The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF

responsible for the work that follows. The author of it, my friend Bradley Pearson, has placed the arrangements for publication in my hands. In this humble mechanical sense it is through my agency that these pages now reach the public. I am also the ‘dear friend’ (and such) who is referred to and at times addressed in the book. I am not however an actor in the drama which Pearson recounts. My friendship with Bradley Pearson dates from a time in our lives posterior to the events here narrated. This has been a time of tribulation when we needed and happily found in each other the blessings of friendship. I can say indeed with confidence that were it not for the encouragement and sympathy which I was able to give to Bradley, this story would probably have remained untold. Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent, or come to doubt their own wit. Without my help this could have been so with Bradley Pearson. He needed someone to believe him and someone to believe in him. He found me, his alter ego , at the time needful.
    What follows is in its essence as well as in its contour a love story. I mean that it is deeply as well as superficially so. Man’s creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. What follows is ambiguous and sometimes tortuously told. Man’s searchings and his strugglings are ambiguous and vowed to hidden ways. Those who live by that dark light will understand. And yet: what can be simpler than a tale of love and more charming? That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom. It has been the doom of Bradley Pearson. And in a quite different way it is my own.
    My task as editor has been a simple one. Perhaps I should more justly describe myself as – what? A sort of impresario? A clown or harlequin figure who parades before the curtain, then draws it solemnly back? I have reserved for myself the last word of all, the final assessment or summing up. Yet I would with better grace appear as Bradley’s fool than as his judge. It may be that in some sense I am both. Why this tale had to be written will appear, in more senses than one, within the tale. But there is after all no mystery. Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
    P. A. Loxias
Editor

Bradley Pearson’s Foreword
    Although several years have now passed since the events recorded in this fable, I shall in telling it adopt the modern technique of narration, allowing the narrating consciousness to pass like a light along its series of present moments, aware of the past, unaware of what is to come. I shall, that is, inhabit my past self and, for the ordinary purposes of story-telling, speak only with the apprehensions of that time, a time in many ways so different from the present. So for example I shall say, ‘I am fifty-eight years old’, as I then was. And I shall judge people, inadequately, perhaps even unjustly, as I then judged them, and not in the light of any later wisdom. That wisdom however, as I trust that I truly think it to be, will not be absent from the story. It will to some extent, in fact it must, ‘irradiate’ it. A work of art is as good as its creator. It cannot be more so. Nor, such as he in this case is, can it be less. The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret. I will not attempt to describe or name that which I have learnt within the disciplined simplicity of my life as it has latterly been lived. I hope that I am a wiser and more charitable man now than I was then-I am certainly a happier man – and that the light of wisdom falling upon a fool can reveal, together with folly, the austere outline of truth. I have already by implication described this ‘reportage’ as a work of art. I do not of course by this mean a work of fantasy. All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth,