ists, an art of description
which by a few fastidious and delicate touches can make the bodily
appearance indicative of the hidden soul; and partly by the cunning
insertion of long, treacherous, pregnant silences which reveal in
some occult indirect manner the very integral quality of the soul thus
betrayed.

The more voluble women of other novelists seem, even while they
are expressing their most violent emotions, rather to blur and
confuse the mysterious depths of their sex-life than to reveal it.
Conrad's women, in a few broken words, in a stammered sentence,
in a significant silence, have the power of revealing something more
than the tragic emotion of one person. They have the power of
revealing what might be called the subliminal sex-consciousness of
the race itself. They have the power of merging the individuality of
the particular speaker into something deeper and larger and wider,
into something universal.

Reserve is the grand device by means of which this subconscious
element is made evident, is hinted at and glimpsed so magically.
When everything is expressed, nothing is expressed. A look, a
gesture, a sigh, a whisper, in Conrad, is more significant of the
ocean-deep mysteries of the soul than pages of eloquent psychology.

The deepest psychology--that is what one comes at last to feel--can
only be expressed indirectly and by means of movements, pictures,
symbols, signs. It can be revealed in words; but the words revealing
it must ostensibly be concerned with something else.

For it is with the deepest things in human life as with the deepest
things in nature; their way must be prepared for them, the mind must
be alert to receive them, but they must not be snatched at in any
direct attack. They will come; suddenly, sharply, crushingly, or
softly as feathers on the wind; but they will only come if we turn
away our faces. They will only come if we treat them with the
reverence with which the ancients treated the mysterious fates,
calling them "The Eumenides"; or the ultimate secret of the universe,
calling it Demogorgon; with the reverence which wears the mask of
superstition.

The reason why Conrad holds us all--old and young, subtle and
simple--with so irresistible a spell, is because he has a clairvoyant
intuition for the things which make up the hidden substratum of all
our human days--the things which cause us those moments of sharp
sweet happiness which come and go on sudden mysterious wings.

H