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For, of course, the Athenaeum is obsequious.  In common with every paper in this country, it has learnt that the proper thing is to praise Mr. Conrad’s work.  Not to appreciate Mr. Conrad’s work at this time of day would amount to bad form.  There is a cliche in nearly every line of the Athenaeum’s discriminating notice.  “Mr. Conrad is not the kind of author whose work one is content to meet only in fugitive form,” etc.  “Those who appreciate fine craftsmanship in fiction,” etc.  But there is worse than cliches.  For example:  “It is too studiously chiselled and hammered-out for that.” (God alone knows for what.) Imagine the effect of studiously chiselling a work and then hammering it out!  Useful process!  I wonder the Athenaeum did not suggest that Mr. Conrad, having written a story, took it to Brooklands to get it run over by a motor-car.  Again:  “His effects are studiously wrought, although—­such is his mastery of literary art—­they produce a swift and penetrating impression.”  Impossible not to recall the weighty judgment of one of Stevenson’s characters upon the Athenaeum:  “Golly, what a paper!”

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The Athenaeum further says:  “His is not at all the impressionistic method.”  Probably the impressionistic method is merely any method that the Athenaeum doesn’t like.  But one would ask:  Has it ever read the opening paragraph of “The Return,” perhaps the most dazzling feat of impressionism in modern English?  The Athenaeum says also:  “Upon the whole, we do not think the short story represents Mr. Conrad’s true metier” It may be that Mr. Conrad’s true metier was, after all, that of an auctioneer; but, after “Youth,” “To-morrow,” “Typhoon,” “Karain,” “The End of the Tether,” and half a dozen other mere masterpieces, he may congratulate himself on having made a fairly successful hobby of the short story.  The most extraordinary of all the Athenaeum’s remarks is this:  “The one ship story here, ‘The Brute,’ makes us regret that the author does not give us more of the sea in his work.”  Well, considering that about two-thirds of Mr. Conrad’s work deals with the sea, considering that he has written “Lord Jim,” “The Nigger of the Narcissus” “Typhoon,” “Nostromo,” and “The Mirror of the Sea,” this regret shall be awarded the gold medal of the silly season.  If the Athenaeum were a silly paper, like the Academy, I should have kept an august silence on this ineptitude.  But the Athenaeum has my respect.  It ought to remember the responsibilities of its position, and ought not to entrust an important work of letters to some one whose most obvious characteristic is an exquisite and profound incompetence for criticism.  The explanation that occurs to me is that “A Set of Six” and “Diana Mallory” got mixed on the Athenaeum’s library table, and that each was despatched to the critic chosen for the other.