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ôThe Wallet of Kai Lung was a thing made deliberately,
in hard material and completely successful. It was
meant to produce a particular effect of humour by the
use of a foreign convention, the Chinese convention,
in the English tongue. It was meant to produce a
certain effect of philosophy and at the same time it
was meant to produce a certain completed interest of
fiction, of relation, of a short epic. It did all
these things.
ôIt is one of the tests of excellent work that such
work is economic, that is, that there is nothing
redundant in order or in vocabulary, and at the same
time nothing ellipticùin the full sense of that word:
that is, no sentence in which so much is omitted that
the reader is left puzzled. That is the quality you
get in really good statuaryùin Houdon, for instance,
or in that triumph the archaic Archer in the Louvre.
The Wallet of Kai Lung satisfied all these conditions.
ôI do not know how often I have read it since I first
possessed it. I know how many copies there are in my
houseùjust over a dozen. I know with what care I have
bound it constantly for presentation to friends. I have
been asked for an introduction to this its successor,
Kai Lung's Golden Hours. It is worthy of its forerunner.
There is the same plan, exactitude, working-out and
achievement; and therefore the same complete satisfaction
in the reading, or to be more accurate, in the
incorporation of the work with oneself.ö
ùHilaire Belloc
From the Introduction |
