Turns of
style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, or the
faces of women, have their chance. And, of course, the excellence,
the charm of Conrad's style is that in its nuances, its slow
winding paragraphs, its pausing sentences, and constant suggestion
of depths beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the
brooding mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of images
that drop like pebbles, now here, now there, in a fathomless pool.
This is to define Conrad in space, but not in time. In time, he
may be Slav or English, but certainly is modern of the moderns.
The tribute of admiration and imitation from the youth of his own
period alone might prove this. But it is easier to prove than to
describe his modernity. To say that he takes the imagination
afield into the margins of the world, where life still escapes
standardization and there are fresh aspects of beauty, is to fail
to differentiate him from Kipling or Masefield. To say that he
strikes below the act and the will into realms of the sub-
conscious, and studies the mechanism as well as the results of
emotion, is but to place him, where indeed he belongs, among the
many writers who have learned of Henry James or moved in parallels
beside him.
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