By
Arthur Christopher Benson
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1907
Copyrighted by
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
1907
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
PREFACE
I have been reading this morning a very pathetic and characteristic document. It is a paper that has lurked for years in an old collection of archives, a preface, sketched by a great writer, who is famous wherever the English language is spoken or read, for the second edition of a noble book. The book, on its first appearance, was savagely and cruelly attacked; and the writer of it, hurt and wounded by a mass of hateful and malevolent criticisms, piled together by an envious and narrow mind, tried, with a miserable attempt at jaunty levity, to write an answer to the vicious assailant. This answer is deeply pathetic, because, behind the desperate parade of cheerful insouciance, one seems to hear the life-blood falling, drop by drop; the life-blood of a dauntless and pure spirit, whose words had been so deftly twisted and satanically misrepresented as to seem the utterances of a sensual and cynical mind.