We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the past—rather, we do impiously, for it begot us, and we are of its blood. The man, the nation that can sneer at dead loves and dead enthusiasms is as if a son should kick his father downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is old-fashioned is an easy triumph, for the dead cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it felt like to wear those clothes, use that forgotten slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the past, have done their cause disservice: youth will have its hit back at the greybeards for all the Polonius-tedium that boyhood endured, in forced silence. But our grandfathers were unwitting accomplices in the conspiracy of convention that then educated us; there was no attitudinizing about their faith, no arriÈre pensÉe in their respectability. To them, as to us, the fashion of an age seemed a Providential culmination; they played ball against its brick enclosure without stopping to ask whether or no it cramped them. And if they could rise up to defend their case against us, they would surely remonstrate with us by appealing to us to do as we would be done by: “Your own times, too,” they would say, “will one day seem uncouth, and frigid, and unimaginative: and brilliant essayists will ransack your gold for the dross in it, their flashlight will make the colour fade from your enthusiasms. Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men were: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same primal mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the past; you came from it, and into it you go.”

That is our apology—ours who are old—for this business of writing memoirs. You may, if you will, be content to read of us only what you will read in scrappy histories, but you will lose the sense of your own value in doing so: you will be like one who picks up a feuilleton at its twentieth chapter, with no more preparation than such as is offered by the editor’s synopsis of previous events: or like one who strolls in when the third act of a drama is being played, and will have his friends whisper a brief summary to put him au fait with the plot. We are Act 1 of the drama, you are Act 3; without us, you cannot understand yourselves. You must follow in detail, as it unfolds itself, the development of the times you sprang from, if you would taste the full savour of the times into which you sprang. You will accuse our retrospect of partiality and of false perspective: “All was not so rosy,” you will be tempted to say, “as grateful memory has pictured it, you have represented the exceptional as the typical, the typical as the exceptional; hard outlines have become blurred for you, and shadows, in their turn, taken substance.” Well, we do our best; we are fogeys, perhaps, and sentimentalists, but you will do well to take our depositions and sift them for yourselves.

One day you will be old, and you too will want to write memoirs; and you too will find that to recall the past is arduous, that modern ways of thinking and ex post facto judgments of value impose themselves upon your mind, and make you despair of the true estimate and the adequate phrase. And you will find that, however unclouded your own faculty of retrospect, you will search in vain for that magic touch which would interpret the past for your younger contemporaries, take them back with you and make them see it with your eyes, your presuppositions. If you could be now what you will be then, though it be farther than ever removed from the old days of which this book is a remembrancer, you would be more disposed to bear an old woman’s day-dreams with patience, and allow for her where she has exaggerated, and pardon her where she has erred.