The deepest psychology—that is what one comes at last to feel—can only be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures, symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words revealing it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.
For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest things in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind must be alert to receive them, but they must not be snatched at in any direct attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, or softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turn away our faces. They will only come if we treat them with the reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates, calling them "The Eumenides"; or the ultimate secret of the universe, calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask of superstition.
The reason why Conrad holds us all—old and young, subtle and simple—with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant intuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of all our human days—the things which cause us those moments of sharp sweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings.
His style is a rare achievement; and it is so because he treats the language he uses with such scrupulous and austere reverence.
The mere fact that English was a foreign tongue to him seems to have intensified this quality; as though the hardness and steepness of its challenge forced the latent scholarship in him to stiffen its fibres to encounter it.
When he writes of ships he does not tease us with the pedantry of technical terms. He undertakes the much more human and the much more difficult task of conveying to us the thousand and one vague and delicate associations which bind the souls of seafarers to the vessels that carry them.
His fine imaginative mind—loving with a large receptive wisdom all the quaint idiosyncrasy of lonely and reserved people—naturally turns with a certain scornful contempt from modern steamships. That bastard romance, full of vulgar acclamation over mechanical achievements, which makes so much of the mere size and speed of a trans-Atlantic liner, is waved aside contemptuously by Conrad.
Like all great imaginative spirits, he realizes that for any inanimate object to wear the rich magic of the deep poetic things, it is necessary for it to have existed in the world long enough to have become intimately associated with the hopes and fears, the fancies and terrors, of many generations.
It is simply and solely their newness to human experience which makes it impossible for any of these modern inventions, however striking and sensational, to affect our imagination with the sense of intrinsic beauty in the way a sailing-ship does.
And it is not only—as one soon comes to feel in reading Conrad—that these old-fashioned ships, with their legendary associations carrying one back over the centuries, are beautiful in themselves. They diffuse the beauty of their identity through every detail of the lives of those who are connected with them. They bring the mystery and terror of the sea into every harbour where they anchor and into every port.