Below will be found the analysis of “Romance.” Any student of literature with an ear for prose will hardly need these underlinings, for Mr. Conrad’s definitenesses of statement stand out amongst his Collaborator’s more English keyings down so that when one of his half sentences bursts into the no doubt suaver prose of the other it is as if the page comes to life and speaks. Every collaboration is a contest of temperaments if it be at all thoroughly carried out; and this collaboration was carried out so thoroughly that, even when the book came to the proof stage, the original publishers, half way through the printing, sent the MS. back to the authors. They were still making innumerable corrections. Originally conceived, in the attempt to convey realistically a real story of adventure recorded in a State Trial, as the thin tale of a very old man--and this before the question of collaboration arose--the book contains of its first version only the two opening sentences--and the single other sentence: “And, looking back, we see Romance!” In between lay to say the least of it almost unbelievable labours--a contest of attrition lasting over several years. For insofar as this collaboration was a contest of wills it was a very friendly one; yet it was the continual attempt on the part of the one collaborator to key up and of the other to key down. And so exhausting was the contest that in the course of the years two definite breakdowns occurred. In the first the robuster writer let the book called “The Inheritors” just go and it remains a monument as it were of silverpoint, delicacies and allusiveness. The second breakdown is recorded in the Fourth Part of “Romance,” sketches for which were written over and over--and then over--again, until the weaker brother, in absolute exhaustion, in turn let it go at that. So, to mark those breaking points, you have the silverpoint of “The Inheritors” set against the, let us say, oil-painting of this matchless Fourth Part. “The Nature of a Crime” should have become a novel treating of the eternal subject of the undetected criminal--a theme which every writer for once or twice in his life at least contemplates in a world in which the fortunate are so very often the merely not found out. The courage of few writers carries them even beyond the contemplation; in this case the joint courages of the authors went as far as what you may read. The passage from the Fifth Part of “Romance” printed below contains the “famous sentence” as to which Mr. Conrad writes: “We both exclaimed: ‘This is genius’.” Joseph Conrad in Italics; F. M. Hueffer in Roman type. _Part One: Chapter One._