man and woman encounter each other, far from civilization, and tearing off, as it were, the mask of one another’s souls, are confronted by a deeper and more inveterate mystery—­the eternal mystery of difference, which separates all men born into the world and keeps us perpetually alone.  In the case of Heyst and Lena—­of Flora de Barral and her Captain Anthony—­of Charles and Mrs. Gould—­of Aissa and Willems—­of Almayer’s daughter and her Malay lover, 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 method of approach with regard to all the great arts, and most especially with regard to the art of literature.