In the retrospect of a life which had, besides its preliminary stage of childhood and early youth, two distinct developments, and even two distinct elements, such as earth and water, for its successive scenes, a certain amount of naiveness is unavoidable.  I am conscious of it in these pages.  This remark is put forward in no apologetic spirit.  As years go by and the number of pages grows steadily, the feeling grows upon one too that one can write only for friends.  Then why should one put them to the necessity of protesting (as a friend would do) that no apology is necessary, or put, perchance, into their heads the doubt of one’s discretion?  So much as to the care due to those friends whom a word here, a line there, a fortunate page of just feeling in the right place, some happy simplicity, or even some lucky subtlety, has drawn from the great multitude of fellow-beings even as a fish is drawn from the depths of the sea.  Fishing is notoriously (I am talking now of the deep sea) a matter of luck.  As to one’s enemies, those will take care of themselves.

There is a gentleman, for instance, who, metaphorically speaking, jumps upon me with both feet.  This image has no grace, but it is exceedingly apt to the occasion—­to the several occasions.  I don’t know precisely how long he had been indulging in that intermittent exercise, whose seasons are ruled by the custom of the publishing trade.  Somebody pointed him out (in printed shape, of course) to my attention some time ago, and straightway I experienced a sort of reluctant affection for that robust man.  He leaves not a shred of my substance untrodden:  for the writer’s substance is his writing; the rest of him is but a vain shadow, cherished or hated on uncritical grounds.  Not a shred!  Yet the sentiment owned to is not a freak of affectation or perversity.  It has a deeper, and, I venture to think, a more estimable origin than the caprice of emotional lawlessness.  It is, indeed, lawful, in so much that it is given (reluctantly) for a consideration, for several considerations.  There is that robustness, for instance, so often the sign of good moral balance.  That’s a consideration.  It is not, indeed, pleasant to be stamped upon, but the very thoroughness of the operation, implying not only a careful reading, but some real insight into work whose qualities and defects, whatever they may be, are not so much on the surface, is something to be thankful for in view of the fact that it may happen to one’s work to be condemned without being read at all.  This is the most fatuous adventure that can well happen to a writer venturing his soul amongst criticisms.  It can do one no harm, of course, but it is disagreeable.  It is disagreeable in the same way as discovering a three-card-trick man amongst a decent lot of folk in a third-class compartment.  The open impudence of the whole transaction, appealing insidiously to the folly and credulity of mankind, the brazen, shameless patter, proclaiming the fraud openly while insisting