Kai Lungs Golden Hours | Page 4

edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a
neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round the
corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and
seeing before one a well-cultivated close and a strong house in the
midst.
It is now many years--I forget how many; it may be twenty or more, or
it may be a little less--since /The Wallet of Kai Lung/ was sent me by a
friend. The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of its
pages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discovery
of that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpected
house in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge. Here was something worth
doing and done. It was not a plan attempted and only part achieved

(though even that would be rare enough to-day, and a memorable
exception); it was a thing intended, wrought out, completed and
established. Therefore it was destined to endure and, what is more
important, it was a success.
The time in which we live affords very few of such moments of relief:
here and there a good piece of verse, in /The New Age/ or in the now
defunct /Westminster/: here and there a lapidary phrase such as a score
or more of Blatchford's which remain fixed in my memory. Here and
there a letter written to the newspapers in a moment of indignation
when the writer, not trained to the craft, strikes out the metal justly at
white heat. But, I saw, the thing is extremely rare, and in the shape of a
complete book rarest of all.
/The Wallet of Kai Lung/ was a thing made deliberately, in hard
material and completely successful. It was meant to produce a
particular effect of humour by the use of a foreign convention, the
Chinese convention, in the English tongue. It was meant to produce a
certain effect of philosophy and at the same time it was meant to
produce a certain completed interest of fiction, of relation, of a short
epic. It did all these things.
It is one of the tests of excellent work that such work is economic, that
is, that there is nothing redundant in order or in vocabulary, and at the
same time nothing elliptic--in the full sense of that word: that is, no
sentence in which so much is omitted that the reader is left puzzled.
That is the quality you get in really good statuary--in Houdon, for
instance, or in that triumph the archaic /Archer/ in the Louvre. /The
Wallet of Kai Lung/ satisfied all these conditions.
I do not know how often I have read it since I first possessed it. I know
how many copies there are in my house--just over a dozen. I know with
what care I have bound it constantly for presentation to friends. I have
been asked for an introduction to this its successor, /Kai Lung's Golden
Hours/. It is worthy of its forerunner. There is the same plan, exactitude,
working-out and achievement; and therefore the same complete
satisfaction in the reading, or to be more accurate, in the incorporation
of the work with oneself.

All this is not extravagant praise, nor even praise at all in the
conventional sense of that term. It is merely a judgment: a putting into
as carefully exact words as I can find the appreciation I make of this
style and its triumph.
The reviewer in his art must quote passages. It is hardly the part of a
Preface writer to do that. But to show what I mean I can at least quote
the following:
"Your insight is clear and unbiased," said the gracious Sovereign. "But
however entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of
bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of
almost equal importance?"
Or again:
"It has been said," he began at length, withdrawing his eyes reluctantly
from an usually large insect upon the ceiling and addressing himself to
the maiden, "that there are few situations in life that cannot be
honourably settled, and without any loss of time, either by suicide, a
bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a
precipice on a dark night."
Or again:
"After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the
most celebrated picture-marker of the province burned the implements
of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants."
You cannot read these sentences, I think, without agreeing with what
has been said above. If you doubt it, take the old test and try to write
that kind of thing yourself.
In connection with such achievements it is customary to-day to deplore
the lack of public appreciation. Either