in this respect with his master--his
master, at least, in the art of the long novel--Henry James. I do not
mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely
original. Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad's stories
than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James's. His manner of
discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the
school of Henry James. Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in
everything down to descriptions of the weather. It can hardly be
questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from
Henry James than from any other writer. As one reads a story like
_Chance_, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something
of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor. Mr. Conrad
never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the
microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does. He seems rather to be
one of the splendid guessers. Not that Henry James is timid in
speculations. He can sally out into the borderland and come back with
his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity. Even when he tells a
ghost story, however--and _The Turn of the Screw_ is one of the great
ghost stories of literature--he remains supremely master of his
materials. He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the
vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad. Where Mr. Conrad will drift into
discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart
and compass.

One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in
the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad's _Under Western Eyes_, for
instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry
James's novels. Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive.
To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. But while
Henry James's birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens,
Mr. Conrad's call from the heart of natural thickets--often from the
depths of the jungle. The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in
_Heart of Darkness_ is symbolic of his method as a writer. He goes on
and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next
bend. He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his
especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the
unseen things that are waiting round the corner. Even when he is
portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel--the daughter of the