sected with the impersonal cruelty of surgeon
psychologists, but revealed by a sympathetic interpreter who knows the
weakness and folly and tragedy of humanity.

The truth is, Conrad is always an analyst; that sets him apart from
other writers of sea stories. Chance is different in theme, but not as
different in treatment as in construction. His pattern of narration
has always been of an evasive character; here the method is carried to
the pitch of polyphonic intricacy. The richness of interest, the
startling variety, and the philosophic largeness of view--the tale is
simple enough otherwise for a child's enjoyment--are a few of its
qualities. Coventry Patmore is said to be the poet alluded to as
Carleon Anthony, and there are distinct judgments on feminism and the
new woman, some wholesome truths uttered at a time when man has
seemingly shrivelled up in the glorified feminine vision of mundane
things. The moral is to be found on page 447. "Of all the forms
offered to us by life it is the one demanding a couple to realise it
fully which is the most imperative. Pairing off is the fate of
mankind. And if two beings thrown together, mutually attracted, resist
the necessity, fail in understanding, and stop voluntarily short ...
they are committing a sin against life."

The Duel (published in America under the title of A Point of Honor) is
a tour de force in story-telling that would have made envious Balzac.
Then there is Winnie Verloc in the Secret Agent, and her cockney
sentiment and rancours. She is remarkably "realised," and is a pitiful
apparition at the close. The detective Verloc, her husband, wavers as
a portrait between reality and melodrama. The minor female characters,
her mother and the titled lady patron of the apostle Michaelis, are no
mere supernumeraries.

The husband and wife in The Return are nameless but unforgetable. It
is a profound parable, this tale. The man discovered in his judgment
of his foolish wife that "morality is not a method of happiness." The
image in the mirrors in this tale produces a ghastly effect. I enjoyed
the amateur anarchist, the English girl playing with bombs in The
Informer; she is an admirable foil for the brooding bitterness of the
ruined Royalist's daughter in that stirring South American tale,
Gaspar Ruiz. Conrad knows this continent of half-baked civilisations;
life grows there like rank vegetations. Nostromo is the most elaborate
and dramatic study of the sort, and a wil