essor that he write perfectly of beautiful happenings.

To disregard this vital longing, and flatly to stifle the innate
striving toward artistic creation, is to become (as with Wycherley and
Sheridan) a man who waives, however laughingly, his sole apology for
existence. The proceeding is paltry enough, in all conscience; and
yet, upon the other side, there is much positive danger in giving to
the instinct a loose rein. For in that event the familiar
circumstances of sedate and wholesome living cannot but seem, like
paintings viewed too near, to lose in gusto and winsomeness. Desire,
perhaps a craving hunger, awakens for the impossible. No emotion,
whatever be its sincerity, is endured without a side-glance toward its
capabilities for being written about. The world, in short, inclines to
appear an ill-lit mine, wherein one quarries gingerly amidst an abiding
loneliness (as with Pope and Ufford and Sire Raimbaut)--and wherein one
very often is allured into unsavory alleys (as with Herrick and
Alessandro de Medici)--in search of that raw material which loving
labor will transshape into comeliness.

Such, if it be allowed to shift the metaphor, are the treacherous
by-paths of that admirably policed highway whereon the well-groomed and
well-bitted Pegasi of Vanderhoffen and Charteris (in his later manner)
trot stolidly and safely toward oblivion. And the result of wandering
afield is of necessity a tragedy, in that the deviator's life, if not
as an artist's quite certainly as a human being's, must in the outcome
be adjudged a failure.

Hereinafter, then, you have an attempt to depict a special
temperament--one in essence "literary"--as very variously molded by
diverse eras and as responding in proportion with its ability to the
demands of a certain hour.

II

And this much said, it is permissible to hope, at least, that here and
there some reader may be found not wholly blind to this book's goal,
whatever be his opinion as to this book's success in reaching it. Yet
many honest souls there be among us average-novel-readers in whose eyes
this volume must rest content to figure as a collection of short
stories having naught in common beyond the feature that each deals with
the _affaires du coeur_ of a poet.

Such must always be the book's interpretation by mental indolence. The
fact is incontestable; and this fact in itself may be taken as
sufficient to establish the inexpediency of publishing _The Certain