Excerpt from The House of Quiet: An Autobiography

I have been reading this morning a very pathetic and characteristic document. It is a paper that has lurked for years in an old collection of archives, a preface, sketched by a great writer, who is famous wherever the English language is spoken or read, for the second edition of a noble book. The book, on its first appearance, was savagely and cruelly attacked; and the writer of it, hurt and wounded by a mass of hateful and male volent criticisms, piled together by an envious and narrow mind, tried, with a miserable attempt at jaunty levity, to write an answer to the vicious assailant. This answer is deeply pathetic, because, behind the des perate parade of cheerful insouciance, one seems to hear the life-blood falling, drop by drop the life-blood of a dauntless and pure spirit, whose words had been so deftly twisted and satanically misrepresented as to seem the utterances of a sensual and cynical mind.

In deference to wise and faithful advice, the preface was withheld and suppressed; and one is thankful for that and the episode is further a tender lesson for all who have faithfully tried to express the deepest thoughts of their heart, frankly and sincerely, never to make the least attempt to answer, or apologise, or explain. If one's book, or poem, or picture survives, that is the best of all answers. If it does not survive well, one has had one's say, thought ones thought, done one's best to enlighten, to contribute, to console and, like millions of other human utterances, the sound is lost upon the wind, the thought, like a rainbow radiance, has shone and vanished upon the cloud.

The book which is here presented has had its share both of good and evil report and it fell so far short of even its own simple pur pose, that I should be the last to hold that it had been blamed unduly. I have no sort of intention of answering my critics; but I would wish to make plain what the book itself perhaps fails to make plain, namely, what my purpose in writing it was. The book grew rather than was made. It was, from the first, meant as a message to the weak rather than as a challenge to the strong. There is a theory of life, wielded like a cudgel by the hands of the merry and high-hearted.

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