BOOKS
143
possibility of my own demise," he wrote Galsworthy, "I shall
fight . .. tooth and claw. I must have 20 volumes behind me and there
are only 11 written."
Chance,
the twelfth, was his first popular success.
But Henry James, for whom Conrad had greater respect than for any
other literary peer, wrote a slighting review, declaring it the exhibition
of a "beautiful and generous mind at play in conditions comparatively
thankless."
It
was "the
only
time a criticism affected me painfully,"
Conrad told John Quinn, the rich American lawyer.
Quinn was another commercial partner in Conrad's struggles.
Conrad had begun to sell his manuscripts to him in 1911 and soon was
sending him each new one as soon as his publishers were done with it,
receiving substantial payments. Il was all part of the aging laborer's
effort to make literature pay. At the same time he was struggling to
retain the attention of the literary public which was beginning to
notice the "new novelists"-Joyce, Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. To
the last dream of art he
was
faithful,
usque ad finem;
yet he was
haunted by the fear that he had not really gone forward, by the way his
early work still pleased some readers best. To a French translator who
wanted to tackle
Lord Jim ,
he wrote, "I feel you'll grow extremely
weary of it long before the end. The other day I found that I could not
read it myself to the end.
It
bored me."
MILLICENT BELL
VULGAR AND NONVULGAR IDEALISM
BACK TO KANT: THE REVIVAL OF KANTIANISM IN GERMAN SO–
CIAL AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT, 1860-1914. By Thomas E. Willey.
Wayne State University Press. $17.95.
Over twenty years ago, Fritz Stern coined the term "vulgar
idealism" to characterize the illiberal, anti-Western, and irrationalist
world view of the unpolitical Germans of the Wilhelmian era. In his
important new book,
Back to Kant,
Thomas Willey argues instead that
the nonvulgarized idealism of that period, known broadly as
neo–
Kantianism,
embodied all of the contrary values. True to Kant's
original emphasis on reason , individualism, and the rule of law, the
neo-Kantians, albeit with certain exceptions, were loyal cosmopolitan
sons of the Western Enlightenment, anxious to realize their lofty ideals
