There follows the heartrending tragedy: "his indifference,-his strangeness penetrating with the repulsion the heart they had begun by irresistibly attracting." Yanko dies, a victim of "that fear of the incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads."

The art of this tale of obscure life has placed it among the high tragedies of literature; and wherein lies its power if not in the very theme and the method of Marlow - the mystery of human love and fear, heightened by the sympathy of one understanding narrator? This unknown hero, "cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair," may stand as the very symbol of the art of Conrad.

In these stories, then, on smaller scale and without the complexities and digressions of his novel structure, we find that the method and motive of Marlow are those of Conrad himself. But the final and convincing testimony to the meaning of Marlow is A Personal Record. Never was autobiography more disordered or bewildering in point of fact; never did reminiscence follow such a random course of haphazard association-the very manner of Marlow. From Poland to Pimlico Square, from the passes of the Alps to the falls of the Congo we leap in utter defiance of geography or chronology. In a life of which the bare facts are more romantic than fiction, adventures are but hinted. Yet what could the record of Marlow be but the record of a spiritual adventure?

Once for all, in his charming Familiar Preface, Conrad has interpreted, has justified, the method of Marlow's stories and of his own story:—

"They too [these pages] have been charged with discursiveness, with disregard of chronological order (which is in itself a crime); with unconventionality of form (which is an impropriety).

"Alas!' I protested mildly. 'Could I begin with the sacramental words, I was born on such a date, in such a place; This is but a bit of psychological documents. . . . All I want to say in their defense is that these memories, put down without any regard for established conventions, have not been thrown off without system and purpose. They have their hope and their

aim. The hope that from the reading of these pages there may emerge at last the vision of a personality; the man behind the books. . . . The immediate aim. .. to give the record of personal memories by presenting faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea."

"A bit of psychological document." What better definition of the tales of Marlow? What better summary could we ask of the method we have been tracing: the vision of a personality glimpsed through the feelings and sensations connected with some crucial moment?

But we cannot dismiss Marlow without becoming aware of some implications of his method. We have seen him ignoring the rules of narration: that a story should have but one teller, to whom nothing in his tale is unknown; that the psychological story in particular demands the omniscient author-narrator. But Marlow's method not only defies the text-books: it insistently questions some basal assumptions of the critics of fiction. They have declared that the novelist, by eliminating the accidental and irrelevant and revealing the causal, simplifies life. Yet here is a writer who deliberately complicates life, who, instead of putting his characters under the microscope, surrounds them with their reflections in the mirroring minds of tellers and listeners. In so doing he has, we have seen, obeyed a higher law than that of text-books,—the law of his vision of reality created of human contact. And in so doing he has verily suggested another law and type for fiction. The older novel, the simplification of life, gave us the creative process achieved, the decision handed down. From the verdict on Becky Sharp or on Rosamond Lydgate there is no appeal. But with Conrad we actually enter into the creative process: we grope with him through blinding mists, we catch at fleeting glimpses and thrill with sudden illuminations. For the art of Conrad is literally a social art-the collaboration of many tellers and of many listeners:

"In time the story shaped itself before me out of the listless answers to my questions, out of the indifferent words heard in wayside inns. . . . People confirmed and completed the story."

Thus we, the listeners, not only share in the creation, but verily "confirm and complete" these stories, whose aim is the search itself and not its ending. For the verdict on Jim and on Flora rests with us at last.

There is one haunting passage in Heart of Darkness, which images the method of Marlow and of Conrad. "To him," says Marlow's interlocutor, "the meaning of the tale was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

To this strange teller the meaning of his tale is indeed outside it-in the creative comradeship that, lightening the burden of its mystery, links teller with hearers in quickened understanding. Such is the method of Conrad-to surround the solitary spirit with a fellowship of wonder and of pity. So he speaks to the sharers of his search:

"If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm-all you demand and perhaps also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

Vassar College.

FRANCES Wentworth Cutler.

ENGLAND'S GREATEST VICEROY

AN APPRECIATION OF EVELYN BARING, FIRST EARL CROMER

The visitor at 36 Wimpole Street, London, on the morning of February twenty-sixth, 1916, would have found in his well-filled library a man of average height, slight but well put together, with white hair, sparse on the crown and well trimmed at the back and sides, a closely cropped white moustache, high forehead and prominent nose, and eyes which seem tired at one moment, yet at another bright with almost juvenescent warmth. This was Lord Cromer, awakened upon his seventy-fifth birthday, though it would have been too much to assume that he was celebrating it, for he is not one to celebrate anything connected with himself. At very most, all he would have indulged in would be a brief pause at the milestone, as he worked on an essay, indited a letter, read a favorite book, or possibly with bent head and half-closed eyes, thought of Egypt,-of affectionate memories left behind among its native people, or perhaps even of an alien hand uplifted to threaten the peace and new-born dignity of the land he has reclaimed.

The face is not an old face, though deeply lined, and the mouth, where mobility and firmness meet, is strongly reminiscent of Beethoven's. For the rest he resembles, somewhat, an aristocratic, kindly Southern gentleman of the Colonel Carter of Cartersville type.

It is no idle thought, that of Beethoven, when one thinks of what this greatest of proconsuls has accomplished, for there must be music of some sort, as well as strength, in the soul of a man who can maintain within himself in perfect harmony the five divergent types of soldier, statesman, financier, lettérateur, and man of the world. Among the great of history it would be difficult to name many who have been so versatile. The most have exhibited power and adaptation solely in the line in which they have become celebrated. Gladstone was writer as well as statesman, of course, but his prejudices and austerity forbid that he be proclaimed as possessing an elastic intellectuality. Frederick the

Great was an eminent soldier, and between battles he wrote poetry -at which Voltaire laughed heartily. Here is a man, trained as a soldier, who once on a time (and in a single morning!) was asked to give his verdict on a proposed economy in the Budget, on the dismissal of a postman, on a plan for increasing the army, on a quarrel between two rival Jewish sects, on the deportation of a drunken Irishman, on a question of precedence between the wives of two Egyptian officials, and on the best method of preserving the remains of a Ptolemaic temple,-and all these oddly diversified tasks were performed with as masterly a precision as with kind forbearance. The Consul General, too, found time at the beginning of each day to gather inspiration from Isaiah or Job, from Homer or Juvenal, and at its close to pursue in his study such lettered labors as enabled him to give the world his delightful Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek.

The poetic instinct had much to do with the affection and service Lord Cromer obtained from his subordinates and the confidence with which he animated the childlike Oriental in working out a process of national assimilation. It colored that frankness and honesty with which he treated all and which inspired frankness and honesty in return. Taciturn the man may have been at times, brusque of manner now and then, but these were only thin crusts on the surface of a generous and genial nature.

The Cromer personality can hardly be fully estimated without somewhat reviewing the conditions preceding the entrance of England into Egypt and those existing when, ten years ago, this her greatest Agent left there. The Turkish empire never did aught but enervate and destroy all individual energy and initiative in every country over which it has had control, and Egypt is no exception to the rule. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mehemet Ali, but little removed from the fifth century "Scourge of God," Attila, was the chosen representative of the Sultan. He fostered industry and production, it is true, but did so by the courbash and ground it out of slaves rather than inciting it from free agents. Passing over his immediate successors there followed Ismail, the first Khedive, who governed from 1863 until deposed by the Sultan in '79, and who by wild extravagance