The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-08-30
CHANCE" ,"

OAA<a-NN1I<s
 By Joseph Conrad Doubleday Page &
 Co.,. publishers. Garden City. N. |.
 Joseph Conrad's name Is synonymous ] with the sea.
 His stories of wayfaring and sea i life are as distinctive as any subject 1 that any author has ever been identi- fled with.
 In an interview given out by this clever author he tells interestingly of how he learned his cunning mastery of English.
 Not by reading the Bible and Sir Thomas Browne did Conrad learn what ] the Interviewer calls This marvellous Biblical English but from London newspapers read in seaside inn parlors. And Conrad says that his first deep draught of English fiction was from the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper whom he prefers to Sir. Walter Scott In Cooper, Conrad finds "sn extraordinarily fine feeling for the sea" The interviewer concludes that the influences which formed the I'ole into an English author were as much American as English.
 Mir. Conrad's latest novel Chance" !" is a fitting successor to his previous works, "A Personal Record" and The Nigger of the Narcissus.'
 Chance" is the story of the tragic issues that flow from the destruction of a womans belief in herself. At the ase of 15 Flora de Barral received an increditible spiritual shock-one so in- credible that we are sure it must ac- tually have happened to somebody, somewhere--with the result that she became obsessed with the idea that there was something about her re- pugnant to love-that no one could be permanently attracted to her. Few peo- pie. of course. suffer from an eXper- fence as concrete as Flora's, but in her NJ. Conrad has illustrated one of the commonest, most obscure, and most tragical of emotions, It is impossible tc say how many people feel, con- scously or subconsciously, a profound diStrust of their own power to inspire affection. or how deeply this distrust may influence their lives, for the req son that it is one of those feelings cherished in it's thousand shades and degrees almost universally, but which each possessor believes to be his own secret and peculiar property. 1t is not confined to either sex; men IS well as women know how poignant it is to be grateful for love, how bitter the sense of meeting only what is expect ed and already familiar, when love is withheld or withdrawn. Yet so far as we can recall MT. Conrad is the first to ,nake it the subject of a novel.
 The result. of course, of such an in- voluntary humility, is that the vic tim's marriage and the success of it be- come purely a matter of 1uck-or chance, as MT. Conrad would put it. Only a person who genuinely believes in himself and in the value of what be has to offer has the power of choice.
 The central figure of MT Conrad's story after Flora is Capt. Roderick Anthony, the well-to-do master and part owner of the sailing ship Ferndale. This Captain Anthony, visiting his sister and brother in-law in the country near London, there meets Flora de Barral, the only daugh- ter of a ruined stock jobber, and promptly falls in love with her. De Barral has been sent to prison for his financial chicaneries and Flora is at the mercy of her dead mothers stingy and ill-natured relatives. She is by no means in love with Cap tain Anthony, but in his offer of mar rage she a way of escape from a hopeless situation and she duly mar ries him and goes to sea with him in the Ferndale.
 On their second voyage old De Barral is also passenger. He has been released from prison, a broken man, and his troubles have unbalanced his mind. His lunacy takes the form of a violent dis like for Captain Anthony, whom he sus- poets of having kidnapped Flora and of holding her aboard the Ferndale by duress. In the end he goes to the length of trying to poison Anthony. His plan