The inherent genius of a writer is usually a deeper and more ingrained thing than the obvious qualities for which the world commends him, and this is true in a very profound sense in Conrad’s case.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say that he has possessed himself of the secret of the sea more completely than any who write in English except Shakespeare and Swinburne.

We have only touched the fringe of the matter when we say he has sounded the ambiguous stops of that mysterious instrument, the heart of the white man exiled from his kind in the darkness of tropical solitudes.

These things are of immense interest, but the essence of Conrad’s genius lies behind and beyond them; lies, in fact, if I am not mistaken, in a region where he has hardly a single rival.

This region is nothing more nor less than that strange margin of our minds, where memories gather which are deeper than memories, and where emotions float by and waver and hover and alight, like wild marsh-birds upon desolate sea-banks.

Conrad’s genius, like the genius of all great writers who appeal to what is common and universal in us, to what unites the clever and the simple, the experienced and the inexperienced, is revealed in something much less accidental and arbitrary than the selection of any striking background, however significant, of ocean-mystery or jungle solitude.

The margin of the mind!  Margin, mid-way between the known and the unknown!  Do not the obscure images, called up by the feelings such words suggest, indicate far more intimately than any description of tropical rivers or Malay seas, the sort of spiritual atmosphere in which he darkly gives us many strange clues?

I seem to see this shadowy borderland, lying on the extreme “bank and shoal” of our human consciousness, as a place like that across which Childe Roland moved when he came to the “dark tower.”

I seem to visualise it as a sort of dim marshland, full of waving reeds and deep black pools.  I seem to see it as a place where patches of dead grass whistle in a melancholy wind, and where half-buried trunks of rain-soaked trees lift distorted and menacing arms.

Others may image it in a different way, perhaps with happier symbols; but the region I have in my mind, crossed by the obscure shapes of dimly beckoning memories, is common to us all.

You can, if you like, call this region of faint rumours and misty intimations the proper sphere and true hunting-ground of the new psychology.  As a matter of fact, psychologists rarely approach it with any clairvoyant intelligence.  And the reason of that is, it is much further removed from the material reactions of the nerves and the senses than the favourite soil of these people’s explorations.

So thin and shadowy indeed is the link between the vague feelings which flit to and fro in this region and any actual sensual impression, that it almost seems as though this subconscious borderland were in contact with some animistic inner world ­not exactly a supernatural world, but a world removed several stages back from the material one wherein our nerves and our senses function; a world wherein we might be permitted to fancy the platonic archetypes dwelling, archetypes of all material forms; or, if you will, the inherent “souls” of such forms, living their own strange inner life upon a plane of existence beyond our rational apprehension.

It is certain that there are many moments in the most naïve people’s experience when, as they walk in solitude along some common highway, the shape of a certain tree or the look of a certain hovel, or the indescribable melancholy of a certain road-side pool, or the way the light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particular manner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself from the bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the mind of which I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings.

It is as though something in the material thing before us ­some inexplicable “soul” of the inanimate ­rushed forth to meet our soul, as if it had been waiting for us for long, long years.

I am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad, through a vague and obscure twilight.  It is not easy to express these things; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy of mystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, or series of experiences, in the “great valley” of the mind.

When Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly at a floating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in “Chance” who is relating the story watches the mud of the road outside the hotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral are making their desperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious “expectancy” which is part of this strange phenomenon, and that curious sudden thrill, “I have been here before!  I have seen and heard all this before!” which gives to so many scenes in Conrad that undertone of unfathomable mystery which is so true an aspect of life.

So often are we conscious of it as we read him!  We are conscious of it ­to give another instance ­when Heyst and Lena are talking together in the loneliness of their island of escape, before the unseen enemies descend on them.

The same insight in him and the same extraordinary power of making words malleable to his purpose in dealing with these hidden things may be remarked in all those scenes in his books where men and women are drawn together by love.

Conrad takes no interest in social problems.  His interest is only stirred by what is permanent and undying in the relations between men and women.  These extraordinary scenes, where Gould and his wife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem and Aissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and Anthony, Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet and peer into the secret depths of one another’s beings, are all scenes possessing that universal human element which no change or reform or revolution or improvement can touch or alter.

Without any theory about their “emancipation,” Conrad has achieved for women, in these stories of his, an extraordinary triumph.  Well does he name his latest book “Victory.”  The victory of women over force, over cunning, over stupidity, over brutality, is one of the main threads running through all his work.

And what women they are!  I do not recall any that resemble them in all literature.

