PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION
I cannot be for ever explaining what I intended when I wrote this book. Upon this, its third appearance, even though it is to rank in that good company which wears the crimson of Eversley, it must take its chance, undefended by its conscious parent. He feels, indeed, with all the anxieties, something of the pride of the hen, who conducts her brood of ducklings to the water, sees them embark upon the flood, and must leave them to their buoyant performances, dreadful, but aware also that they are doing a finer thing than her own merits could have hoped to win them. So it is here. I did not at the outset expect a third edition in any livery; I may still fear a wreck for this cockboat of my early invention; but I hope I am too respectful of myself to try throwing oil upon the waters.
I leave the former prefaces as they stand. I felt them when I made them, and feel them still; but I shall make no more. If Earthwork has the confidence, at this time of day, to carry a red coat, it shall carry it alone.
LONDON, 1901.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Mr. Critics—to whom, kind or unkind, I confess obligations—and the Public between them have produced, it appears, some sort of demand for this Second Edition. While I do not think it either polite or politic to enquire too deeply into reasons, I am not the man to disoblige them. It is sufficient for me that in a world indifferent well peopled five hundred souls have bought or acquired my book, and that other hundreds have signified their desire to do likewise. Nevertheless—the vanity of authors being notoriously hard-rooted—I must own to my mortification in the discovery that not more than two in every hundred who have read me have known what I was at. I have been told it is a good average, but, with deference, I don't think so. No man has any right to take beautiful and simple things out of their places, wrap them up in a tissue of his own conceits, and hand them about the universe for gods and men to wonder upon. If he must convey simple things let him convey them simply. If I, for instance, must steal a loaf of bread, would it not be better to walk out of the shop with it under my coat than to call for it in a hansom and hoodwink the baker with a forged cheque on Coutts's bank? Surely. If, then, I go to Italy, and convey the hawthor-scent of Della Robbia, the straining of Botticelli to express the ineffable, the mellow autumn tones of the life of Florence; if I do this, and make a parade of my magnanimity in permitting the household to divide the spoil, how on earth should I mar all my bravery by giving people what they don't want, or turn double knave by fobbing them off with an empty box?
I had hoped to have done better than this. I tried to express in the title of my book what I thought I had done; more, I was bold enough to assume that, having weathered the title, my readers would find a smooth channel with leading-lights enough to bring them sound to port. Mea culpa! I believe that I was wrong. The book has been read as a collection of essays and stories and dialogues only pulled together by the binder's tapes; as otherwise disjointed, fragmentary, décousue, a "piebald monstrous book," a sort of kous-kous, made out of the odds and ends of a scribbler's note-book. Some have liked some morsels, others other morsels: it has been a matter of the luck of the fork. Very few, one only to my knowledge, can have seen the thing as it presented itself to my flattering eye—not as a pudding, not as a case of confectionery even, but as a little sanctuary of images such as a pious heathen might make of his earthenware gods. Let us be serious: listen. The thing is Criticism; but some of it is criticism by trope and figure. I hope that is plain enough.
When the first man heard his first thunderstorm he said (or Human Nature has bettered itself), "Certainly a God is angry." When after a night of doubt and heaviness the sun rose out of the sea, the sea kindled, and all its waves laughed innumerably, again he said, "God is stirring. Joy cometh in the morning." Even in saying so much he was making images, poor man, for one's soul is as dumb as a fish and can only talk by signs. But by degrees, as his hand grew obedient to his heart, he set to work to make more lasting images of these gods—Thunder Gods, Gods of the Sun and the Morning. And as these gods were the sum of the best feelings he had, so the images of them were the best things he made. And that goes on now whenever a young man sees something new or strange or beautiful. He wonders, he falls on his face, he would say his prayers; he rises up, he would sing a pæan. But he is dumb, the wretch! He must make images. This he does because Necessity drives him: this I have done. And part of the world calls the result Criticism, and another part says, It may be Art. But I know that it is the struggling of a dumb man to find an outlet, and I call it Religion.
"God first made man, and straightway man made God;
No wonder if a tang of that same sod,
Whereout we issued at a breath, should cling
To all we fashion. We can only plod
Lit by a starveling candle; and we sing
Of what we can remember of the road."
The vague informed, the lovely indefinite defined: that is Art. As a sort of pâte sur pâte comes Criticism, to do for Art what Art does for life. I have tried in this book to be the artist at second-hand, to make pictures of pictures, images of images, poems of poems. You may call it Criticism, you may call it Art: I call it Religion. It is making the best thing I can out of the best things I feel.