From Hugh Walpole's essay:
Quote:
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, 28Overdue 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, mto 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 29cruelties, her inhuman disregard of the lives of men, but, finally, her glory is enough for him. He will write of her like this:
“The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power. The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard-of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown... the most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.”
Nevertheless she holds him her most willing slave and he is that because he believes that she alone in all the world is worthy to indulge this cruelty. She positively “brings it off,” this assertion of her right, and once he is assured of that, he will yield absolute obedience. In this worship of the Sea and the winds that rouse her he allows himself a 30lyrical freedom that he was afterwards to check. He was never again, not even in Typhoon and Youth, to write with such free and spontaneous lyricism as in his famous passage about the “West Wind.”
The Mirror of the Sea forms then the best possible introduction to Conrad’s work, because it attests, more magnificently and more confidently than anything else that he has written, his faith and his devotion.
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07-27-2021, 01:06 AM
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