LONDON
Digby, Long & Co.
18, Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, E.C.
1910
TO FRANCE—
The Country of Many Ideals
[PREFACE]
To each man or woman of us there is the Country of our Ideals. The ideals may be newly aroused; they may be of long standing. But some time or other, in some way or other, there is the country; there is the place; there is the sunny spot in our imagination-world which calls to us—and calls to us in no uncertain voice.
It is true we are not always susceptible to that call: it is true we are not always responsive, but it is there all the same. Sometimes there comes to us a day when that "call" is insistent, all-compelling, irresistible; a day in which it sounds with indescribable music, indescribable vibration, through that inner world into which we all go now and again, when days are monotonous or depressing.
It is impossible to conjecture why some country, some place, some woman, should make that indescribable appeal which lays a hand on the latch of those gates leading to that world of imagination which exists in most of us far, far below the placid, shallow waters of conventionalism. It is impossible to conjecture when or where the voice and the call will sound in our ears. The man who hears it will recognise what it means, but will in no way be able to account for it.
He will only know with what infinite satisfaction he is sensible of the touch which enables him to "slip through the magic gates," as a great friend once expressed it, into the world of Idealism, of Imagination.
True, the pleasure, the satisfaction, is elusive. He can lay no hand upon those wonderful moments which come thus to him. Even before he is aware that they have begun, he is conscious that they are already slipping out of his grasp.