e have lost or gained more by our podgy
indifference. Sometimes it seems as if there were a sentence of "Thou
fool" hanging over us as we lounge in our deck-chairs. In any case the
men who were troubled by the fancy of Scylla and Charybdis, and were
conscious of the nearness of Leviathan, and saw without surprise the
rising of islands of doom in the sunset went out none the less
high-heartedly for their fears. We are sometimes inclined to think
that no one ever quite enjoyed the wonders of the sea before the
nineteenth century. We have been brought up to believe that all the
ancients regarded the sea, with Horace, as the sailor's grave and that
that was the end of their emotions concerning it. Even in the
eighteenth century, it has been dinned into us, men took so little
impartial pleasure in the sea that a novel like _Roderick Random_,
though full of nautical adventures, does not contain three sentences
in praise of its beauty. This has always seemed to me to be great
nonsense. No doubt, men were not so much at their ease with the sea in
the old days as they are now. But be sure the terrors of the sea did
not stun the ancients into indifference to its beauty any more than
the terrors of tragedy stupefy you or me into insensitiveness. There
is a sense of all the magnificence of the sea in the cry of Jonah:

All thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight;...
The waters compassed me about, even to the soul:
The depth closed me round about,
The weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottoms of the mountains.

There is perhaps more of awe than of the pleasure of the senses in
this. It has certainly nothing of the "Oh, for the life of the
sailor-lad" jollity of the ballad-concert. But, then, not even the
most enthusiastic sea-literature of this sea-ridden time has. Mr
Conrad, who has found in the sea a new fatherland--if the phrase is
not too anomalous--never approaches it in that mood of flirtation that
we get in music-hall songs. He is as conscious of its dreadful
mysteries as the author of the _Book of Jonah_, and as aware of its
terrors and portents as the mariners of the _Odyssey_. He discovers
plenty of humour in the relations of human beings with the sea, but
this humour is the merest peering of stars in a night of tragic irony.
His ships crash through the tumult of the waves like creatures of
doom, even when they triumph as they do under the guidance