Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally appeared in The Freeman, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ in The Nineteenth Century and After. My thanks are due to the editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays here.
C. C. W.
PREFACE
Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.
Opinions are troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels. Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that the characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be. Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to write Wayfarers? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to write itself.’
What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own. They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often, like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they will be expressed. And the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of characters who would never have held them.