SOURCE: Preface to Kai Lung's Golden Hours, Jonathan Cape, 1922, pp. vii-xii.

In the following essay, Belloc offers praise for the artistry of The Wallet of Kai Lung and Kai Lung's Golden Hours.

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...