The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Ghost Ship, by Richard Middleton

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Title: The Ghost Ship

Author: Richard Middleton

Release Date: February 11, 2004 [EBook #11045]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GHOST SHIP ***

Produced by Tom Harris

THE GHOST-SHIP

by Richard Middleton

Thanks are due to the Editors of _The Century_,
_English Review_, _Vanity Fair_, and _The Academy_, for
permission to reproduce most of the stories in this volume.

Preface

The other day I said to a friend, "I have just been reading in proof
a volume of short stories by an author named Richard Middleton. He is
dead. It is an extraordinary book, and all the work in it is full of
a quite curious and distinctive quality. In my opinion it is very
fine work indeed."

It would be so simple if the business of the introducer or
preface-writer were limited to such a straightforward, honest, and
direct expression of opinion; unfortunately that is not so. For most
of us, the happier ones of the world, it is enough to say "I like
it," or "I don't like it," and there is an end: the critic has to
answer the everlasting "Why?" And so, I suppose, it is my office,
in this present instance, to say why I like the collection of tales
that follows.

I think that I have found a hint as to the right answer in two of
these stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "The
Biography of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, though
the form of each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewilderment
of a successful novelist who feels that, after all, his great work
was something less than nothing.

He could not help noticing that London had discovered the
secret which made his intellectual life a torment. The
streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses,
London herself was more than a tangled skein of streets,
and overhead heaven was more than a meeting-place of
individual stars. What was this secret that made words
into a book, houses into cities, and restless and
measurable stars into an unchanging and immeasurable
universe?