Excerpt from Joseph Conrad: A Study The facts in this book relative to Mr Conrad have Mr Conrad's authorization, the criticism is entirely my own affair. No one can realize more clearly than I the difficulty of writing a pioneer book about Mr Conrad's works. My excuse for doing it must be my excuse for the way in which it is done. There are many points that need further developing - the individual structure of the books, for instance, the general sense of form, the realism and romance of Mr Conrad's art, his feeling for tragedy, and his philosophy. As to this last, I. Must admit that I dislike the habit of writing gravely about the philosophy of novelists. That is to wreck the meaning of a work of art, although it is true enough that art divorced from ideas soon wears very thin. A novelist's philosophy, as such, does not concern literary criticism, although his person ality, which is largely the accumulative effect of his outlook, does. The purely moral treatise type of fiction is neither more nor less ridiculous than the type which is concerned wholly with experiments in form. As in everything else, common sense is the surest guide in criticism. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.