



Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger





SOME REMINISCENCES

By Joseph Conrad




A Familiar Preface.

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 command 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
amongst 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 downwind 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. Amongst 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 either
amongst 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,
amongst 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 recommended. 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 <DW65> 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
onwards 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 secheresse du coeur. 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 either
of 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 recognised 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.

Yes! I too would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's own breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their
souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary
intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the
sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular
wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may
be my sea-training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold
on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive
horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of
myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried
my notion of good service from my earlier into my later existence. I,
who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of
the Beautiful, I have carried over that article of creed from the decks
of ships to the more circumscribed space of my desk; and by that act,
I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the
ineffable company of pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not
lo