"All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free." (Page 21.)
Or again:
"Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame." (Page 194.)
This simplicity, this fidelity, this hatred of self-assertion and self-satisfaction, this sobriety—these qualities do give some implication of the colour of the work that will arise from them; and when to these qualities we add that before-mentioned zest and vigour we must have some true conception of the nature of the work that he was to do.
It is for this that Some Reminiscences is valuable. To read it as a detached work, to expect from it the amiable facetiousness of a book of modern memories or the heavy authoritative coherence of the My Autobiography or My Life of some eminent scientist or theologian, is to be most grievously disappointed.
If the beginning is bewilderment the end is an impression of crowding, disordered life, of a tapestry richly dark, with figures woven into the very thread of it and yet starting to life with an individuality all their own. No book reveals more clearly the reasons both of Conrad's faults and of his merits. No book of his is more likely by reason of its honesty and simplicity to win him true friends. As a work of art there is almost everything to be said against it, except that it has that supreme gift that remains, at the end, almost all that we ask of any work of art, overwhelming vitality. But it is formless, ragged, incoherent, inconclusive, a fragment of eager, vivid, turbulent reminiscence poured into a friend's ear in a moment of sudden confidence. That may or may not be the best way to conduct reminiscences; the book remains a supremely intimate, engaging and enlightening introduction to its author.
With The Mirror of the Sea we are on very different ground. As I have already said, this is Conrad's happiest book—indeed, with the possible exception of The Nigger of the Narcissus, his only happy book. He is happy because he is able, for a moment, to forget his distrust, his dread, his inherent ironical pessimism. He is here permitting himself the whole range of his enthusiasm and admiration, and behind that enthusiasm there is a quiet, sure confidence that is strangely at variance with the distrust of his later novels.
The book seems at first sight to be a collection of almost haphazard papers, with such titles as Landfalls and Departures, Overdue and Missing, Rulers of East and West, The Nursery of the Craft. No reader however, can conclude it without having conveyed to him a strangely binding impression of Unity. He has been led, it will seem to him, into the very heart of the company of those who know the Sea as she really is, he has been made free of a great order.
The foundation of his intimacy springs from three sources—the majesty, power and cruelty of the Sea herself, the homely reality of the lives of the men who serve her, the vibrating, beautiful life of the ships that sail upon her. This is the Trilogy that holds in its hands the whole life and pageant of the sea; it is because Conrad holds all three elements in exact and perfect balance that this book has its unique value, its power both of realism, for this is the life of man, and of romance, which is the life of the sea.
Conrad's attitude to the Sea herself, in this book, is one of lyrical and passionate worship. He sees, with all the vivid accuracy of his realism, her deceits, her cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this: