knew everything there was to be known in life, and could do everything that was to be done.

Because of this background in our inheritance, emphasized now for three centuries, we are likely to are likely to understand but half the ideal of selfsufficiency. To be whole in our character means to us to have missed nothing, to have clutched at everything that belongs to us-and though we do not say it precisely, we assume that all things do belong to us. Even when experience has chastened our ambitions, we say with resignation that of course we can't expect everything in this world, meaning that we can and do expect everything, but we are not likely to get it.

But the other half of the ideal is quite as important. If life has imposed something upon us which is not an integral part of our natures, then we are not whole, and the alien portion of us takes something away in worry and friction from that inward unity which would have been our happiness and our peace. The ambition to know everything is difficult to argue against. All knowledge, when once we have acquired it, seems to have been destined for us. You can't imagine a child just instructed in the truth that two and two make four, rejecting it as though to say, "This truth is not for me. Yet when you consider how much supposed knowledge in the world is not knowledge at all, but hypothesis of the most temporary sort, and what a difference there is in importance in the sorts of knowledge which do rest on ascertained truth, it is not ungenerous nor absurd to ask whether even in the realm of

intelligence we should not seek primarily what is our own.

A simple illustration can be found. in almost any field of the arts and the sciences. We still try to educate largely on the Renaissance principle that all knowledge is properly ours, and that our school years should introduce us, as we say, to this large territory. School and college are introductory chiefly in the sense that they provide for bewildered and distracted youth a terrific and fast-moving panorama of apparently unrelated fields. Yet there are men about us who have achieved not only an adequate education, but even the highest kind of culture, not by starting from a miscellaneous study of the universe and trying to specialize afterwards, but by beginning with what most obviously belonged to their temperament and their capacity, and broadening out. There are men in high place to-day who entered the business world as manual laborers, and who by imaginative study of their immediate work have reached a superb grasp of modern thought and an astonishing control of modern society. There are artists who beginning with their craft in the most immediate and narrow sense, have widened their outlook and added to their knowledge until we think of them not primarily as painters, sculptors or musicians, but as men richly endowed and more richly trained. They seem to have at least this one advantage over the rest of us, that all the things with which they occupy their time bear some necessary relation to their inner life. In them the prayer of Socrates seems answered his hope that his outward appearance, his conduct and

Even in the Renaissance the artists enjoyed the advantage of this sort of training. Their scrupulous respect for their art secured for them even in that expansive age the selfdenying half of integrity. Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, no matter how widely scattered his interests might seem to be, would ward off instinctively any interruption of his chief pursuit. Whatever aided the quest for competence in the arts would belong to him, but other things would be trivial. To this day integrity of the soul is more often found among artists than among the rest of us.

That unlucky rest of us! Hard as it is in a busy and complicated world to develop all our gifts, it is still harder to keep free of the engagements, the obligations, the habits, with which we should have nothing to do. Any man or woman in our country who should write down with frankness at the end of a day the number of things done, the number of engagements kept or obligations assumed, which though innocent enough were altogether unnecessary and undesired, would realize where we waste the time of which we complain there is so little. The lessening of the sense of integrity is aggravated by our unwillingness to say No to those mystical or mythical demands society makes upon us. The suspicion that our friends are doing a certain kind of thing encourages us to believe that we ought to do the same. We groan, but we do it. Do they live in a certain style, or inhabit a certain section of the town, or wear a certain fashion, or read

missing something, we know, if we failed to imitate them. Yet it is easy to imagine what a prophet like Socrates would say of such an attitude. If my neighbor's clothes are suitable for him, by that very fact they are probably unsuitable for me. Unless, of course, I am willing to maintain there is no difference at all between me and my neighbor. If an amusement satisfies my friend, represents a true balance in his nature, a harmony between his occupations and his soul, then, unless my soul is identical with his, my amusement ought to be in some respects different. If my fellows move out from a quarter of the town which no longer is the proper environment for their spirit, may it not be that they are instinctively resigning the space to me, who belong there?

These are rhetorical questions, not to be answered by a rough Yes or No. But they suggest themselves when we look at contemporary society. We talk as though we were ultraindividualists, but we act as though none of us trusted his personality. We do indeed abandon an ancient faith that men have certain broad faculties in common, and we therefore aspire to provide for every child an individual tutor so that his unique case can be treated without prejudice. But we live, and compel the child to live, after the tutor has done his best, in moblike tendencies, each fearing the opinions of the others, and none of us, perhaps, reaching even a small part of that peace which wise men say comes only to those who are whole in spirit and in heart. In such a failure of integrity we cannot even expect the practice of

cognate virtues, like the honesty we just spoke of. Even in a moblike existence, of course, good people will not steal money or jewels; but perhaps they will unintentionally rob their neighbors of happiness, and of the chance to be sincere. They will combat them if they show a genuine preference for what is not the fashion. They will repress them if their talents promise to go beyond the

average.

