no way polished, extending from the year '98 to the year '20, a thin
array (for such a stretch of time) of really innocent attitudes: Conrad
literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial.
Well, yes! A one-man show--or is it merely the show of one man?

The only thing that will not be found amongst those Figures and Things
that have passed away will be Conrad "_en pantoufles_." It is a
constitutional inability. _Schlafrock und pantoffeln!_ Not that! Never!
I don't know whether I dare boast like a certain South American general
who used to say that no emergency of war or peace had ever found him
"with his boots off"; but I may say that whenever the various
periodicals mentioned in this book called on me to come out and blow the
trumpet of personal opinions or strike the pensive lute that speaks of
the past, I always tried to pull on my boots first. I didn't want to do
it, God knows! Their Editors, to whom I beg to offer my thanks here,
made me perform mainly by kindness but partly by bribery. Well, yes!
Bribery. What can you expect? I never pretended to be better than the
people in the next street and even in the same street.

This volume (including these embarrassed introductory remarks) is as
near as I shall ever come to deshabille in public; and perhaps it will
do something to help towards a better vision of the man, if it gives no
more than a partial view of a piece of his back, a little dusty (after
the process of tidying up), a little bowed, and receding from the world
not because of weariness or misanthropy but for other reasons that
cannot be helped: because the leaves fall, the water flows, the clock
ticks with that horrid pitiless solemnity which you must have observed
in the ticking of the hall clock at home. For reasons like that. Yes! It
recedes. And this was the chance to afford one more view of it--even to
my own eyes.

The section within this volume called Letters explains itself though I
do not pretend to say that it justifies its own existence. It claims
nothing in its defence except the right of speech which I believe
belongs to everybody outside a Trappist monastery. The part I have
ventured, for shortness' sake, to call Life, may perhaps justify itself
by the emotional sincerity of the feelings to which the various papers
included under that head owe their origin. And as they relate to events
of which everyone has a date, they are in the nature of sign-posts
pointing out the d