Published February 1911
To
NORMAN FORBES ROBERTSON
My Dear Norman,
Here are my Patchwork Papers for you to unpick at your leisure. I have not presumed to call them essays, since it is nowadays unseemly for a novelist to attempt anything worthy of the name of letters—moreover, would any one read them? By the same token, I have not dared to call them short stories, and that, mainly because the so-called essential love interest is conspicuous by its absence. Really they are illustrated essays. What better name then than papers can be given them?
It may, for example, be pardonable in a paper to split an infinitive for the sake of euphony, as I have done in “From my Portfolio,”—but to split an infinitive in an essay! It were better to rob a church, or speak out one’s mind about the monarchy. All such things as these are treasonable. To call them papers then will save me much from my friends.
When they appeared serially, it was under the title “Beauties which are Inevitable.” I altered that when I thought of you trying to remember what the book was called, as you recommended it with a twinkle in your eye to your friends. But that title still stands justified in my mind, since these papers express the things which latterly have become realities to me. For wheresoever you may go in this world—whether it be striving to the highest heights, or descending, as some would have it, to the deepest depths—life is just as ugly or just as beautiful as you are inclined to find it.