So naturally the owners, being fully covered by insurance, are clamorous in their demands, and the ship’s officers are bending all their energies to save every yard of distance and every second of time. Always and everywhere up and down the coast they are gliding past the rocky points, and in the darkness and fogs and storms they risk an inch too much. To me this seems an eminently “romantic” situation; I can imagine a great imaginative artist rearing it into a tremendous symbol of human guilt. But this artist would make the discovery that the principal magazines on the Pacific Coast are published by the railroad companies which own and operate the steamship lines! Every hour the progress of science increases man’s control over nature, and therefore the safety of travel at sea. If it were not for private ownership and the blind race for profits, these dangers would be largely a memory, and the stealthy Nemesis of Conrad, like the gods of the Polish Catholic and the Anglican Protestant churches, would shrivel up and crumble and blow away as dust. Would Conrad like that? Or would he feel the irritation of an old man who has staked his reputation upon a bad guess? He gives you the answer in “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” a whole novel written to satirize the altruistic impulse, and expose it as a destroyer of discipline and character. He assigns the role of “agitator” at sea to an odious little Cockney rat; and when this creature has got the poor crew stirred up to mutiny, what sport Conrad has with them! Such lofty sarcasm: Our little world went on its curved and unswerving path carrying a discontented and aspiring population. They found comfort of a gloomy kind in an interminable and conscientious analysis of their unappreciated worth; and inspired by Donkin’s hopeful doctrines they dreamed enthusiastically of the time when every lonely ship would travel over a serene sea, manned by a wealthy and well-fed crew of satisfied skippers. In the chapter on Matthew Arnold I mentioned Paul Elmer More as a critic who has based his reputation upon the thesis of man’s helplessness in the presence of the universe; I explained Matthew Arnold as a poet who finds his ideal both moral and poetical in a dignified and mournful resignation to the evils of life. And here is another of these Great Mourners, a zealot of Pessimism. Woe to you, if in his Agnostic Sunday school you venture to breathe a hope for mankind! Woe to you if you commit the supreme offense of art, the suggesting of a happy ending for a novel! Woe to you, beyond all land-woes; for now you are in Neptune’s empire, and there is no Bill of Rights, no freedom of speech, press or assemblage; he who murmurs an optimistic thought hears the dread word Mutiny--and the “beak” gives him “six months hard!” CHAPTER CX THE REBEL IMMORTAL