fully and
pathetically English.

With these exceptions I am unwavering in my adherence to his
curious and intricate method. I love the way he pours his main
narrative, like so much fruity port-wine, first through the sieve of
one quaint person's mind and then of another; each one adding some
new flavour, some new vein of body or bouquet or taste, to the
original stream, until it becomes thick with all the juices of all the
living fermentations in the world.

I think the pleasure I derive from Conrad is largely due to the fact
that while he liberates us with a magnificent jerk from the tiresome
monotonous sedentary life of ordinary civilised people, he does so
without assuming that banal and bullying air of the adventurous
swashbuckler, which is so exhausting; without letting his intellectual
interests be swamped by these physiological violences and by these
wanderings into savage regions.

Most of our English writers, so it appears to me, who leave the quiet
haunts of unadventurous people and set off for remote continents,
leave behind them, when they embark, all the fineness and subtlety
of their intelligence, and become drastic and crude and journalistic
and vulgar. They pile up local colour till your brain reels, and they
assume a sort of man-of-the-wide-world "knowingness" which is
extremely unpleasant.

Conrad may follow his tropical rivers into the dim dark heart of his
Malay jungles, but he never forgets to carry with him his
sensitiveness, his metaphysical subtlety, his delicate and elaborate
art.

What gives one such extraordinary pleasure in his books is the fact
that while he is writing of frontier-explorers and backwoods-peddlers,
of ivory-traffickers and marooned seafarers, he never forgets that
he is a philosopher and a psychologist.

This is the kind of writer one has been secretly craving for, for years
and years; a writer who can liberate us from the outworn restrictions
of civilised life, a writer who can initiate us into all the magical
mysteries of dark continents and secret southern islands, without
teasing us with the harsh sterilities of a brain devoid of all finer
feelings.

This is the sort of writer one hardly dared to hope could ever appear;
a writer capable of describing sheer physical beauty and savage
elemental strength while remaining a subtle European philosopher. I
suppose it would be impossible for a writer of English blood to
attain such a distinction--to be as crafty as a H