247

FOREWORD

DEAR GEOFFREY WHITWORTH,--Considering for how many ages how many clever
people have been complaining of their publishers, you might have
supposed that no device for getting one of them into a scrape could have
been left untried. Yet, so far as I can remember, no author has had the
bright idea of denouncing his publisher, particularly, and by name, as
accessory before the fact. I am willing to suspect my memory rather than
my profession of being at fault in this matter; but that the practice is
uncommon is most certain and that, surely, is very strange. No author
thinks twice of saddling his friend, his wife, his mother, or even his
mistress with the responsibility of having been the onlie begetter of
some feckless cub or monstrous abortion; but on his publisher, the very
man he should wish to injure, who ever thought of fastening the offence?
Yet you cannot deny, my dear Whitworth, that this book is your fault. I
was all for abandoning the project after I had read Mr. Arnold Bennett's
volume and recognized how much more readable his journalism was than
mine: your reader, I suspect, was of like mind: it was you, and you
alone, who, by enlisting my vanity, conquered my pride.

Of course in the end my vanity might have triumphed without you: it is
not often or easily beaten.

"Obliged by hunger and request of friends,"

I can imagine myself printing under that classic excuse, which has the
merit of being in the grand literary tradition and as disingenuous as
another; for in these days an author is not more hungry than every one
else, and my friends would have been the first to pardon my silence. You
may take it for certain, by the way, that when a man says he is
publishing at the instance of two or three friends he means that he is
offering the public what he knows that the public could have done
perfectly well without. He means that he is printing neither to persuade
nor to inform nor yet to express the truth that is in him, but simply to
gratify an itch for such notoriety as the careless attention of a few
thousand readers may be supposed to give. If I now contrive to escape
the consequences of my own axiom it is thanks to you, My Publisher--or
Publisher's representative must I say? (You are so very modest, my dear
Whitworth, and so exact.) Naturally, by so obliging me you have made me
your friend for life. But that was _ex post facto_.

I said just n