Joseph Conrad 11
II. Theodore Dreiser 67
III. James Huneker 151
IV. Puritanism as a Literary Force 197
Index 285
A BOOK OF PREFACES
I
JOSEPH CONRAD
Sec. 1
"Under all his stories there ebbs and flows a kind of tempered
melancholy, a sense of seeking and not finding...." I take the words
from a little book on Joseph Conrad by Wilson Follett, privately
printed, and now, I believe, out of print.[1] They define both the mood
of the stories as works of art and their burden and direction as
criticisms of life. Like Dreiser, Conrad is forever fascinated by the
"immense indifference of things," the tragic vanity of the blind groping
that we call aspiration, the profound meaninglessness of
life--fascinated, and left wondering. One looks in vain for an attempt
at a solution of the riddle in the whole canon of his work. Dreiser,
more than once, seems ready to take refuge behind an indeterminate sort
of mysticism, even a facile supernaturalism, but Conrad, from first to
last, faces squarely the massive and intolerable fact.
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