Nocturne

Nocturne

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: ISO-8859-1
*** 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 creeps in.) To all of which suspicions, enquiries and
objections, I will quote, tritely but conclusively: "In my Father's house
are many Mansions," or in the words of Mr. Kipling:
"There are five and forty ways Of composing tribal lays And every
blessed one of them is right."
Indeed now that I come to think it over, I have never in all my life read
a writer of closely kindred method to my own that I have greatly
admired; the confessed imitators give me all the discomfort without the
relieving admission of caricature; the parallel instances I have always
wanted to rewrite; while, on the other hand, for many totally dissimilar
workers I have had quite involuntary admirations. It isn't merely that I
don't so clearly see how they are doing it, though that may certainly be
a help; it is far more a matter of taste. As a writer I belong to one

school and as a reader to another--as a man may like to make optical
instruments and collect old china. Swift, Sterne, Jane Austen,
Thackeray and the Dickens of Bleak House were the idols of my
youthful imitation, but the contemporaries of my early praises were
Joseph Conrad, W.H. Hudson, and Stephen Crane, all utterly remote
from that English tradition. With such recent admirations of mine as
James Joyce, Mr. Swinnerton, Rebecca West, the earlier works of Mary
Austen or Thomas Burke, I have as little kindred as a tunny has with a
cuttlefish. We move in the same medium and that is about all we have
in common.
This much may sound egotistical, and the impatient reader may ask
when I am coming to Mr. Swinnerton, to which the only possible
answer is that I am coming to Mr. Swinnerton as fast as I can and that
all this leads as straightly as possible to a definition of Mr.
Swinnerton's position. The science of criticism is still crude in its
classification, there are a multitude of different things being done that
are all lumped together heavily as novels, they are novels as
distinguished from romances, so long as they are dealing with
something understood to be real. All that they have in common beyond
that is that they agree in exhibiting a sort of story continuum. But some
of us are trying to use that story continuum to present ideas in action,
others to produce powerful excitements of this