Hugh Walpole - Joseph Conrad

Not all his theme, however; there remains the third element in it, the soul of the ship. It is, perhaps, after all, with the life of the ship that The Mirror of The Sea , ultimately, has most to do. As other men write of the woman they have loved, so does Conrad write of his ships. He sees them, in this book that is so especially dedicated to their pride and beauty, coloured with a fine glow of romance, but nevertheless he realises them with all the accurate detail of a technician who describes his craft. You may learn of the raising and letting go of an anchor, and he will tell the journalists of their crime in speaking of "casting" an anchor when the true technicality is "brought up"—"to an anchor" understood. In the chapter on "Yachts" he provides as much technical detail as any book of instruction need demand and then suddenly there come these sentences—"the art of handling slips is finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men."… "A ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to mark."

Indeed it is the ship that gives that final impression of unity, of which I have already spoken, to the book. She grows, as it were, from her birth, in no ordered sequence of events, but admitting us ever more closely into her intimacy, telling us, at first shyly, afterwards more boldly, little things about herself, confiding to us her trials, appealing sometimes to our admiration, indulging sometimes our humour. Conrad is tender to her as he is to nothing human. He watches her shy, new, in the dock, "her reputation all to make yet in the talk of the seamen who were to share their life with her."… "She looked modest to me. I imagined her diffident, lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf to which she was made fast with very new lines, intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced bisters already familiar with all the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men."

Her friend stands there on the quay and bids her be of good courage; he salutes her grace and spirit—he echoes, with all the implied irony of contrast, his companion's "Ships are all right...."

He explains the many kinds of ships that there are—the rogues, the wickedly malicious, the sly, the benevolent, the proud, the adventurous, the staid, the decorous. For even the worst of these he has indulgences that he would never offer to the soul of man. He cannot be severe before such a world of fine spirits.

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