there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own
expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set
foot in Brighton and then found I was the last. It recounts my
elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious. No one can think my
case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here
of trying to make a fool of him: I am the fool of this story, and no
rebel shall hurl me from my throne. I freely confess all the idiotic
ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century. I did, like all other
solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried
to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was
eighteen hundred years behind it. I did strain my voice with a painfully
juvenile exaggeration in uttering my truths. And I was punished in the
fittest and funniest way, for I have kept my truths: but I have
discovered, not that they were not truths, but simply that they were not
mine. When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous
position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven
forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in
inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of
civilized religion. The man from the yacht thought he was the first to
find England; I thought I was the first to find Europe. I did try to
found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I
discovered that it was orthodoxy.

It may be that somebody will be entertained by the account of this happy
fiasco. It might amuse a friend or an enemy to read how I gradually
learnt from the truth of some stray legend or from the falsehood of some
dominant philosophy, things that I might have learnt from my
catechism--if I had ever learnt it. There may or may not be some
entertainment in reading how I found at last in an anarchist club or a
Babylonian temple what I might have found in the nearest parish church.