Produced by Tom Harris
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 proofa volume of short stories by an author named Richard Middleton. He isdead. It is an extraordinary book, and all the work in it is full ofa quite curious and distinctive quality. In my opinion it is veryfine work indeed."
It would be so simple if the business of the introducer orpreface-writer were limited to such a straightforward, honest, anddirect expression of opinion; unfortunately that is not so. For mostof us, the happier ones of the world, it is enough to say "I likeit," or "I don't like it," and there is an end: the critic has toanswer the everlasting "Why?" And so, I suppose, it is my office,in this present instance, to say why I like the collection of talesthat follows.
I think that I have found a hint as to the right answer in two ofthese stories. One is called "The Story of a Book," the other "TheBiography of a Superman." Each is rather an essay than a tale, thoughthe form of each is narrative. The first relates the sad bewildermentof a successful novelist who feels that, after all, his great workwas 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?
Then from "The Biography of a Superman" I select this very strikingpassage:—
Possessed of an intellect of great analytic and destructive force, he was almost entirely lacking in imagination, and he was therefore unable to raise his work to a plane in which the mutually combative elements of his nature might have been reconciled. His light moments of envy, anger, and vanity passed into the crucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand, and his work never took wings above his conception.
Now compare the two places; "the streets were more than a mereassemblage of houses;" . . . "his light moments . . . passed into thecrucible to come forth unchanged. He lacked the magic wand." I thinkthese two passages indicate the answer to the "why" that I am forcedto resolve; show something of the secret of the strange charm which"The Ghost-Ship" possesses.
It delights because it is significant, because it is no mereassemblage of words and facts and observations and incidents, itdelights because its matter has not passed through the crucibleunchanged. On the contrary, the jumble of experiences and impressionswhich fell to the lot of the author as to us all had assuredly beenplaced in the athanor of art, in that furnace of the sages which issaid to be governed with wisdom. Lead entered the burning of thefire, gold came forth from it.
This analogy of the process of alchemy which Richard Middleton hashimself suggested is one of the finest and the fittest for ourpurpose; but there are many others