KAI LUNG’S GOLDEN HOURS

PREFACE

Homo faber. Man is born to make. His business is to construct: to plan:to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing.

That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end (and in whichit is far easier to neglect it than in any other) is the art of writing. Yetthis much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless andephemeral: and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed.

The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a testof a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately.The essential is the matter of excellence: that a piece of work should achieveits end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character ofintrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamentalcondition.

It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglectconstruction. We write to establish a record for a few days: or to send athousand unimportant messages: or to express for others or for ourselvessomething very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which doesnot demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. No writer can bejudged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note heever sent round the corner; every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff.But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming that by thenature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinksworthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom hebelongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible.

Yet, I say, the great mass of men to-day do not attempt it in the Englishtongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothingof a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once:“This is the voice of such and such a one.” It is no one’smanner or voice. It is part of a common babel.

Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across work which isplanned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by thefinding of a wrought human thing in the wild. It is like finding, as I oncefound, de

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