A LITTLE PREFACE

          Care I for the limbs, the thews, the stature, bulk and big assemblance of a man? Give me the spirit.         
HENRY IV, Part II.

Being of such a strange temper and vision that when I aim my pen at a man I am as likely as not to hit his grandfather, I have in this instance endeavoured to forestall the treachery of my faculties and to go straight for the grandfather, though my interest is centred in the man. In a sense I have written his life as it was long before he was born, when he was nothing more than a growing presentiment. I have found it instructive and entertaining to observe and follow the evolution of the material, moral, and intellectual atmosphere which was to bear on him first of all through his mother’s mind, and then through his own senses as soon as his life was separated from hers.

I launch my hero upon the world and leave it to anybody who likes to kill him, and I pray that those who are in process of morally slaughtering their own innocents may take my imaginary child instead, for there is no remedy for the murder of a living soul, but, should it ever happen that my bantling demanded the right to continue his existence and in his turn to become a father, I have only to revive him, give him another name, and let him do his worst.

My conscience has been greatly exercised for some time now over the many errors and literary sins I have committed in the past—sins not against the rules (there are none) but against the persons whom I have forced to live in a mutilated, limited sort of life in the printed page, and those other excellent persons whom I have invited to collaborate in the fun of watching them. Upon these two sets of persons I have too often forced my beliefs without making it clear to them what my beliefs are. And here again I shall often seem to offend, because, honestly, I can neither codify my beliefs nor force them into any existing code. I can, however, give a hint at them by saying that, in my view, we can only accept life with dignity and without injury to our self-respect in perfect freedom—by which I shall be taken to mean Licence. Freedom is a much-abused word, and when you use it to seven men and women out of ten they at once think of a world full of satyrs. When I use the word Freedom, I think of a world full of what Walt Whitman, [Pg viii]who had no sense of humour when he took pen in hand, called “superb persons,” that is, men and women who are not imprisoned in their own thoughts. Only a man’s own mind can make him a slave, and every healthy human being from first to last of conscious life struggles for the freedom of his own mind. We set about it often in strange ways and make dreadful muddles, but the fight itself renders life enjoyable, even if the aim be never attained. Freedom, of course, like everything else, is subject to the limitations of this existence. A man’s thoughts, like his life, are bounded by birth and death. When he tries to cast them beyond death they fall cold and lifeless, as will be seen in much imaginative poetry, many spiritualistic theories, and all presentations of Heaven. For reasons quite explicable when we consider the dying belief in a sort of straight-line human progress, men have never been interested in events antecedent to birth. I look forward to the day when they will be as little interested in events after death. A man’s father and his son (mother and daughter included) are all the past and future vouchsafed to him, and if he will take the trouble to understand them he will find satisfaction and to spare for what is at present called his thirst for immortality.

I find immortality an admirable word upon which to end my preface, but, in face of the grey tints of this composition, I must protest my optimism, believing human life to be like a river, that, if it be fouled, will run itself clear in time. Only, you must trace the poison to its source and stop it.