e vulgar superficial
minds are impressed by the mere portentousness of machinery, are
only making once more the old familiar blunder of mistaking size
for dignity, and brutal energy for noble strength.

Conrad has done well in his treatment of ships and sailors to reduce
these startling modern inventions to their proper place of emotional
insignificance compared with the true seafaring tradition. What one
thinks of when any allusion is made to a ship in Conrad's works is
always a sailing-ship, a merchant ship, a ship about which from the
very beginning there is something human, mellow, rich, traditional,
idiosyncratic, characteristic, full of imaginative wistfulness and with
an integral soul.

One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a _figure-head;_ and is it
possible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd
steamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment? Liners
are things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart by
their paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of
financiers who monopolise them.

"Floating hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which the
awed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders.

Well! In Conrad's books we are not teased with "floating hotels." If
a certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from
thinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea,
let it be remembered that the sea has its _poetic_ revenge upon them
by absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the real
magic of its secret.

No one knows the sea--that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite
clear--who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel.

Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written--one hopes that
for many years each new Spring will bring a new work from his
pen--my own favourites are "Chance" and "Lord Jim," and, after
those two, "Victory."

I think the figure of Flora de Barral in "Chance" is one of the most
arresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind.
Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeks
and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation,
her shadowy and abysmal reserve--haunt me like a figure seen and
loved in some previous incarnation.

I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and
Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by
means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface