Art. 2.-JOSEPH CONRAD.

low that Joseph Conrad has been laid to rest on the land which he chose for his home, it may be marked by aritime historians, not irrelevantly, that a spacious nd wonderful era has come to an end also. None can ay much to enlighten the exact beginnings of that era: hey are somewhere away in the dimness of time; and he transition from canoes, coracles, and galleys to alleons and sailing-ships (it was an era belonging specically to the sea and the wind along the tides) would of ecessity be far vaguer than the transition from sails to team which signified its decline and conclusion. All we now is that the era was definitely established by the ime that Richard Coeur de Lion conveyed his forces in varie monstrous great sail-schips' to the Crusades. learly a thousand years it endured, breeding men of eak-high pride and mastery, and endowing the oceans vith a great glory. That ships and seafarers were ecoming different by the time that Conrad left the sea vas a plain fact, so plain and unwelcome to the older ype of mariner that when he crossed the Atlantic in 923 he quickly wearied of the ship on which he was ravelling. Mr Muirhead Bone, the artist, was his comanion during the voyage, and he recalls that Conrad esisted the captain's artful attempt to trap him into an dmiration for her, the mere size of modern liners giving im no pleasure, although

I remember Conrad peering from the ship's high bridge and elling me we were the height of a full-rigged ship from the ea and all these decks were like an immense spread of canvas atching the wind. . . . He had none of a Kiplingite enthuiasm for material powers-with him it was Man and the lements, with the apparatus always a bit inadequate. I emember his turning back from the big engine-room-very ittle of it had sufficed him-and only becoming happy again alking to David, in the captain's room, of all the sailinghips and small tramp steamers of their mutual acquaintance nd what had become of them. . . . The two old windjammer kippers agreed that with the passing of the sailing-ship the aerchant officer had become " different," and would never now a peculiar something they had known. I remember

him saying, "It is hotel life, but I don't like hotel life, and it rate is no improvement when it is floating.'

As to the loss of Conrad by death, the calendar hasa been scored at Aug. 3, 1924-rather later, it is true, than 50 the change on the sea; but who shall declare an erab to be definitely closed before the departure of its noblest pr chronicler?

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Joseph Conrad was more than a great sea-writer. He was the first psychologist of the sea and the sailor. of t Therefore, his chronicles, which could not conceivably has have as their artistic basis this later era of floating palaces and business men, disguised as engineers, with ev machinery that smells of a dry land workshop, must take precedence even over Herman Melville's writings, Thom H done decades earlier but only lately being read with a real appreciation; for Melville had a blundering and unith th disciplined genius, while Conrad's never blundered, and discipline-except perhaps for one brief middle period in his literary career-is among its most vital qualities. Not for Conrad the hulking symbolism of a 'Moby Dick,' but the clarified and compact symbolism of common shipmen, islands, and rivers. For all their dissimilarity, He however, Conrad and Melville are closely associated, in that the content of their symbolism, major no less than minor, is related to disreputableness and boorishness met just one grade removed from ruffianism-and here we at do not refer to the extreme people, like Donkin in 'The it Nigger of the Narcissus,' of obvious and active odious-see ness. Neither by Melville nor by Conrad are we pre-er, sented to puppets and dolls, merely working out their destinies at the ordination of the puppet-master. But logi whereas Melville seemed unable to concentrate on any particular purpose, so far as his jolly'sailors are involved, pri except to see how 'tall' a story he could tell about them,ter Conrad was primarily concerned with the inner mind of ot the mariners who carried his tough old clippers and windjammers safely into Bombay harbour or Fu-chau ly or London River. Yet-and this is where Conrad made a definite advance as a psychological novelist on Georget Meredith and Henry James (James, whose books made a direct appeal to his fine conscience: they stand on my shelves in a place whose accessibility proclaims the habit of frequent communion ')-Conrad's method

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as to create a personage as the son of Adam he was, nd make it his artistic business to observe how the haracter reacted to outward surroundings. Meredith nd James, on the other hand, set a standard for their reatures to live up to. Thus, in spite of living in the eriod just prior to general recognition of the common lan, these two novelists had in their art no traffic with he common man. Conrad, however, was obsessed by he idea of the common man. He chose, as Mr Hugh Valpole has pointed out

in almost every case the most solid and unimaginative of uman beings for his heroes, and it seems that it is these men lone whom he can admire. "If a human soul has vision he imply gives the thing up," we can hear him say. "He can see Et once that the odds are too strong for him. But these simple ouls, with their consciousness of the job before them and othing else, with their placid sense of honour and of duty, pon them you may loosen all heaven's bolts and lightnings nd they will not quail." They command his pity, his revernce, his tenderness, almost his love. But at the end, with n ironic shrug of his shoulders, he says: "You see. I told He may even think he has won. We know better,

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And something sinister, harsh, and pessimistic-almost norbid at the heart of Conrad's curiously contradictory ature (it had at least a dash of the Asiatic), impelled him to seek for the all-too-human 'kink' in the common haracter, the assailable spot in the armoury of an inividual existence. Such an existence was to him as a sychologist always the most arresting in its moment of risis.

