The question whether this or that man is great or
small is one which only posterity can answer. A silly begging of the
question, for doesn't posterity also make mistakes? Shakespeare's ghost
has seen two or three posterities, beautifully at odds. Even today, it
must notice a difference in flitting from London to Berlin. The shade of
Milton has been tricked in the same way. So, also, has Johann Sebastian
Bach's. It needed a Mendelssohn to rescue it from Coventry--and now
Mendelssohn himself, once so shining a light, is condemned to the
shadows in his turn. We are not dead yet; we are here, and it is now.
Therefore, let us at least venture, guess, opine.
My own conviction, sweeping all those reaches of living fiction that I
know, is that Conrad's figure stands out from the field like the Alps
from the Piedmont plain. He not only has no masters in the novel; he has
scarcely a colourable peer. Perhaps Thomas Hardy and Anatole France--old
men both, their work behind them. But who else? James is dead. Meredith
is dead. So is George Moore, though he lingers on.
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