The Fortune

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Excerpt from The Fortune: A Romance of Friendship Dear G. H. B. I offer you this story not because I consider it a tribute of gratitude in any way worthy of a friend to whom I owe more than I shall ever be able to repay, but simply because, with all its defects, I hope you may discern in it a striving after Truth. No doubt the book will be dubbed by many elderly people as a mere pacificist tract masquerading under a thin disguise of fiction, but I do not think that you will so regard it. In writing The Fortune have tried to give a straightforward account of the spiritual adventures of an average intellectual in the first years of the war, and to show how the minds of persons of his age and temperament have become, almost inevitably, a battle-ground for opposing influences and conflicting ideals. I have purposely refrained from endowing my hero with any exceptional or heroic qualities. I suppose it will be agreed that his tragedy is that he is neither sheep nor goat, that he falls between two stools, and that he contrives successfully to make the worst of both worlds. It is the tragedy of how many thousands of old public-schoolboys who have taken part in the present conflict. Though the defects of this novel are entirely my own, it is but the bare truth to acknowledge that any saving qualities which it may possess are due principally to your unsparing criticism. As a critic whether of events, of books or of persons have never once known you allow your vision to be obscured either by sentiment or by passion. Even in that delirious August of 1914 you were never taken in for one moment by the clap-trap and the parrotcries of the Press. it will be along while before I forget the appalling atrocities committed by you on current humbug in those remote days! How scalding and ruthless your comments sounded then, how wickedly, how wilfully unfair! About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.