His principal books are built up around the kink in haracter and the moment of crisis. We need hardly oint to the extreme instance of 'Lord Jim,' who deserted he pilgrim ship in the Red Sea so casually, so naturally, hat only long after we have read that grave and beauiful narrative of psychological action is the misdeed aade vivid to us. In 'Karain,' a story belonging to the ollection of Tales of Unrest,' we have these words: Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to ll-failure and death.' Conrad strikes this muted note f irony as by instinct with all his heroes; nor should

we find difficulty in recognising how the instinct was fostered. He writes in 'Chance':

'It was one of those dewy, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure magnificence of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sunt of which warms his heart: and cloudy soft nights are more im kindly to our littleness.

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Mr Galsworthy has pointed out how, with Conrad, Nature comes first and man only second. Man's littleness is infinite, especially as exposed through the aboriginal conditions into which Conrad the creator decided to place his Almayer, his Jim, his Axel Heyst. There was, however, splendour and beauty in that littleness, the splendour and beauty of the idealism dumbly of felt by each of them, that keeps the reader for ever asking himself, even about the most apparently hopeless of the novelist's characters, whether they are fools or saints!

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.. What was most difficult to detect was the nature of the deep impulses which these men obeyed. What spirit was it that inspired the unfailing manifestations of their simple fidelity? No outward cohesive force of compulsion or discipline was holding them together or had shaped their unex- ca pressed standards. It was very mysterious. At last I came ove to the conclusion that it must be something in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced for the at most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a that loose agglomeration of individuals toiling for their living away from the eyes of mankind. Who can tell how tradition comes into the world? We are children of the earth. It may be that the noblest tradition is but the offspring of material conditions, of the hard necessities besetting men's precarious lives. But once it has been born it becomes a spirit. Nothing can extinguish its force then. Clouds of greedy selfishness, the subtle dialectics of revolt and fear, obscure it for a time, but in very truth it remains an immortal ruler invested with the power of honour and shame.',

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Here, of course, Conrad is speaking of the individuals he himself had rubbed shoulders against in the first phase of his life, the phase of observation and movement preceding that of analysis and

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terary expression which was to make him so much lore than the master-mariner on whom the critics ppear to be laying uncommon emphasis since his death. or the story of Conrad's own career, told autobioraphically in his 'Personal Record,' is an old wives' le by now. The reading world knows all that is to learnt of his youthful insistence, after reading Marryat ad Fenimore Cooper in that inland city of Cracov, on ing to sea; all that is to be known of his apprenticeip in French waters, despite the opposition to the roject by aristocratic elders; all that is to be known his astounding resolve that he shall become a complete ariner under the red ensign of the British mercantile rvice. The resolve was astounding, because Teodor osef Konrad Karzeniowski belonged to the smaller obility of Poland; and that at least his sense of the rotesque was properly insular is shown by the fact that e carried into later life memories of a great-uncle who ad once eaten dog in the privations of the retreat from foscow, no less vividly than he carried the poignant lemories of a mother exiled by the Russian Government. his preferential ambition of his was almost as astoundg as the later achievement in the matter of language, hose initial stimulus came, as he has told us, beautifully ad yet casually, when first he beheld the red ensign igh above him in the morning mists of the Mediternean as he gazed across the waters from a Marseilles lot-boat, and listened to somebody's slow clear English peech that was to count so largely and superbly in his ter life.

Not until Conrad was approaching his forties did he ake what he has called his 'distinct development' from ater to earth. And when he came finally ashore he as laden in mind and imagination with as magnificent treasure-trove as genius has ever been blessed with. or every ship whose deck he had trod-as commander ring the last phase of his maritime career—was his easure-ship, and for him every island he visited was treasure island. Consider, as amplification of this, hat his seamanship eventually meant to him. The Nan-Shan' of Typhoon' is the s.s. 'John P. Best,' at he encountered at Bangkok, the capital city of am on the banks of the Menam. Fundamentally, 'The