The House Of Souls

Contents


A Fragment of Life 1

The White People 111

The Great God Pan 167

The Inmost Light 245




Introduction


_It was somewhere, I think, towards the autumn of the year 1889 that the
thought occurred to me that I might perhaps try to write a little in the
modern way. For, hitherto, I had been, as it were, wearing costume in
literature. The rich, figured English of the earlier part of the
seventeenth century had always had a peculiar attraction for me. I
accustomed myself to write in it, to think in it; I kept a diary in that
manner, and half-unconsciously dressed up my every day thoughts and
common experiences in the habit of the Cavalier or of the Caroline
Divine. Thus, when in 1884 I got a commission to translate the
Heptameron, I wrote quite naturally in the language of my favourite
period, and, as some critics declare, made my English version somewhat
more antique and stiff than the original. And so "The Anatomy of
Tobacco" was an exercise in the antique of a different kind; and "The
Chronicle of Clemendy" was a volume of tales that tried their hardest to
be mediæval; and the translation of the "Moyen de Parvenir" was still a
thing in the ancient mode._