y, then? The true answer, when it is
forthcoming at all, is always much more complex than the melodramatist's
answer. It may be so enormously complex, indeed, as to transcend all the
normal laws of cause and effect. It may be an answer made up largely, or
even wholly, of the fantastic, the astounding, the unearthly reasons of
lunacy. That is the chief, if not the only difference between melodrama
and reality. The events of the two may be, and often are identical. It
is only in their underlying network of causes that they are dissimilar
and incommensurate.

Here, in brief, you have the point of essential distinction between the
stories of Conrad, a supreme artist in fiction, and the trashy
confections of the literary artisans--_e.g._, Sienkiewicz, Dumas, Lew
Wallace, and their kind. Conrad's materials, at bottom, are almost
identical with those of the artisans. He, too, has his chariot races,
his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes us
through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms,
abominable treacheries. But always he illuminates the nude and amazing
event with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of its
workings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it.
Always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomes
almost inevitability. His "Nostromo," for example, in its externals, is
a mere tale of South American turmoil; its materials are those of
"Soldiers of Fortune." But what a difference in method, in point of
approach, in inner content! Davis was content to show the overt act,
scarcely accounting for it at all, and then only in terms of
conventional romance. Conrad penetrates to the motive concealed in it,
the psychological spring and basis of it, the whole fabric of weakness,
habit and aberration underlying it. The one achieved an agreeable
romance, and an agreeable romance only. The other achieves an
extraordinarily brilliant and incisive study of the Latin-American
temperament--a full length exposure of the perverse passions and
incomprehensible ideals which provoke presumably sane men to pursue one
another like wolves, and of the reactions of that incessant pursuit upon
the men themselves, and upon their primary ideas, and upon the
institutions under which they live. I do not say that Conrad is always
exhaustive in his explanations, or that he is accurate. In the first
case I know that he often is not, in the second case I d