rt. 2.-JOSEPH CONRAD.

ow that Joseph Conrad has been laid to rest on the and which he chose for his home, it may be marked by aritime historians, not irrelevantly, that a spacious d wonderful era has come to an end also. None can y much to enlighten the exact beginnings of that era : ey are somewhere away in the dimness of time; and e transition from canoes, coracles, and galleys to lleons and sailing-ships (it was an era belonging specially to the sea and the wind along the tides) would of cessity be far vaguer than the transition from sails to eam which signified its decline and conclusion. All we how is that the era was definitely established by the ne that Richard Coeur de Lion conveyed his forces in arie monstrous great sail-schips' to the Crusades. early a thousand years it endured, breeding men of ak-high pride and mastery, and endowing the oceans ith a great glory. That ships and seafarers were coming different by the time that Conrad left the sea as a plain fact, so plain and unwelcome to the older pe of mariner that when he crossed the Atlantic in 23 he quickly wearied of the ship on which he was avelling. Mr Muirhead Bone, the artist, was his comnion during the voyage, and he recalls that Conrad sisted the captain's artful attempt to trap him into an miration for her, the mere size of modern liners giving m no pleasure, although

remember Conrad peering from the ship's high bridge and ling me we were the height of a full-rigged ship from the a and all these decks were like an immense spread of canvas tching the wind. . . . He had none of a Kiplingite enthusm for material powers—with him it was Man and the ements, with the apparatus always a bit inadequate. I member his turning back from the big engine-room-very tle of it had sufficed him-and only becoming happy again lking to David, in the captain's room, of all the sailingips and small tramp steamers of their mutual acquaintance d what had become of them. . . . The two old windjammer ippers agreed that with the passing of the sailing-ship the erchant 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 is no improvement when it is floating."

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

Joseph Conrad was more than a great sea-writer. He was the first psychologist of the sea and the sailor. Therefore, his chronicles, which could not conceivably have as their artistic basis this later era of floating palaces and business men, disguised as engineers, with machinery that smells of a dry land workshop, must take precedence even over Herman Melville's writings, done decades earlier but only lately being read with a real appreciation; for Melville had a blundering and undisciplined 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, 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 just one grade removed from ruffianism-and here we do not refer to the extreme people, like Donkin in 'The Nigger of the Narcissus,' of obvious and active odiousness. Neither by Melville nor by Conrad are we presented to puppets and dolls, merely working out their destinies at the ordination of the puppet-master. But whereas Melville seemed unable to concentrate on any particular purpose, so far as his jolly'sailors are involved, except to see how 'tall' a story he could tell about them, Conrad was primarily concerned with the inner mind of the mariners who carried his tough old clippers and windjammers safely into Bombay harbour or Fu-chau or London River. Yet-and this is where Conrad made a definite advance as a psychological novelist on George 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

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

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

ou and I."'

nd something sinister, harsh, and pessimistic-almost orbid at the heart of Conrad's curiously contradictory ature (it had at least a dash of the Asiatic), impelled m to seek for the all-too-human 'kink' in the common aracter, the assailable spot in the armoury of an invidual existence. Such an existence was to him as a ychologist always the most arresting in its moment of isis.

His principal books are built up around the kink in aracter and the moment of crisis. We need hardly int to the extreme instance of 'Lord Jim,' who deserted e pilgrim ship in the Red Sea so casually, so naturally, at only long after we have read that grave and beauful narrative of psychological action is the misdeed ade vivid to us. In 'Karain,' a story belonging to the llection of Tales of Unrest,' we have these words: Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to l-failure and death.' Conrad strikes this muted note 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 sun which warms his heart: and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness.

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 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!

.. 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 disci pline was holding them together or had shaped their unex pressed standards. It was very mysterious. At last I came to the conclusion that it must be something in the nature of the life itself; the sea-life chosen blindly, embraced for the most part accidentally by those men who appeared but a 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.',

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

Cerary expression which was to make him so much ore than the master-mariner on whom the critics pear to be laying uncommon emphasis since his death. or the story of Conrad's own career, told autobioaphically 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 d Fenimore Cooper in that inland city of Cracov, on ing to sea; all that is to be known of his apprenticep in French waters, despite the opposition to the oject 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 sef Konrad Karzeniowski belonged to the smaller bility of Poland; and that at least his sense of the otesque was properly insular is shown by the fact that carried into later life memories of a great-uncle who d once eaten dog in the privations of the retreat from Dscow, no less vividly than he carried the poignant emories of a mother exiled by the Russian Government. is preferential ambition of his was almost as astoundg as the later achievement in the matter of language, nose initial stimulus came, as he has told us, beautifully d yet casually, when first he beheld the red ensign gh above him in the morning mists of the Mediternean as he gazed across the waters from a Marseilles ot-boat, and listened to somebody's slow clear English eech that was to count so largely and superbly in his

er life.

Not until Conrad was approaching his forties did he ake what he has called his distinct development' from ter to earth. And when he came finally ashore he sladen in mind and imagination with as magnificent treasure-trove as genius has ever been blessed with. r every ship whose deck he had trod-as commander ring the last phase of his maritime career-was his asure-ship, and for him every island he visited was treasure island. Consider, as amplification of this, at 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 ■m on the banks of the Menam. Fundamentally, 'The