The frontispiece of the English edition represents a scene in the House
of Commons, and this brings to my mind a warning which was given me
similar to that on my entering new fields outside the one in which I
first made a reputation in fiction. When, in a certain year, I determined
that I would enter the House of Commons I had many friends who, in
effect, wailed and gnashed their teeth. They said that it would be the
death of my imaginative faculties; that I should never write anything any
more; that all the qualities which make literature living and compelling
would disappear. I thought this was all wrong then, and I know it is all
wrong now. Political life does certainly interfere with the amount of
work which an author may produce. He certainly cannot write a book every
year and do political work as well, but if he does not attempt to do the
two things on the same days, as it were, but in blocks of time devoted to
each separately and respectively, he will only find, as I have found,
that public life the conflict of it, the accompanying attrition of mind,
the searching for the things which will solve the problems of national
life, the multitudinous variations of character with which one comes in
contact, the big issues suddenly sprung upon the congregation of
responsible politicians, all are stimulating to the imagination,
invigorating to the mind, and marvellously freshening to every literary
instinct.
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