AMORE ANTIQUI RITUS, ALTO SUB NUMINE ROMAE
PRAISE OF THIS BOOK
To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
greeting - and whatever else can be had for nothing.
If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
all - when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
Christian by force of rhetoric - what should I note (after so many
years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and
new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that
such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the
work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this
shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered,
and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as
the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had
been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a
statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had
ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite
taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage
and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I
will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will
walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep
rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every
morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast
of St Peter and St Paul.'
Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and
I walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and
so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow;
and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one.
For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I
kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high
Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify - to wit:
Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of
_so-and-so - o - polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there
together.
And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in what Anglo-Saxons
call a Foreword, but gentlemen a Preface? Why, it is because I have
noticed that no book can appear without some such thing tied on before
it; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, be certain that I read
some eight or nine thousand of them to be sure of how they were
written and to be safe from generalizing on too frail a basis.
And having read them and discovered first, that it was the custom of
my contemporaries to belaud themselves in this prolegomenaical ritual
(some saying in a few words that they supplied a want, others boasting
in a hundred that they were too grand to do any such thing, but most
of them baritoning their apologies and chanting their excuses till one
knew that their pride was toppling over) - since, I say, it seemed a
necessity to extol one's work, I wrote simply on the lintel of my
diary, _Praise of this Book,_ so as to end the matter at a blow. But
whether there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, for I am
riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a mouth of iron.
Now there is another thing book writers do in their Prefaces, which is
to introduce a mass of nincompoops of whom no one ever heard, and to
say 'my thanks are due to such and such' all in a litany, as though
any one cared a farthing for the rats! If I omit this believe me it is
but on account of the multitude and splendour of those who have
attended at the production of this volume. For the stories in it are
copied straight from the best authors of the Renaissance, the music
was written by the masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is
Erasmus' own; indeed, there is scarcely a word that is mine. I must
also mention the Nine Muses, the Three Graces; Bacchus, the Maenads,
the Panthers, the Fauns; and I owe very hearty thanks to Apollo.
Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious of their style,
thinking (not saying) -
'True, I used "and which" on page 47, but Martha Brown the stylist
gave me leave;' or:
'What if I do end a sentence with a preposition? I always follow the
rules of Mr Twist in his "'Tis Thus 'Twas Spoke", Odd's Body an' I do
not!'
Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book writers) that they
think style power, and yet never say as much in their Prefaces. Come,
let me do so ... Where are you? Let me marshal you, my regiments of
words!
Rabelais! Master of all happy men! Are you sleeping there pressed into
desecrated earth under the doss-house of the Rue St Paul, or do you
not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon looking on the
Vienne where it rises in Paradise?
