, a strange
revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the
intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person's
first love.

I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are
thus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the
_sensual_ from these evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual;
of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about love
we have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again,
as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation of
women, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger cleverer
writers playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession. I think the
greatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to
sacrifice the mysterious truth of passion either to sentiment or to
sensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural human feeling
free from both these turbid and morbid streams.

A very curious psychological blunder made by many of our younger
writers is the attributing to women of the particular kind of sex
emotion which belongs essentially to men, an emotion penetrated by
lust and darkened by feverish restlessness. From this blunder Conrad
is most strangely free. His women love like women, not like vicious
boys with the faces of women. They love like women and they hate
like women; and they are most especially and most entirely
womanlike in the extreme difficulty they evidently always
experience in the defining with any clearness--even to themselves
--of their own emotions.

It is just this mysterious inability to define their own emotions which
renders women at once so annoying and so attractive; and the mere
presence of something in them which refuses definition is a proof
that they are beyond both sentiment and sensuality. For sentiment
and sensuality lend themselves very willingly to the most exact and
logical analysis. Sensualists love nothing better than the epicurean
pleasure of dissecting their own emotions as soon as they are once
assured of a discreet and sympathetic listener. The same is doubly
true of sentimentalists. The women of Conrad--like the women of
Shakespeare--while they may be garrulous enough and witty enough
on other matters, grow tongue-tied and dumb when their great
emotions call for overt expression.

It seems to me quite a natural thing that the writer who, of all others,
has caught the mystery of ships should be the writer