TO-DAY in warfare all the niceties of old-world tactics are fallen into
contempt. No word of outworks, ravelins, of mamelons, of counter-scarps,
of glacis, fascines; none of the terms by means of which Vauban obscured
his art, are even mentioned. Armies fall to and blow such brains as they
may have out of each other’s heads without so much as a salute. And so
of literature, your “few first words,” your “avant-propos,” your nice
approaches to the reader, giving him beforehand some taste of what is to
follow, have also fallen into disuse. The man of genius (and in no age
has self-dubbed genius called out so loud in every street, and been
accepted at its own appraisement) stuffs you his epoch-making book full
of the technicalities of some obscure or half-forgotten trade, and
rattles on at once, sans introduction, twenty knots an hour, like a
torpedo boat. No preface, dedication, not even an apology _pro
existentiâ ejus_ intervening betwixt the bewildered public and the full
power of his wit. A graceless way of doing things, and not comparable to
the slow approach by “prefatory words,” “censura,” “dedication,” by means
of which the writers of the past had half disarmed the critic ere he had
read a line. I like to fancy to myself the progress of a fight in days
gone by, with marching, countermarching, manoeuvring, so to speak, for
the weather-gauge, and then the general engagement all by the book of
arithmetic, and squadrons going down like men upon a chessboard after
nice calculation, and like gentlemen.
Who, hidden in a wood, watching a nymph about to bathe, would care to see
her strip off her “duds” like an umbrella-case, and bounce into the river
like a water-rat?—a lawn upon the grass, a scarf hung on a bush, a
petticoat rocked by the wind upon the sward, then the shy trying of the
water with the naked feet, and lastly something flashing in the sun which
you could hardly swear you had seen, so rapidly it passed into the
stream, would most enchant the gaze of the rapt watcher hidden behind his
tree. And so of literature, wheedle me by degrees, your reader to your
book, as did the giants of the past in graceful preface, dedication, or
what do you call it, that got the readers, so to speak, into the book
before they were aware. It seems to me, a world all void of grace must
needs be cruel, for cruelty and grace go not together, and perhaps the
hearts of the pig-tailed, pipe-clayed generals of the past were not more
hard than are the hearts of their tweed-clad descendants who now-a-days
blow you a thousand savages to paradise, and then sit down to lunch.
Let there be no mistake; the writer and the reader are sworn foes. The
writer labouring for bread, or hopes of fame, from idleness, from too
much energy, or from that uncontrollable dance of St. Vitus in the
muscles of the wrist which prompts so many men to write (the Lord knows
why), works, blots, corrects, rewrites, revises, and improves; then
publishes, and for the most part is incontinently damned. Then comes the
reader cavalierly, as the train shunts at Didcot, or puffs and snorts
into Carlisle, and gingerly examining the book says it is rubbish, and
that he wonders how people who should have something else to do, find
time to spend their lives in writing trash.
I take it that there is a modesty of mind as deep implanted in the soul
of man as is the supergrafted post-Edenian modesty of the body; which
latter, by the way, so soon is lost, restraints of custom or convention
laid aside.
Who that would strip his clothes off, and walk down Piccadilly, even if
the day were warm (the police all drunk or absent), without some
hesitation, and an announcement of his purpose, say, in the columns of
the _Morning Post_?
Therefore, why strip the soul stark naked to the public gaze without some
hesitation and due interval, by means of which to make folk understand
that which you write is what you think you feel; part of yourself, a
part, moreover, which once given out can never be recalled?
So of the sketches in this book, most of them treat of scenes seen in
that magic period, youth, when things impress themselves on the
imagination more sharply than in after years; and the scenes too have
vanished; that is, the countries where they passed have all been changed,
and now-a-days are full of barbed-wire fences, advertisements, and
desolation, the desolation born of imperfect progress. The people, too,
I treat of, for the most part have disappeared; being born unfit for
progress, it has passed over them, and their place is occupied by worthy
men who cheat to better purpose, and more scientifically. Therefore, I,
writing as a man who has not only seen but lived with ghosts, may perhaps
find pardon for this preface, for who would run in heavily and dance a
hornpipe on the turf below which sleep the dead? And if I am not
pardoned for my hesitation, dislike, or call it what you will, to give
these little sketches to the world without preamble, after my fashion, I
care not overmuch.
In the phantasmagoria we call the world, most things and men are ghosts,
or at the best but ghosts of ghosts, so vaporous and unsubstantial that
they scarcely cast a shadow on the grass. That which is most abiding
with us is the recollection of the past, and . . . hence this preface.