, however, the mass of his work cannot be called tragic. _Youth,
Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer, The Shadow Line_--are not all
these fables of conquest and redemption? Man in Mr. Conrad's stories is
always a defier of the devils, and the devils are usually put to flight.

Though he is eager to disclaim being a moralist or even having any
liking for moralists, it is clear that he is an exceedingly passionate
moralist and is in more ardent imaginative sympathy with the duties of
man and Burke than with the rights of man and Shelley. Had it not been
so, he might have been a political visionary and stayed at home. As it
is, this son of a Polish rebel broke away from the wavering aspirations
and public dreams of his revolutionary countrymen, and found salvation
as an artist in the companionship of simple men at sea.

Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that
Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist. No one but
an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion
of discovery. The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our
everyday earth. Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a
new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the
Renaissance. He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light. That,
I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant
to Mr. Conrad. But some such image seems to me to be necessary to
express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a
man who has lived much underground. He is a dark man who carries the
shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him. He initiates us in
his stories into the romance of Erebus. He leads us through a haunted
world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the
darkness. Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who
exalts rather than dispirits. His genius moves enlargingly among us, a
very spendthrift of treasure--treasure of recollection, observation,
imagery, tenderness, and humour. It is a strange thing that it was not
until he published _Chance_ that the world in general began to recognize
how great a writer was enriching our time. Perhaps his own reserve was
partly to blame for this. He tells us that all the "characters" he ever
got on his discharge from a ship contained the words "strictly sober,"
and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety--"asceticism of
sentime