Arnold Bennett

Books and Persons Arnold Bennett

The contents of this book have been chosen from a series of weekly articles which enlivened the New Age during the years 1908, 1909, 1910, and 1911, under the pseudonym "Jacob Tonson." The man responsible for the republication is the dedicatee, who, having myste-riously demanded from me back numbers of the New Age, sat in my house one Sunday afternoon and in four hours read through the entire series. He then an-nounced that he had made a judicious selection, and that the selection must positively be issued in volume form. Mr. Frank Swinnerton approved the selection and added to it slightly. In my turn I suggested a few more additions. The total amounts to one-third of the original matter. Beyond correcting misprints, soften-ing the crudity of several epithets, and censoring lines here and there which might give offence without help-ing the sacred cause, I have not altered the articles. They appear as they were journalistically written in Paris, London, Switzerland, and the Forest of Fon-tainebleau. In particular I have left the critical judg-ments alone, for the good reason that I stand by nearly all of them, though perhaps with a less challenging vivacity, to this day.