Kai Lung’s Golden Hours - Ernest Bramah (the reading strategies book .TXT) 📗

Kai Lung’s Golden Hours

By Ernest Bramah.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Preface Kai Lung’s Golden Hours I: The Encountering of Six Within a Wood II: The Inexorable Justice of the Mandarin Shan Tien The Story of Wong Ts’in and the Willow Plate Embellishment III: The Degraded Persistence of the Effete Ming-Shu The Story of Ning, the Captive God, and the Dreams That Mark His Race I: The Malice of the Demon, Leou II: The Part Played by the Slave-Girl, Hia III: The Incoming of the Youth, Tian IV: Events Round Walled Ti-Foo IV: The Inopportune Behaviour of the Covetous Li-Loe The Story of Wong Pao and the Minstrel V: The Timely Intervention of the Mandarin Shan Tien’s Lucky Day The Story of Lao Ting and the Luminous Insect VI: The High-Minded Strategy of the Amiable Hwa-Mei The Story of Weng Cho; or, the One Devoid of Name VII: Not Concerned with Any Particular Attribute of Those Who Are Involved The Story of Wang Ho and the Burial Robe VIII: The Timely Disputation Among Those of an Inner Chamber of Yu-Ping The Story of Chang Tao, Melodious Vision and the Dragon IX: The Propitious Dissension Between Two Whose General Attributes Have Already Been Sufficiently Described The Story of Yuen Yan, of the Barber Chou-Hu, and His Wife Tsae-Che X: The Incredible Obtuseness of Those Who Had Opposed the Virtuous Kai Lung The Story of Hien and the Chief Examiner XI: Of Which It Is Written: “In Shallow Water Dragons Become the Laughingstock of Shrimps” XII: The Out-Passing Into a State of Assured Felicity of the Much-Enduring Two with Whom These Printed Leaves Have Chiefly Been Concerned The Story of the Loyalty of Ten-Teh, the Fisherman I: Under the Dragon’s Wing II: The Message from the Outer Land III: The Last Service Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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Preface

Homo faber. Man is born to make. His business is to construct: to plan: to carry out the plan: to fit together, and to produce a finished thing.

That human art in which it is most difficult to achieve this end (and in which it is far easier to neglect it than in any other) is the art of writing. Yet this much is certain, that unconstructed writing is at once worthless and ephemeral: and nearly the whole of our modern English writing is unconstructed.

The matter of survival is perhaps not the most important, though it is a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence: that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the fundamental condition.

It may be objected that the mass of writing must in any age neglect construction. We write to establish a record for a few days: or to send a thousand unimportant messages: or to express for others or for ourselves something very vague and perhaps very weak in the way of emotion, which does not demand construction and at any rate cannot command it. No writer can be judged by the entirety of his writings, for these would include every note he ever sent round the corner; every memorandum he ever made upon his shirt cuff. But when a man sets out to write as a serious business, proclaiming that by the nature of his publication and presentment that he is doing something he thinks worthy of the time and place in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs, then if he does not construct he is negligible.

Yet, I say, the great mass of men today do not attempt it in the English tongue, and the proof is that you can discover in their slipshod pages nothing of a seal or stamp. You do not, opening a book at random, say at once: “This is the voice of such and such a one.” It is no one’s manner or voice. It is part of a common babel.

Therefore in such a time as that of our decline, to come across work which is planned, executed and achieved has something of the effect produced by the finding of a wrought human thing in the wild. It is like finding, as I once found, deep hidden in the tangled rank grass of autumn in Burgundy, on the edge of a wood not far from Dijon, a neglected statue of the eighteenth century. It is like coming round the corner of some wholly desolate upper valley in the mountains and seeing before one a well-cultivated close and a strong house in the midst.

It is now many years⁠—I forget how many; it may be twenty or more, or it may be a little less⁠—since The Wallet of Kai Lung was sent me by a friend. The effect produced upon my