PREFACE life, to commit himself to some great undertaking such as a pilgrimage; for a man has only one life to live. Also it will help to make him an agreeable fellow. He will derive an astonishing amount of amusement from planning the cost, poring over maps, and discussing the adventure beforehand with his wife; and afterwards he can tell his neighbours about it. Next, although a holiday is good, a pilgrimage is better; for it proceeds from those impulses which, though he repress them by daily work, still intrude and whisper that he was born for higher things. Almost every man feels that his fate holds him down to a rut; that, though he love his wife and children, he has missed for their sake to do God (whatever his God may be) some service which had been within his free capacity. Therefore his release upon pilgrimage offers him something which is more than a holiday, and at the same time something which is better, being less. It has not the dissoluteness of a holiday, which so often disappoints because the holiday-maker has cut himself off from his interests, and changed them for Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised, whereas the pilgrim is one who has made an appointment with his higher self, to meet at some distant date and place. As Donne says Meet me in London then Twenty dayes hence, and thou shalt see Me fresher and more fat, by being with men, By being with men'-that is another gain of the pilgrim's. He not only, like Ulysses, visits cities and foreigners, and learns their minds: he makes acquaintance, among his fellow-travellers, with men at once 'practical,' taking the day as it comes, and congregationally PREFACE bent on bettering their souls. Their sociability (you may note this in Chaucer's pilgrims) does not hide their serious common purpose, but rather takes it for granted, and so makes it more real. Again, the pilgrim is doing what the race has done constantly for many thousands of years; and to any one with a catholic mind (no matter what his creed) this ought to be a tremendous argument. Lastly, he is putting into drama and acting for himself that parable which-so true is it has in one way and another inspired the very best books in the worldamong them the Odyssey, the Eneid, the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote. All these are but different versions of the Pilgrim's Progress: and if this little book dares to follow the parable, it is because a truth so universal covers the small equally with the great. We are all on pilgrimage here: and though to beguile the road I have sung a song or two, and told perhaps too many stories, there has also been time to make a notebook of a few good thoughts I met on the way and pondered and sometimes took to rest with me. Perhaps the best of all, for all weathers and for every business, is the following of Fénelon's, which I have kept for my preface: 'Do everything without excitement, simply in the spirit of grace. So soon as you perceive natural activity gliding in, recall yourself quietly into the presence of God.. You will find yourself infinitely more quiet, your words will be fewer and more effectual, and, while doing less, what you do will be more profitable. It is not a question of a hopeless mental activity, but a question of acquiring a quietude and peace in which you readily advise with your beloved as to all you have to do.' A. T. QUILLER-COUCH. NOTE NOTE I MUST here thank those who have helped me by permitting the use of copyright poems and prose passages:— Canon H. C. Beeching, Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. William Canton, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Meredith, Mr. Herbert Trench, Mr. William Watson, Mr. Israel Zangwill; Lady Seeley and Mrs. Coventry Patmore; Mr. Lloyd Osbourne for three pieces by Robert Louis Stevenson; Mr. Bertram Dobell for extracts from Traherne and James Thomson; Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co. for sundry poems of Browning's and a prose passage from Thackeray; Mr. Alfred Nutt for two lyrics by W. E. Henley, and Mr. John Lane for one by William Brighty Rands; Messrs. Macmillan for two by T. E. Brown and two stanzas by Frederick Tennyson; Mr. Alfred Sutro for permission to use his translation of M. Maurice Maeterlinck, and Mr. George Allen for confirming that permission and for a poem by William (Johnson) Cory. Of other translators I have gone for Epictetus to the late Mr. George Long (Messrs. G. Bell and Sons); for Marcus Aurelius to Long and to Casaubon; for Cervantes to Mr. H. E. Watts (Messrs. A. and C. Black); for Pascal to Mr. W. F. Trotter, who made the excellent rendering for Messrs. J. M. Dent and Co.'s 'Temple Classics'; for two passages from Fénelon to the anonymous editor of some selections from the Lettres Spirituelles published by the H. M. Caldwell Co. of New York and Boston. For other translations I am responsible: while for the text of many of the poems included I have relied upon redactions made by me for the Oxford Book of English Verse, published by the Clarendon Press. A. T. Q.-C. |