At the same time, if he tells little about himself, he does not escape giving himself away in his admiration for other men. He has an artistic faith that breaks into his sentences as soon as he begins to talk of Henry James or Maupassant or Turgenev. Not that he belongs to any school in literature: he hates all references to schools. He becomes sullenly hostile if anyone attempts to classify authors as romantics, realists, naturalists, etc. Every great author is for him a man, not a formula. He can hardly mention the word “formula” without disgust. “No secret of eternal life for our books,” he declares, “can be found among the formulas of art, any more than for our bodies in a prescribed combination of drugs.” Again, “the truth is, that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.” And once more, in speaking of the good artist: “It is in the impartial practice of life, if anywhere, that the promise of perfection for his art can be found, rather than in the absurd formulas trying to prescribe this or that particular method of technique or conception.” This may suggest to the pedantic that Mr. Conrad has no critical standards, and he certainly prefers to portray an author rather than to measure him with a tape as if for a suit of clothes. And he is right; for to portray an author truthfully is to measure him in a far profounder sense than can be done with a tape run round his waist, and down the side of his leg. Mr. Conrad’s quest is the soul of his author. If it be a noble soul, he has a welcome for it, as Plutarch had in his biographies. He may not agree with Maupassant’s deterministic view of life, but he salutes Maupassant in passing with the remark: “The worth of every conviction consists precisely in the steadfastness with which it is held.” His first demand of an author is truth--not absolute truth, but the truth that is in him. “At the heart of fiction,” he declares, “even the least worthy of the name, some sort of truth can be found--if only the truth of a childish theatrical ardour in the game of life, as in the novels of Dumas the father.” Mr. Conrad, indeed, claims for fiction that it is nearer truth than history, agreeing more or less on this point with Aristotle and Schopenhauer: Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it stands on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms and the observation of social phenomena, whereas history is based on documents, and the reading of print and handwriting--on second-hand impression. Thus fiction is nearer truth. But let that pass. An historian may be an artist, too, and a novelist is an historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.