Conrad First The Joseph Conrad Periodical Archive
Extract (The Fine Art)

Sailing and Sincerity

in The Canaseraga Times (Canaseraga, NY, USA) (Jun 30, 1905): (Page imagery not yet available)

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Subtitled "The Link of Sympathy Between a Vessel and a Skipper," the passage reads:

"Like all fine arts, it must be based upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a law of Nature, rules an infinity of different phenomena, says Joseph Conrad in the Booklover's Magazine. Your endeavor must be single-minded. You would talk differently to a coal-heaver and to a professor. But is this duplicity? I deny it. The truth consists in the genuineness of the feeling, in the genuine recognition of the two men, so similar and so different, as your two partners in the hazard of life. Obviously, a humbug, thinking only of winning his little race, would stand a chance of profiting by his artifices. Men, professors or coal-heavers, are easily deceived; they even have an extraordinary knack of lending themselves to deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable propensity to allow themselves to be led by the nose with their eyes open. But a ship is a creature which we have brought into the world, as it were on purpose to keep us up to the mark.

In her handling a ship will not put up with a mere pretender, as, for instance, the public will do with Mr. X, the popular statesman, Mr. Y, the popular scientist, or Mr. Z, the popular--what shall we say?--anything from a teacher of high morality to a bagman--who have won their little race. But I would like, though not accustomed to betting, to wager a large sum that not one of the few first-rate skippers of racing yachts has ever been a humbug. It would have been too difficult. The difficulty arises from the fact that one does not deal with ships in a mob, but with a ship as an individual. So we may have to do with men. But in each of us there lurks some particle of the mob spirit, of the mob temperament. No matter how earnestly we strive against each other, we remain brothers on the lowest side of our intellect and in the instability of our feeling.

With ships it is not so. Much as they are to us, they are nothing to each other. Those sensitive creatures have no ears for our blandishments. It takes something more than words to cajole them to do our will, to cover us with glory--luckily, too, or else there would have been more shoddy reputations for first-rate seamanship." Available at Google News Archive. Click here.