I am talking.  If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing.  But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.  We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome.  We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable.  It is this achievement of my creed that I shall chiefly pursue in these pages.

But I have a peculiar reason for mentioning the man in a yacht, who discovered England.  For I am that man in a yacht.  I discovered England.  I do not see how this book can avoid being egotistical; and I do not quite see (to tell the truth) how it can avoid being dull.  Dullness will, however, free me from the charge which I most lament; the charge of being flippant.  Mere light sophistry is the thing that I happen to despise most of all things, and it is perhaps a wholesome fact that this is the thing of which I am generally accused.  I know nothing so contemptible as a mere paradox; a mere ingenious defence of the indefensible.  If it were true (as has been said) that Mr. Bernard Shaw lived upon paradox, then he ought to be a mere common millionaire; for a man of his mental activity could invent a sophistry every six minutes.  It is as easy as lying; because it is lying.  The truth is, of course, that Mr. Shaw is cruelly hampered by the fact that he cannot tell any lie unless he thinks it is the truth.  I find myself under the same intolerable bondage.  I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though, of course, I have had ordinary human vain-glory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it.  It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist.  It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.  One searches for truth, but it may be that one pursues instinctively the more extraordinary truths.  And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

For if this book is a joke it is a joke against me.  I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before.  If there is an element of farce in what follows, the farce is at my own expense; for this book explains how I fancied I was the first to set foot in Brighton and then found I was the last.  It recounts my elephantine adventures in pursuit of the obvious.  No one can think my case more ludicrous than I think it myself; no reader can accuse me here of trying to make a fool of him:  I am the fool of this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.  I freely confess all the idiotic ambitions of the end of the nineteenth century.