is the
creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears
that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are
complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the
great simplicity of life and death.

Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the
synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where
the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood
and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A
statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise
from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was
all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive
biographical resume is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas
B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was
bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the
delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad
devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical
reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the
tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical
comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity 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 nove