The Patchwork Papers

The original spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained, with the exception of apparent typographical errors which have been corrected.

In the original, the Table of Contents does not contain the entries to Chapters XI, XII, and XIII. However, in the electronic version, they have been added.

Cover

THE PATCHWORK PAPERS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Apple of Eden

Mirage

The City of Beautiful Nonsense

THE
PATCHWORK PAPERS

E. TEMPLE THURSTON

D·M·&·Co

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1910

Some eight of these papers appear in print for the first time. For those which have been published before, my thanks are due to the Editors of “The Onlooker” and “The Ladies’ Field” for permission to reprint.

THE AUTHOR.

Published February 1911

To
NORMAN FORBES ROBERTSON

My Dear Norman,

Here are my Patchwork Papers for you to unpick at your leisure. I have not presumed to call them essays, since it is nowadays unseemly for a novelist to attempt anything worthy of the name of letters—moreover, would any one read them? By the same token, I have not dared to call them short stories, and that, mainly because the so-called essential love interest is conspicuous by its absence. Really they are illustrated essays. What better name then than papers can be given them?

It may, for example, be pardonable in a paper to split an infinitive for the sake of euphony, as I have done in “From my Portfolio,”—but to split an infinitive in an essay! It were better to rob a church, or speak out one’s mind about the monarchy. All such things as these are treasonable. To call them papers then will save me much from my friends.

When they appeared serially, it was under the title “Beauties which are Inevitable.” I altered that when I thought of you trying to remember what the book was called, as you recommended it with a twinkle in your eye to your friends. But that title still stands justified in my mind, since these papers express the things which latterly have become realities to me. For wheresoever you may go in this world—whether it be striving to the highest heights, or descending, as some would have it, to the deepest depths—life is just as ugly or just as beautiful as you are inclined to find it.

In all my early work, until, in fact, I wrote “Sally Bishop,” I was inclined to find it ugly enough in all conscience. But now beauty does seem inevitable and, what is more, the only reality we have. For if, as they say, God made man in His own image, then to call the ugliness of man a reality is to curse the sight of God; in which case, it were as well to die and have done with this business of existence altogether.

To see nothing but ugliness then, or, as the modern school would have it, to see nothing but realism, is a form of mental suicide which, thank God, no longer appeals to me. For when every year I find the daffodils bringing up their glory of colour and beauty of line with unfailing perfection, I cannot but think that man, made in God’s image, was meant to be still more beautiful in his thoughts and deeds even than they. Then surely what man was meant to be must be the only true reality of what he is. All else happens to him. That is all.

Wherefore, when, in these pages, you read of Bellwattle and of Emily the housemaid, of my little old pensioner, or of the poor woman in Limehouse; when, too, you read my attempt to give words to the maternal instinct; then you will see realities as I have seen them over the past two years and I dedicate this true record of them to you, because I know that you will take them to be as real as the beauty of Livy, the manliness of Nod, or the colour of those wall-flowers which bloom by the little red-brick paths in that graceful garden of yours in Kent.

Yours always,
E. Temple Thurston.

Eversley, 1910.

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