sailors voyage,
but has a sort of dim background of long rests from toil in ancient
harbourback-waters where the cobblestones on the wharf-edge are thick
with weeds and moss, and where the November rain beats mistily
and greyly, as in Russia and in England, upon the tiled roofs and the
lamplit streets.

It is nothing less than just this human imagination in him, brooding
so carefully over the intimate and sacred relations between our frail
mortality and its material surroundings, that makes it possible for
him to treat with such delicate reverence the ways and customs, the
usages and legendary pieties, of the various half-savage tribes
among whom his exiled Europeans wander.

I am not ashamed to admit that I find the emphasis laid in Conrad's
books upon sheer physical violence a little hurtful to my pleasure in
reading him. What is the cause of this mania for violence? It surely
detracts from the charm of his writing, and it is difficult to see, from
any psychological point of view, where the artistic necessity of it
lies. I do not feel that the thing is an erotic perversion. There is a
downright brutality in it which militates against any subtly
voluptuous explanation. Can it be that he is simply and solely
appealing here to what he is led to believe is the taste of his
Anglo-Saxon readers? No--that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely
must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an
abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by
a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a
physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer
has to pay; has to pay to the merciless cruelty of truth?

No; that does not seem to me quite to cover the case. It is an obscure
matter, and I think, in our search for the true solution, we may easily
stumble upon very interesting and deeply hidden aspects, not only of
Conrad's temperament, but of the temperament of a great many
artists and scholars. In all artistic work there is so much that goes on
in the darkness, so much secret exploitation of the hidden forces of
one's nature, that it is extremely difficult to put one's finger upon the
real cause of any particular flaming outbreak.

I have observed this sudden and tempestuous "obsession of
violence" in the moods of certain highly-strung and exquisitely
wrought-upon women; and it is possible that the heavy, dull, thick,
self-complacent brutality of Nature and av