Less passionate than the women of Dostoievsky, less sentimental than the women of Balzac, less sensual than the women of de Maupassant, Conrad’s women have a quality entirely their own, a quality which holds us spell-bound.  It is much easier to feel this quality than to describe it.  Something of the same element ­and it is a thing the positivity of which we have to search out among many crafty negations ­may be discerned in some of the women of Shakespeare and, in a lesser degree, in one or two of the young girls in the stories of Turgenief.

I think the secret of it is to be looked for in the amazing poise and self-possession of these women; a self-possession which is indicated in their moments of withdrawn and reserved silence.

They seem at these times to sink down into the very depths of their femininity, into the depths of some strange sex-secret of which they are themselves only dreamily conscious.

They seem to withdraw themselves from their own love, from their own drama, from their own personality, and to lie back upon life, upon the universal mystery of life and womanhood.  This they do without, it might seem, knowing what they are doing.

They all, in these strange world-deep silences of theirs, carry upon their intent and sibylline faces something of that mysterious charm ­expectant, consecrated, and holy ­which the early painters have caught the shadow of in their pictures of the Annunciation.

There is something about them which makes us vaguely dream of the far-distant youth of the world; something that recalls the symbolic and poetic figures of Biblical and Mythological legend.

They tease and baffle us with the mystery of their emotions, with the magical and evasive depths of the feminine secret in them.  They make us think of Rebecca at the well and Ruth in the corn-field; of Andromache on the walls of Troy and of Calypso, Brunhilda, Gwenevere, Iphigeneia, Medea, Salome, Lilith.

And all this is achieved by the most subtle and yet by the most simple means.  It is brought about partly by an art of description which is unique among English novelists, an art of description which by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodily appearance indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunning insertion of long, treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal in some occult indirect manner the very integral quality of the soul thus betrayed.

The more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while they are expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur and confuse the mysterious depths of their sex-life than to reveal it.  Conrad’s women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence, in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something more than the tragic emotion of one person.  They have the power of revealing what might be called the subliminal sex-consciousness of the race itself.  They have the power of merging the individuality of the particular speaker into something deeper and larger and wider, into something universal.

Reserve is the grand device by means of which this subconscious element is made evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically.  When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed.  A look, a gesture, a sigh, a whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of the ocean-deep mysteries of the soul than pages of eloquent psychology.

The deepest psychology ­that is what one comes at last to feel ­can only be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures, symbols, signs.  It can be revealed in words; but the words revealing it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.

For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest things in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind must be alert to receive them, but they must not be snatched at in any direct attack.  They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, or softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turn away our faces.  They will only come if we treat them with the reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates, calling them “The Eumenides”; or the ultimate secret of the universe, calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask of superstition.

The reason why Conrad holds us all ­old and young, subtle and simple ­with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant intuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of all our human days ­the things which cause us those moments of sharp sweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings.

His style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats the language he uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence.

The mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems to have intensified this quality; as though the hardness and steepness of its challenge forced the latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibres to encounter it.

When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of technical terms.  He undertakes the much more human and the much more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague and delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to the vessels that carry them.

His fine imaginative mind ­loving with a large receptive wisdom all the quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people ­naturally turns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships.  That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical achievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a trans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad.

Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimate object to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is necessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to have become intimately associated with the hopes and fears, the fancies and terrors, of many generations.

It is simply and solely their newness to human experience which makes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, however striking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of intrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does.

And it is not only ­as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad ­that these old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carrying one back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves.  They diffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the lives of those who are connected with them.  They bring the mystery and terror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into every port.

No great modern landing-stage for huge liners, from which the feverish crowds of fashionable tourists or bewildered immigrants disembark, can compare in poetic and imaginative suggestiveness, with any ramshackle dock, east or west, where brigs and schooners and trawlers put in; and real sailors ­sailors who sail their ships ­enter the little smoky taverns or drift homeward down the narrow streets.

The shallow, popular, journalistic writers whose vulgar superficial minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size for dignity, and brutal energy for noble strength.

Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce these startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotional insignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition.  What one thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad’s works is always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional, idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with an integral soul.

One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a figure-head; and is it possible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd steamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment?  Liners are things entirely without souls.  One only knows them apart by their paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of financiers who monopolise them.

“Floating hotels” is the proud and inspiring term with which the awed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders.

Well!  In Conrad’s books we are not teased with “floating hotels.”  If a certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from thinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea, let it be remembered that the sea has its poetic revenge upon them by absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the real magic of its secret.

No one knows the sea ­that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite clear ­who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel.

Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written ­one hopes that for many years each new Spring will bring a new work from his pen ­my own favourites are “Chance” and “Lord Jim,” and, after those two, “Victory.”

