commentary. This is a comment against which I may reasonably
expostulate, but which nevertheless I am indisposed to ignore.

The task of introducing a dissimilar writer to a new public has its own
peculiar difficulties for the elder hand. I suppose logically a writer
should have good words only for his own imitators. For surely he has
chosen what he considers to be the best ways. What justification has he
for praising attitudes he has never adopted and commending methods of
treatment from which he has abstained? The reader naturally receives his
commendations with suspicion. Is this man, he asks, stricken with
penitence in the flower of his middle-age? Has he but just discovered
how good are the results that the other game, the game he has never
played, can give? Or has he been disconcerted by the criticism of the
Young? The Fear of the Young is the beginning of his wisdom. Is he
taking this alien-spirited work by the hand simply to say defensively
and vainly: "I assure you, indeed, I am _not_ an old fogy; I _quite_
understand it." (There it is, I fancy, that the Pumblechook quotation
creeps in.) To all of which suspicions, enquiries and objections, I will
quote, tritely but conclusively: "In my Father's house are many
Mansions," or in the words of Mr. Kipling:

"There are five and forty ways
Of composing tribal lays
And every blessed one of them is right."

Indeed now that I come to think it over, I have never in all my life
read a writer of closely kindred method to my own that I have greatly
admired; the confessed imitators give me all the discomfort without the
relieving admission of caricature; the parallel instances I have always
wanted to rewrite; while, on the other hand, for many totally dissimilar