Complete Works

after Conrad’s death, in the London Daily Mail of August 15, 1924.
    Next follow two essays which have the war at sea as background. “The Unlighted Coasf recalls Conrad’s experiences in the North Sea during his ten days’ cruise in the Ready in 1917 — a full account of this cruise is to be found in Captain Sutherland’s “At Sea with Joseph Conrad” — and was written for the Admirably. For some reason or other they never used it and it first saw the light in the London Times of August 18,1925.
    The Dover Patrol,” written at the request of the late Lord Northcliffe, was published in the London Timeso\ July 27,1921, the day on which the Prince of Wales unveiled the Dover Patrol Memorial. It is glowing tribute to “the physical endurance, the inborn seamanship, the matter-of-fact, industrious, indefatigable enthusiasm” of the men who guarded unsleepingly and at extreme hazard the entrance to the Channel.
    The “Memorandum on the Scheme for Fitting Out a Sailing Ship” is here first printed. Written in 1919 for the Holt Steamship Company, who had proposed to fit out a sailing ship for the training of boys destined for the Mercantile Marine, it is an example of Conrad’s intense and practical interest in such subjects. It is exactly what it purports to be — a memorandum, precise, technical, full of
    his accumulated experience and long-pondered ideas. Nothing came of the scheme: as Mr. Lawrence Holt wrote to me, it was “abandoned owing to the depression of trade which set in soon after my conversation with Mr. Conrad.” The document from then to now has been in Mr. Holt’s possession, and cordial thanks are due to him for his permission to use it here.
    “The Loss of the Daigonaf is a further example of Conrad’s interest in questions of seamanship. Indeed, I print it solely for that reason, because, in itself, it but refers to the contents of an article from another pen. It appeared, as a letter to the editor, in the London Mercury of December, 1921, and was called forth by a paper in the September issue entitled “A True Story: Log and Record of the Wreck of the Snip Dalgonaro\ Liverpool, bound from Callao to Taltal.” This paper described the wreck of the barque Loire, which happened in October, 1913; and Conrad’s letter, while correcting some obvious mistakes in the narrative as printed, is a testimony to the gallantry and efficiency of the officers and crew.
    The essay calied “Travel” was written, I am proud to think, out of friendship for myself and formed the preface to a book by me, “Into the East: Notes on Burma and Malaya,” 1923. The effort to finish “The Rover” held up the writing of this preface for about a year, but it seems to me that in its evocation of the great travellers of old and of times that have gone for ever it reaches the highest beauty and distinction. Let me quote one paragraph:
    “And those things, which stand as if imperishable in the pages of old books of travel, are all blown away; have vanished as utterly as the smoke of the travellers’ camp fires in the icy night air of the Gobi Desert, as the smell of incense burned in the temples of strange gods, as the voices of Asiatic statesmen speculating with the cruel wisdom of past ages on matters of peace and war.”
    “Stephen Crane,” the longest and most elaborate essay in the book, was written as an introduction to Mr. Thomas Beer’s “Stephen Crane, a Study in American Letters,” 1923. Conrad, as in generally known, was a close friend of Crane during the last years of that meteoric life, when Crane was frequently a neighbour of his in southern England. In all, he wrote three essays on Crane and his
    work. One appeared in “Notes on Life and Letters,” two are printed in this volume, and all breathe a spirit of affectionate admiration. This essay is a study in biographical sidelights and is undoubtedly the most personal and the most delightful of all reminiscences of Crane.
    The short essay. “His War Book,” which follows, was composed specifically as a preface to a new edition of Crane’s best-known work, “The Red Badge of Courage” — the new edition came out at last in 1925 — and it gives clear indication of Conrad’s feeling for the artist who could observe so truly and create with such economy.
    “John Galsworthy,” as I have said, was only accidentally omitted from the previous volume of Conrad’s essays. It was composed as a review of “A Man of Property,” contained