Dedication and Preface

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_ MY DEAR WILLIAM ARCHER,

Severe and ruthlessly honest man that you are, you will find that the levities and the gravities of this book do not accord, and will say so.

I plead only that they were written at intervals, and in part for recreation, during years in which their author has striven to maintain a cheerful mind while a popular philosophy which he believed to be cheap took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated: but let us remove it from all spheres in which we are interested and contemplate it as expounded by an American Insurance 'Lobbyist,' a few days ago, before the Armstrong Committee:--

"The Insurance world to-day is the greatest financial proposition in the United States; and, _as great affairs always do, it commands a higher law._"

I have read precisely the same doctrine in a University Sermon preached by an Archbishop; but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric: the point being that in life, which is a struggle, success has in itself something divine, by virtue of which it can be to itself a law of right and wrong; and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the noble obligation to command himself so soon and in so far as he is rich enough or strong enough to command other people.

But why (you will ask) do I drag this doctrine into a dedication? Because, my dear Archer, I have fought against it for close upon seventeen years; because seventeen years is no small slice of a man's life--rather, so long a time that it has taught me to prize my bruises and prefer that, if anybody hereafter care to know me, he shall know me as one whose spirit took its cheer in intervals of a fight against detestable things; that-- let him rank me in talent never so low beside my contemporaries who preached this doctrine--he shall at least have no excuse but to acquit me of being one with them in mind or purpose; and lastly, because in these times few things have brought me such comfort (stern comfort!) as I have derived from your criticism, so hospitable to ideas, so inflexible in judging right from wrong. As I have lived lonelier it has been better for me, and a solace beyond your guessing, to have been reminded that criticism still lives amongst us and has a Roman spirit.

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH

The Haven,
FOWEY,
April 3rd, 1906.

PREFACE.

My old friend and publisher, Mr. Arrowsmith, maintains that the time has come for a cheap edition of this book. Should the public endorse that opinion, he will probably go about pretending that his head is as good as his heart.

_From a Cornish Window_ first appeared between cloth covers some six or seven years ago. I see that its Dedication bears the date, April 3rd, 1906. But parts of it were written years before in the old _Pall Mall Magazine_, under the editorship of Lord Frederic Hamilton (who invented its title for me), and a few fragments date back almost to undergraduate days. The book, in short, is desultory to the last degree, and discourses in varying moods on a variety of topics. Yet, turning the pages again, I find them curiously and somewhat alarmingly consistent--consistent not only in themselves, but with their surviving author as he sits here to-day, using the same pen-holder which he bought for twopence in 1886, and gazing out of the same window, soon to be exchanged for another with a view more academic: and 'alarmingly consistent' because (as Emerson has very justly observed) a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. To persevere in one fixed outlook upon life may be evidence of arrested capacity to grow, while on the other hand mere flightiness is a sure sign that the mind has not even arrived at man's estate. The best plan seems to be to care not a farthing for consistency or inconsistency, but to keep the eye turned outwards, and to keep it fresh by taking on new interests (however trivial), and reading new books, but still comparing them with the old. I think we ought to be especially careful to read new poetry as we get on in life, if only as a discipline-- as men with increasing waists practise calisthenics--because poetry is always trying to reach beyond the phenomena of life, and because these are all the while, if imperceptibly, narrowing us within the round of daily habit. As the author of _Ionica_ put it (I quote from memory)--

Our feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after thirty years or so:
Professionising modern men
Thenceforth admire what pleased them then.

But on the whole I do not regret this consistency, believing that the years 1896-1906 laid an almost holy constraint on the few who believed neither in Sham-Imperialism nor in the Superman, to stand together, to be stubborn, to refuse as doggedly as possible to bow the knee to these idols, to miss no opportunity of drawing attention to their feet of clay.

I seem to perceive that the day of the Superman is drawing to its close. He is a recurring nuisance, like the influenza, and no doubt will afflict mankind again in due season. But our generation has enjoyed a peculiarly poisonous variety of him. In his Renaissance guise, whether projected upon actual history, as in the person of Richard III, or strutting sublimated through Marlowe's blank verse, he spared at any rate to sentimentalise his brutality. Our forefathers summed him up in the byword that an Italianate Englishman was a devil incarnate; but he _had_ the grace of being Italianate. It is from the Germanised avatar--the Bismarck of the 'Ems telegram,' with his sentimentalising historians and philosophers--that Europe would seem to be recovering to-day. Well, I believe that the Christian virtues, the lovable and honourable code of ancient gentlemen, may always be trusted to win in the long run, and extrude the impostor. But while his vogue lasts, it may be of service to keep reminding men that to falsify another man's dispatch is essentially a stupider action than to tilt at windmills: and that is the main moral of my book.

Arthur Quiller-Couch.

December 2nd, 1912. _

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