THE HOUSE OF QUIET [Illustration: _The House of Quiet_] THE HOUSE OF QUIET AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON [Illustration] NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY 1907 COPYRIGHTED BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 1907 The Knickerbocker Press, New York PREFACE I have been reading this morning a very pathetic and characteristic document. It is a paper that has lurked for years in an old collection of archives, a preface, sketched by a great writer, who is famous wherever the English language is spoken or read, for the second edition of a noble book. The book, on its first appearance, was savagely and cruelly attacked; and the writer of it, hurt and wounded by a mass of hateful and malevolent criticisms, piled together by an envious and narrow mind, tried, with a miserable attempt at jaunty levity, to write an answer to the vicious assailant. This answer is deeply pathetic, because, behind the desperate parade of cheerful _insouciance_, one seems to hear the life-blood falling, drop by drop; the life-blood of a dauntless and pure spirit, whose words had been so deftly twisted and satanically misrepresented as to seem the utterances of a sensual and cynical mind. In deference to wise and faithful advice, the preface was withheld and suppressed; and one is thankful for that; and the episode is further a tender lesson for all who have faithfully tried to express the deepest thoughts of their heart, frankly and sincerely, never to make the least attempt to answer, or apologise, or explain. If one’s book, or poem, or picture survives, that is the best of all answers. If it does not survive, well, one has had one’s say, thought one’s thought, done one’s best to enlighten, to contribute, to console; and, like millions of other human utterances, the sound is lost upon the wind, the thought, like a rainbow radiance, has shone and vanished upon the cloud.