see the face of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in “A Personal Record” one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself.  He tells us that he has never been very well acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set this down as polite modesty only.  Here in the “Personal Record” is Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood.  This book and the famous preface to the “Nigger” give us the essence, the bouillon, of his genius.  Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth?  And in these informal confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of autobiography as it is rarely written.

One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as lightning or dawn.  Fidelity, service, sincerity—­those are the words that stand again and again across his pages.  “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.”  He has carried over to the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea.  He says that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a hardness of heart.  To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the surrendering one’s self to exaggeration, allowing one’s self to be carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility.  Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist.  This, indeed, is the creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the great simplicity of life and death.

Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the synoptic gospels exceeds “A Personal Record.”  Such minor facts as where the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored.  A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was all about.  The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive biographical resume is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania.  To the delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical comment.  In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity