To find a greater novel than _Lord Jim_, we might have to go back to _Don Quixote._ Like that immortal masterpiece, it is more than a novel; it is life itself, and it is a criticism of life. Like Don Quixote, Lord Jim, in his followings of a dream, encounters many rough handlings. He has the same egoism, isolation, and conviction; the same interrupting world about him, the same contempt of reality, the same unconsciousness of the nature of windmills. In Marlow, he has quite a modern Sancho Panza, disillusioned, but following his master. Certainly this narrator of Jim's failures and successes represents them under the obscure guidance of "a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved half-unconsciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of remote unattainable truth, seen dimly." He is a soul "drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in himself." That illusion is suddenly put to the test; he fails, he goes into the cloud, emerges out of it, is struck gloriously dead.
In _Lord Jim_ Conrad has revealed, more finally than elsewhere, his ideal: the ideal of an applauded heroism, the necessity of adding to one's own conviction the world's acceptance and acclamation. In this stupendous work, what secret of humanity is left untold? Only told, is too definite a word. Here is Conrad's creed, his statement of things as they are:
It is when we try to grapple with another man's need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.
"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," says some one in the book, one of the many types and illustrations of men who have fallen into a dream, all with some original sin to proclaim or conceal or justify, men of honor, tottering phantoms clinging to a foul existence, one crowding on another, disappearing, unrealized. All have their place, literally or symbolically, in the slow working-out of the salvation of Tuan Jim. Amazing they may be, but Jim "approaching greatness as genuine as any man ever achieved," with the shame of his "jump" from a sinking ship and his last fearless jump "into the unknown," his last "extraordinary success," when, in one proud and unflinching glance, he beholds "the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side": amazing he may be, but a masterpiece, proved, authentic, justifying Man.