Fascinating handwritten statement, three sides of two pages, 5.75 x 8.25, May 6, 1933. Charteris writes, in part: “At 26 I am still young, mad enough to believe in adventures. Not an adventure that depends on the artificial trappings of cloak & sword, but the adventurousness of the spirit. There are too many people who have taken weak refuge in the excuse that mankind cannot be romantic without flamboyant…To those who in their day wore these accoutrements, the costume was no more exciting than our plus-toms (?) & starched shirts are to us.
This is the philosophy I have tried to write into a few books, which I hope to go on writing: that the salvation of man, if he finds any, must come through a change of heart. There are words which in our day have become a symbol of ingenuousness, in which I think we must learn to believe once again—unless we are to surrender our destinies to the spirit of the machines that serve us. Glamour is one of them; romance is another. It has become a sophisticated fashion to cheapen & sneer at both.
But I wish to remember, & to write it again now while I am still young enough to believe it so sincerely that even in this…it rings out at times like a trumpet call, that there are years in the life of every man when he knows, as he will never know again, that there was more than a gross & materialistic philosophy in the old pagan search for wine, women, & song. When he knows that there is no challenge to a high heart than the call of a lost cause; & that one reckless fight for a thing he loves is worth a century of safe & comfortable equivocations.
I begin to acknowledge, too, that as the years go by, & the drab walls of this passionless era begin to close in from the once limitless horizons, this faith becomes more & more difficult to keep. But I believe that when once it has been lost, there is lost with it all the glory & the valour & the pride of life.” Some trivial corner creasing, rough left edges and a few small tears along the right edge of each page, otherwise fine condition. RRAuction COA.
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