To-day in warfare all the niceties of old-world tactics are fallen into contempt. No word of outworks, ravelins, of mamelons, of counter-scarps, of glacis, fascines; none of the terms by means of which Vauban obscured his art, are even mentioned. Armies fall to and blow such brains as they may have out of each other’s heads without so much as a salute. And so of literature, your “few first words,” your “avant-propos,” your nice approaches to the reader, giving him beforehand some taste of what is to follow, have also fallen into disuse. The man of genius (and in no age has self-dubbed genius called out so loud in every street, and been accepted at its own appraisement) stuffs you his epoch-making book full of the technicalities of some obscure or half-forgotten trade, and rattles on at once, sans introduction, twenty knots an hour, like a torpedo boat. No preface, dedication, not even an apology pro existenti ejus intervening betwixt the bewildered public and the full power of his wit. A graceless way of doing things, and not comparable to the slow approach by “prefatory words,” “censura,” “dedication,” by means of which the writers of the past had half disarmed the critic ere he had read a line. I like to fancy to myself the progress of a fight in days gone by, with marching, countermarching, manoeuvring, so to speak, for the weather-gauge, and then the general engagement all by the book of arithmetic, and squadrons going down like men upon a chessboard after nice calculation, and like gentlemen.

Who, hidden in a wood, watching a nymph about to bathe, would care to see her strip off her “duds” like an umbrella-case, and bounce into the river like a water-rat?—a lawn upon the grass, a scarf hung on a bush, a petticoat rocked by the wind upon the sward, then the shy trying of the water with the naked feet, and lastly something flashing in the sun which you could hardly swear you had seen, so rapidly it passed into the stream, would most enchant the gaze of the rapt watcher hidden behind his tree. And so of literature, wheedle me by degrees, your reader to your book, as did the giants of the past in graceful preface, dedication, or what do you call it, that got the readers, so to speak, into the book before they were aware. It seems to me, a world all void of grace must needs be cruel, for cruelty and grace go not together, and perhaps the hearts of the pig-tailed, pipe-clayed generals of the past were not more hard than are the hearts of their tweed-clad descendants who now-a-days blow you a thousand savages to paradise, and then sit down to lunch.

Let there be no mistake; the writer and the reader are sworn foes. The writer labouring for bread, or hopes of fame, from idleness, from too much energy, or from that uncontrollable dance of St. Vitus in the muscles of the wrist which prompts so many men to write (the Lord knows why), works, blots, corrects, rewrites, revises, and improves; then publishes, and for the most part is incontinently damned. Then comes the reader cavalierly, as the train shunts at Didcot, or puffs and snorts into Carlisle, and gingerly examining the book says it is rubbish, and that he wonders how people who should have something else to do, find time to spend their lives in writing trash.

I take it that there is a modesty of mind as deep implanted in the soul of man as is the supergrafted post-Edenian modesty of the body; which latter, by the way, so soon is lost, restraints of custom or convention laid aside.

Who that would strip his clothes off, and walk down Piccadilly, even if the day were warm (the police all drunk or absent), without some hesitation, and an announcement of his purpose, say, in the columns of the Morning Post?

Therefore, why strip the soul stark naked to the public gaze without some hesitation and due interval, by means of which to make folk understand that which you write is what you think you feel; part of yourself, a part, moreover, which once given out can never be recalled?

So of the sketches in this book, most of them treat of scenes seen in that magic period, youth, when things impress themselves on the imagination more sharply than in after years; and the scenes too have vanished; that is, the countries where they passed have all been changed, and now-a-days are full of barbed-wire fences, advertisements, and desolation, the desolation born of imperfect progress. The people, too, I treat of, for the most part have disappeared; being born unfit for progress, it has passed over them, and their place is occupied by worthy men who cheat to better purpose, and more scientifically. Therefore, I, writing as a man who has not only seen but lived with ghosts, may perhaps find pardon for this preface, for who would run in heavily and dance a hornpipe on the turf below which sleep the dead? And if I am not pardoned for my hesitation, dislike, or call it what you will, to give these little sketches to the world without preamble, after my fashion, I care not overmuch.

In the phantasmagoria we call the world, most things and men are ghosts, or at the best but ghosts of ghosts, so vaporous and unsubstantial that they scarcely cast a shadow on the grass. That which is most abiding with us is the recollection of the past, and . . . hence this preface.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham.