Kai Lung's Golden Hours

by Ernest Bramah

  Produced by John Bickers

  KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS

  By Ernest Bramah

  First Published 1922.

  KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS

  BY

  ERNEST BRAMAH

  With a Preface by Hilaire Belloc

  PREFACE

  _Homo faber_. Man is born to make. His business is to construct: toplan: to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce afinished thing.

  That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end (andin which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other) is the artof writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is atonce worthless and ephemeral: and nearly the whole of our modernEnglish writing is unconstructed.

  The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it isa test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feelsmost intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence: that apiece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, thecharacter of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence,construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition.

  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 tosend a thousand unimportant messages: or to express for others or forourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way ofemotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannotcommand it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings,for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner;every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff. But when a man setsout to write as a serious business, proclaiming that by the nature ofhis publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinksworthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people towhom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible.

  Yet, I say, the great mass of men to-day do not attempt it in theEnglish tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in theirslipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a bookat random, say at once: "This is the voice of such and such a one." Itis no one's manner or voice. It is part of a common babel.

  Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across workwhich is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effectproduced by the finding of a wrought human thing in the wild. It islike finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grassof autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, aneglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming roundthe corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains andseeing before one a well-cultivated close and a strong house in themidst.

  It is now many years--I forget how many; it may be twenty or more, orit may be a little less--since _The Wallet of Kai Lung_ was sent me bya friend. The effect produced upon my mind at the first opening of itspages was in the same category as the effect produced by the discoveryof that hidden statue in Burgundy, or the coming upon an unexpectedhouse in the turn of a high Pyrenean gorge. Here was something worthdoing and done. It was not a plan attempted and only part achieved(though even that would be rare enough to-day, and a memorableexception); it was a thing intended, wrought out, completed andestablished. Therefore it was destined to endure and, what is moreimportant, it was a success.

  The time in which we live affords very few of such moments of relief:here and there a good piece of verse, in _The New Age_ or in the nowdefunct _Westminster_: here and there a lapidary phrase such as ascore or more of Blatchford's which remain fixed in my memory. Hereand there a letter written to the newspapers in a moment ofindignation when the writer, not trained to the craft, strikes out themetal justly at white heat. But, I say, the thing is extremely rare,and in the shape of a complete book rarest of all.

  _The Wallet of Kai Lung_ was a thing made deliberately, in hardmaterial and completely successful. It was meant to produce aparticular effect of humour by the use of a foreign convention, theChinese convention, in the English tongue. It was meant to produce acertain effect of philosophy and at the same time it was meant toproduce a certain completed interest of fiction, of relation, of ashort epic. It did all these things.

  It is one of the tests of excellent work that such work is economic,that is, that there is nothing redundant in order or in vocabulary,and at the same time nothing elliptic--in the full sense of that word:that is, no sentence in which so much is omitted that the reader isleft puzzled. That is the quality you get in really good statuary--inHoudon, for instance, or in that triumph the archaic _Archer_ in theLouvre. _The Wallet of Kai Lung_ satisfied all these conditions.

  I do not know how often I have read it since I first possessed it. Iknow how many copies there are in my house--just over a dozen. I knowwith what care I have bound it constantly for presentation to friends.I have been asked for an introduction to this its successor, _KaiLung's Golden Hours_. It is worthy of its forerunner. There is thesame plan, exactitude, working-out and achievement; and therefore thesame complete satisfaction in the reading, or to be more accurate, inthe incorporation of the work with oneself.

  All this is not extravagant praise, nor even praise at all in theconventional sense of that term. It is merely a judgment: a puttinginto as carefully exact words as I can find the appreciation I make ofthis style and its triumph.

  The reviewer in his art must quote passages. It is hardly the part ofa Preface writer to do that. But to show what I mean I can at leastquote the following:

  "Your insight is clear and unbiased," said the gracious Sovereign. "But however entrancing it is to wander unchecked through a garden of bright images, are we not enticing your mind from another subject of almost equal importance?"

  Or again:

  "It has been said," he began at length, withdrawing his eyes reluctantly from an unusually large insect upon the ceiling and addressing himself to the maiden, "that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without any loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice on a dark night."

  Or again:

  "After secretly observing the unstudied grace of her movements, the most celebrated picture-maker of the province burned the implements of his craft, and began life anew as a trainer of performing elephants."

  You cannot read these sentences, I think, without agreeing with whathas been said above. If you doubt it, take the old test and try towrite that kind of thing yourself.

  In connection with such achievements it is customary to-day to deplorethe lack of public appreciation. Either to blame the hurried millionsof chance readers because they have only bought a few thousands of amasterpiece; or, what is worse still, to pretend that good work is forthe few and that the mass will never appreciate it--in reply to whichit is sufficient to say that the critic himself is one of the mass andcould not be distinguished from others of the mass by his very ownself were he a looker-on.

  In the best of times (the most stable, the least hurried) the date atwhich general appreciation comes is a matter of chance, and to-day thepresentation of any achieved work is like the reading of Keats to afootball crowd. It is of no significance whatsoever to English Letterswhether one of its glories be appreciated at the moment it issues fromthe press or ten years later, or twenty, or fifty. Further, after avery small margin is passed, a margin of a few hundreds at the most, itmatters little whether strong permanent work finds a thousand or fiftythousand or a million of readers. Rock stands and mud washes away.

  What is indeed to be deplored is the lac
k of communication betweenthose who desire to find good stuff and those who can produce it: itis in the attempt to build a bridge between the one and the other thatmen who have the privilege of hearing a good thing betimes write suchwords as I am writing here. HILAIRE BELLOC

  KAI LUNG'S GOLDEN HOURS