e Barral in Chance, with her self-tortured temperament, you
experience that "emotion of recognition" described by Mr. James. You
know they live, that some of them go on marching in your memory after
the book has been closed. Their actions always end by resembling their
ideas. And their ideas are variegated.

In Under Western Eyes we encounter the lovely Natalie Haldin, a sister
in spirit to Helena, to Lisa, to any one of the Turgenieff heroines.
Charm is hers, and a valiant spirit. Her creator has not, thus far,
succeeded in bettering her. Only once does he sound a false note. I
find her speech a trifle rhetorical after she learns the facts in the
case of Razumov (p. 354). Two lines are superfluous at the close of
this heart-breaking chapter, and in all the length of the book that is
the only flaw I can offer to hungry criticism. The revolutionary group
at Geneva--the mysterious and vile Madame de S----, the unhappy slave,
Tekla, the much-tried Mrs. Haldin, and the very vital anarchist,
surely a portrait sur le vif, Sophia Antonovna, are testimonies of the
writer's skill and profound divination of the human heart. (He has
confessed that for him woman is "a human being, very much like
myself.") The dialogue between Razumov, the spiritual bankrupt, and
Sophia in the park is one of those character-revealing episodes that
are only real when handled by a supreme artist. Its involutions and
undulations, its very recoil on itself as the pair face their
memories, he haunted, she suspicious, touch the springs of desperate
lives. As an etching of a vicious soul, the Eliza of Chance is
arresting. We do not learn her last name, but we remember her brutal
attack on little Flora, an attack that warped the poor child's nature.
Whether the end of the book is justified is apart from my present
purpose, which is chiefly exposition, though I feel that Captain
Anthony is not tenderly treated. But "there is a Nemesis which
overtakes generosity, too, like all the other imprudences of men who
dare to be lawless and proud...." And this sailor, the son of the
selfish poet, Carleon Anthony, himself sensitive, but unselfish, paid
for his considerate treatment of his wife Flora. Only Hardy could have
treated the sex question with the same tact as Conrad (he has done so
in Jude the Obscure).

In his sea tales Conrad is a belated romanticist; and in Chance, while
the sea is never far off, it is the soul of an unhappy girl that is
shown us; not dis