, just as he belongs to no school in art,
except the school of humanity; for him there are no types, only
humans. (He detests formulae and movements.) His sensibility, all
Slavic, was stimulated by Dickens, who was a powerful stimulant of the
so-called "Russian pity," which fairly honeycombs the works of
Dostoievsky. There is no mistaking the influence of the English Bible
on Conrad's prose style. He is saturated with its puissant, elemental
rhythms, and his prose has its surge and undertow. That is why his is
never a "painted ship on a painted ocean"; by the miracle of his art
his water is billowy and undulating, his air quivers in the torrid
sunshine, and across his skies--skies broken into new, strange
patterns--the cloud-masses either float or else drive like a typhoon.
His rhythmic sense is akin to Flaubert's, of whom Arthur Symons wrote:
"He invents the rhythm of every sentence, he changes his cadence with
every mood, or for the convenience of every fact; ... he has no fixed
prose tune." Nor, by the same token, has Conrad. He seldom indulges,
as does Theophile Gautier, in the static paragraph. He is ever in
modulation. There is ebb and flow in his sentences. A typical
paragraph of his shows what might be called the sonata form: an
allegro, andante, and presto. For example, the opening pages of Karain
(one of his best stories, by the way) in Tales of Unrest:

"Sunshine gleams between the lines of those short paragraphs [he is
writing of the newspaper accounts of various native risings in the
Eastern Archipelago]--sunshine and the glitter of the sea. A strange
name wakes up memories; the printed words scent the smoky atmosphere
of to-day faintly, with the subtle and penetrating perfume as of
land-breezes breathing through the starlight of bygone nights; a
signal-fire gleams like a jewel on the high brow of a sombre cliff;
great trees, the advanced sentries of immense forests, stand watchful
and still over sleeping stretches of open water; a line of white surf
thunders on an empty beach, the shallow water foams on the reefs; and
green islets scattered through the calm of noonday lie upon the level
of a polished sea like a handful of emeralds on a buckler of steel."

There is no mistaking the _coda_ of this paragraph--selected at
random--beginning at "and"; it suggests the author of Salammbo, and it
also contains within its fluid walls evocations of sound, odour, bulk,
tactile values, the colour of life, the wet of t