of texture—­it is a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from the French—­he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his uncle’s house becomes a figure in our own daily lives.  And to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for dinner at his uncle’s house.  With what adorable tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole mythology of his youth!  Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever written:  true to the inner secrets of the human soul.  It is the passkey to the Master’s attitude toward all the dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel he has written.  What self-revealing words are these:  “An imaginative and exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a writer of tales.”  And when one stops to consider, how essentially impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and Glucose school!

This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart—­such is the kind of calculus that makes “A Personal Record” unique among textbooks of the soul.  It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend.  Setting out only with the intention to “present faithfully the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea,” Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life.  And the sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to meet the Skipper face to face.

Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth.  Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us as he himself?  How imperiously, by his own noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity.  And how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, the smile which is not a grin.

A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD

    Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.

    —­EDWARD FITZGERALD.