Some such tremendous breach with the past was necessary in order that Mr. Conrad might be able to achieve his destiny as an artist.  No one but an inland child could, perhaps, have come to the sea with such a passion of discovery.  The sea to most of us is a glory, but it is a glory of our everyday earth.  Mr. Conrad, in his discovery of the sea, broke into a new and wonder-studded world, like some great adventurer of the Renaissance.  He was like a man coming out of a pit into the light.  That, I admit, is too simple an image to express all that going to sea meant to Mr. Conrad.  But some such image seems to me to be necessary to express that element in his writing which reminds one of the vision of a man who has lived much underground.  He is a dark man who carries the shadows and the mysteries of the pit about with him.  He initiates us in his stories into the romance of Erebus.  He leads us through a haunted world in which something worse than a ghost may spring on us out of the darkness.  Ironical, sad, a spectator, he is nevertheless a writer who exalts rather than dispirits.  His genius moves enlargingly among us, a very spendthrift of treasure—­treasure of recollection, observation, imagery, tenderness, and humour.  It is a strange thing that it was not until he published Chance that the world in general began to recognize how great a writer was enriching our time.  Perhaps his own reserve was partly to blame for this.  He tells us that all the “characters” he ever got on his discharge from a ship contained the words “strictly sober,” and he claims that he has observed the same sobriety—­“asceticism of sentiment,” he calls it—­in his literary work as at sea.  He has been compared to Dostoevsky, but in his quietism he is the very opposite of Dostoevsky—­an author, indeed, of whom he has written impatiently.  At the same time, Mr. Conrad keeps open house in his pages as Dostoevsky did for strange demons and goblins—­that population of grotesque characters that links the modern realistic novel to the fairy tale.  His tales are tales of wonder.  He is not only a philosopher of the bold heart under a sky of despair, but one of the magicians of literature.  That is why one reads the volume called Youth for the third and fourth time with even more enthusiasm than when one reads it for the first.

2.  TALES OF MYSTERY

Mr. Joseph Conrad is a writer with a lure.  Every novelist of genius is that, of course, to some extent.  But Mr. Conrad is more than most.  He has a lure like some lost shore in the tropics.  He compels to adventure.  There is no other living writer who is sensitive in anything like the same degree to the sheer mysteriousness of the earth.  Every man who breathes, every woman who crosses the street, every wind that blows, every ship that sails, every tide that fills, every wave that breaks, is for him alive with mystery as a lantern is alive with light—­a little light in an immense darkness.  Or perhaps