A Personal Record - Page 2

Swettenham know of Malays I would make everybody sit up."
He went on looking kindly (but firmly) at me and then we both burst out
laughing. In the course of that most welcome visit twenty years ago,
which I remember so well, we talked of many things; the characteristics
of various languages was one of them, and it is on that day that my
friend carried away with him the impression that I had exercised a
deliberate choice between French and English. Later, when moved by his
friendship (no empty word to him) to write a study in the _North
American Review_ on Joseph Conrad he conveyed that impression to the
public.

This misapprehension, for it is nothing else, was no doubt my fault. I
must have expressed myself badly in the course of a friendly and
intimate talk when one doesn't watch one's phrases carefully. My
recollection of what I meant to say is: that _had I been under the
necessity_ of making a choice between the two, and though I knew French
fairly well and was familiar with it from infancy, I would have been
afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly "crystallized."
This, I believe, was the word I used. And then we passed to other
matters. I had to tell him a little about myself; and what he told me of
his work in the East, his own particular East of which I had but the
mistiest, short glimpse, was of the most absorbing interest. The present
Governor of Nigeria may not remember that conversation as well as I do,
but I am sure that he will not mind this, what in diplomatic language is
called "rectification" of a statement made to him by an obscure writer
his generous sympathy had prompted him to seek out and make his friend.

The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as
natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have
a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent
part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor
adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as
to adoption--well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted
by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the
stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I
truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my
still plastic character.

It was a very intimate action and for that very reason it is too
mysterious to explain. The task would be as impossible as trying to
explain love at first sight. There was something in this conjunction of
exulting, almost physical recognition, the same sort of emotional
surrender and the same pride of possession, all united in the wonder of
a great discovery; but there was on it none of that shadow