He is, like Dunsany, a pure artist. His work, as he
once explained, is not to edify, to console, to improve or to encourage,
but simply to get upon paper some shadow of his own eager sense of the
wonder and prodigality of life as men live it in the world, and of its
unfathomable romance and mystery. "My task," he went on, "is, by the
power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is,
before all, to make you _see_. That--and no more, and it is
everything."...[6]
This detachment from all infra-and-ultra-artistic purpose, this
repudiation of the role of propagandist, this avowal of what Nietzsche
was fond of calling innocence, explains the failure of Conrad to fit
into the pigeon-holes so laboriously prepared for him by critics who
must shelve and label or be damned. He is too big for any of them, and
of a shape too strange. He stands clear, not only of all the schools and
factions that obtain in latter-day English fiction, but also of the
whole stream of English literature since the Restoration. He is as
isolated a figure as George Moore, and for much the same reason.
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