One great writer, however, we possess who can give us any detail he likes without tedium, because of the quality of the intelligence which presents it. Mr. Conrad is not an Englishman by race, and he is the master, moreover, of a vast exotic experience of strange lands and foreign seas, where very few of his readers can follow him with any personal knowledge. And yet we instinctively feel that in all his best work he is none the less richly representative of what goes to make the English mind, as compared with the French, or the German, or the Italian mind--a mind, that is, shaped by sea-power and far-flung responsibilities, by all the customs and traditions, written and unwritten, which are the fruit of our special history, and our long-descended life. It is this which gives value often to Mr. Conrad's slightest tales, or intense significance to detail, which, without this background, would be lifeless or dull. In it, of course, he is at one with Mr. Kipling. Only the tone and accent are wholly different. Mr. Conrad's extraordinary intelligence seems to stand outside his subject, describing what he sees, as though he were crystal-gazing at figures and scenes, at gestures and movements, magically clear and sharp. Mr. Kipling, on the other hand, is part of--intimately one with--what he tells us; never for a moment really outside it; though he has at command every detail and every accessory that he needs. Mr. Galsworthy, I hope, when this war is over, on which he has written such vivid, such moving pages (I know! for in some of its scenes--on the Somme battle-fields, for instance--I have stood where he has stood), has still the harvest of his literary life before him. Since _The Country House_ it does not seem to me that he has ever found a subject that really suits him--and "subject is everything." But he has passion and style, and varied equipment, whether of training or observation; above all, an individuality it is abundantly worth while to know.