An untitled fragment by D. K. Broster. By kind permission of the Principal and Fellows of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.
This consists of two fragmentary pages, filed alongside the three other untitled typescripts listed on the Writings of D. K. Broster page but not apparently belonging to any of them. Some of the material is shared with typescript 3, but this one is evidently addressed to an Australian audience (whereas the Horn Book Magazine was an American publication).
My work I suppose is rather old fashioned, but I am not ashamed of it, nor of the fact that as a newspaper critic recently sneeringly remarked of my last book ‘chivalry and honour are again at a premium.’ Why shouldn’t they be? What have the present generation of young writers whose handling of dreary or then often rather repulsive material is so immensely competent to give us in their place? Qualities like them have been the inspiration of much the greatest literature of the past, and, to come to practical matters of conduct, if man is to prefer a standard of behaviour below, and not above, his least admirable instincts, then he might as well return to the tree-tops, even to the primeval ooze from which he first emerged. Australia I am sure does not so misinterpret the meaning of her ‘Advance!’
It is possible that being a continent Australia is too vast to remember that she is an island, even as little England is; nevertheless I shall venture to send greetings as from one islander to others. Here in Britain it is not easy for us to forget the existence all round us of that sea to whose sadly disfigured shores we all rush in summer if we can, and which we must traverse if we wish to visit even the twenty mile distant soil of our nearest neighbour. And for myself, I was born outside a great seaport town—Liverpool, where the Mersey is wide as English rivers go, and almost my first recollections are of ships and smells of tar and ropes—liners, ferryboats, tugs, tramps, cargoes of timber out of steamers with names from Norse mythology, of bales of esparto grass. And still the sight now so sadly infrequent of a full rigged ship, even of some coasting schooner, has a power of enchantment which nothing else possesses.
I suppose the fact that I took my degree at Oxford in Modern History determined the trend of the writing which I had always from a child set my heart upon doing. But I was not able to turn to it for some years after leaving the University, since I had my living to earn—and that, too, was exclusively concerned with historical matters. Finally [the second page ends here]