enry James, moving
on velvety feline paws through the drawing-rooms of London and
the gardens of Paris; and yet to be leading us through the shadows of
primordial forests, cheek by jowl with monstrous idolatries and
heathen passions.

But what renders the work of Conrad so extraordinarily rich in
human value is not only that he can remain a philosopher in the
deserted outposts of South-Pacific Islands, but that he can remain a
tender and mellow lover of the innumerable little things, little stray
memories and associations, which bind every wanderer from Europe,
however far he may voyage, to the familiar places he has left behind
in the land of his birth.

Here he is a true Slav, a true continental European. Here he is rather
Russian--or French, shall I say--than an adopted child of Britain; for
the colonising instinct of the British race renders its sentimental
devotion to the country of its engendering less burdened with the
passionate intimate sorrows of the exile than the nostalgia of the
other races.

Conrad has indeed to a very high degree that tender imaginative
feeling for the little casual associations of a person's birthplace in
town or country, which seems to be a peculiar inheritance of the
Slavonic and Latin races, and which for all their sentimental play
with the word "home" is not really natural to the tougher-minded
Englishman or Scotchman.

One is conscious, all the while one reads of these luckless wanderers
in forlorn places, of the very smell of the lanes and the very look of
the fields and the actual sounds and stir of the quaint narrow streets
and the warm interiors of little friendly taverns by wharfside and by
harbour-mouth, of the far-off European homes where these people
were born.

No modern English writer, except the great, the unequalled Mr.
Hardy, has the power which Conrad has, of conveying to the mind
that close indescribable intimacy between humanity's passions and
the little inanimate things which have surrounded us from childhood.

Conrad can convey this "home-feeling," this warm secure turning of
the human animal to the lair which it has made for itself, even into
the heart of the tempestuous ocean. He can give us that curious
half-psychic and half-physical thrill of being in mellow harmony with
our material surroundings, even in the little cabin of some
weather-battered captain of a storm-tossed merchant-ship; and not a
sailor, in his books, and not a single ship in which his