myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position
which outside the circus world cannot be regarded as desirable. It needs
a special temperament for one to derive much gratification from the fact
of being able to do freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, from
mere vanity.
The fact of my not writing in my native language has been of course
commented upon frequently in reviews and notices of my various works and
in the more extended critical articles. I suppose that was unavoidable;
and indeed these comments were of the most flattering kind to one's
vanity. But in that matter I have no vanity that could be flattered. I
could not have it. The first object of this Note is to disclaim any
merit there might have been in an act of deliberate volition.
The impression of my having exercised a choice between the two
languages, French and English, both foreign to me, has got abroad
somehow. That impression is erroneous. It originated, I believe, in an
article written by Sir Hugh Clifford and published in the year '98, I
think, of the last century. Some time before, Sir Hugh Clifford came to
see me. He is, if not the first, then one of the first two friends I
made for myself by my work, the other being Mr. Cunninghame Graham, who,
characteristically enough, had been captivated by my story An Outpost of
Progress. These friendships which have endured to this day I count
amongst my precious possessions.
Mr. Hugh Clifford (he was not decorated then) had just published his
first volume of Malay sketches. I was naturally delighted to see him and
infinitely gratified by the kind things he found to say about my first
books and some of my early short stories, the action of which is placed
in the Malay Archipelago. I remember that after saying many things which
ought to have made me blush to the roots of my hair with outraged
modesty, he ended by telling me with the uncompromising yet kindly
firmness of a man accustomed to speak unpalatable truths even to
Oriental potentates (for their own good of course) that as a matter of
fact I didn't know anything about Malays. I was perfectly aware of
this. I have never pretended to any such knowledge, and I was moved--I
wonder to this day at my impertinence--to retort: "Of course I don't
know anything about Malays. If I knew only one hundredth part of what
you and Frank Swettenham know of Malays I would make everybody sit up."
He went on looking kindly (but firmly) at me and then we both burst out
laughing. In the course of that most welcome visit twenty years ago,
which I remember so well, we talked of many things; the characteristics
of various languages was one of them, and it is on that day that my
friend carried away with him the impression that I had exercised a
deliberate choice between French and English. Later, when moved by his
friendship (no empty word to him) to write a study in the _North
American Review_ on Joseph Conrad he conveyed that impression to the
public.
This misapprehension, for it is nothing else, was no doubt my fault. I
must have expressed myself badly in the course of a friendly and
intimate talk when one doesn't watch one's phrases carefully. My
recollection of what I meant to say is: that _had I been under the
necessity_ of making a choice between the two, and though I knew French
fairly well and was familiar with it from infancy, I would have been
afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly "crystallized."
This, I believe, was the word I used. And then we passed to other
matters. I had to tell him a little about myself; and what he told me of
his work in the East, his own particular East of which I had but the
mistiest, short glimpse, was of the most absorbing interest. The present
Governor of Nigeria may not remember that conversation as well as I do,
but I am sure that he will not mind this, what in diplomatic language is
called "rectification" of a statement made to him by an obscure writer
his generous sympathy had prompted him to seek out and make his friend.
The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as
natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have
a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent
part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor
adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as
to adoption--well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted
by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the
stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I
truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my
still plastic character.
It was a very intimate action and for that very reason it is too
mysterious to explain. The task would be as impossible as trying to
explain love at first sight. There was something in this conjunction of
exulting, almost physical recognition, the same sort of emotional
surrender and the same pride of possession, all united in the wonder of
a great discovery; but there was on it none of that shadow of dreadful
doubt that falls on the very flame of our perishable passions. One knew
very well that this was for ever.
A matter of discovery and not of inheritance, that very inferiority of
the title makes the faculty still more precious, lays the possessor
under a lifelong obligation to remain worthy of his great fortune. But
it seems to me that all this sounds as if I were trying to explain--a
task which I have just pronounced to be impossible. If in action we may
admit with awe that the Impossible recedes before men's indomitable
spirit, the Impossible in matters of analysis will always make a stand
at some point or other. All I can claim after all those years of devoted
practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and
falterings in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I
had not written in English I would not have written at all.
The other remark which I wish to make here is also a rectification but
of a less direct kind. It has nothing to do with the medium of
expression. It bears on the matter of my authorship in another way. It
is not for me to criticize my judges, the more so because I always felt
that I was receiving more than justice at their hands. But it seems to
me that their unfailingly interested sympathy has ascribed to racial and
historical influences much, of what, I believe, appertains simply to the
individual. Nothing is more foreign than what in the literary world is
called Sclavonism, to the Polish temperament with its tradition of
self-government, its chivalrous view of moral restraints and an
exaggerated respect for individual rights: not to mention the important
fact that the whole Polish mentality, Western in complexion, had
received its training from Italy and France and, historically, had
always remained, even in religious matters, in sympathy with the most
liberal currents of European thought. An impartial view of humanity in
all its degrees of splendour and misery together with a special regard
for the rights of the unprivileged of this earth, not on any mystic
ground but on the ground of simple fellowship and honourable
reciprocity of services, was the dominant characteristic of the
mental and moral atmosphere of the houses which sheltered my hazardous
childhood:--matters of calm and deep conviction both lasting and
consistent, and removed as far as possible from that humanitarianism
that seems to be merely a matter of crazy nerves or a morbid conscience.
