New-York tribune. [volume] (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, 1920-07-16
The Wisdom Of Joseph Conrad


idealist, one of the oldest and most
indestructible of human disagree
ments, may be described as a dispute
touching the size of man. Is he the
whole show, the mighty master of
universe that he has tanned to his
pleasure through force of intellect
and will? Or is~he speck upon the
f1ywheel, a tiny, passing phenome-
non among whirling worlds and ex-
ploding cosmos? Somewhere between
stands the average view; and &C.
cording as ones outlook tends to
dwell upon the one or the other view
does faith in ideas or faith in facts
give the prevailing cast to ones
mind.
Probably the great war made
more realists in a shorter space Of
time than ever were manufactured
before. For one thing, there were
never so many idealists as in that
comfortable, prosperous, sunny era
before Sarajevo, when the millen-
MUM looked to be around the corner
and mans control Of himself and the
universe seemed wellnigh perfect.
For another, there was never a more
complete blowing off of the crust of
civilization than in those months of
1914. The impossible happened
every hour. Giant forces of emotion
which most people had supposed to
be securely buried under generations
of peace and order and industry
suddenly erupted.
AS result any number of humans
abandoned their faith in the larger
congratulations and went back to the
simpler and more elementary loyal
ties-abstractions so rooted in the
habits of mind and body as to be
comparable with such certain
ties as life and death and hunger and
love and hate. Those idealists who
were unable to make this shift, this
reconstruction, have since been wan
dering about like lost sheep. They
are our radicals and ,Utopians of the
hour.
The broad swing from an excess
of idealism to a sounder realism sug-
gestS a wholesome lesson for the
future. 1t is not that we want to
eXterminate idealism for the future;
we shall need it quite as much as
ever; but we can use also better
balanced human being-one who
feels the power Of man and his
ideas and yet does not shut his eyes
to the eternal facts of the universe
who keeps his perspective in this
matter of the size of man.
Direct contact with nature in it's
might and unexpectedness is prob
ably the sanest method of preserv-
ing this balance in our world Of
much civilization and softness-the
philosophy that one gets from Joseph
Conrad, for instance. An admira-
ton amounting to reverence is the
total attitude toward man, from the
humblest to the highest, to be gained
from the novels. But it is ALWAYS
the simpler loyalties that are upheld;
the picture glorified is that of man
rs small and lonely figure in a
gigantic universe, fighting on, for
himself and his comrades, blindly.
endlessly, fearlessly. The loyalties
engendered by the sea, of captain
to his ship, of a sailor to his mates.
are the obvious illustrations. Such
narrative as that in Youth" for
instance, where a scratch crew. the
scum of the wharves, fight fire in
their coal-laden ship, doggedly, hope
lessly, beyond all reason, to the peril
OF their lives, simply because it is
the thing to do. There is the superb
loyalty of a woman to a man in
Victory; and in "Nostromo"--that
strangest. largest. most -extraordi-