The Altar of the Dead: The Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace, and Other Tales (Classic Reprint) - Softcover

Excerpt from The Altar of the Dead: The Beast in the Jungle the Birthplace and Other Tales

To desire, amid these collocations, to place, so far as possible, like with like, was to invite The Beast in the Jungle to stand here next in order. As to the accidental determinant of which composition, once more - oi comparatively recent date and destined, like its predecessor, first to see the light in a volume of miscellanies The Better Sort, 1903) - I remount the stream of time, all inquiringly, but to come back empty-handed. The subject of this elaborated fan tasy - which, I must add, I hold a successful thing only as its motive may seem to the reader to stand out sharp - can't quite have belonged to the im memorial company of such solicitations; though in spite of this I meet it, in ten lines of an old note-book, but as a recorded conceit and an accomplished fact. Another poor sensitive gentleman, fit indeed to mate with Stransom of. The Altar - my attested pre dilection for poor sensitive gentlemen almost em barrasses me as I march -was to have been, after a strange fashion and from the threshold of his career, condemned to keep counting with the unreasoned prevision of some extraordinary fate the conviction, lodged in his brain, part and parcel of his imagination from far back, that experience would be marked for him, and whether for good or for ill, by some rare distinction, some incalculable Violence or unprecedented stroke. '50 I seemed to see him start in life under the so mixed star of the extreme of apprehension and the extreme of confidence all to the logical, the quite inevitable effect of the complication aforesaid: his having to wait and wait for the right recognition; none of the mere usual and normal human adventures, whether delights or disconcertments, appearing to conform to the great type of his fortune. So it is that he's depicted. No gathering appearance, no descried or interpreted promise or portent, affects his super stitious soul either as a damnation deep enough (if damnation be in question) for his appointed quality of consciousness, or as a translation into bliss sublime enough (on that hypothesis) to fill,'in vulgar parlance, the bill. Therefore as each item of experience comes, with its possibilities, into View, he can but dismiss it under this sterilising habit of the failure to find it good enough and thence to appropriate it.

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PREFIACE
It TilE Altar of the Dead" forms part of a volume
bearing the tiJle or ," Tenninations," which appeared
in I895. Figuring last in that collection of short
pieces, it here stands at the head of my list, not as
prevailing over its companions by length, but a.c:; being
ample enough and of an earlier date than several. I
have to add that with this fact of its tcnlporal order,
and the fact that, as I remember, it llad vainly been
" hawked about," knoCking, in the world of nlagazines,
at half-a-do7.:en editorial doors ilnpenetrably closed to
it, I shall have exhausted rny fund of allusion to the
influences attending its birth. I consult memory
fur tiler to no effect; so that if I should seenl to have
lost every trace of c. how I came to think" of such a
Inotive, didn't I, by a longer reach of .reflexion, help
myself back to the state ·of not having had to think
of it? The idea embodied in this composition must
in other words never have been so absent from my

Table of Contents

CONTENTS; THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD; THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE; THE lllRTHPLACE; THE PRIVATE LIFE; OVEN VINGRAVE; THE FRIENDS OF THE FRIENDS; SIR EO:·1UND ORME ; THE REAL RIGHT THING; THE JOLLY CORNER; JULIA BRIDE; xxxv; I; 53; I 1 5; 43 1

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