To get a better perspective of Conrad's essential modernity I
should like to propose a more cogent comparison, and a more
illuminating contrast, with a man whose achievements were in
Conrad's own province, who challenges and rewards comparison,
Herman Melville.
It may be that others have set "Moby Dick" beside the works of
Conrad. Some one must have done it, so illuminating in both
directions is the result. Here are two dreamers who write of the
sea and strange men, of the wild elements and the mysterious in
man; two authors who, a half century apart, sail the same seas and
come home to write not so much of them as what they dream when
they remember their experiences. Each man, as he writes,
transcends the sea, sublimates it into a vapor of pure
imagination, in which he clothes his idea of man, and so doing
gives us not merely great literature, but sea narrative and
description unsurpassed:
And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical seas,
among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding
rapture, Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full
terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wretched
hideousness of his jaw.
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