INTRODUCTORY
because work is being done; because dark spots are being cleared away; because new haunts are beings formed for new people around whom will congregate new associations. And he ought to see that these new associations will in their turn grow old, tender, romantic, glamorous enough. He should, in fact, when he presumes to draw morals, be prepared to draw all the morals.—He must not only sniff at the "Suburbs" as a place of small houses and dreary lives; he must remember that in each of these houses dwells a strongly individualised human being with romantic hopes, romantic fears, and at the end, an always tragic death. He must remember that the thatched, mud-hovels that crowded round the Tower of original London, were just as dull, just as ordinary, just as commonplace; that men in them lived lives, according to their scale, just as squalid and just as unromantic—or just as alert and just as tragic. This author—this ideal author—then, must be passionately alive to all aspects of life. What picturesqueness there is in his work must arise from contrasts—but actual contrasts vividly presented. This is what gives interest to a work of art; and such a work must, before all things, be interesting.
It is along these lines that I have tried to work; one falls, no doubt very far short of one's ideal. But, for my own part, if this particular work gives a number of readers pleasure, or that counterpart of pleasure which
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