I think the figure of Flora de Barral in “Chance” is one of the most arresting figures in all fiction.  I cannot get that girl out of my mind.  Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeks and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation, her shadowy and abysmal reserve ­haunt me like a figure seen and loved in some previous incarnation.

I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person’s first love.

I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are thus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the sensual from these evasive portraits.  And not only of the sensual; of the sentimental as well.  In the average popular books about love we have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality.  Then again, as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation of women, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger cleverer writers playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession.  I think the greatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to sacrifice the mysterious truth of passion either to sentiment or to sensuality.  He keeps this great clear well of natural human feeling free from both these turbid and morbid streams.

A very curious psychological blunder made by many of our younger writers is the attributing to women of the particular kind of sex emotion which belongs essentially to men, an emotion penetrated by lust and darkened by feverish restlessness.  From this blunder Conrad is most strangely free.  His women love like women, not like vicious boys with the faces of women.  They love like women and they hate like women; and they are most especially and most entirely womanlike in the extreme difficulty they evidently always experience in the defining with any clearness ­even to themselves ­of their own emotions.

It is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions which renders women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the mere presence of something in them which refuses definition is a proof that they are beyond both sentiment and sensuality.  For sentiment and sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact and logical analysis.  Sensualists love nothing better than the epicurean pleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as they are once assured of a discreet and sympathetic listener.  The same is doubly true of sentimentalists.  The women of Conrad ­like the women of Shakespeare ­while they may be garrulous enough and witty enough on other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb when their great emotions call for overt expression.

It seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others, has caught the mystery of ships should be the writer who, of all moderns, has caught the mystery of women.  Women are very like ships:  ships sailing over waters of whose depths they themselves know nothing; ships upon whose masts strange wild birds ­thoughts wandering from island to island of remote enchantment ­settle for a moment and then fly off forever; ships that can ride the maddest and most tragical storms in safety; ships that some hidden rock, unmarked on any earthly chart, may sink to the bottom without warning and without mercy!

Conrad reveals to us the significant fact that what the deepest love of women suffers from ­the kind of storm which shakes it and troubles it ­is not sensuality of any sort but a species of blind and fatal fury, hardly conscious of any definite cause, but directed desperately and passionately against the very object of this love itself.  Conrad seems to indicate, if I read him correctly, that this mad, wild, desperate fury with which women hurl themselves against what they love best in a blind desire to hurt it, is nothing less than a savage protest against that deep and inviolable gulf which isolates every human being from every other human being.

Such a gulf men ­in a measure ­pass, or dream they pass, on the swift torrent of animal desire; but women are more clairvoyant in these things, and their love being more diffused, and, in a sense, more spiritual, is not so easily satisfied by mere physical possession.

They want to possess more.  They want to possess body, soul and spirit.  They want to share every thought of their beloved, every instinct, every wish, every ambition, every vision, every remotest dream.

That they are forbidden this complete reciprocity by a profound law of nature excites their savage fury, and they blindly wreak their anger upon the innocent cause of their bewildered un-happiness.

It is their maternal instinct which thus desires to take complete and absolute possession of the object of their love.  The maternal instinct is always ­as Conrad makes quite clear ­at the bottom of the love-passion in the most normal types of women; and the maternal instinct is driven on by a mad relentless force to seek to destroy every vestige of separate independence, bodily, mental or spiritual, in the person it pursues.

Conrad shows with extraordinary subtlety how this basic craving in women, resulting in this irrational and, apparently, inexplicable anger, is invariably driven to cover its tracks by every kind of cunning subterfuge.

This loving anger of women will blaze up into flame at a thousand quite trivial causes.  It may take the form of jealousy; but it is in reality much deeper than jealousy.  It may take the form of protest against man’s stupidity, man’s greed, man’s vanity, man’s lust, man’s thick-skinned selfishness; but it is in reality a protest against the law of nature which makes it impossible for a woman to share this stupidity, this vanity, this lust, this greed, and which holds her so cruelly confined to a selfishness which is her own and quite different from the selfishness of man.

One would only have to carry the psychological imagination of Conrad a very little further to recognise the fact that while man is inherently and completely satisfied with the difference between man and woman; satisfied with it and deriving his most thrilling pleasure from it; woman is always feverishly and frantically endeavouring to overcome and overreach this difference, endeavouring, in fact, to feel her way into every nerve and fibre of man’s sensibility, so that he shall have nothing left that is a secret from her.  That he should have any such secrets ­that such secrets should be an inalienable and inevitable part of his essential difference from herself ­excites in her unmitigated fury; and this is the hidden cause of those mysterious outbursts of apparently quite irrational anger which have fallen upon all lovers of women since the beginning of the world.

