The Project Gutenberg EBook of Nocturne, by Frank Swinnerton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Nocturne

Author: Frank Swinnerton

Release Date: February 26, 2005 [EBook #15177]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NOCTURNE ***

Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan and the PG Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.

NOCTURNE

By FRANK SWINNERTON

1917

TO MARTIN SECKER

THIS "NOCTURNE"

INTRODUCTION BY H.G. WELLS

"'But do I see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of
happy infancy? And may I--_may_ I?'

"This May I, meant might he shake hands?"

--DICKENS, _Great Expectations_.

I do not know why I should be so overpoweringly reminded of the
immortal, if at times impossible, Uncle Pumblechook, when I sit down to
write a short preface to Mr. Swinnerton's _Nocturne_. Jests come at
times out of the backwoods of a writer's mind. It is part of the
literary quality that behind the writer there is a sub-writer, making a
commentary. This is a comment against which I may reasonably
expostulate, but which nevertheless I am indisposed to ignore.

The task of introducing a dissimilar writer to a new public has its own
peculiar difficulties for the elder hand. I suppose logically a writer
should have good words only for his own imitators. For surely he has
chosen what he considers to be the best ways. What justification has he
for praising attitudes he has never adopted and commending methods of
treatment from which he has abstained? The reader naturally receives his
commendations with suspicion. Is this man, he asks, stricken with
penitence in the flower of his middle-age? Has he but just discovered
how good are the results that the other game, the game he has never
played, can give? Or has he been disconcerted by the criticism of the
Young? The Fear of the Young is the beginning of his wisdom. Is he
taking this alien-spirited work by the hand simply to say defensively
and vainly: "I assure you, indeed, I am _not_ an old fogy; I _quite_
understand it." (There it is, I fancy, that the Pumblechook quotation
c