ence Barclay, or Robert Hichens. Mr. Wells
and Mr. Bennett? Sometimes, but not all the
time. Thomas Hardy, always; and with equal
soberness, though not with equal felicity,
Joseph Conrad, J. M. Barrie, John Galsworthy,
Miss Sinclair, and Miss Willcocks. No modern
novelists have higher ideals than these five.

The ability to write for publication in a
language other than one's mother-tongue is not
altogether unknown; as is shown by the in-
stances of Turgenev, Maarten Maartens, Oscar
Wilde, and Rabindranath Tagore. But the case
of Joseph Conrad is unique. He knew no Eng-
lish at all until he was nineteen, and it was not
until his thirty-eighth year that he published
anything. When he determined to become an
author, his perplexity was quite unlike the ob-
stacle that balks most writers. The question
that Mr. Conrad put to himself was, "In what
language shall I write?" Now that is not the
question that troubles the mind of most men of
letters. The question that afflicts their peace
is not, In what language shall I write, but What
shall I say? I have read a great many novels,

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