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
tha