liating the pages that
follow. Peter and Paul are the two primary influences upon European
literature to-day; and I may be permitted to put my own preference in
its most favourable shape, even if I can only do it by what little girls
call telling a story.

I need scarcely say that I am the pigmy. The only excuse for the scraps
that follow is that they show what can be achieved with a commonplace
existence and the sacred spectacles of exaggeration. The other great
literary theory, that which is roughly represented in England by Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, is that we moderns are to regain the primal zest by
sprawling all over the world growing used to travel and geographical
variety, being at home everywhere, that is being at home nowhere. Let it
be granted that a man in a frock coat is a heartrending sight; and the
two alternative methods still remain. Mr. Kipling's school advises us
to go to Central Africa in order to find a man without a frock coat. The
school to which I belong suggests that we should stare steadily at the
man until we see the man inside the frock coat. If we stare at him long
enough he may even be moved to take off his coat to us; and that is a
far greater compliment than his taking off his hat. In other words,
we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually
before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up
their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose. The purpose of the
Kipling literature is to show how many extraordinary things a man may
see if he is active and strides from continent to continent like the
giant in my tale. But the object of my school is to show how many
extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur
himself to the single activity of seeing. For this purpose I have taken
the laziest person of my acquaintance, that is myself; and made an idle
diary of such odd things as I have fallen over by accident, in walking
in a very limited area at a very indolent pace. If anyone says that
these are very small affairs talked about in very big language, I can
only gracefully compliment him upon seeing the joke. If anyone says that
I am making mountains out of molehills, I confess with pride that it is
so. I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture
than that of making mountains out of molehills. But I would add this not
unimportant fact, that molehills are mountains; one has only to become a
pigmy like Peter