So much for its faults. They are not of serious importance and should not obscure the really splendid qualities of Mr. Curle’s book. It abounds in acutely perceptive remarks—often extremely well put. In the course of seven chapters on Conrad’s Psychology, Men, Women, Irony and Sardonic Humour, Prose and the Artist, he piles up an overwhelming evidence of the man’s greatness. Is there a man alive, has any English novelist ever lived about whom one could wax so easily, so madly enthusiastic? True, to some Conrad does not appeal. They have never caught the glorious glamour of his pages—the solemn grandeur of his magnificent prose. Probably the surest way to win converts would be to compile a small book of extracts from his works, carefully graded according to their difficulty. When I was still at college I was curious about Conrad. A well-meaning bookseller sold me _Lord Jim_. I tried to read it, but fifty pages was as far as I could go. I tried again, but with even less success. Then one day at Interlaken I found a Tauchnitz copy of _A Set of Six_. Before I had quite finished the last story I lost the book—changing trains. But Conrad has never since seemed obscure to me. A beginner in French would never try to appreciate the shimmering pages of Flaubert; nor would even the Yankee farm-hand feed his baby pie. More than any living writer has Conrad needed some one to _present_ him to the public. This his American publishers have tried of late to do. Mr. Curle’s book will add to their success in so far as they manage to persuade people to read it. Except for those who have begun with _Lord Jim_, _Nostromo_, or _Chance_, I have never found anyone, who, having read one book by Conrad, was content to stop there. Mr. Curle thinks _Nostromo_ Conrad’s greatest work. It is now, with Europe in the throes of a bloody conflict, that one realizes more and more how Conrad’s men and women, far removed from the problems of a Wells, a Chesterton, or a Shaw—problems which _appear_ suddenly to be of very little importance after all—bulk great and ever greater. There they loom—like Rodin’s _Balzac_ against the glowering sky. ALFRED KNOPF. _A Set of Six, by Joseph Conrad._ [_Doubleday, Page and Company, New York._]