Sinister Street

my own case many critics have persisted in regarding “Youth’s Encounter” merely as an achievement of memory, and I have felt sometimes that I ought to regard myself as a sort of literary Datas, rather than as a mask veiling the nature of a novelist. You know from many hours of talk that if I were to set down all I could remember of my childhood, the book would not by this time have reached much beyond my fifth year. Obviously in so far as I chose my own public school and my own college at Oxford there has been autobiography, but I fancy it would have been merely foolish to send Michael to Cambridge, a place of which I know absolutely nothing. Yourself assures me that nowadays it is a much better university than Oxford, and in thinking thus you are the only Oxford man who has ever held such a heresy. Obviously, too, it was unavoidable in writing about St. James’ that I should draw certain characters from the life, and for doing this I have been attacked on grounds of good taste. I do not recognize the right of schoolmasters to be exempt from the privilege of public men to be sometimes caricatured. Therefore, I offer no apology for doing so. With regard to the Oxford dons I felt it really would be unfair to apply to them what is after all much more likely to be a true impression of their virtues and follies than those formed by a schoolboy of his masters. Therefore, in this second volume, “Sinister Street,” there is not a single portrait of a don. As a matter of fact, dons are to the undergraduate a much less important factor than the schoolmaster is to the schoolboy, and the few shadows of dons which appear in this volume are as vital as most dons in the flesh seem to the normal undergraduate.

The theme of these two stories is the youth of a man who presumably will be a priest. I shall be grateful if my readers will accept it as such rather than as an idealized or debased presentation of my own existence up to the age of twenty-three. Whether or not it was worth writing at such length depends finally, I claim, upon the number of people who can bear to read about it. A work of art is bounded by the capacity of the spectator to apprehend it as a whole. This on your authority was said by Aristotle. “Art,” says The Sydney Bulletin, a curious antipodean paper, “is selection.” “It is time to protest,” says an American paper, “against these long books.” At this rate, we shall soon be spending all our time with books. “The enormous length must make it formless,” other critics have decided. Ultimately I believe Aristotle’s remark to be the truest guide, and I am tempted to hope that with the publication of the second volume many irrelevancies have established their relevancy.

It is obvious that were I to continue the life of Michael Fane to the end of his seventy-second year, his story would run into twenty volumes as thick as this book. My intention, however, was not to write a life, but the prologue of a life. He is growing up on the last page, and for me his interest begins to fade. He may have before him a thousand new adventures: he may become a Benedictine monk: he may become a society preacher. I have given you as fully as I could the various influences that went to mold him. Your imagination of him as a man will be determined by your prejudice gathered from the narrative of these influences. I do not identify myself with his opinions: at the same time I may believe in all of them. He is to me an objective reality: he is not myself in a looking-glass.

I would like to detain you for a moment with a defense of my occasional use of archaic and obsolete words. This is not due to any “preciousness,” but to efforts at finding the only word that will say what I mean. To take two examples: “Reasty” signifies “covered with a kind of rust and having a rancid taste,” and it seems to me exactly to describe the London air at certain seasons, and also by several suggestive assonances to convey a variety of subtler effects. “Inquiline” sounds a pompous word for lodgers, but it has not yet been sentimentalized like “pilgrim”; it is not an Americanism like “transients,” and it does give to me the sense of a fleeting stay; whereas lodgers sound dreadfully permanent since they have been given votes.

We have in the English language the richest and noblest in the world, and perhaps after this war we shall hear less of the advocates of pure Saxon, an advocacy which personally I find rather like the attitude of the plain man who wants to assert himself on his first introduction to a duke.

There remains for me to apologize for the delay in the appearance of this volume. You who know how many weeks I have spent ill in bed this year will forgive me, and through you I make an apology to other readers who by their expressions of interest in the date of the second volume have encouraged me so greatly. Finally it strikes me that I have seemed above to be grumbling at criticism. This is not so. I believe there is nobody, certainly no young writer who is under such a debt of obligation as I am to the encouragement and the sympathy of his anonymous critics.

Accept this dedicatory epilogue, my dear John, as the pledge of our enduring friendship.

Yours ever,

Compton Mackenzie

Iver, October 18, 1914

Colophon

Sinister Street
was published between 1913 and 1914 by
Compton Mackenzie.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2010