But how, we ask, dare Marlow presume to reveal to us not simply the minutest details, but the innermost meaning of a scene like this last which he never witnessed? He who said, "It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence-that which makes its truth, its meaning, its subtle and penetrating essence," how can he venture to lay bare the life-essence of Roderick Anthony, whom he never saw?

Our query is met by an utter disclaimer of that omniscience which the narrators of fiction so often claim. Thus he disarms us at the outset of his story of Jim: "I don't pretent I understand him. The views he let me have of himself were like those gleams through the shifting rents in a thick fog-bits of vivid and vanishing detail."

Vivid, vanishing gleams. What could be more remote from the microscopic analyses of Henry James, from the psychoanalysts of fiction? Listen to Marlow, as discoursing of Flora's father, he describes his own method:

"'You seem to have studied the man,' I observed.

"'Studied,' repeated Marlow thoughtfully, 'no, not studied. I had no opportunities. You know that I saw him only on that one occasion I told you of. But it may be that a glimpse, and no more, is the proper way of seeing an individual. If one has a taste for that sort of thing, the merest starting-point becomes a coign of vantage, and then by a series of logically deducted verisimilitudes, one arrives at the truth.'

So a single gesture of the condemned financier discloses to Marlow "the feelings of a man whose imagination wakes up at the very moment he is about to enter the tomb." So from echoes of old words whole scenes are conjured, imagined, with asides like these: "You understand I am piecing here bits of disconnected statements." "What they said to each other in private, we can imagine." And so Chance itself, the masterpiece of Marlow, is created as if before our very eyes.

Let us, if we would wrest from Marlow the secret of his art, follow the strange creative process in which the reader, as in few books, shares the adventure of discovery. No beginning could, as we have noted, seem more irrelevant than the casual meeting with young Powell, leading to his story of the strange chance

that made him Captain Anthony's second mate. This chance, sprung from a mere coincidence of names, illustrates a striking feature of Marlow's narratives, the use of coincidence and association. Like Miss Bates, like any simple soul who tries to tell a tale, he follows the random way of word-association: Young Powell-the Ferndale-Captain Anthony-his father, the poet-his sister, Mrs. Fyne-the Fynes' girl friend. Yet what seems but the familiar wanderings of the aimless mind has led us, with that subtle art that conceals art, to Flora, the heart of our mystery. Nothing could be more sure, more masterly, than the art of that first meeting of Marlow with Flora-walking on the edge of the high quarry, a sheer one hundred feet above the road; than his swift intuition of her from her clouded brow, her pained mouth, her vague, fixed glance. That moment's glimpse has given us not only the motive of Marlow's tale-the sympathetic curiosity that follows Flora's story to its end-but the theme of Flora, the victim of Chance.

Action follows swift-the disappearance of Flora, the news of her intended marriage to Captain Anthony. Then for four chapters the action halts, while Marlow's unfaltering curiosity extracts from the indignant Fynes, and re-creates for us the pitiful past of Flora. In this tour de force of the imagination there appears a second significant feature of the method of Marlow. Just as his sonorous cadences, such as no man ever talked, transcend the reality of speech, so he casts to the winds mere physical possibility. We re-live with him scenes of which he could actually have heard nothing. If, as the critics declare, the function of Marlow be simply "to secure realistic conviction for the most romantic episodes," how dare he thus intertwine fact and fancy? Here, I think the reader may answer the critic. Marlow's power rests, not on his appeal to sense or reason, but on the response of our awakened imaginations to his own. If his knowledge is sometimes in fact impossible, it is seldom in imagination improbable. Marlow's "logically deducted verisimilitudes" carry us, not spectators only, but sharers, into the inner reality-the vraie verité-of character.

Our belief does not waver through Marlow's account of his amazing talk with Flora on a London pavement-an account

that, "piecing bits of disconnected statements," brings us face to face with the "innocent suffering and unexpressed menace" of her sea-blue eyes.

So we follow her on her fateful voyages, watching her now through the grave, kind eyes of young Powell, our chance acquaintance of Chapter I, destined by chance to be the very deus ex machina of Flora's fate. Nowhere is Marlow's power more surely shown than in his re-telling of young Powell's story. How skilfully he accounts for the young man's vivid memory and growing curiosity by his surprise at the strange atmosphere of the ship-the mate's alarm, the captain's haggard face, the silence of Flora, the mystery of her father. How surely he interpolates his own re-creation of those earlier scenes: Flora's first visit to the ship, her wedding day, her father's release from prison-that reveal to us "the impossible existence" of those two beings, tortured by ignorance of each other's love. So he leads us straight to the climax scene, when Powell's chance discovery turns the long agony of Anthony and Flora into a seaencircled peace, that triumphs at last over chance.

