This is the spirit in which I have written. We are all engaged—not merely one or two prominent persons here and there—in creating the spiritual world. I have never written but with the thought that the reader, even though he may not know it, is already on my side. Only so could I write with that sincerity and simplicity without which it would not seem to me worth while to write at all. That may be seen in the saying which I set on the forefront of my earliest book, “The New Spirit”: he who carries farthest his most intimate feelings is simply the first in file of a great number of other men, and one becomes typical by being to the utmost degree one’s self. That saying I chose with much deliberation and complete conviction because it went to the root of my book. On the surface it obviously referred to the great figures I was there concerned with, representing what I regarded—by no means in the poor sense of mere modernity—as the New Spirit in life. They had all gone to the depths of their own souls and thence brought to the surface and expressed—audaciously or beautifully, pungently or poignantly—intimate impulses and emotions which, shocking as they may have seemed at the time, are now seen to be those of an innumerable company of their fellow men and women. But it was also a book of personal affirmations. Beneath the obvious meaning of that motto on the title-page lay the more private meaning that I was myself setting forth secret impulses which might some day be found to express the emotions also of others. In the thirty-five years that have since passed, the saying has often recurred to my mind, and if I have sought in vain to make it mine I find no adequate justification for the work of my life.
And now, as I said at the outset, I am even prepared to think that that is the function of all books that are real books. There are other classes of so-called books: there is the class of history books and the class of forensic books, that is to say, the books of facts and the books of argument. No one would wish to belittle either kind. But when we think of a book proper, in the sense that a Bible means a book, we mean more than this. We mean, that is to say, a revelation of something that had remained latent, unconscious, perhaps even more or less intentionally repressed, within the writer’s own soul, which is, ultimately, the soul of mankind. These books are apt to repel; nothing, indeed, is so likely to shock us at first as the manifest revelation of ourselves. Therefore, such books may have to knock again and again at the closed door of our hearts. “Who is there?” we carelessly cry, and we cannot open the door; we bid the importunate stranger, whatever he may be, to go away; until, as in the apologue of the Persian mystic, at last we seem to hear the voice outside saying: “It is thyself.”
H. E.