f literary Datas,
rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist. You know from
many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could remember of my
childhood, the book would not by this time have reached much beyond my
fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public school and my
own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I fancy it would
have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a place of which
I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that nowadays it is a
much better university than Oxford, and in thinking thus you are the
only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy. Obviously, too, it was
unavoidable in writing about St. James' that I should draw certain
characters from the life, and for doing this I have been attacked on
grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of schoolmasters to
be exempt from the privilege of public men to be sometimes caricatured.
Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With regard to the Oxford
dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to them what is after all
much more likely to be a true impression of their virtues and follies
than those formed by a schoolboy of his masters. Therefore, in this
second volume, "Sinister Street," there is not a single portrait of a
don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the undergraduate a much less
important factor than the schoolmaster is to the schoolboy, and the few
shadows of dons which appear in this volume are as vital as most dons in
the flesh seem to the normal undergraduate.

The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably will
be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as such
rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own existence
up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth writing at
such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of people who can
bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the capacity of the
spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your authority was said by
Aristotle. "Art," says _The Sydney Bulletin_, a curious antipodean
paper, "is selection." "It is time to protest," says an American paper,
"against these long books." At this rate, we shall soon be spending all
our time with books. "The enormous length must make it formless," other
critics have decided. Ultimately I believe Aristotle's remark to be the
truest guide, and I am tempted to hope that with the publicat