It would be going too far to suggest, however, that Mr. Conrad merely emphasises in other writers those qualities which he himself either possesses or desires to possess. Most good portraits are double portraits: they portray both the painter and the sitter. Mr. Conrad always does justice to his sitter, as when he writes: “Henry James is the historian of fine consciences,” or as when he says of Maupassant: “It cannot be denied that he thinks very little. In him extreme energy of perception achieves great results, as in men of action the energy of force and desire.” At the same time, we read _Notes on Life and Letters_ for the light it throws, not on this or that author or the Polish question or the question of unsinkable ships, but on Mr. Conrad himself. The essay on Anatole France, for instance, interests us mainly because it reminds us that Mr. Conrad is as impatient of political panaceas as of literary formulas. Remembering that Anatole France is a Socialist, he observes characteristically: “He will disregard the stupidity of the dogma and the unlovely form of the ideal. His art will find its own beauty in the imaginative presentation of wrongs, of errors, and miseries that call aloud for redress.” He commands the artist to hope, but he clearly forbids anybody to hope too much. His “Note on the Polish Problem” shows that during the war the most he hoped for his country was an Anglo-French protectorate. Humanitarians horrify him with their dreams. He hates impossibilism as he hates the talk about unsinkable ships. But what he really hates most, both in politics and in ships, is the blind worship of machinery. He looks on Socialism, I fancy, as an attempt on the part of machine-worshippers to build an unsinkable State--a monstrous political _Titanic_, defiant of the facts of nature and fore-doomed to catastrophe. And how this old master of a sailing-ship hates the _Titanic_! He has little that is good to say, indeed, of any steam vessels, at least of cargo steam vessels--“a suggestion of a low parody directed at noble predecessors by an improved generation of dull mechanical toilers, conceited and without grace.” Progress? He retorts: “The tinning of salmon was ‘progress.’” And yet, when he met the men of the merchant service during the war, he had to admit that “men don’t change.” That is a fact at once reassuring and depressing. It is reassuring to know that human beings, if they avoid the sin of idolaters, can make use of machines with reasonable safety. The machine, like the literary formula, is a convenience. Even the Socialist State would be only a convenience. It would in all probability be very little more alarming than a button-hook or a lead pencil. IV MR. WELLS AND THE WORLD