For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions (or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unload them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the house-tops—all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer, and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.
Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more than usually vain, or unless he is one of the very few whose books are in every home and whose opinions therefore presumably sway thousands (only I don’t believe they do), he must in his heart be aware that nothing he has written has had the slightest effect on any one, that nothing any one has written has had much effect, and that immortality is a myth. No, there he and I are wrong. There is one way to literary immortality, a small immortality but assured: to have a book printed in the Tauchnitz Edition. Miss Rhoda Broughton’s name may be to the world at large but a shadowy memory, Mrs. Mackarness’s a total blank, but for ever and ever, on rainy afternoons, in dingy German or Italian pensions, elderly English spinsters will, in default of anything else to do, read tattered Tauchnitz copies of Cometh Up as a Flower and A Peerless Wife. They will be bored—but they will read them.
At any rate, your writer of novels, if he is to go on writing novels that at all satisfy him for the moment (though why he should, God knows!), must occasionally get rid of his opinions by means of a volume of essays; which does him good and does no one else any harm.
And that is what I have set out to do here.