defalcating financier and wife of the ship's captain, who is the heroine
of _Chance_--he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of
persons hurrying round a corner. He gives us a picture of disappearing
heels as the portrait of a personality. He suggests the soul of wonder
in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by
suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a
shadowy island seen at twilight. One result of this is that his human
beings are seldom as rotund as life. They are emanations of personality
rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels. They are, if you
like, ghostly. That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my
Uncle Toby and Sam Weller. But how wonderful they are in their
environment of the unusual! How wonderful as seen in the light of the
strange eyes of their creator! "Having grown extremely sensitive (an
effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair"--so
the narrator of _Chance_ begins one of his sentences; and it is not in
the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a
sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad
wins his laurels as a writer of novels. He would be sensitive, I do not
doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons
tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted
scone. His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however,
when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny--when,
bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or
is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.

Some of his best work is contained in the two stories _Typhoon_ and
_The Secret Sharer_, the latter of which appeared in the volume called
_'Twixt Land and Sea_. And each of these is a fable of man's mysterious
quarrel with fate told with the Conrad sensitiveness, the dark Conrad
irony, and the Conrad zest for courage. These stories are so great that
while we read them we almost forget the word "psychology." We are swept
off our feet by a tide of heroic literature. Each of the stories,
complex though Mr. Conrad's interest in the central situation may be, is
radically as heroic and simple as the story of Jack's fight with the
giants or of the defence of the round-house in _Kidnapped_. In each of
them the soul of man challenges fate with its terrors: it dares all, it
risks all, it invades and def