Some Of The Evil Of My Tale

He Feared His Maturity As It Grew Upon Him With Its Ripe Thought, Its Skill, Its Finished Art; Yet Which Lacked The Poetry Of Boyhood To Make Living A Full End Of Life.

All The Revision In The World Will Not Save A Bad First Draft: For The Architecture Of The Thing Comes, Or Fails To Come, In The First Conception, And Revision Only Affects The Detail And Ornament, Alas!

Suppose We Were (as We Might Be) An Influence, An Idea, A Thing Intangible, Invulnerable, Without Front Or Back, Drifting About Like A Gas? Armies Were Like Plants, Immobile, Firm-rooted, Nourished Through Long Stems To The Head. We Might Be A Vapour, Blowing Where We Listed Ours Should Be A War Of Detachment. We Were To Contain The Enemy By The Silent Threat Of A Vast, Unknown Desert

A Skittish Motorbike With A Touch Of Blood In It Is Better Than All The Riding Animals On Earth, Because Of Its Logical Extension Of Our Faculties, And The Hint, The Provocation, To Excess Conferred By Its Honeyed Untiring Smoothness.

In Peace-armies Discipline Meant The Hunt, Not Of An Average But Of An Absolute; The Hundred Per Cent Standard In Which The Ninety-nine Were Played Down To The Level Of The Weakest Man On Parade.... The Deeper The Discipline, The Lower Was The Individual Excellence; Also The More Sure The Performance.