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 OPINIONS _by_ CLAUDE WASHBURN NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS _First published 1926_ Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. CONSTABLE LTD. at the University Press, Edinburgh TO T. R. YBARRA Of the following essays, ‘Zenith’ and ‘Black-and-White’ originally appeared in _The Freeman_, ‘Sophistication’ and ‘The French’ in _The Nineteenth Century and After_. My thanks are due to the editors of both publications for permission to reprint those essays here. C. C. W. PREFACE _Which should by all means be read, being quite as much an essay as any one of those that follow, and, if not the best, at any rate the shortest; so that it affords a swift and almost painless means of determining 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 the characters they create acquire a life of their own, take the bit in their teeth, and become altogether unmanageable. This is as it may be. Novelists are not among the most veracious of people, and are apt to state as true, if in a whimsical deprecatory manner, things about their work that they only wish were true. ‘How did I come to write _Wayfarers_? Really I can hardly say. Once begun, the book seemed to write 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, like clogging sediment in a water-pipe; they _will_ be expressed. And the reason that they trouble especially the writer of novels is that he will again and again find himself putting them in the mouths of characters 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 unload them repeatedly on conversation, he may shout them to the house-tops--all to no avail. But once he has embalmed them in print he is released from them, perhaps does not even believe in them any longer, and sets involuntarily about collecting other different opinions.