... From his height he can follow their
fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. He
admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony
springs from his knowledge of the inevitable end."...
Substitute the name of Dreiser for that of Conrad, and you will have to
change scarcely a word. Perhaps one, to wit, "clever." I suspect that
Dreiser, writing so of his own creed, would be tempted to make it
"stupid," or, at all events, "unintelligible." The struggle of man, as
he sees it, is more than impotent; it is gratuitous and purposeless.
There is, to his eye, no grand ingenuity, no skilful adaptation of means
to end, no moral (or even dramatic) plan in the order of the universe.
He can get out of it only a sense of profound and inexplicable disorder.
The waves which batter the cockleshells change their direction at every
instant. Their navigation is a vast adventure, but intolerably
fortuitous and inept--a voyage without chart, compass, sun or stars....
So at bottom. But to look into the blackness steadily, of course, is
almost beyond the endurance of man.
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