he waves, and the
whisper of the wind. Or, as a contrast, recall the rank ugliness of
the night when Razumov visits the hideous tenement, expecting to find
there the driver who would carry to freedom the political assassin,
Haldin. Scattered throughout the books are descriptive passages with
few parallels in our language. Indeed, Conrad often abuses his gift,
forgetting that his readers do not possess his tremendously developed
faculty of attention.

II

Invention he has to a plentiful degree, notwithstanding his giving it
second place in comparison with imagination. His novels are the novels
of ideas dear to Balzac, though tinged with romance--a Stendhal of the
sea. Gustave Kahn called him un puissant reveur, and might have added,
a wonderful spinner of yarns. Such yarns--for men and women and
children! At times yarning seemingly for the sake of yarning--true
art-for-art, though not in the "precious" sense. From the brilliant
melochromatic glare of the East to the drab of London's mean streets,
from the cool, darkened interiors of Malayan warehouses to the
snow-covered allees of the Russian capital, or the green parks on the
Lake of Geneva, he carries us on his magical carpet, and the key is
always in true pitch. He never saves up for another book as Henry
James once said of some author, and for him, as for Mr. James, every
good story is "both a picture and an idea"; he seeks to interpret "the
uncomposed, unrounded look of life with its accidents, its broken
rhythms." He gets atmosphere in a phrase; a verbal nuance lifts the
cover of some iniquitous or gentle soul. He contrives the illusion of
time, and his characters are never at rest; even within the narrow
compass of the short story they develop; they grow in evil or wisdom,
are always transformed; they think in "character," and ideality unites
his vision with that of his humans. Consider the decomposition of the
moral life of Lord Jim and its slow recrudescence; there is a
prolonged duel between the will and the intelligence. Here is the
tesselation of mean and tragic happenings in the vast mosaic we call
Life. And the force of fatuity in the case of Almayer--a book which
has for me the bloom of youth. Sheer narrative could go no further
than in The Nigger of the Narcissus (Children of the Sea), nor
interior analysis in The Return.

What I once wrote of Henry James might be said of Joseph Conrad: "He
is exquisitely aware of t