Mr. Bullen’s work in literature requires no introduction. If it ever did, it has received one so complete from Mr. Kipling, that not another word is needed. Mr. Kipling, in phrases as happy as they are generous, has exactly described the character of Mr. Bullen’s writings. After that, to commend him to the public is superfluous. However, in spite of this, Mr. Bullen has asked me to write a few words to put in the front of his book, and I obey. If my introduction does no good, it will at least do no harm, and I shall at any rate have the pleasure of being in very good company. His whales and sharks and other monsters of the deep are creatures with whom one is proud to be associated.

These Idylls—little pictures—strike me as some of the most vivid things ever written about the sea. I take it that only a man who has used the sea as a common sailor, and before the mast, really knows it in all its humours,—has heard all those multitudinous voices that echo along the vast waste spaces of the deep. The officer is either too busy with his responsibilities of command, or else is off duty and so not at close quarters with the winds and waves. As a rule the sailor,—the man who heaves the lead, stands at the wheel, sits in the crow’s nest for long hours together, and does the more wearisome and leisurely duties of the ship, is not a person of sufficient imagination and education to record the impressions that come to those who do battle with “a remote and unhearing Ocean.” In Mr. Bullen, perhaps for the first time, we have a man who has been a fo’c’s’le hand and yet has the power, first to realise in a literary shape, and then to set down, the wonders of the flood. It was a most happy combination that for once the man who saw the tropic dawn from the crow’s nest of a whaler should be able to communicate the full magic of the scene.

It is not conventionally that I have called Mr. Bullen’s work “vivid.” It is of writing such as his that we can say, and say truly:

He transports us to the very place he describes—does not merely hand us a stereoscopic glass in which to observe a well-defined photograph.

One other quality has always struck me in Mr. Bullen’s work. In spite of the fact that he knows so much science, and makes so keen and convincing a use of this knowledge, there is always an air of mystery and enchantment about his writing. De Quincey’s brother told De Quincey that all his arguments against the supernatural were perfectly sound here in England, but that they did not hold “to the suth’ard of the line.” In the Southern Seas were still to be found realms where pure reason was not supreme. But Mr. Bullen’s experiences and Idylls are “to the suth’ard of the line.” He deals as a rule with that region of romance, and hence it is, I suppose, that a sense of something strange and fateful, and so fascinating, haunts his pictures of the sea.

But I am doing the readers of this book a very ill turn in keeping them waiting at the door. Let them be assured that there is matter well worth their marking within, and that if they are capable of taking pleasure in the sea and its secrets, they cannot fail of entertainment here.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.