With the Conrad cult, so discreetly nurtured out of a Barabbasian silo,
there arises a considerable Conrad literature, most of it quite
valueless. Huneker's essay, in "Ivory, Apes and Peacocks,"[9] gets
little beyond the obvious; William Lyon Phelps, in "The Advance of the
English Novel," achieves only a meagre judgment;[10] Frederic Taber
Cooper tries to estimate such things as "The Secret Agent" and "Under
Western Eyes" in terms of the Harvard enlightenment;[11] John Galsworthy
wastes himself upon futile comparisons;[12] even Sir Hugh Clifford, for
all his quick insight, makes irrelevant objections to Conrad's
principles of Malay psychology.[13] Who cares? Conrad is his own God,
and creates his own Malay! The best of the existing studies of Conrad,
despite certain sentimentalities arising out of youth and schooling, is
in the book of Wilson Follett, before mentioned. The worst is in the
official biography by Richard Curle,[14] for which Conrad himself
obtained a publisher and upon which his _imprimatur_ may be thus assumed
to lie.
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