Man wishes woman to remain different from himself.  It interests him that she should be different.  He loves her for being different.  His sensuality and his sentiment feed upon this difference and delight to accentuate it.  Women seem in some subtle way to resent the division of the race into two sexes and to be always endeavouring to get rid of this division by possessing themselves of every thought and feeling and mood and gesture of the man they love.  And when confronted by the impassable gulf, which love itself is incapable of bridging, a blind mad anger, like the anger of a creative deity balked of his purpose, possesses them body and soul.

Mr. Wilson Follet in his superb brochure upon Conrad, written in a manner so profoundly influenced by Henry James that as one reads it one feels that Henry James himself, writing upon Conrad, could not possibly have done better, lays great stress upon Conrad’s complicated and elaborate manner of building up his stories.

Mr. Follet points out, for instance, how in “Chance” we have one layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more underscored and overscored with interesting personal values.

This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of all attention.

But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the art of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quite direct and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting, between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story.

I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Leñas, are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation.  I think he is always at his best when two passionate and troubled natures ­not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a man and man, like Lingard and Willem ­are brought together in direct and tragic conflict.  At such moments as these we get that true authentic thrill of immemorial romance ­romance as old as the first stories ever told or sung ­of the encounter of protagonist and antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and terrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.

But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated passionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet in treasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all those elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which give to the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a background.

Except for a few insignificant passages when that sly old mariner Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his pipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and overlappings of his inverted method of narration ­of those rambling “advances,” as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated “conclusions.”  In the few occasional passages where Marlowe assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded, worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to the Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonderfully and pathetically English.

With these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to his curious and intricate method.  I love the way he pours his main narrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve of one quaint person’s mind and then of another; each one adding some new flavour, some new vein of body or bouquet or taste, to the original stream, until it becomes thick with all the juices of all the living fermentations in the world.

I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome monotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does so without assuming that banal and bullying air of the adventurous swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectual interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these wanderings into savage regions.

Most of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiet haunts of unadventurous people and set off for remote continents, leave behind them, when they embark, all the fineness and subtlety of their intelligence, and become drastic and crude and journalistic and vulgar.  They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and they assume a sort of man-of-the-wide-world “knowingness” which is extremely unpleasant.

Conrad may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark heart of his Malay jungles, but he never forgets to carry with him his sensitiveness, his metaphysical subtlety, his delicate and elaborate art.

What gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the fact that while he is writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers, of ivory-traffickers and marooned seafarers, he never forgets that he is a philosopher and a psychologist.

This is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for years and years; a writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictions of civilised life, a writer who can initiate us into all the magical mysteries of dark continents and secret southern islands, without teasing us with the harsh sterilities of a brain devoid of all finer feelings.

This is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear; a writer capable of describing sheer physical beauty and savage elemental strength while remaining a subtle European philosopher.  I suppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood to attain such a distinction ­to be as crafty as a Henry James, moving on velvety feline paws through the drawing-rooms of London and the gardens of Paris; and yet to be leading us through the shadows of primordial forests, cheek by jowl with monstrous idolâtries and heathen passions.

But what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich in human value is not only that he can remain a philosopher in the deserted outposts of South-Pacific Islands, but that he can remain a tender and mellow lover of the innumerable little things, little stray memories and associations, which bind every wanderer from Europe, however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has left behind in the land of his birth.

Here he is a true Slav, a true continental European.  Here he is rather Russian ­or French, shall I say ­than an adopted child of Britain; for the colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimental devotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with the passionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of the other races.

Conrad has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginative feeling for the little casual associations of a person’s birthplace in town or country, which seems to be a peculiar inheritance of the Slavonic and Latin races, and which for all their sentimental play with the word “home” is not really natural to the tougher-minded Englishman or Scotchman.

One is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderers in forlorn places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look of the fields and the actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streets and the warm interiors of little friendly taverns by wharfside and by harbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these people were born.

No modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr. Hardy, has the power which Conrad has, of conveying to the mind that close indescribable intimacy between humanity’s passions and the little inanimate things which have surrounded us from childhood.

Conrad can convey this “home-feeling,” this warm secure turning of the human animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even into the heart of the tempestuous ocean.  He can give us that curious half-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony with our material surroundings, even in the little cabin of some weather-battered captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not a sailor, in his books, and not a single ship in which his sailors voyage, but has a sort of dim background of long rests from toil in ancient harbourback-waters where the cobblestones on the wharf-edge are thick with weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats mistily and greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and the lamplit streets.

It is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, brooding so carefully over the intimate and sacred relations between our frail mortality and its material surroundings, that makes it possible for him to treat with such delicate reverence the ways and customs, the usages and legendary pieties, of the various half-savage tribes among whom his exiled Europeans wander.

