Author's Note to the Reader - Page 2

but I do not promise anything but rage and
confusion to him who proposes to glance through my pages just to see
if I agree with him, or to begin in the middle, or to read without
a constantly alert attention. If you are not already a little
interested and open-minded with regard to social and political
questions, and a little exercised in self-examination, you will find
neither interest nor pleasure here. If your mind is "made up" upon
such issues your time will be wasted on these pages. And even if you
are a willing reader you may require a little patience for the
peculiar method I have this time adopted.

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but it is not so careless
as it seems. I believe it to be--even now that I am through with the
book--the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness which has always
been my intention in this matter. I tried over several beginnings of
a Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected from the outset the
form of the argumentative essay, the form which appeals most readily
to what is called the "serious" reader, the reader who is often no
more than the solemnly impatient parasite of great questions. He
likes everything in hard, heavy lines, black and white, yes and no,
because he does not understand how much there is that cannot be
presented at all in that way; wherever there is any effect of
obliquity, of incommensurables, wherever there is any levity
or humour or difficulty of multiplex presentation, he refuses
attention. Mentally he seems to be built up upon an invincible
assumption that the Spirit of Creation cannot count beyond two, he
deals only in alternatives. Such readers I have resolved not to
attempt to please here. Even if I presented all my tri-clinic
crystals as systems of cubes----! Indeed I felt it would not be
worth doing. But having rejected the "serious" essay as a form, I
was still greatly exercised, I spent some vacillating months, over
the scheme of this book. I tried first a recognised method of
viewing questions from divergent points that has always attracted me
and which I have never succeeded in using, the discussion novel,
after the fashion of Peacock's (and Mr. Mallock's) development of
the ancient dialogue; but this encumbered me with unnecessary
characters and the inevitable complication of intrigue among them,
and I abandoned it. After that I tried to cast the thing into a
shape resembling a little the double personality of Boswell's
Johnson, a sort of interplay between monologue and commentator; but
that too, although it got nearer to the quality I sought, finally
failed. Then I hesitated over what one might call "hard narrative."
It will be evident to the experienced reader that by omitting