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OPINIONS
BOOKS BY CLAUDE WASHBURN
PAGES FROM THE BOOK OF PARIS
GERALD NORTHROP
ORDER
THE LONELY WARRIOR
THE PRINCE AND THE PRINCESS
THE GREEN ARCH
{iii}
OPINIONS
by
CLAUDE WASHBURN
NEW YORK
E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
{iv}
First published 1926
Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable Ltd.
at the University Press, Edinburgh
{v}
TO
T. R. YBARRA
Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originallyappeared in The Freeman, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ inThe Nineteenth Century and After. My thanks are due to theeditors of both publications for permission to reprint those essayshere.
C. C. W.
PREFACE
Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as anyone of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate theshortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means ofdetermining whether it is worth while to borrow the book.
Opinions are troublesome things, especially to a writer of novels.Members of the latter, not very lovable tribe frequently assert that thecharacters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit intheir teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be.Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt tostate as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about theirwork that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to writeWayfarers? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed towrite itself.’
What is much more certain is that opinions have a life of their own.They form gradually in one’s mind and must be got rid of ever so often,{x}like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they will be expressed. Andthe reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that hewill again and again find himself putting them in the mouths ofcharacters who would never have held them.
For it is a curious fact that a writer cannot rid himself of opinions(or of anything else) save by writing them down in a book. He may unloadthem repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to thehouse-tops—all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print heis released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer,and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.
Why this should be so is a mystery. Unless the writer is even more thanusually vain, or unless he is one