Hard Facts

In a celebrated essay, Macaulay sums up Bacon’s career as a “chequered spectacle of so much glory and so much shame.” The words may fitly enough be applied not only to Bacon’s life but to most men’s lives and to most large experiments of human action. In 1942 I began to write a novel whose purpose was to trace the course of one such experiment from its beginnings in the eighties of last century up to our present time. I intended to call this novel, which would have been very long, So Much Glory: So Much Shame. It seemed to me as time went on that the war years, with the paper shortage, were not the best for the publication of so long a book as I had in mind. And, too, my writing during the war is so sporadic and occasional that progress was slow, and it might be years before the book as I conceived it (or at any rate as my conception worked out in practice) was finished. Things being thus, I decided that it would be better to publish the book piecemeal. In my plan, it was divided into three parts called Hard Facts, Dunkerley’s and The Banner. The first of these is the present volume, which makes, I think, a rounded and self-sufficient story. I hope that, in due course, the other volumes will do so, too; and that finally it may be possible to publish the three as one book bearing the title originally chosen for it.