dly adventurous romance into
the bargain. The two women, fascinating Mrs. Gould and the proud,
beautiful Antonia Avellanos, are finely contrasted. And what a mob of
cutthroats, politicians, and visionaries! "In real revolutions the
best characters do not come to the front," which statement holds as
good in Paris as in Petrograd, in New York, or in Mexico. The Nigger
of the Narcissus and Nostromo give us the "emotion of multitude."

A genuinely humorous woman is the German skipper's wife in Falk, and
the niece, the heroine who turns the head of the former cannibal of
Falk--this an echo, doubtless, from the anecdote of the dog-eating
granduncle B---- of the Reminiscences--is heroic in her way. Funniest
of all is the captain himself. Falk is almost a tragic figure. Amy
Foster--in the same volume--is pathetic, and Bessie Carvil, of
To-morrow, might have been signed by Hardy. In Youth the old sea-dog's
motherly wife is the only woman. As for the impure witch in The Heart
of Darkness, I can only say that she creates a new shudder. How she
appeals to the imagination! The soft-spoken lady, bereft of her hero
in this narrative, who lives in Brussels, is a specimen of Conrad's
ability to make reverberate in our memory an enchanting personality,
and with a few strokes of the brush. We cannot admire the daughter of
poor old Captain Whalley in The End of Tether, but she is the
propulsive force of his actions and final tragedy. For her we have
"that form of contempt which is called pity." That particular story
will rank with the best in the world's literature. Nina Almayer shows
the atavistic "pull" of the soil and opposes finesse to force, while
Alice Jacobus in 'Twixt Land and Sea (A Smile of Fortune) is half-way
on the road back to barbarism. But Nina will be happy with her chief.
In depicting the slow decadence of character in mixed races and the
naive stammerings at the birth of their souls, Conrad is
unapproachable.

In the selection of his titles he is always happy; how happy, may be
noted in his new book, Victory. It is not a war book, though it
depicts in his most dramatic manner the warring of human instincts. It
was planned several years ago, but not finished until the writer's
enforced stay in his unhappy native land, Poland. Like Goethe or
Stendhal, Conrad can write in the midst of war's alarums about the
hair's-breadth 'scapes of his characters. But, then, the Polish is the
most remarkable race in Europe; from leading