PREFACE A BOOK is a machine to think with, but it need not attempt to emulate a force-pump. As soon as the main outlines of this essay had taken shape, its scale became evidently a matter of comparative indifference. What is most important about it, the interconnection of its several points of view, might have been exhibited, though not with equal clarity, in a pamphlet or in a two-volume work. Few of the separate items are original. One does not expect novel cards when playing so traditional a game; it is the hand which matters. I have chosen to present it here on the smallest scale which would allow me to fit together the various positions adopted into a whole of some firmness. The elaborations and expansions which suggest themselves have been constantly cut short at the point at which I thought that the reader would be able to see for himself how they would continue. The danger of this procedure, which otherwise has great advantages both for him and for me, is that the different parts of a connected account such as this mutually illumine one another. The writer, who has, or should have, the whole position in his mind throughout, may overlook sources of obscurity for the reader, due to the serial form of the exposition. This I have endeavoured to prevent by means of numerous cross-references, forwards and backwards. But some further explanation of the structure of the book is due to the reader. At sundry pointsnotably in Chapters VI, VII, and XI-XV—its A progress appears to be interrupted by lengthy excursions into theory of value, or into general psychology. These I would have omitted if it had seemed in any way possible to develop the argument of the rest strongly and clearly in their absence. The view of value implied throughout is one which must be held in some form by very many persons. Yet I have been unable to discover anywhere any statement of it to which I might satisfactorily refer the reader. I had to make a fairly full statement with applications and illustrations myself. And I had to put it in the forefront of the book where, to the more exclusively literary reader, it will appear a dry and uninviting tract to be crossed for problematical advantages. The same remarks apply to the second theoretical expansion, the psychological chapters; they are to the value chapters, I fear, as a Sahara to a Gobi. No other choice seemed open if I did not wish my later, critical, sections to be misunderstood, than to include as a preliminary what amounts to a concise treatise on psychology. For nearly all the topics of psychology are raised at one point or another by criticism, but raised from an angle which ordinary text-books do not contemplate. These two deserts passed, the rest of the book accords, I believe, much more closely with what may be expected of an essay in criticism, although the language in which some of the more obvious remarks are couched may seem unnecessarily repellent. The explanation of much of the turgid uncouthness of its terminology is the desire to link even the commonplaces of criticism to a systematic exposition of psychology. The reader who appreciates the advantages so gained will be forgiving. I have carefully remembered throughout that I am not writing for specialists alone. The omissions, particularly as to qualifications and reservations, which this fact entails should in fairness to myself be mentioned. My book, I fear, will seem to many sadly lacking in the condiments which have come to be expected in writings upon literature. Critics and even theorists upon criticism currently assume that their first duty is to be moving, to excite in the mind emotions appropriate to their august subjectmatter. This endeavour I have declined. I have used, I believe, few words which I could not define in the actual use which I have made of them, and necessarily such words have little or no emotive power. I have comforted myself with the reflection that there is perhaps something debilitated about a taste for speculation which requires a flavouring of the eternal and the ultimate or even milder literary spices of mystery and profundity. I have attempted to write in a scientific spirit trusting to interest by what is said rather than by the manner of the saying. But the critic is in a bad position when he sits down to write; may my practice not be allowed to prejudice my theory. It should be borne in mind that the knowledge which the men of A.D. 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our æsthetics, all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful. Poor indeed would be the prospect if this were not so. The thought, "What shall we do with the powers, which we are so rapidly developing, and what will happen to us if we cannot use them in time? already marks for many people the chief interest of existence. The controversies which the world has known in the past are as nothing to those which are ahead. I would wish this book to be regarded as a contribution towards these choices of the future. I. A. R. |