Conrad and Crippen

Abstract

It was Conrad who made the deepest impression upon me. His magnificent head, surely one of the handsomest that was ever set on a pair of shoulders, if you are to take into account what a face reflects of the spirit that enlightens it, his dignity, austerity, kindness of heart, even his irritabilities, made him an unforgettable figure. I had no personal experience of those irritabilities, but used to hear enough about them, and they all seemed part of him, for nobody ever took his work as a writer more to heart than he did, and it was because he almost agonised over it that little outside impingements upon his brain annoyed him, like midge bites.

From Out and About: Random Reminiscences (London: John Murray, 1933) pp. 143–5.