Contributors to the July Review His lyric Croglin Mr. JOHN HELSTON is an English poet. Water appeared in THE REVIEW for July, 1921. The EDITOR Contributes an appreciation of the work of Joseph Conrad. Miss AMELIA JOSEPHINE BURR contributed Indian Song to THE REVIEW for January, 1921. Mr. NORREYS JEPHSON O'CONOR is a well-known poet and a capable critic of Irish literature. He resides in Boston. Mrs. G. O. WARREN, author of Trackless Regions, lives in Harvard, Massachusetts. Dr. CLARENCE AUGUSTUS MANNING is Lecturer in Slavonic Languages in Columbia University. He wrote Unreality in Russian Literature for THE REVIEW for July, 1921. Dr. NORMAN FOERSTER is Professor of English in the University of North Carolina. He contributed Thoreau as Artist to THE REVIEW for July, 1921. Dr. SEDLEY LYNCH WARE, Professor of History in the University of the South, concludes in this number a series of three articles dealing with France and the Great War. Mrs. MARGARETTA BYRDE, of London, England, is a poet and essayist of note. Dr. JULIAN WILLIS ABERNETHY, of Burlington, Vermont, has been a teacher of literature for many years, and is now devoting himself to critical writing. He has published a number of books, including English Literature and American Literature. Dr. ARTHUR L. KEITH is Professor of Latin in the University of South Dakota. He contributed The Spirit of Horace to THE REVIEW for October, 1920. Dr. WILLIAM H. SCHEIFLY has been a frequent contributor to THE REVIEW. He is Professor of Romance Languages in Indiana University. JOSEPH CONRAD AND HIS ART Men and women are impelled to write novels through various motives: the desire for distinction, for money, for experiment, for pastime. The great novels have been written because they had to be written, because the minds and spirits behind them have had to pay the price of hard service to art and life for the joy of conscious growth and for the relief of coming out on the other side of each task of creative expression; because, too, they have found themselves their own most attentive, most insatiable hearers as they have preached in each instance that gospel of beauty which, unpreached, would have become a sterile woe to them. A gospel now of glamorous emprise, now of robust actuality, now of Baconian "power to do good", now of generous indignation, now of stoic duty, now of ironic pity, now of dreamy symbolism, now of prophetic vision, and now of the laws of human behavior as modern psychology observes and attempts to organize them. Joseph Conrad, like Hardy and Turgenev and James, has his own peculiar gospel, but it is not a matter of label and category. It is an intimate, unsparable revelation-hardly a revelation, a suggestion rather-of some of the strangely hidden, subtly excellent if melancholy truths of duty and of destiny. Conrad is a Slav, a Pole by nativity and temperament; an Englishman by choice, affection, long residence and formal naturalization; a Frenchman by cultural sympathy and understanding; a seaman through the habit and experience of twenty years; a husband and father; and the creator of twelve novels, seven volumes containing in all twenty-four tales, one play, three works of personal reflection and reminiscence, and two romances written in collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer. He is sixtyfour years of age. Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski was born in the Ukraine on December 6, 1857, the son of a well-read poet-patriot who in 1862 was seized and exiled to Vologda by the Russian Government. Conrad writes of his father's "ardent fidelity" and of his "fearless confession in word and deed of a creed which the simplest heart. . . . could feel and understand". could feel and understand". The child and his mother accompanied the father, but three years later she died and the boy was placed in the keeping of her brother in the Ukraine, spending there five happy years of childhood, of which he writes in Some Reminiscences. Between his father's release in 1868 and his death in 1870, Conrad was with him in Cracow. In Poland Revisited we are given a vivid picture of "a small boy of eleven, wending his way, not very fast, to a preparatory school for day-pupils on the second floor of the third house down from the Florian gate. It was in the winter months of 1868. At eight o'clock of every morning that God made, sleet or shine, I walked up Florian street. But of the school I remember very little.. I was rather indifferent to school troubles. I had a private gnawing worm of my own. This was the time of my father's last illness. Every evening at seven . . . I walked all the way to a big old house in a quiet narrow street a good distance beyond the great square. There, in a large drawingroom, panelled and bare, with heavy cornices and a lofty ceiling, in a little oasis of light made by two candles in a desert of dusk I sat at a little table to worry and ink myself all over till the task of my preparation was done. The table of my toil faced a tall white door, which was kept closed; now and then it would come ajar and a nun in a white coif would squeeze herself through the crack, glide across the room, and disappear. There were two of these noiseless nursing nuns. Their voices were seldom heard. For, indeed, what could they have had to say? When they did speak to me it was with their lips hardly moving, in a claustral clear whisper. Our domestic matters were ordered by the elderly housekeeper of our neighbor on the second floor, a Canon of the Cathedral, lent for the emergency. She, too, spoke but seldom. She wore a black dress with a cross hanging by a chain on her ample bosom. And though when she spoke she moved her lips more than the nun, she never let her voice rise above a peacefully murmuring note. The air around me was all piety, resignation, and silence. "I don't know what would have become of me if I had not been a reading boy. My prep. finished I would have had nothing to do but sit and watch the awful stillness of the sick room flow out through the closed door and coldly enfold my scared heart. I suppose that in a futile childish way I would have gone crazy. But I was a reading boy, |