p. viiPREFACE

p. vii

To-day in warfare all the niceties of old-world tactics are fallen into contempt. No word of outworks, ravelins, of mamelons, of counter-scarps, of glacis, fascines; none of the terms by means of which Vauban obscured his art, are even mentioned. Armies fall to and blow such brains as they may have out of each other’s heads without so much as a salute. And so of literature, your “few first words,” your “avant-propos,” your nice approaches to the reader, giving him beforehand some taste of what is to follow, have also fallen into disuse. The man of genius (and in no age has self-dubbed genius called out so loud in every street, and been accepted at its own appraisement) stuffs you his epoch-making book full of the technicalities of some obscure or half-forgotten trade, and rattles on at once, sans introduction, twenty knots an hour, like a torpedo boat. No preface, dedication, not even p. viiian apology pro existentiâ ejus intervening betwixt the bewildered public and the full power of his wit. A graceless way of doing things, and not comparable to the slow approach by “prefatory words,” “censura,” “dedication,” by means of which the writers of the past had half disarmed the critic ere he had read a line. I like to fancy to myself the progress of a fight in days gone by, with marching, countermarching, manoeuvring, so to speak, for the weather-gauge, and then the general engagement all by the book of arithmetic, and squadrons going down like men upon a chessboard after nice calculation, and like gentlemen.

To-day

p. viii

Who, hidden in a wood, watching a nymph about to bathe, would care to see her strip off her “duds” like an umbrella-case, and bounce into the river like a water-rat?—a lawn upon the grass, a scarf hung on a bush, a petticoat rocked by the wind upon the sward, then the shy trying of the water with the naked feet, and lastly something flashing in the sun which you could hardly swear you had seen, so rapidly it passed into the stream, would most enchant the gaze of the rapt watcher hidden behind his tree. And so of literature, wheedle me by degrees, your reader to your book, as did the giants of the past in graceful p. ixpreface, dedication, or what do you call it, that got the readers, so to speak, into the book before they were aware. It seems to me, a world all void of grace must needs be cruel, for cruelty and grace go not together, and perhaps the hearts of the pig-tailed, pipe-clayed generals of the past were not more hard than are the hearts of their tweed-clad descendants 

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