liam
Blackwood suggested I should give something again to his magazine.

It was only then that I perceived that the pilgrim ship episode was a
good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event,
too, which could conceivably colour the whole 'sentiment of existence'
in a simple and sensitive character. But all these preliminary moods
and stirrings of spirit were rather obscure at the time, and they do not
appear clearer to me now after the lapse of so many years.

The few pages I had laid aside were not without their weight in the
choice of subject. But the whole was re-written deliberately. When I sat
down to it I knew it would be a long book, though I didn't foresee that
it would spread itself over thirteen numbers of Maga.

I have been asked at times whether this was not the book of mine I liked
best. I am a great foe to favouritism in public life, in private life,
and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works. As a
matter of principle I will have no favourites; but I don't go so far
as to feel grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to
my Lord Jim. I won't even say that I 'fail to understand . . .' No! But
once I had occasion to be puzzled and surprised.

A friend of mine returning from Italy had talked with a lady there who
did not like the book. I regretted that, of course, but what surprised
me was the ground of her dislike. 'You know,' she said, 'it is all so
morbid.'

The pronouncement gave me food for an hour's anxious thought. Finally
I arrived at the conclusion that, making due allowances for the subject
itself being rather foreign to women's normal sensibilities, the lady
could not have been an Italian. I wonder whether she was European at
all? In any case, no Latin temperament would have perceived anything
morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour. Such a consciousness
may be wrong, or it may be right, or it may be condemned as artificial;
and, perhaps, my Jim is not a type of wide commonness. But I can
safely assure my readers that he is not the product of coldly perverted
thinking. He's not a figure of Northern Mists either. One sunny morning,
in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form
pass by--appealing--significant--under a cloud--perfectly silent. Which
is as it should be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was
capable, to seek fit words for his meaning. He was 'one of us'.

J.C.

1917.

L