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In order to warn off trespassers, I have begun my novel with four chapters that an expert bookmaker—indeed, my own book-maker—has pronounced dull: I knew that only those to whom the book belonged would persevere. By the same token, being aware that the story which is prefaced by an apology is ended with suspicion, I preface this story with an apology: I want to apologize to my friends for using them and to my enemies for not giving them what they have expected; I want to create in the minds of the former the suspicion that I am darker than I have been painted, and in the minds of the latter the suspicion that I am not a whited sepulcher but a blackened altar.

In 1909 I projected, vaguely it is true, a cycle of four novels, each to be independent of the others in plot and character, but all carrying forward a definite view of life. As, however, the announcement of a cycle is the surest means of alienating readers, not to mention publishers, I held my tongue about the general plan and concerned myself, in public, only with its separate parts. These were "The House of Bondage," "The Sentence of Silence," "Running Sands" and "The Spider's Web."

Privately, the first question demanding answer was that of method. In what I had to say I believed burningly, as I still believe deeply, and the great thing with me was not to say it in the manner that most people would call Art, but to say it in the manner that would convert as many readers as possible to my way of thinking. I did not want to produce the effect of a work of Art; I wanted to produce conviction of truth. On the one hand, I must avoid even the appearance of a personal interest in my characters, because that would divert my readers into the charge of sentimentality; and on the other, I must not hesitate to marshal my events in their largest force, even though the reviewers called this melodrama.

Here is a choice that is sure to come sooner or later to every writer of fiction: the choice between what he has considered Art for Art's sake and what he considers art for Man's sake. He has kept in mind the day when his books will be judged solely by their own merits, when the causes with which he sympathizes have been defeated and forgotten or established and beyond the need of sympathy; when new evils demand new remedies and old wounds are healed. He knows, as few of his contemporary readers can know, that then he will be heavily handicapped by all that is immediate or local in what he writes; that by nothing save adherence to the eternal standards of Art can he endure. He may be certain, in his own mind, that any true art is the expression, in the manner best calculated to secure a desired effect, of the ideas essential to the effect, but he will be equally sure that the world will not so consider. If he sets any propaganda above Art, the future will forget his work, the present meet it with prejudice, probably with opposition; and against all this he has to set only his own faith in the righteousness of the thing he has to say.

I made my choice and began my cycle with that one of my four novels which I knew would receive the readiest hearing. In "The House of Bondage" I wanted to put before my readers the theory that the superimposing of one human being's will, or the will of any group of human beings, upon any other's is the Great Crime. For the purposes of illustration, I chose for attack the chief present means of such imposition or compulsion, the pressure of our economic system, and depicted its effects in forcing women into prostitution. The result was amazing: the book sold and, they tell me, is still selling in my own and several other countries and tongues; it either originated or promoted a series of sociological crusades and legislative investigations concerning themselves with the symptoms and neglecting the disease, and by no persons was it so heartily welcomed as by those who are themselves the instruments of compulsion. I began to think that the instruments were becoming conscious and that I might not be so unpopular after all.

I was never more mistaken. In "The Sentence of Silence" I proceeded to show other effects of the same evil compulsion: the effects of our failure to instruct our children in sex-hygiene; of imposing upon our heirs the moral code that our economic system has imposed upon us, and of imposing upon our daughters an abstinence from which we absolve our sons. In its circulation, this book left its publishers nothing to complain of; but its reception was of a sort vastly different from that of its predecessor. Parents that were loath to see other people's daughters forced into prostitution were shocked at a proposal to educate their own sons against the practice of seduction; husbands that lived in secret polygamy were aghast at the idea of instructing their wives in any code save that which they preached, but did not follow; and men that took any woman's body they could get were horrified at the notion of any woman sharing their liberty.

The remarkable book-reviewer of the generally sane Philadelphia "Inquirer" upbraided me because, after I had dragged my central character, Dan Barnes, through the sewers of debauchery and venereal disease, I did not "save" him by marrying him to a "pure" woman!

Came the third novel, "Running Sands," and came a louder protest. I had here tried to take a step further my argument against compulsion and to show that, if I had been right before, then compulsion by matrimony—the marriage of the old to the young and the knowing to the ignorant, rape within wedlock and forcing of wives to become mothers against their will—was wrong. Here again the people read and the instruments of compulsion condemned me. Those persons who, without a wry face among them, swallow the funny but futile jokes of another type of fiction were so whole-hearted in their curses of my book that I was inclined to believe their present bitterness enhanced by their recollection of how they had once praised me.

