See them
how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering
fellows!
First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no man; fresh, young,
hearty, and for the most part very long-limbed, though some few short
and strong. There also are the Misprints to confuse the enemy at his
onrush. Then see upon the flank a company of picked Ambiguities
covering what shall be a feint by the squadron of Anachronisms led by
old Anachronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and a great
murderer of fools.
But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand Egotisms shining in
their armour and roaring for battle. They care for no one. They
stormed Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of Good-Manners,
who died of fear without a wound; so they drank his wine and are
to-day as strong as lions and as careless (saving only their Captain,
Monologue, who is lantern-jawed).
Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and Dithyramb that killed
Punctuation in open fight; Parenthesis the giant and champion of the
host, and Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write but is very
handy with his sword; and Metathesis and Hendiadys, two Greeks. And
last come the noble Gallicisms prancing about on their light horses:
cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere sight of them and
are overcome without a blow. Come then my hearties, my lads, my
indefatigable repetitions, seize you each his own trumpet that hangs
at his side and blow the charge; we shall soon drive them all before
us headlong, howling down together to the Picrocholian Sea.
So! That was an interlude. Forget the clamour.
But there is another matter; written as yet in no other Preface:
peculiar to this book. For without rhyme or reason, pictures of an
uncertain kind stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why?
_Because it has become so cheap to photograph on zinc._
In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all. He did well. Then
either there were no pictures in his book, or (if there were any) they
were done by some other man that loved him not a groat and would not
have walked half a mile to see him hanged. But now it is so easy for a
man to scratch down what he sees and put it in his book that any fool
may do it and be none the worse - many others shall follow. This is the
first.
Before you blame too much, consider the alternative. Shall a man march
through Europe dragging an artist on a cord? God forbid!
Shall an artist write a book? Why no, the remedy is worse than the
disease.
Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim may for the future
draw (if he likes) that most difficult subject, snow hills beyond a
grove of trees; that he may draw whatever he comes across in order to
enliven his mind (for who saw it if not he? And was it not his
loneliness that enabled him to see it?), and that he may draw what he
never saw, with as much freedom as you readers so very continually see
what you never draw. He may draw the morning mist on the Grimsel, six
months afterwards; when he has forgotten what it was like: and he may
frame it for a masterpiece to make the good draughtsman rage.
The world has grown a boy again this long time past, and they are
building hotels (I hear) in the place where Acedes discovered the
Water of Youth in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes.
Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon
laugh no longer - and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest
men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for
that is only to suffer one another.
Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious fellow that sat down
dutifully to paint the soul of Switzerland upon a fan.
When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed upon all peoples by his
epigrams and his fallacious half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton
appeals to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I take it he
was a man, and a wicked one) was passing through France he launched
among the French one of his pestiferous phrases, _'Ce n'est que le
premier pas qui coute'_ and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth
self-satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his day at
least seventeen million three hundred and sixty-two thousand five
hundred and four times by a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company
Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general
whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up
and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the
true breeding soil of Revelation.
For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other blossoms and prides
of nature, are for lying steady in the shade and letting the Mind
commune with its Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking about
and eager as though it were a duty to force the said Mind to burrow
and sweat in the matter of this very perishable world, its temporary
habitation.
'Up,' says Authority, 'and let me see that Mind of yours doing
something practical. Let me see Him mixing painfully with
circumstance, and botching up some Imperfection or other that shall at
least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy.'
Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, and the boy takes his
horrible Homer in the real Greek (not Church's book, alas!); the Poet
his rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross-nibbed pen; the
Soldier abandons his inner picture of swaggering about in ordinary
clothes, and sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his
boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure of his pack; and
Authority is satisfied, knowing that he will get a smattering from the
Boy, a rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier a long and
thirsty march.
