is 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 whos