Excerpt: "In a book of political dialogues, published a year ago, I explained (perhaps unnecessarily) that they were entirely unauthentic—a personal interpretation, given in dramatic form, of certain minds and events that had gone to make history. But the dialogue which here follows differs from those, in that it has a solid basis in fact, and that I myself was a participant in the conversation which, as here recorded, is but a free rendering of what was then actually said. And if it would interest any of my readers to know where these paraphrases of memory stand nearest to fact, they will find them in those passages dealing with the writings of Carlyle, the Scotsman’s worship of success, and the theory of the complete life of the artist. Other references by the way were the bird with the Berkeleyan philosophy, and the novels of Mr. Benjamin Swift. The rest is my own development of the main theme, though it may well be that, here and there, I have remembered better than I know. The scene, as regards its setting—the outside[Pg 6] of a Paris restaurant—is true to history; and if, toward the end, a touch of drama has been introduced, the reader will understand that it is more symbolic than actual. The non-arriving guest, with the unreal name, did not, on that occasion, even begin to arrive. He was, nevertheless, a very real element in the tragic situation which I have tried to depict; and it is likely enough that there were more of his kind than one knew—that he was generic rather than individual."
