Some of his best work is contained in the two stories Typhoon and The Secret Sharer, the latter of which appeared in the volume called ’Twixt Land and Sea.  And each of these is a fable of man’s mysterious quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad irony, and the Conrad zest for courage.  These stories are so great that while we read them we almost forget the word “psychology.”  We are swept off our feet by a tide of heroic literature.  Each of the stories, complex though Mr. Conrad’s interest in the central situation may be, is radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack’s fight with the giants or of the defence of the round-house in Kidnapped.  In each of them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors:  it dares all, it risks all, it invades and defeats the darkness. Typhoon was, I fancy, not consciously intended as a dramatization of the struggle between the soul and the Prince of the power of the air.  But it is because it is eternally true as such a dramatization that it is—­let us not shrink from praise—­one of the most overwhelmingly fine short stories in literature.  It is the story of an unconquerable soul even more than of an unconquerable ship.  One feels that the ship’s struggles have angels and demons for spectators, as time and again the storm smashes her and time and again she rises alive out of the pit of the waters.  They are an affair of cosmic relevance as the captain and the mate cling on, watching the agonies of the steamer.

Opening their eyes, they saw the masses of piled-up foam dashing to and fro amongst what looked like fragments of the ship.  She had given way as if driven straight in.  Their panting hearts yielded before the tremendous blow; and all at once she sprang up again to her desperate plunging, as if trying to scramble out from under the ruins.  The seas in the dark seemed to rush from all sides to keep her back where she might perish.  There was hate in the way she was handled, and a ferocity in the blows that fell.  She was like a living creature thrown to the rage of a mob:  hustled terribly, struck at, borne up, flung down, leaped upon.

It is in the midst of these blinding, deafening, whirling, drowning terrors that we seem to see the captain and the mate as figures symbolic of Mr. Conrad’s heroic philosophy of life.

     He [the mate] poked his head forward, groping for the ear of his
     commander.  His lips touched it, big, fleshy, very wet.  He cried in
     an agitated tone, “Our boats are going now, sir.”

And again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice—­the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution, and purpose, that shall