Preface
Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.
Opinions are troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels. Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that the characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be. Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to write Wayfarers? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to write itself.’
What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own. They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often, like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they will be expressed. And the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of characters who would never have held them.
For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions (or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unload them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the house-tops—all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer, and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.
Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No, there he and I are wrong. There is one way to literary immortality, a small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a shadowy memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian pensions, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies of Cometh Up as a Flower and A Peerless Wife. They will be bored—but they will read them.
At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm.
And that is what I have set out to do here.