LETTERS TO X I PROLOGUE MY DEAR X, If I refuse to waste my time defining and expounding you, you must put it down to your name, which is insulted by explanation. I may as well acknowledge you ab ovo an excuse for discharging upon you a series of undress reflections about English literature old and new, accompanied by an odd topic or two for the sake of diversity, not, however, meant to be quite so irrelevant as they may appear. You are, besides, an excuse for my not confining these letters to the exact contours of the essay a form rather too rigid for my purpose. There I leave you a rival in the affections of the YonghyBonghy-Bo, upon the coast of Coromandel. So many of the old worthies have lavished their discontents upon their own times that I am exposing myself to the arm-chair philosopher by going and doing likewise. Well, and supposing one could huddle them all into these anni diaboli, is it not possible that the fires of their own contemporary ills might grow pale and ineffectual to them? Indeed the maladies of the world seem to me to be B so desperate that it is incumbent upon a mere reader and reviewer like myself at least to refer to them obliquely and to examine his own scanty armoury for weapons of defence. It is useless for him to brawl against the brawlers or to snatch up a flintlock against a machinegun (which would happen to him if he downed tools as a henchman of letters to enroll himself as a private of what Fielding called "pollitrics"). It is true that the critic and the reader have been the common butt of the wiseacre from generation to generation-though for what purpose great men write books, except to be read and judged, if not in their own time in another, I cannot tell. At any rate, there seems to me to be a metaphysical value. in good reading and quiet reflection which is none too obvious to this generation, and which, being a platitude that has become almost a paradox, is constructive and profitable. It is for men of affairs to make communities; it is for men of books to remind them and their charges of the godly benefits of humanism. Firmly should humanism preside in the pulpit and the senate-house, but it does not preach of hell, and mild is its rod of office. "It sheweth more wit," said Fuller, "but no lesse vanity to commend oneself not in a strait line but by reflection," but I feel justified in being an office boy for literature, for the sake not of the office boy but the literature. I cannot but feel (despite some individual examples to the contrary) that a nation which loves letters is a nation of I once put it to one of these incredibly romantic personages that it was his business to give to the world, and not to take. At once his countenance had letters of fire written across it-"These literary men !" But inasmuch as these "men of affairs" have made of the world not communities, but manure heaps, it seemed to me high time to call in the "unacknowledged legislators." |