PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
JUST as I am on my way to carry the message of this book farther East under the auspices of The Keiogijuku University of Tokyo, Japan, to which the book was one of the main causes of my being called, I am asked by the publishers to prepare a second edition for the press.
I have the happy pleasure of revising the book and adding some chapters (which will, I hope, be regarded as an enrichment, not a mere accretion) while visiting one of the world's greatest figures in literature, Rabindranath Tagore, in the quiet simplicity of his Indian home.
In such auspicious circumstances I am hopeful that the second edition comes into existence under as benignant a star as the first edition, and that it may be found as useful as I am assured the first edition was found by those who wish to know how the wind of inspiration now blows in literature in the English language.
I have also somewhat altered the order of the chapters in the book, which how move in a less , zig-zag manner than before from immediate to recent new ways in English literature.. If this order presents any difficulty to the chronologically minded, it can be easily overcome by the simple expedient of beginning at the last chapter and reading back to the first, a procedure not unknown to readers of fiction. It is a poor book that cannot be read both ways.
J.H.C. En route to Japan, 25th April, 1919. PREFACE
THIS book has not been written on purpose Its chapters are separated by years, and in some cases by several thousands of miles. This circumstance will account for, though it will not excuse, any instability that may be felt in style.
The essays have been drawn together by the necessity for some temporary indication, however inadequate, of the direction of English literature at the present time and in the immediate past. This necessity has arisen put of a special movement to make education in India both national and rational by putting it in contact with the vital spirit of literature, instead of starving it on half a dozen stale fragments of the literature of the past that have no interest for Indian youth, and that make the cultivation of good modern English speech impossible.
All the same, though the essays can claim no unity in original intention, I have had an uncomfortable feeling, while shaping them for the press, of being pulled slowly and irresistibly into the noarrow prison-cell of a category, and held in a vice while being branded Idealist. I do not feel happy in presence of the word, because it has always appeared to me to connote in the history of English literature a remoteness from life; a derivativeness like the shepherd and swain convention from Spencer downwards ; a tendency to fall into dogma, Which is not objectionable because it is dogma, hut because it is based on an incomplete view of humanity and the universe.
At the same time I should not care to find myself forced into the other category and be labelled Realist. I admire the protestant spirit, and the claim that art should serve life; and not life art ; but I object to realism for exactly the same reason (which is probably not a reason but a temperament) as I object to so-called idealism. Realism in art that does not take into account all the facts ; that leaves out psychic experience and metaphysical thought, which are as real a part of human activity as the emotions and emotionalised thought generated by industrial and commercial conflict, is to me meaningless.
I think the tendency in the following pages which may be regarded as idealistic is a sign xiv of a search for a deeper unity in literature that may embrace both idealism and realism. Certain it is that some phases of the enlarged knowledge and experience that have been important characteristics of life East and West "during the past thirty years will affect profoundly the literature and criticism of the future—knowledge of an order of things more sensible than that conceived by the simple faith and blank ignorance of western religious convention; experience of faculties and entities beyond reach of the five senses, whose vivid actuality is beyond the ken of a type of thought that quaintly calls itself rationalistic and ignores the most important premises in human reasoning.
Such knowledge and experience, have been granted to me in some measure, and have obviously influenced the judgment of these essays. Inadequate though they may be as guides along the road of literary evolution, they may at least act as finger posts, showing a general direction without stating the mileage.
J.H.C. The College, Madanapalle, South India, 1st November, 1917. |
