Transcribed from the December 1909 Arthur L. Humphreys edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
BY
ROBERT ROSS
LONDON:
ARTHUR L. HUMPHREYS
187 PICCADILLY, W.
1909
p. ivTheauthor wishes to express his indebtedness, to Messrs. Smith, Elder forleave to reproduce ‘A Case at the Museum,’ which appearedin the Cornhill of October, 1900; to the Editor of the WestminsterGazette, which first published the account of Simeon Solomon; andto the former proprietors of the Wilsford Press, for kindly allowingother articles to be here reissued. ‘How we Lost the Bookof Jasher’ and ‘The Brand of Isis’ were contributedto two undergraduate publications, The Spirit Lamp and TheOxford Point of View.
My Dear Child,
It is not often the privilege of a contributor to address his formereditor in so fatherly a fashion; yet it is appropriate because you justifiedan old proverb in becoming, if I may say so, my literary parent. Though I had enjoyed the hospitality, I dare not say the welcome, ofmore than one London editor, you were the first who took off the bearing-reinfrom my frivolity. You allowed me that freedom, of manner andmatter, which I have only experienced in undergraduate periodicals. It is not any lack of gratitude to such distinguished editors as thelate Mr. Henley; or Mr. Walter Pollock, who first accorded me the courtesiesof print in a periodical not distinguished for its courtesy; or ProfessorC. J. Holmes, who has occasionally endured me with patience in the BurlingtonMagazine; or Mr. Edmund Gosse, to whom I p. xamunder special obligations; that I address myself particularly to you. But I, who am not frightened of many things, have always been frightenedof editors. I am filled with awe when I think of the ultramarinepencil that is to delete my ultramontane views. You were, as Ihave hinted, the first to abrogate its use in my favour. Whenyou, if not Consul, were at least Plancus, I think the only thing youever rejected of mine was an essay entitled ‘Editors, their Causeand Cure.’ It is not included, for obvious reasons, in thepresent volume, of which you will recognise most of the contents. These may seem even to your indulgent eyes a trifle miscellaneous anddisconnected. Still there is a thread common to all, though Icannot claim for them uniformity. There is no strict adherenceto those artificial divisions of literature into fiction, essay, criticism,and poetry. Count Tolstoy, however, has shown us that a novelmay be an essay rather than a story. No less a writer than Swiftused the medium of fiction for his most brilliant criticism of life;his fables, apart from their satire, are often mere essays. Plato,Sir Thomas More, p. xiWilliamMorris, and Mr. H. G. Wells have not disdained to transmit their philosophyunder the domino of romance or myth. Some of the greatest poets—Ruskinand Pater for example—have chosen prose for their instrument ofexpression. If that theory is true of literature—and I askyou to accept it as true—how much truer is it of journalism, atleast such journalism as mine; though I see a great gulf between literatureand journalism far greater than that between fiction and essay-writing. The line, too, dividing the poetry of Keats from the