a certain road-side pool, or the way
the light happens to fall upon a heap of dead leaves, or the particular
manner in which some knotted and twisted root protrudes itself from
the bank, awakes quite suddenly, in this margin of the mind of
which I speak, the strangest and subtlest feelings.

It is as though something in the material thing before us--some
inexplicable "soul" of the inanimate--rushed forth to meet our soul,
as if it had been _waiting_ for us for long, long years.

I am moving, in this matter of the essential secret of Conrad,
through a vague and obscure twilight. It is not easy to express these
things; but what I have in my thoughts is certainly no mere fancy of
mystical idealism, but a quite definite and actual experience, or
series of experiences, in the "great valley" of the mind.

When Almayer, for instance, stares hopelessly and blankly at a
floating log in his gloomy river; when the honest fellow in "Chance"
who is relating the story watches the mud of the road outside the
hotel where Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral are making their
desperate arrangements; you get the sort of subconscious
"expectancy" which is part of this strange phenomenon, and that
curious sudden thrill, "I have been here before! I have seen and
heard all this before!" which gives to so many scenes in Conrad that
undertone of unfathomable mystery which is so true an aspect of life.

So often are we conscious of it as we read him! We are conscious of
it--to give another instance--when Heyst and Lena are talking
together in the loneliness of their island of escape, before the unseen
enemies descend on them.

The same insight in him and the same extraordinary power of
making words malleable to his purpose in dealing with these hidden
things may be remarked in all those scenes in his books where men
and women are drawn together by love.

Conrad takes no interest in social problems. His interest is only
stirred by what is permanent and undying in the relations between
men and women. These extraordinary scenes, where Gould and his
wife, where Antonia Avellanos and her friend, where Willem and
Aissa, where Nina and her Malay chief, where Flora and Anthony,
Heyst and Lena, and many other lovers, meet and peer into the
secret depths of one another's beings, are all scenes possessing that
universal human element which no change or reform or revolution
or improvement can touch or alter.

Without any theory about their "emancip