Both
are exotics, and both, in a very real sense, are public enemies, for
both war upon the philosophies that caress the herd. Is Conrad the
beyond-Kipling, as the early criticism of him sought to make him?
Nonsense! As well speak of Mark Twain as the beyond-Petroleum V. Nasby
(as, indeed, was actually done). He is not only a finer artist than
Kipling; he is a quite different kind of artist. Kipling, within his
limits, shows a talent of a very high order. He is a craftsman of the
utmost deftness. He gets his effects with almost perfect assurance.
Moreover, there is a poet in him; he knows how to reach the emotions.
But once his stories are stripped down to the bare carcass their
emptiness becomes immediately apparent. The ideas in them are not the
ideas of a reflective and perspicacious man, but simply the ideas of a
mob-orator, a mouther of inanities, a bugler, a school-girl. Reduce any
of them to a simple proposition, and that proposition, in so far as it
is intelligible at all, will be ridiculous. It is precisely here that
Conrad leaps immeasurably ahead.
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