Sometimes short stories are brought together like parcels in a basket.
Sometimes they grow together like blossoms on a bush. Then, of course,
they really belong to one another, because they have the same life in
them.
The stories in this book have been growing together for a long time. It
is at least ten years since the first of them, the story of The Other
Wise Man, came to me; and all the others I knew quite well by heart a
good while before I could find the time, in a hard-worked life, to write
them down and try to make them clear and true to others. It has been a
slow task, because the right word has not always been easy to find, and
I wanted to keep free from conventionality in the thought and close to
nature in the picture. It is enough to cause a man no little shame to
see how small is the fruit of so long labour.
And yet, after all, when one wishes to write about life, especially
about that part of it which is inward, the inwrought experience of
living may be of value. And that is a thing which one cannot get in
haste, neither can it be made to order. Patient waiting belongs to it;
and rainy days belong to it; and the best of it sometimes comes in the
doing of tasks that seem not to amount to much. So in the long run, I
suppose, while delay and failure and interruption may keep a piece of
work very small, yet in the end they enter into the quality of it and
bring it a little nearer to the real thing, which is always more or less
of a secret.
But the strangest part of it all is the way in which a single thought,
an idea, will live with a man while he works, and take new forms from
year to year, and light up the things that he sees and hears, and lead
his imagination by the hand into many wonderful and diverse regions. It
seems to me that there am two ways in which you may give unity to a book
of stories. You may stay in one place and write about different themes,
preserving always the colour of the same locality. Or you may go into
different places and use as many of the colours and shapes of life as
you can really see in the light of the same thought.
There is such a thought in this book. It is the idea of the search for
inward happiness, which all men who are really alive are following,
along what various paths, and with what different fortunes! Glimpses of
this idea, traces of this search, I thought that I could see in certain
tales that were in my mind,--tales of times old and new, of lands near
and far away. So I tried to tell them, as best as I could, hoping that
other men, being also seekers, might find some meaning in them.
There are only little, broken chapters from the long story of life.
None of them is taken from other books. Only one of them--the story of
Winifried and the Thunder-Oak--has the slightest wisp of a foundation in
fact or legend. Yet I think they are all true.
But how to find a name for such a book,--a name that will tell enough to
show the thought and yet not too much to leave it free? I have borrowed
a symbol from the old German poet and philosopher, Novalis, to stand
instead of a name. The Blue Flower which he used in his romance of
Heinrich von Ofterdingen to symbolise Poetry, the object of his young
hero’s quest, I have used here to signify happiness, the satisfaction of
the heart.
Reader, will you take the book and see if it belongs to you? Whether
it does or not, my wish is that the Blue Flower may grow in the garden
where you work.
AVALON, December 1, 1902.