A very great man, this Mr. Conrad. As yet, I believe decidedly underestimated, even by many of his post-mortem advocates. Most of his first acclaimers mistook him for a mere romantic--a talented but somewhat uncouth follower of the Stevenson tradition, with the orthodox cutlass exchanged for a Malay _kris_. Later on he began to be heard of as a linguistic and vocational marvel: it was astonishing that any man bred to Polish should write English at all, and more astonishing that a country gentleman from the Ukraine should hold a master’s certificate in the British merchant marine. Such banal attitudes are now archaic, but I suspect that they have been largely responsible for the slowness with which his fame has spread in the world. At all events, he is vastly less read and esteemed in foreign parts than he ought to be, and very few Continental Europeans have risen to any genuine comprehension of his stature. When one reflects that the Nobel Prize was given to such third-raters as Benavente, Heidenstam, Gjellerup and Tagore, with Conrad passed over, one begins to grasp the depth and density of the ignorance prevailing in the world, even among the relatively enlightened. One “Lord Jim,” as human document and as work of art, is worth all the works produced by all the Benaventes and Gjellerups since the time of Rameses II. It is, indeed, an indecency of criticism to speak of such unlike things in the same breath: as well talk of Brahms in terms of Mendelssohn. Nor is “Lord Jim” a chance masterpiece, an isolated peak. On the contrary, it is but one unit in a long series of extraordinary and almost incomparable works--a series sprung suddenly and overwhelmingly into full dignity with “Almayer’s Folly.” I challenge the nobility and gentry of Christendom to point to another Opus 1 as magnificently planned and turned out as “Almayer’s Folly.” The more one studies it, the more it seems miraculous. If it is not a work of absolute genius then no work of absolute genius exists on this earth. 2 _Hergesheimer_