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By Root 1025 0

and possibly the world appeared to be passing under the dominion of writers newer and much more vivid. Those were the passionate days of the literary Cubists, Vorticists, Imagistes and the rest of the tapageux and riotous Jeunes4 of that young decade. So I regarded myself as the Eel which, having reached the deep sea, brings forth its young and dies – or as the Great Auk I considered that, having reached my allotted, I had laid my one egg and might as well die.5 So I took a formal farewell of Literature in the columns of a magazine called the Thrush6 – which also, poor little auk that it was, died of the effort. Then I prepared to stand aside in favour of our good friends – yours and mine – Ezra, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, H. D.,7, and the rest of the clamorous young writers who were then knocking at the door.

But greater clamours beset London and the world which till then had seemed to lie at the proud feet of those conquerors; Cubism, Vorticism, Imagism and the rest never had their fair chance amid the voices of the cannon, and so I have come out of my hole again and beside your strong, delicate and beautiful works have taken heart to lay some work of my own.

The Good Soldier, however, remains my great auk’s egg for me as being something of a race that will have no successors and as it was written so long ago I may not seem over-vain if I consider it for a moment or two. No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: ‘Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?’ for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.

Be that as it may, I was lately forced into the rather close examination of this book, for I had to translate it into French,8 that forcing me to give it much closer attention than would be the case in any reading however minute. And I will permit myself to say that I was astounded at the work I must have put into the construction of the book, at the intricate tangle of references and cross-references. Nor is that to be wondered at for, though I wrote it with comparative rapidity, I had it hatching within myself for fully another decade. That was because the story is a true story and because I had it from Edward Ashburnham himself and I could not write it till all the others were dead. So I carried it about with me all those years, thinking about it from time to time.

I had in those days an ambition: that was to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la mort, Maupassant had done for the French.9 One day I had my reward, for I happened to be in a company where a fervent young admirer exclaimed: ‘By Jove, The Good Soldier is the finest novel in the English language!’ whereupon my friend Mr John Rodker10 who has always had a properly tempered admiration for my work remarked in his clear, slow drawl: ‘Ah yes. It is, but you have left out a word. It is the finest French novel in the English language!’

With that – which is my tribute to my masters and betters of France – I will leave the book to the reader. But I should like to say a word about the title. This book was originally called by me The Saddest Story, but since it did not appear till the darkest days of the war were upon us, Mr Lane11 importuned me with letters and telegrams – I was by that time engaged in other pursuits! – to change the title which he said would at that date render the book unsaleable. One day, when I was on parade, I received a final wire of appeal from Mr Lane, and the telegraph being reply-paid I seized the reply-form and wrote in hasty irony : ‘Dear Lane, Why not The Good Soldier?’… To my horror six months later the book appeared under that title.

I have never ceased to regret it but, since the War, I have received so much evidence that the book has been read under that name that I hesitate to make a change for fear of causing confusion. Had the chance occurred during the War I should not have hesitated to make the change, for I had only two evidences that