n and women of
Wessex, thrills one with the same weight of accumulated fatality,
as--the comparison is tedious and pedantic--the fortunes of the
ill-starred houses of Argos and Thebes. One peculiarity of Mr. Hardy's
method must finally be mentioned, as giving their most characteristic
quality to these formidable scenes--I mean his preference for form
over color. Who can forget those desolately emphatic human
protagonists silhouetted so austerely along the tops of hills and
against the perspectives of long white roads?

75. JOSEPH CONRAD. CHANCE. LORD JIM. VICTORY. YOUTH. ALMAYER'S
FOLLY. _Published by Doubleday Page & Co. with a critical monograph,
so admirably written (it is given gratis) by Wilson Follet that one
longs to see more criticism from such an accomplished hand_.

Conrad's work--and, considering his foreign origin and his late choice
of English as a medium of expression, it is no less than an astounding
achievement--is work of the very highest literary and psychological
value. It is, indeed, as Mr. Follet says, only such criticism as is
passionately anxious to prove for itself the true "romance of the
intellect" that can hope to deal adequately with such an output. The
background of Conrad's books is primarily the sea itself; and after
the sea, ships. No one has indicated the extraordinary romance of
ships in the way he has done--of ships in the open sea, in the
harbour, at the wharf, or driven far up some perilous tropical river.

But it is neither the sea nor the tropical recesses nor the
sun-scorched river-edges of his backgrounds that make up the essence
of romance in the Conrad books. This is found in nothing less than the
mysterious potencies for courage and for fear, for good and for evil,
of human beings themselves--of human beings isolated by some external
"diablerie" which throws every feature of them into terrible and
baffling relief.

The finest and deepest effects of Conrad's art are always found when,
in the process of the story, some solitary man and woman encounter
each other, far from civilization, and tearing off, as it were, the
mask of one another's souls, are confronted by a deeper and more
inveterate mystery--the eternal mystery of difference, which separates
all men born into the world and keeps us perpetually alone. In the
case of Heyst and Lena--of Flora de Barral and her Captain Anthony--of
Charles and Mrs. Gould--of Aissa and Willems--of Almayer's daughter
and her Malay lo