One is aware of a certain deliberate indolent hither-and-thitherness in the psychological progress of Mr. Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, for instance, which is never to be found even in the most elusive of Henry James’s novels.  Both of them are, of course, in love with the elusive.  To each of them a bird in the bush is worth two in the hand.  But while Henry James’s birds perch in the cultivated bushes of botanical gardens, Mr. Conrad’s call from the heart of natural thickets—­often from the depths of the jungle.  The progress of the steamer up the jungle river in Heart of Darkness is symbolic of his method as a writer.  He goes on and on, with the ogres of romance always lying in wait round the next bend.  He can describe things seen as well as any man, but it is his especial genius to use things seen in such a way as to suggest the unseen things that are waiting round the corner.  Even when he is portraying human beings, like Flora de Barrel—­the daughter of the defalcating financier and wife of the ship’s captain, who is the heroine of Chance—­he often permits us just such glimpses of them as we get of persons hurrying round a corner.  He gives us a picture of disappearing heels as the portrait of a personality.  He suggests the soul of wonder in a man not by showing him realistically as he is so much as by suggesting a mysterious something hidden, something on the horizon, a shadowy island seen at twilight.  One result of this is that his human beings are seldom as rotund as life.  They are emanations of personality rather than collections of legs, arms, and bowels.  They are, if you like, ghostly.  That is why they will never be quoted like Hamlet and my Uncle Toby and Sam Weller.  But how wonderful they are in their environment of the unusual!  How wonderful as seen in the light of the strange eyes of their creator!  “Having grown extremely sensitive (an effect of irritation) to the tonalities, I may say, of the affair”—­so the narrator of Chance begins one of his sentences; and it is not in the invention of new persons or incidents, but in just such a sensitiveness to the tonalities of this and that affair that Mr. Conrad wins his laurels as a writer of novels.  He would be sensitive, I do not doubt, to the tonalities of the way in which a waitress in a Lyons tea-shop would serve a lumpy-shouldered City man with tea and toasted scone.  His sensitiveness only becomes matter for enthusiasm, however, when it is concerned with little man in conflict with destiny—­when, bare down to the immortal soul, he grapples with fate and throws it, or is beaten back by it into a savage of the first days.