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AUTHOR'S
NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
Since this book, written in 1893-1894, appeared in
print in 1927, 1 have often been asked whether the
story which it presents is fact or fiction. My answer,
a prevaricating answer, was that every event in the
story was lived through; but that only a very few
events that had taken place in the years with which
the book deals found their place in it; and among
them there was not one of the terrible things.
I should like to seize
this opportunity to add a word or so.
Every work of so-called imaginative
literature, good or bad, is necessarily at once both
fact and fiction; and not only in the sense that fiction
is mingled with fact. In every single part fact and
fiction are inextricably interwoven.
Imaginative literature is not primarily
concerned with facts; it is concerned with truth.
It sees fact only within the web of life, coloured
and made vital by what preceded it, coloured and made
significant by what followed. In its highest flights,
imaginative literature, which is one and indivisible,
places within a single fact the history of the universe
from its inception as well as the history of its future
to the moment of its final extinction.
The reason for this is that, in
imaginative literature, no fact enters as mere fact;
a fact as such can be perceived; but, to form subject-matter
for art, it must contain its own interpretation; and
a fact interpreted, and therefore made capable of
being understood, becomes fiction.*
The book which follows is essentially
retrospective; which means that it is teleological;
what was the present when it was written had already
become its telos. Events that had followed were already
casting their shadows backward. By writing the book,
in that long-ago past, I was freeing myself of the
mental and emotional burden implied in the fact that
I had once lived it and had left it behind. But the
present pervaded the past in every fibre.
One more point. Why, so I have
been asked, did I choose a pseudonym for my hero?
Well, while a pseudonym ostensibly dissociates the
author from his creation, it gives him at the same
time an opportunity to be even more personal than,
in the conditions of our present-day civilization,
it would be either safe or comfortable to be were
he speaking in the first person, unmasked.
F.
P. G.
Simcoe, Ontario,
February, 1939.
*See Hueffer, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance,
for Conrad's perfectly sincere reminiscences of
his seafaring life. In their oral presentations, they
varied as their significances unfolded themselves
in the telling.
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