I am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid in Conrad’s books upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure in reading him.  What is the cause of this mania for violence?  It surely detracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, from any psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of it lies.  I do not feel that the thing is an erotic perversion.  There is a downright brutality in it which militates against any subtly voluptuous explanation.  Can it be that he is simply and solely appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his Anglo-Saxon readers?  No ­that, surely, were unworthy of him.  That surely must be considered unthinkable!  Is it that, being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer has to pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?

No; that does not seem to me quite to cover the case.  It is an obscure matter, and I think, in our search for the true solution, we may easily stumble upon very interesting and deeply hidden aspects, not only of Conrad’s temperament, but of the temperament of a great many artists and scholars.  In all artistic work there is so much that goes on in the darkness, so much secret exploitation of the hidden forces of one’s nature, that it is extremely difficult to put one’s finger upon the real cause of any particular flaming outbreak.

I have observed this sudden and tempestuous “obsession of violence” in the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitely wrought-upon women; and it is possible that the heavy, dull, thick, self-complacent brutality of Nature and average human nature is itself so hurting and rending a thing to the poignant susceptibilities of a noble spirit, that, out of a kind of desperate revenge upon it, it goes to the extreme limit itself and, so to speak, out-Tamberlaines Tamberlaine in bloody massacre.

What, however, really arrests and holds us in Conrad is not the melodramatic violence of these tempestuous scenes, but the remote psychological impulses at work behind them.

Where, in my opinion, he is supremely great, apart from his world-deep revelations of direct human feeling, is in his imaginative fusion of some particular spiritual or material motif through the whole fabric of a story.

Thus the desolate “hope against hope” of poor Almayer becomes a thing of almost bodily presence in that book; a thing built up, fragment by fragment, piece by piece, out of the very forlornness of his surroundings, out of the debris and litter of his half-ruined dwelling, out of the rotting branches of the dim misty forest, out of the stakes and piles of his broken-down wharf, out of the livid mud of his melancholy river.

Thus the sombre and tragic philosophy of Heyst’s father ­that fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity ­overshadows, like a ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so ironic, so devastating, which happen to his lethargic and phlegmatic son.  It is this imaginative element in his work which, in the final issue, really and truly counts.  For it is a matter of small significance whether the scene of a writer’s choice be the uplands of Wessex or the jungles of the tropics, as long as that ironic and passionate consciousness of the astounding drama ­of men and women being the baffled and broken things they are ­rises into unmitigated relief and holds us spell-bound.  And beyond and above this overshadowing in his stories of man’s fate by some particular burden of symbolic implication, Conrad flings the passionate flame of his imagination into the words of every single sentence.

That is why his style is a thing of such curious attraction.  That is why it has such sudden surprises for us, such sharp revelations, such rare undertones.  That is why after reading Conrad it is difficult to return to the younger English writers of the realistic school.

One enjoys, in savouring the style of Conrad, a delicious ravishing thrill in the mere look of the words, as we see them so carefully, so scrupulously laid side by side, each with its own burden of intellectual perfume, like precious vases full of incense on the steps of a marble altar.  To write as delicately, as laboriously, as exquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murder and suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; to write as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wild secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-bestial savages, is great mastery.  And it is more than mastery.  It is a spiritual triumph.  It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting the worst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning all things into grist for its mill.

For Conrad, while he finds nothing except meaningless and purposeless chance in the ways of Nature, is inspired by a splendid tenacity of courage in resisting any desperate betrayal of human joy.

Like that amazing character in “Lord Jim,” who collects butterflies and keeps his affections simple and sweet in the presence of tragedy upon tragedy, he seems to indicate to us, in these stark and woeful stories, that since there is no help in heaven or earth for the persecuted child of man, it is the more necessary that in defiance of the elements, in defiance of chance, yea! in defiance of fate itself, man should sink into his own soul and find in the strength of his own isolated and exiled spirit a courage equal to all that can be laid upon it.  Even this would be but a barren comfort if what we found when we sank down thus into ourselves were courage, and courage only.  What one comes to feel from the reading of Conrad is that there is nothing in the world which has enduring value ­nothing in the world which gives the mad convoluted hurly-burly any kind of dignity or beauty ­except only love.  And love like this, which is the forlorn hope of the race, is as far from lust as it is far from sentiment or indolent pity.  It is the “high old Roman virtue.”  It is the spirit of comradeship defiant still, under the tottering pillars of a shaken earth.

     “Man must abide his going hence, even as his coming hither. 
          Ripeness is all.”

. . . . .

     “Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
     The gods themselves throw incense.”