eats the darkness. _Typhoon_ was, I fancy,
not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the
soul and the Prince of the power of the air. But it is because it is
eternally true as such a dramatization that it is--let us not shrink
from praise--one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in
literature. It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of
an unconquerable ship. One feels that the ship's struggles have angels
and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and
time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters. They are an
affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on,
watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to
and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship. She had
given way as if driven straight in. Their panting hearts yielded
before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to
her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the
ruins. The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep
her back where she might perish. There was hate in the way she was
handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell. She was like a
living creature thrown to the rage of a mob: hustled terribly,
struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning
terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic
of Mr. Conrad's heroic philosophy of life.

He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his
commander. His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet. He cried in
an agitated tone, "Our boats are going now, sir."

And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with
a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of
noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the
black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man's voice--the frail
and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of
thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall be pronouncing
confident words on the last day, when the heavens fall and justice
is done--again he heard it, and it was crying to him, as if from
very, very far: "All right."

Mr. Conrad's work, I have already suggested, belongs to the literature
of confidence. It i