from shyness, perhaps, or caution, or simply from weariness,
induces, I suspect, some writers of criticism to conceal the

adventurous side of their calling, and then the criticism becomes
a mere "notice," as it were, the relation of a journey where

nothing but the distances and the geology of a new country should
be set down; the glimpses of strange beasts, the dangers of flood

and field, the hairbreadth escapes, and the sufferings (oh, the
sufferings, too! I have no doubt of the sufferings) of the

traveller being carefully kept out; no shady spot, no fruitful
plant being ever mentioned either; so that the whole performance

looks like a mere feat of agility on the part of a trained pen
running in a desert. A cruel spectacle--a most deplorable

adventure! "Life," in the words of an immortal thinker of, I
should say, bucolic origin, but whose perishable name is lost to

the worship of posterity--"life is not all beer and skittles."
Neither is the writing of novels. It isn't, really. Je vous

donne ma parole d'honneur that it--is--not. Not ALL. I am thus
emphatic because some years ago, I remember, the daughter of a

general. . . .
Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and

then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of middle
ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations

of the world's superficial judgment, shocking to the souls
concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of

sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of
art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute. And

thus this general's daughter came to me--or I should say one of
the general's daughters did. There were three of these bachelor

ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring
farm-house in a united and more or less military occupation. The

eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village
children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers

for the conquest of courtesies. It sounds futile, but it was
really a war for an idea. The second skirmished and scouted all

over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance
right to my very table--I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.

She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of
afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.

She marched into my room swinging her stick . . . but no--I
mustn't exaggerate. It is not my specialty. I am not a

humoristic writer. In all soberness, then, all I am certain of
is that she had a stick to swing.

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode. The window was open; the
door, too, stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm,

still sunshine of the wide fields. They lay around me infinitely
helpful, but, truth to say, I had not known for weeks whether the

sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved
on their appointed courses. I was just then giving up some days

of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel "Nostromo,"
a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still

mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in
connection with the word "failure" and sometimes in conjunction

with the word "astonishing." I have no opinion on this
discrepancy. It's the sort of difference that can never be

settled. All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the
common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this

earth, I had, like the prophet of old, "wrestled with the Lord"
for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness

of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the
sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the

shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.
These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to

characterize other wise the intimacy and the strain of a creative
effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the

full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to
the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and

gentle--something for which a material parallel can only be found
in the everlasting sombre stress of the westward winter passage

round Cape Horn. For that, too, is the wrestling of men with the
might of their Creator, in a great isolation from the world,

without the amenities and consolations of life, a lonely struggle
under a sense of overmatched littleness, for no reward that could

be adequate, but for the mere winning of a longitude. Yet a
certain longitude, once won, cannot be disputed. The sun and the

stars and the shape of your earth are the witnesses of your gain;
whereas a handful of pages, no matter how much you have made them

your own, are at best but an obscure and questionable spoil.
Here they are. "Failure"--"Astonishing": take your choice; or

perhaps both, or neither--a mere rustle and flutter of pieces of
paper settling down in the night, and undistinguishable, like the

snowflakes of a great drift destined to melt away in sunshine.
"How do you do?"

It was the greeting of the general's daughter. I had heard
nothing--no rustle, no footsteps. I had felt only a moment

before a sort of premonition of evil; I had the sense of an
inauspicious presence--just that much warning and no more; and

then came the sound of the voice and the jar as of a terrible
fall from a great height--a fall, let us say, from the highest of

the clouds floating in gentle procession over the fields in the
faint westerly air of that July afternoon. I picked myself up

quickly, of course; in other words, I jumped up from my chair
stunned and dazed, every nerve quivering with the pain of being

uprooted out of one world and flung down into another--perfectly
civil.

"Oh! How do you do? Won't you sit down?"
That's what I said. This horrible but, I assure you, perfectly

true reminiscence tells you more than a whole volume of
confessions a la Jean Jacques Rousseau would do. Observe! I

didn't howl at her, or start up setting furniture, or throw
myself on the floor and kick, or allow myself to hint in any

other way at the appallingmagnitude of the disaster. The whole
world of Costaguana (the country, you may remember, of my

seaboard tale), men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town,
campo(there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of

its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the
history, geography, politics, finance; the wealth of Charles

Gould's silver-mine, and the splendour of the magnificent Capataz
de Cargadores, whose name, cried out in the night (Dr. Monygham

heard it pass over his head--in Linda Viola's voice), dominated
even after death the dark gulf containing his conquests of

treasure and love--all that had come down crashing about my ears.
I felt I could never pick up the pieces--and in that very moment

I was saying, "Won't you sit down?"
The sea is strong medicine. Behold what the quarter-deck

training even in a merchant ship will do! This episode should
give you a new view of the English and Scots seamen (a

much-caricatured folk) who had the last say in the formation of
my character. One is nothing if not modest, but in this disaster

I think I have done some honour to their simple teaching. "Won't
you sit down?" Very fair; very fair, indeed. She sat down. Her

amused glance strayed all over the room.
There were pages of MS. on the table and under the table, a batch

of typed copy on a chair, single leaves had fluttered away into
distant corners; there were there living pages, pages scored and

wounded, dead pages that would be burned at the end of the
day--the litter of a cruel battle-field, of a long, long, and

desperate fray. Long! I suppose I went to bed sometimes, and
got up the same number of times. Yes, I suppose I slept, and ate

the food put before me, and talked connectedly to my household on
suitable occasions. But I had never been aware of the even flow

of daily life, made easy and noiseless for me by a silent,
watchful, tirelessaffection. Indeed, it seemed to me that I had

been sitting at that table surrounded by the litter of a
desperate fray for days and nights on end. It seemed so, because

of the intenseweariness of which that interruption had made me
aware--the awful disenchantment of a mind realizing suddenly the