A Personal Record

The re-issue of this book in a new form does not, strictly speaking,
require another Preface. But since this is distinctly a place for
personal remarks I take the opportunity to refer in this Author's Note
to two points arising from certain statements about myself I have
noticed of late in the press.

One of them bears upon the question of language. I have always felt
myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position
which outside the circus world cannot be regarded as desirable. It needs
a special temperament for one to derive much gratification from the fact
of being able to do freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, from
mere vanity.

The fact of my not writing in my native language has been of course
commented upon frequently in reviews and notices of my various works and
in the more extended critical articles. I suppose that was unavoidable;
and indeed these comments were of the most flattering kind to one's
vanity. But in that matter I have no vanity that could be flattered. I
could not have it. The first object of this Note is to disclaim any
merit there might have been in an act of deliberate volition.

The impression of my having exercised a choice between the two
languages, French and English, both foreign to me, has got abroad
somehow. That impression is erroneous. It originated, I believe, in an
article written by Sir Hugh Clifford and published in the year '98, I
think, of the last century. Some time before, Sir Hugh Clifford came to
see me. He is, if not the first, then one of the first two friends I
made for myself by my work, the other being Mr. Cunninghame Graham, who,
characteristically enough, had been captivated by my story An Outpost of
Progress. These friendships which have endured to this day I count
amongst my precious possessions.

Mr. Hugh Clifford (he was not decorated then) had just published his
first volume of Malay sketches. I was naturally delighted to see him and
infinitely gratified by the kind things he found to say about my first
books and some of my early short stories, the action of which is placed
in the Malay Archipelago. I remember that after saying many things which
ought to have made me blush to the roots of my hair with outraged
modesty, he ended by telling me with the uncompromising yet kindly
firmness of a man accustomed to speak unpalatable truths even to
Oriental potentates (for their own good of course) that as a matter of
fact I didn't know anything about Malays. I was perfectly aware of
this. I have never pretended to any such knowledge, and I was moved--I
wonder to this day at my impertinence--to retort: "Of course I don't
know anything about Malays. If I knew only one hundredth part of what
you and Frank