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Nevertheless, Kipling writes in the rhetorical stance of an aesthete and is very much a Paterian in the metaphysical sense. The conclusion of Pater’s Renaissance is precisely the credo of Kipling’s protagonists: Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

Introduction 21 Despite this “moral ruin,” and not because of it, Conrad and his readers share the conviction of Nostromo’s greatness, share in his sublime selfrecognition. How many persuasive images of greatness, of a natural sublimity, exist in modern fiction? Conrad’s may be the last enhanced vision of Natural Man, of the Man of the People, in which anyone has found it possible to believe. ” Magnificent, beyond the reach of all irony, Nostromo manifestly is. It is the magnificence of the natural leader who disdains leadership, yet who loves reputation.

We are unable of course, with whatever habit 44 Henry James of presumption engendered, to insist upon genius; so that who shall describe the measure of success we still achieve as not virtually the search for freshness, and above all for closeness, in quite a different direction? To this nearer view of commoner things Mr. Wells, say, and Mr. Arnold Bennett, and in their degree, under the infection communicated, Mr. H. Lawrence and Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. Compton Mackenzie and Mr. Hugh Walpole, strike us as having all gathered themselves up with a movement never yet undertaken on our literary scene, and, beyond anything else, with an instinctive divination of what had most waved their predecessors off it.