et points out, for instance, how in "Chance" we have one
layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of
rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under
our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more
underscored and overscored with interesting personal values.

This is perfectly true, and it is a fine arresting method and worthy of
all attention.

But for myself I am not in the least ashamed to say that I prefer the
art of Conrad at those moments when the narrative becomes quite
direct and when there is no waylaying medium, however interesting,
between our magnetised minds and the clear straightforward story.

I like his manner best, and I do not scruple to admit it, when his
Almayers and Ninas, his Anthonys and Floras, his Heysts and Lenas,
are brought face to face in clear uncomplicated visualisation. I think
he is always at his best when two passionate and troubled
natures--not necessarily those of a man and woman; sometimes those of a
man and man, like Lingard and Willem--are brought together in
direct and tragic conflict. At such moments as these we get that true
authentic thrill of immemorial romance--romance as old as the first
stories ever told or sung--of the encounter of protagonist and
antagonist; and from the hidden depths of life rise up, clear and
terrible and strong, the austere voices of the adamantine fates.

But though he is at his greatest in these direct uncomplicated
passionate scenes, I am quite at one with Mr. Wilson Follet in
treasuring up as of incalculable value in the final effect of his art all
those elaborate by-issues and thickly woven implications which give
to the main threads of his dramas so rich, so suggestive, so mellow a
background.

Except for a few insignificant passages when that sly old mariner
Marlowe, of whom Conrad seems perhaps unduly fond, lights his
pipe and passes the beer and utters breezy and bracing sentiments, I
can enjoy with unmitigated delight all the convolutions and
overlappings of his inverted method of narration--of those rambling
"advances," as Mr. Follet calls them, to already consummated
"conclusions." In the few occasional passages where Marlowe
assumes a moralising tone and becomes bracing and strenuous I
fancy I detect the influence of certain muscular, healthy-minded,
worthy men, among our modern writers, who I daresay appeal to the
Slavonic soul of this great Pole as something quite wonder