Do we not now begin to see the meaning of this glimpsemethod of Marlow-the meaning that makes it not accidental, but the inevitable expression of his vision of life?

Beaten by shifting winds of chance, straining to catch through driving mists shadow of rock or gleam of beacon, always he pilots us on seas unfathomable. Always his tale has one burdenthe mystery that wraps the lonely soul. Wanderers, exiles, such are his heroes and heroines. There is Flora, arresting Marlow on the London pavement by "the mysterious aloofness of her fragile presence.' There is Kurtz, grim phantom from the "heart of a conquering darkness." "He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived . . . . . insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities, a shadow, darker than the shadows of the night." There is that last glimpse of Jim: "that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. "And that's the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart."

"Truth, illusive, obscure, half submerged, floats in the silent, still waters of mystery." In that sea echo is the motive of this

seaman's tales. Only by such a teller can we be drawn into the mystery of those tales. The "I" of Poe's tales would convince us of the reality of unearthly mysteries and inhuman horrors; Marlow would quicken us to the mystery of forgotton lives, would share with us his and our own questionings. And how could such tales be told save as Marlow tells them,-chance incidents, scraps of speech, interwoven, interpreted?

But the meaning of Marlow goes yet deeper. These tales woven of accident and coincidence mean just this: that real understanding, that "resonant" truth which alone is life and gives life, comes to us most directly through rumors, hearsays, echoes of long-spoken words. So Marlow's maxim, "The science of life consists in seizing every chance that presents itself," unlocks the method of his art,-the seizing and re-creating of chance human contacts. So only can we, onlookers, tale-tellers, snatch from the encircling mystery "that subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts."]

But if we had only the testimony of Marlow, we might still doubt whether his method is the expression of Conrad himself, his peculiar contribution to fiction. If, however, we find these characteristics of the art of Marlow: his absorbing passion for the adventure of the spirit, his constant sense of the mystery of that adventure, his seizing of the significance of personal contacts, if these traits belong to other tellers of Conrad's tales; if, finally, they belong to Conrad's own tale of himself, his Personal Record, we are close, I think, to the meaning of Conrad himself.

His stories are so various in method and in quality that to say of them that the features we have traced are invariably associated with the personal narrator method would be far too sweeping. There is, on the one hand, "The Partner," in Within the Tides, in which the romantic old ruffian of a teller seems to serve no purpose other than to set off the sordid realism of his "raw" tale. On the other hand, there is the swift, straight telling of Victory, and of the last, first person story, The Shadow-Line. But it is worth noting that Victory begins with a section quite superfluous to the plot development, a picture of Heyst as

others see and misinterpret him; and that throughout, though the narrative is ostensibly direct, the tone is that of the spectator. Even here, then, Conrad affirms his faith that we see only in glimpses and through others' eyes.

We have only to contrast that prolonged literary autopsy, The Return, Conrad's first, last, and only experiment in direct psychological analysis, with some of the tales that will not be forgotten, to see how the personal method of the latter reveals his power and his personality.

Take The Secret Sharer, a young captain's story of how he risked the life of his first ship to save the life of a stranger and a murderer. Here is a short story perfect by every formula: unity of situation and of conflict, suspense, climax, and the rest. Technically flawless, breathlessly exciting, it is far more than these. It is a crucial moment of experience, lived through with the teller. He focuses our interest, not on the hair-breadth escape of the stranger, the more miraculous escape of the ship, but on his own weird psychological situation. The "mysterious communication" instantly established between the captain and the refugee becomes such a sense of identity as to make of the rescue of that second self a veritable struggle for self-preservation. "Constantly watching my second self, unable to detach my mental vision from my second self," the captain's suspense reaches such a pitch that "that mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically, as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul." Sharing his dread, we share the intensity of his relief in that climax moment when "the secret sharer of my cabin and my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment."

Here the first person narrative is the only one which could re-create the mystery of that strange intimacy between two stray souls.

As inevitable is it that Amy Foster should have a narrator, "a country surgeon of that unappeasable curiosity which believes that there is a particle of truth in every mystery." Here the mystery is "an irresistible and fateful impulse-a possession," the love of poor Amy Foster for the wild foreign castaway.