. The piano in the saloon
carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an
ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway
just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head
through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down
into the 'tweendecks.

But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated
here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative
tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a
grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at
midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now
living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face
of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record"
one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the
Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well
acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set
this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is
Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and
the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of
his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James,
and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would
omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal
confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of
autobiography as it is rarely written.

One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled
complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as
lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words
that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror
of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself
which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to
the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says
that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a
hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and
that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the
surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be
carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is
the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed,