The Project Gutenberg EBook of Kai Lung's Golden Hours, by Ernest Bramah

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Title: Kai Lung's Golden Hours

Author: Ernest Bramah

Commentator: Hilaire Belloc

Posting Date: August 22, 2008 [EBook #1267]
Release Date: April, 1998

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS ***

Produced by John Bickers

KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS

By Ernest Bramah

First Published 1922.

KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS

BY

ERNEST BRAMAH

With a Preface by
Hilaire Belloc

PREFACE

_Homo faber_. Man is born to make. His business is to construct: to
plan: to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a
finished thing.

That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end (and
in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other) is the art
of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at
once worthless and ephemeral: and nearly the whole of our modern
English writing is unconstructed.

The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is
a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels
most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence: that a
piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the
character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence,
construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition.

It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect
construction. We write to establish a record for a few days: or to
send a thousand unimportant messages: or to express for others or for
ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of
emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot
command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings,
for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner;
every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff. But when a man sets
out to write as a serious business, proclaiming