The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings
is, as the saying runs, old as the hills--and as
immortal. Questionless, there was many a serviceable
brick wasted in Nineveh because finicky persons must
needs be deleting here and there a phrase in favor of
its cuneatic synonym; and it is not improbable that
when the outworn sun expires in clinkers its final ray
will gild such zealots tinkering with their "style."
Some few there must be in every age and every land of
whom life claims nothing very insistently save that
they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.
Yet, that the work of a man of letters is almost
always a congenial product of his day and environment,
is a contention as lacking in novelty as it is in
the need of any upholding here. Nor is the rationality
of that axiom far to seek; for a man of genuine
literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose
susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any
other, is inevitably of all people the one most
variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he,
in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and
compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his
times' tendencies, not merely in his writings--where it
conceivably might be just predetermined affectation--
but in his personality.
Such being the assumption upon which this volume is
builded, it appears only equitable for the architect
frankly to indicate his cornerstone. Hereinafter you
have an attempt to depict a special temperament--one in
essence "literary"--as very variously molded by diverse