I mean to try, in the pages that follow, to be as sincere as I can.
It is not an easy task, though it may seem so; for it means a
certain disentangling of the things that one has perceived and felt
for oneself from the prejudices and preferences that have been
inherited, or stuck like burrs upon the soul by education and
circumstance.

It may be asked why I should thus obtrude my point of view in
print; why I should not keep my precious experience to myself; what
the value of it is to other people. Well, the answer to that is
that it helps our sense of balance and proportion to know how other
people are looking at life, what they expect from it, what they
find in it, and what they do not find. I have myself an intense
curiosity about other people's point of view, what they do when
they are alone, and what they think about. Edward FitzGerald said
that he wished we had more biographies of obscure persons. How
often have I myself wished to ask simple, silent, deferential
people, such as station-masters, butlers, gardeners, what they make
of it all! Yet one cannot do it, and even if one could, ten to one
they would not or could not tell you. But here is going to be a
sedate confession. I am going to take the world into my confidence,
and say, if I can, what I think and feel about the little bit of
experience which I call my life, which seems to me such a strange
and often so bewildering a thing.

Let me speak, then, plainly of what that life has been, and tell
what my point of view is. I was brought up on ordinary English
lines. My father, in a busy life, held a series of what may be
called high official positions. He was an idealist, who, owing to a
vigorous power of practical organization and a mastery of detail,