it is more subtle than that.  With Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura.  Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see.  Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things.  Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie.  But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily certain as of some noise that we have heard at night.  It is like the “mana” which savages at once reverence and fear in a thousand objects.  It is unlike “mana,” however, in that it is a quality not of sacredness, but of romance.  It is as though for Mr. Conrad a ghost of romance inhabited every tree and every stream, every ship and every human being.  His function in literature is the announcement of this ghost.  In all his work there is some haunting and indefinable element that draws us into a kind of ghost-story atmosphere as we read.  His ships and men are, in an old sense of the word, possessed.

One might compare Mr. Conrad in this respect with his master—­his master, at least, in the art of the long novel—­Henry James.  I do not mean that in the matter of his genius Mr. Conrad is not entirely original.  Henry James could no more have written Mr. Conrad’s stories than Mr. Conrad could have written Henry James’s.  His manner of discovering significance in insignificant things, however, is of the school of Henry James.  Like Henry James, he is a psychologist in everything down to descriptions of the weather.  It can hardly be questioned that he has learned more of the business of psychology from Henry James than from any other writer.  As one reads a story like Chance, however, one feels that in psychology Mr. Conrad is something of an amateur of genius, while Henry James is a professor.  Mr. Conrad never gives the impression of having used the dissecting-knife and the microscope and the test-tubes as Henry James does.  He seems rather to be one of the splendid guessers.  Not that Henry James is timid in speculations.  He can sally out into the borderland and come back with his bag of ghosts like a very hero of credulity.  Even when he tells a ghost story, however—­and The Turn of the Screw is one of the great ghost stories of literature—­he remains supremely master of his materials.  He has an efficiency that is scientific as compared with the vaguer broodings of Mr. Conrad.  Where Mr. Conrad will drift into discovery, Henry James will sail more cunningly to his end with chart and compass.