One other thing the obituary reviews agree upon--that he was the perfect type of the “pure” artist, who gave us immortal fiction without trace of purpose. And that I call a joke for the ages: Joseph Conrad being as grim and determined a propagandist as ever used fiction for a medium. Most of the time he carries on this propaganda with the Olympian calm of one who is sure of his thesis and fears no dispute. But now and then he stumbles upon some personality or point of view which seems to threaten his doctrine; and then suddenly the front of Jove becomes wrinkled, and the eyes of Jove shoot flames, and we discover the great Olympian in a venomous fury. The strangest fact about this master of English prose is that he was born in Poland, and began life as a sailor, shipping on French craft in the Mediterranean. He was born in 1857 and came to England at the age of twenty-one; he rose in the British merchant service to become a captain, and was nearly forty before his first novel was published. This man paces the quarter-deck through the long night watches in lonely silent seas. He reflects upon life, and comes to a conclusion about it. But it is not the conclusion officially recommended by his native countrymen; this merchant captain does not pray to the Virgin Mary for the safety of his ship and the souls of those on board; neither does he accept the official formula of his adopted country, in whose churches the congregations implore: Eternal Father, strong to save, Whose arm hath bound the restless wave, Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep Its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to Thee For those in peril on the sea. No, in the fiction of Joseph Conrad the gods, both male and female, have shriveled up and crumbled and blown away as dust, and over the universe there broods a dark inscrutable fate. Conrad himself puts it into words: “a stealthy Nemesis lies in wait.” You see, he uses the classic symbol, and unites in one blending the terror of four different races--Greek, Polish, English and Malay. This “stealthy Nemesis” is the enemy of men, and they fight against it, and almost invariably it overcomes them and destroys them, the good and generous and capable as well as the cowardly and weak.