I believe, first of all, that Conrad has remained much more a Slav than he, or any of us, have been willing to admit. A friend of mine, married to a Slav, told me of her husband, how, with his cab at the door, and dinner waiting somewhere, he would sit brooding (so he said) over the wrongs of his race. It is dangerous to generalize in racial characteristics, but no one will dispute a tendency to brood as a characteristic of the Slav. The Russian novels are full of characters who brood, and of brooding upon the characters and their fates. The structure of the Russian story is determined not by events so much as by the results of passionate brooding upon the situation in which the imagined characters find themselves. So it is with Conrad, always and everywhere. In "Nostromo" he broods upon the destructive power of a fixed idea; in "The Rescue" upon the result of flinging together elemental characters of the kind that life keeps separate; in "Youth" upon the illusions, more real than reality, of youth. No writer of our race had ever the patience to sit like an Eastern mystic over his scene, letting his eye fill with each slightest detail of it, feeling its contours around and above and beneath, separating each detail of wind and water, mood and emotion, memory and hope, and returning again and again to the task of description, until every impression was gathered, every strand of motive threaded to its source. Henry James, you will say, was even more patient. Yes, but James did not brood. His work was active analysis, cutting finer and finer until the atom was reached. His mind was Occidental. He wished to know why the wheels went round. Conrad's, in this respect, is Oriental. He wants to see what things essentially are. Henry James refines but seldom repeats. Conrad, in such a story as "Gaspar Ruiz" for example, or in "Chance," gives the impression of not caring to understand if only he can fully picture the mind that his brooding imagination draws further and further from its sheath. It is incredible, to one who has not counted, how many times he raises the same situation to the light--the Garibaldean and Nostromo, Mrs. Travers marveling at her knowledge of Lingard's heart--turns it, opens it a little further, and puts it back while he broods on. Here is the explanation of Conrad's prolixity; here the reason why among all living novelists he is least a slave to incident, best able to let his story grow as slowly as life, and still hold the reader's interest. As we read Conrad we also brood; we read slowly where elsewhere we read fast. Turns of style, felicities of description, as of the tropic ocean, or the faces of women, have their chance. And, of course, the excellence, the charm of Conrad's style is that in its nuances, its slow winding paragraphs, its pausing sentences, and constant suggestion of depths beyond depths, it is the perfect expression of the brooding mind that grasps its meaning by the repetition of images