One of the most sympathetic of my critics tried to account for certain
characteristics of my work by the fact of my being, in his own words,
"the son of a Revolutionist." No epithet could be more inapplicable to a
man with such a strong sense of responsibility in the region of ideas
and action and so indifferent to the promptings of personal ambition as
my father. Why the description "revolutionary" should have been applied
all through Europe to the Polish risings of 1831 and 1863 I really
cannot understand. These risings were purely revolts against foreign
domination. The Russians themselves called them "rebellions," which,
from their point of view, was the exact truth. Amongst the men concerned
in the preliminaries of the 1863 movement my father was no more
revolutionary than the others, in the sense of working for the
subversion of any social or political scheme of existence. He was simply
a patriot in the sense of a man who believing in the spirituality of a
national existence could not bear to see that spirit enslaved.
Called out publicly in a kindly attempt to justify the work of the son,
that figure of my past cannot be dismissed without a few more words. As
a child of course I knew very little of my father's activities, for I
was not quite twelve when he died. What I saw with my own eyes was the
public funeral, the cleared streets, the hushed crowds; but I understood
perfectly well that this was a manifestation of the national spirit
seizing a worthy occasion. That bareheaded mass of work people, youths
of the University, women at the windows, school-boys on the pavement,
could have known nothing positive about him except the fame of his
fidelity to the one guiding emotion in their hearts. I had nothing but
that knowledge myself; and this great silent demonstration seemed to me
the most natural tribute in the world--not to the man but to the Idea.
What had impressed me much more intimately was the burning of his
manuscripts a fortnight or so before his death. It was done under his
own superintendence. I happened to go into his room a little earlier
than usual that evening, and remaining unnoticed stayed to watch the
nursing-sister feeding the blaze in the fireplace. My father sat in a
deep armchair propped up with pillows. This is the last time I saw him
out of bed. His aspect was to me not so much that of a man desperately
ill, as mortally weary--a vanquished man. That act of destruction
affected me profoundly by its air of surrender. Not before death,
however. To a man of such strong faith death could not have been an
enemy.
For many years I believed that every scrap of his writings had been
burnt, but in July of 1914 the Librarian of the University of Cracow
calling on me during our short visit to Poland, mentioned the existence
of a few manuscripts of my father and especially of a series of letters
written before and during his exile to his most intimate friend who had
sent them to the University for preservation. I went to the Library at
once, but had only time then for a mere glance. I intended to come back
next day and arrange for copies being made of the whole correspondence.
But next day there was war. So perhaps I shall never know now what he
wrote to his most intimate friend in the time of his domestic happiness,
of his new paternity, of his strong hopes--and later, in the hours of
disillusion, bereavement and gloom.
I had also imagined him to be completely forgotten forty-five years
after his death. But this was not the case. Some young men of letters
had discovered him, mostly as a remarkable translator of Shakespeare,
Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny, to whose drama _Chatterton_, translated
by himself, he had written an eloquent Preface defending the poet's deep
humanity and his ideal of noble stoicism. The political side of his life
was being recalled too; for some men of his time, his co-workers in the
task of keeping the national spirit firm in the hope of an independent
future, had been in their old age publishing their memoirs, where the
part he played was for the first time publicly disclosed to the world. I
learned then of things in his life I never knew before, things which
outside the group of the initiated could have been known to no living
being except my mother. It was thus that from a volume of posthumous
memoirs dealing with those bitter years I learned the fact that the
first inception of the secret National Committee intended primarily to
organize moral resistance to the augmented pressure of Russianism arose
on my father's initiative, and that its first meetings were held in our
Warsaw house, of which all I remember distinctly is one room, white and
crimson, probably the drawing room. In one of its walls there was the
loftiest of all archways. Where it led to remains a mystery, but to this
day I cannot get rid of the belief that all this was of enormous
proportions, and that the people appearing and disappearing in that
immense space were beyond the usual stature of mankind as I got to know
it in later life. Amongst them I remember my mother, a more familiar
figure than the others, dressed in the black of the national mourning
worn in defiance of ferocious police regulations. I have also preserved
from that particular time the awe of her mysterious gravity which,
indeed, was by no means smileless. For I remember her smiles, too.
Perhaps for me she could always find a smile. She was young then,
certainly not thirty yet. She died four years later in exile.
In the pages which follow I mentioned her visit to her brother's house
about a year before her death. I also speak a little of my father as I
remember him in the years following what was for him the deadly blow of
her loss. And now, having been again evoked in answer to the words of a
friendly critic, these Shades may be allowed to return to their place of
rest where their forms in life linger yet, dim but poignant, and
awaiting the moment when their haunting reality, their last trace on
earth, shall pass for ever with me out of the world.
J. C.
1919.
A FAMILIAR PREFACE
A PERSONAL RECORD
As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
ourselves; yet this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion,
and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some
spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted,
"You know, you really must."
It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must!...
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of
sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this
by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable
than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a
whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the other hand, you
cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek.
Shouted with perseverance, with ardour, with conviction, these two by
their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the
dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's
"virtue" for you if you like!... Of course the accent must be attended
to. The right accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the
thundering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your
Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical
imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for
engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the
world.
What a dream for a writer! Because written words have their accent, too.
Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out
aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It
may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's
no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a
pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and
fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world
unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and
something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Among other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
embroil one with one's friends.
"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine among
either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the
mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in
his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among
imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains,
to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a
seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.
In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help
thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic
author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons
esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the
opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of
fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print
till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of
his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
they recommend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its
men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that
I am incorrigible.
Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
sea life, I have a special piety towards that form of my past; for its
impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me,
and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then,
that in my two exclusively sea books--"The Nigger of the _Narcissus_,"
and "The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like
"Youth" and "Typhoon")--I have tried with an almost filial regard to
render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts
of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also
that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of
their hands and the objects of their care.
One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to
write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of
what the French would call _sécheresse du c[oe]ur_. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I
feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can only
express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom an
open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of
either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the
reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or
contempt. No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which
only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a
task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the
world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the
regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the
dignity of one's work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as
the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass into
each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of
life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.