20

To say that integrity is a matter of conduct as well as of character may seem so obvious as to be absurd. How else would a character show except in conduct? Yet when we think of integrity as a virtue located first in the heart and working outward into behavior, it is perhaps not absurd to add that our personal career in its overt manifestations may be criticized from the point of view of its harmony with itself. The man who aspires to this virtue will have many an occasion to review his own history, and many more, perhaps, to dream of his future. If we look back on our lives and observe, as most of us must, episodes which seem properly to belong in our experience, but which were never finished, or episodes complete enough but in retrospect somewhat irrelevant to what we later became or did, then our lives, viewed as works of art, as accomplishments, lack integrity. They are like unfinished and disproportioned statues. From such a retrospect most of us protect ourselves by cultivating blindness-we call it tolerance or magnanimity, but it deserves such fine names only when we apply it to others. Looking at ourselves we are not wise if we run

away from the admonition or the punishment which the sight gives us. Or if we have been so unusually fortunate or so unbelievably inspired as to lead only an integral and harmonious career, the signs of that blessedness also can be observed. In an integral life one supposes there would be nothing left over, no experience undigested or unconsumed, nothing to regret, nothing which we should desire to go back and live again. For an integral life nature's progress from youth to age would be obviously the fate most desirable. The next step would always be the best. Yet merely to describe the ideal in these words is to remind us how few have reached it.

When we consider our future, the quest for integrity involves one constant chief problem. It is easy to think of our destiny in terms of our past—that is, as a logical prolongation of all that we have yet done. But if we review our past, we see that such a logic everywhere applied would not always have foretold those developments in us which after they occurred we found inevitable. How shall we know what is our proper destiny, the future which properly belongs to us? If we think the answer is easy, we should beware. As soon as we cross the middle line of life, we begin to value highly a continuity of effort. It is for youth to change and experiment, we say; sooner or later maturity must make up its mind and keep on. The snare that awaits us even in this sound wisdom is that innate disposition to momentum and habit and laziness from which not even the wisest is free.

Perhaps it is dangerous in the

extreme to plan our future too far ahead. At the present moment we perhaps can see ourselves as we are, and among many choices can select the one which corresponds most closely to our contemporary selves. But how can we select now the life for which we may be fitted ten years from now? It was prudence, then, in the double sense of foresight and caution, which advised us to take no thought for the morrow. The narrower kind of prudence which ties us up to a future for which we may not be suited when it arrives, is hostile to

integrity. Vocational guidance, save the mark! What fortune is rarer than a good guess for ourselves and for to-day-a clear sight of what is and is not our true nature? But to tell another what part of this world will belong to him for the rest of his life, or to commit him once for all to a career, may be either an aid toward his salvation or a sentence to jail. A more friendly help would be to teach him to look into his own heart, and to go toward those aspects of life which he only can recognize as belonging to him.

C

ONRAD's slow progress in increasing his circle of readers demands some explanation. Nineteen years of arduous work (1895-1913) failed to bring him into real popularity. It was not the fault of the reviewers. His work was too "exotic" for British insular taste. From the first he received eulogistic notices, but it is forgotten that several score of Conrad's popular contemporaries were also then receiving notices quite as flattering. Good reviews of "exotic" novels do not excite general interest, and it is probable that the figure of the lady on the "jacket" of "Chance" (1914) did more to bring the novel into popular favor than the long review by Sir Sidney Colvin in "The Observer." In any case the fact that the critics' handsome praise of "Almayer's Folly" failed to sell the novel is attested by my old friend, Mr. David Rice, then Mr. Fisher Unwin's town traveler, who at my instigation had prevailed on the booksellers to subscribe practically the whole edition. Mr. Rice tells me that the majority of these copies rested for years on the booksellers' shelves, and that the title "Almayer's Folly" long remained a jest in "the trade" at his own expense. Conrad's first book took seven years to get into the third im

pression and both "The Outcast of the Islands," which received brilliant reviews, and "Tales of Unrest” took eleven years to reach a second impression. Even worse, relatively, was the case of "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (1897) which in spite of a general blast of eulogy from a dozen impressive sources, including James Payn, A. T. Quiller-Couch, W. L. Courtney, and the advantage of its serialization in W. S. Henley's "New Review," took sixteen years to reach its third impression! While "Lord Jim," doing better, had to wait nine years (1904-14) to pass from the fourth to the fifth impression, and "Youth" (1903) took six years to pass from the second to the third.

After the further revision of the last chapter of "The Outcast of the Islands" when he wrote (letter, September 24, 1895), “I shall set to at once and grub amongst all these bones," Conrad took a spell off from writing, and when he began again he found it impossible to make headway with "The Sisters." He was so depressed by his position that he explained to me his hopes of getting a command at sea and I wrote to a friend of my wife, Mr. Charles Booth the ship-owner, to try to interest him in Conrad's future. Mr. Booth's