One always feels that a ship in Conrad has a _figure-head;_ and is it possible to imagine a White Star liner, or a North German Lloyd steamer, with such an honourable and beautiful adornment? Liners are things entirely without souls. One only knows them apart by their paint, their tonnage, or the name of the particular set of financiers who monopolise them. "Floating hotels" is the proud and inspiring term with which the awed journalistic mind contemplates these wonders. Well! In Conrad's books we are not teased with "floating hotels." If a certain type of machine-loving person derives satisfaction from thinking how wonderfully these monsters have conquered the sea, let it be remembered that the sea has its _poetic_ revenge upon them by absolutely concealing from those who travel in this way the real magic of its secret. No one knows the sea--that, at any rate, Conrad makes quite clear--who has not voyaged over its waves in a sailing vessel. Of the books which Mr. Conrad has so far written--one hopes that for many years each new Spring will bring a new work from his pen--my own favourites are "Chance" and "Lord Jim," and, after those two, "Victory." I think the figure of Flora de Barral in "Chance" is one of the most arresting figures in all fiction. I cannot get that girl out of my mind. Her pale flesh, her peculiarly dark-tinted blue eyes, her white cheeks and scarlet mouth; above all, her broken pride, her deep humiliation, her shadowy and abysmal reserve--haunt me like a figure seen and loved in some previous incarnation. I like to fancy that in the case of Flora, as in the case of Antonia and Nina and Lena and Aissa, Conrad has been enabled to convey, by means of an art far subtler than appears on the surface, a strange revival, in the case of every person who reads the book, of the intangible memories of the sweetness and mystery of such a person's first love. I believe half the secret of this wonderful art of his, by which we are thus reminded of our first love, is the absolute elimination of the _sensual_ from these evasive portraits. And not only of the sensual; of the sentimental as well. In the average popular books about love we have nowadays a sickening revel of sentimentality. Then again, as opposed to this vulgar sentimentality, with its false idealisation of women, we have the realistic sensuality of the younger cleverer writers playing upon every kind of neurotic obsession. I think the greatness of Conrad is to be found in the fact that he refuses to sacrifice the mysterious truth of passion either to sentiment or to sensuality. He keeps this great clear well of natural human feeling free from both these turbid and morbid streams.