The essentially modern quality of Conrad lies in this transference of wonder from nature to the behavior of man, the modern man for whom lightning is only electricity and wind the relief of pressure from hemisphere to hemisphere. Mystery lies in the personality now, not in the blind forces that shape and are shaped by it. It is the difference, in a sense, between Hawthorne, who saw the world as shadow and illusion, symbolizing forces inimical to humanity, and Hardy, who sees in external nature the grim scientific fact of environment. It is a difference between eras more marked in Conrad than in many of his contemporaries, because, like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his romantic heroes against the great powers of nature--tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of romantic setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying; his moral problems are raised only that he may study their effect upon man. If, then, we are to estimate Conrad's work, let us begin by defining him in these terms. He is a Slav who broods by racial habit as well as by necessity of his theme. He is a modern who accepts the growing control of physical forces by the intellect and turns from the mystery of nature to brood upon personality. From this personality he makes his stories. External nature bulks large in them, because it is when beat upon by adversity, brought face to face with the elemental powers, and driven into strange efforts of will by the storms without that man's personality reaches the tensest pitch. Plot of itself means little to Conrad and that is why so few can tell with accuracy the stories of his longer novels. His characters are concrete. They are not symbols of the moral nature, like Melville's men, but they are nevertheless phases of personality and therefore they shift and dim from story to story, like lanterns in a wood. Knowing their hearts to the uttermost, and even their gestures, one nevertheless forgets sometimes their names, the ends to which they come, the tales in which they appear. The same phase, indeed, appears under different names in several stories.