The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page B

indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. I have endeavoured in what follows to be wisely artful and artfully wise, and to tell truth as I understand it, not only concerning the superficial and ‛exciting’ aspects of this drama, but also concerning what lies deeper.
    I am aware that people often have completely distorted general ideas of what they are like. Men truly manifest themselves in the long patterns of their acts, and not in any nutshell of self-theory. This is supremely true of the artist, who appears, however much he may imagine that he hides, in the revealed extension of his work. And so am I too here exhibited, whose pitiful instinct is alas still for a concealment quite at odds with my trade. Under this cautionary rubric I shall however now attempt a general description of myself. And now I am speaking, as I explained, in the persona of the self of several years ago, the often inglorious ‘hero’ of the tale that follows. I am fifty-eight years old. I am a writer. ‘A writer’ is indeed the simplest and also the most accurate general description of me. In so far as I am also a psychologist, an amateur philosopher, a student of human affairs, I am so because these things are a part of being the kind of writer that I am. I have always been a seeker. And my seeking has taken the form of that attempt to tell truth of which I have just spoken. I have, I hope and I believe, kept my gift pure. This means, among other things, that I have never been a successful writer. I have never tried to please at the expense of truth. I have known, for long periods, the torture of life without self-expression. The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. Art has its martyrs, not least those who have preserved their silence. There are, I hazard, saints of art who have simply waited mutely all their lives rather than profane the purity of a single page with anything less than what is perfectly appropriate and beautiful, that is to say, with anything less than what is true.
    As is well known, I have published very little. I say ‘as is well known’, relying here for my fame upon publicity deriving from my adventures outside the purlieus of art. My name is not unknown, but this alas is not because I am a writer. As a writer I have reached and doubtless will reach only a perceptive few. The paradox perhaps of my whole life, and it is an absurdity upon which I do not cease to meditate, is that the dramatic story which follows, so unlike the rest of my work, may well prove to be my only ‘best seller’. There are undoubtedly here the elements of crude drama, the ‘fabulous’ events which simple people love to hear of. And indeed I have had, in this connection, my own good share of being ‘front page news’.
    I will not attempt to describe my publications. They were, in the context to which I alluded above, much talked of, though not I fear read. I published a precocious novel at the age of twenty-five. I published another novel, or quasi-novel, at the age of forty. I have also emitted a small book of ‘texts’ or ‘studies’, I would not exactly call it a work of philosophy. ( Pensées perhaps.) Time has not been given me in which to become a philosopher, and this I but in part regret. Only stories and magic really endure. How tiny one’s area of understanding is art teaches one perhaps better than philosophy. There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between ‘dreaming on things to come’ and ‘it is too late, it is all over’ is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt