You, who have read the three volumes of The Sensationalists in manuscript, place me under further obligation by allowing me to dedicate the third to you in commemoration of a friendship which has been long, intimate and—to me—unmatched. Though I acquit you of responsibility for shortcomings in anything that I have written, the tale of these shortcomings would have been far longer if I had not availed myself of your unfailing vigilance and ever-ready help, as I have profited by your sensitive criticism and sympathetic encouragement.

The novel-trilogy is so little acclimatized to latter-day Georgian England that, though it may need no defence, it has provoked attacks from readers who will suffer all artistic forms but those which are offered to the public in his present majesty’s reign; I say no more in its apology than that it provides a convenient medium for a study in which the story-teller occupies, in succession, three different standpoints. In Lady Lilith, the emotion hunters and sensation-mongers who supply the drama of this trilogy are still practising their poses in mirrored and passionless detachment; in The Education of Eric Lane, artifice has grown to such strength that, in its contest with reality, the battle—between antagonists no longer detached nor passionless—stands drawn; in The Secret Victory, a close contact with reality deflates the tumid pretensions of artifice and forces an amateur company of tragi-comedians into the revealing daylight of the open street. Even if it had been possible to present these three phases in a single volume, I should have been sorry to lose the interval which bridged the transition from one phase to another.

Whether a study of flamboyantly conscious egotism deserves three volumes can hardly be decided impartially by one who has attempted the study; but the novelist has at no time been more insistently urged to contemplate unabashed egotism than in an age when the camera and the printing-press, the public confession and the private conversation, the conclusions of psychology and the phantasies of psycho-analysis combine forces to further the cult of personality. “Ninety-five per cent. of the human race,” said Mr. Cutler Walpole in The Doctor’s Dilemma, “suffer from chronic blood-poisoning, and die of it. It’s as simple as A. B. C. Your nuciform sac is full of decaying matter....” Ninety-five In reading the manuscript of this trilogy you encountered characters whom you had met in earlier novels; if at some future time you have the patience to read those later novels which have been executed, or at least planned, but not yet published, you are more than likely to meet some of them again. The practice of carrying certain characters from one book to another is hardly so much an arrogant assumption that the public has made their acquaintance in a former presentation as an effort to give additional verisimilitude to a picture which is being built up in sections: an academic history of the years before the war, of the war itself and of the years following it would inevitably introduce, in volume after volume, some at least of the same warriors, statesmen, financiers and social leaders; if, in an imaginary picture of the same period, the novelist offends by following the same method, he offends in the consoling company of Balzac, Disraeli and Thackeray among the dead and of Galsworthy and Mackenzie among the living.

To you I need offer no excuse for having hitherto confined myself for the most part to men and women whose means and leisure enable them to be occupied with public affairs or preoccupied with private introspection: as human beings, susceptible to pain and pleasure, they are not less interesting than those who devote a greater proportion of their time to the struggle for existence; in the opinion of some, they may win an added interest by the larger air of a more spacious life and by the subtile discrimination of wider intellectual sympathies; if a novelist offends by neglecting the narrow streets and sunless cottages of this era, he offends once more in the company of Disraeli and Thackeray.

The present volume of The Sensationalists brings the trilogy to an end; the reception accorded to the first volumes was too evenly mixed to indicate how the third will be greeted; but, since all three books were planned and completed as one whole before the first was published, it is as one whole that I should like them to be judged. Jointly and severally, however, their fate is of less importance to me than the pleasure which I derived from writing them; and, in the present volume, no words give me greater pleasure than those on the dedication page.