o retail them, to adopt them; they
must be formed, created, truly felt. The work of a sincere artist is
almost certain to have some value; the work of an insincere artist is
of its very nature worthless.

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, was essentially a
man of affairs. Yet he contrived to be a student too. Thus, owing to
the fact that he often shifted his headquarters, I have seen a good
deal of general society in several parts of England. Moreover, I was
brought up in a distinctly intellectual atmosphere.

I was at a big public school, and gained a scholarship at the
University. I was a moderate scholar and a competent athlete; but I
will add that I had always a strong literary bent. I took in younger
days little interest in history or po