Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism.  However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me.  They are more fit for a moralist than for an artist.  Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity.  That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.

“Embroil” is perhaps too strong an expression.  I can’t imagine either amongst my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.  “To disappoint one’s friends” would be nearer the mark.  Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work.  He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, amongst imaginary things, happenings, and people.  Writing about them, he is only writing about himself.  But the disclosure is not complete.  He remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a seen presence—­a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.  In these personal notes there is no such veil.  And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the “Imitation of Christ” where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that “there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them.”  This is the danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.

While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes.  It seems that I am not sufficiently literary.  Indeed a man who never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations and emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so much material for his hands.  Once before, some three years ago, when I published “The Mirror of the Sea,” a volume of impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me.  Practical remarks.  But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift they recommended.  I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am.  That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to their shades.  There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.  It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am incorrigible.