Melville crossed the shadow line in his pursuit of the secret of man's relation to the universe; only magnificent fragments of his imagination were salvaged for his books. Conrad sails on an open sea, tamed by wireless and conquered by steel. Mystery for him lies not beyond the horizon, but in his fellow passengers. On them he broods. His achievement is more complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has pushed back the unknown to the horizon and given us a little space of light in the darkness of the universe. There the ego is for a time the greatest mystery. It is an opportunity for the psychologists and, while we are thinking less of the soul, they have rushed to study the mechanics of the brain. It was Conrad's opportunity also to brood upon the romance of personality at the moment of man's greatest victory over dark external force. THE NOVELIST OF PITY To those interested in the meaning of the generation that has now left us quivering on the beach of after war, Thomas Hardy's books are so engrossing that to write of them needs no pretext; yet the recent publication of an anniversary edition with all his prefaces included is a welcome excuse for what I propose to make, not so much an essay as a record of a sudden understanding. Long familiarity with Hardy's novels had led to an afternoon of conversation with the author himself in the mildness of old age. But he remained for me a still inexplicable figure, belonging to an earlier century, yet in other respects so clearly abreast, if not ahead, of the emotions of our own times, that at eighty he saw the young men beginning to follow him. It was a reading of "The Dynasts," in the tall, red volumes of the new edition, that suddenly and unexpectedly seemed to give me a key. The danger, so I had thought and think, is that Hardy bids fair to become a legendary figure with an attribute, as is the way with such figures, better known than the man himself. "Hardy, oh, yes, the pessimist" threatens to become all the schoolboy knows and all he needs to know of him, and his alleged philosophy of gloom is already overshadowing the man's intense interest in strong and appealing life. It has been the fate of many a great artist to get a nickname, like a boy, and never be rid of it.