Now I have written "The Spider's Web," the last of my four, and I have read that it is expected to be to its predecessors what Landor said the fourth George was to his. For a good pair of eyes at the conventional point of view, it is all this and more; but then there are no good eyes at the conventional point of view, and so I fear that, without help, the condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running Sands" may find this novel innocent: there is only one "bad" woman among its speaking-roles, and she appears but three brief times. In order that my condemners may not miss what they want to find in me, I shall tell them in a simpler form than the dramatic what I have done.

I have made Luke Huber a man that comes to see the sin of compulsion exerting itself against humanity in all the powers that conduct modern society; in the ownership of men and things; in our entire system of production and distribution, and in the creatures and ministers of that system: Government, Politics, Law, and what passes by the name of Religion.

Such a mind as Huber's comes to Dora Marsden's conclusion: "Life is no two days the same: the same measure never fits twice exactly; hence the futility of state-making, law-making, moral-making, when all that is of importance is life-augmenting, and that is the individual's affair." He sees that only Labor creates wealth, and that nothing should be robbed of a fraction of what it creates. He sees that actually government is "not the president, congress and the courts, not any body or power created by the Constitution, but always a combination of important business interests,"[#] not even any individual, and that even if it were completely constitutional it would still be compulsion—that to "consent" to be governed is to consent to be compelled.

[#] Charles Edward Russell.

He would argue of politics:

"We Americans pretend to hate kings, and so we devise a republic; finding the rule of one man bad, we believe we can better it by multiplying it by ninety millions; finding an ounce has evil effects, we take a ton. We simply change the tyranny of one for the tyranny of many. Even if the will of our fifteen million voters ruled us as they tell us it does, then each one of the fifteen million would be giving all the 14,999,999 others the right to interfere with him in return for his one fifteen-millionth right to take a hand in interfering with them. For that fraction of power over others, he would be giving away all his power over himself."

Huber would say of religion and law:

"Both are tools in the hands of compulsion. Both try to belittle divine humanity, the first making Man a pygmy before God and the second making Man a pygmy before a few men. There can be no crime against God, since God, or the force that created the world, is omnipotent; no crime against law, since law is an instrument of the great crime. The law a deterrent? It isn't. The statistics prove that, so far as statistics can prove anything. But you prove it yourself. Why do you try to refrain from conscious wrong? Not because you're afraid of the law in heaven or on earth—you're not a coward. You simply want to do the decent thing because it is the decent thing. The desire to do the decent thing: that's all the religion and law there is to-day among even the people that make laws and religions for the purpose of ruling other people by them. The rulers sin only because their system has dimmed their judgment of the decent thing, and so they go on maintaining their law and their religion. The ruled will want to do the decent thing just as soon as they become responsible creatures through the abolition of these compulsions, exactly as the rulers, though dulled by keeping up their system, wanted to do it as soon as they became responsible creatures by growing above the dictates of these compulsions."

Other men, other religions. For some faith; for some denial. Huber's religion was the Gospel of Negation.

He came to this by conversion, which means the sudden revelation by the sub-conscious self to the conscious self of the meanings that the sub-conscious self has long been drawing from the conscious self's experiences. The outward phenomena of such conversions—"being saved," "receiving grace," "being regenerated," "experiencing religion"—are perfectly familiar to all persons that have attended evangelical churches, know the work of the Salvation Army, or have read Harold Begbie's "Broken Earthenware." The psychology of the force causing them has been elaborately, but not always scientifically, treated in William James's stimulating volume, "Some Varieties of Religious Experience." The force itself can, and often does, change the entire life of a man from evil to good. The men so changed that we most hear of are changed by an affirmation of faith, because they are men whose only spiritual experience has been in connection with accepted religions and because their change is generally first exhibited in the public meeting-place of the followers of some such religion; but there are other men similarly changed by a denial of faith, because they have had spiritual experiences distinct from any accepted religion, and of them we hear little, because their change is generally wrought in the solitude in which they have had those spiritual experiences which are unconnected with accepted religion.

Huber was a man of the latter sort. Being of that sort, he says the last word that follows logically from an acceptance of "The House of Bondage."

About the manner of this last word I should, perhaps, say something more. I have not, I confess with shame, read M. Fabre's book on the habits of the spider, but I have read other books and studied the spider in my own garden; and the more I learned of web and spider the more I realize how Huber would see their simulacra in our civilization and learn at last that there the web outlived many spiders. That is how I got my title, and that is why I have tried to construct my chapters with a certain rough resemblance to the female diadem-spider's web. At the end, both the web and Huber win: the former because it catches its fly and goes on catching other and larger flies; the latter because his soul has found itself.

The method of procuring data requires a fuller explanation. The writer who endeavors to present actual conditions in fictional form has constantly to choose between truth and facts, and if his readers accept his facts, they are inclined to doubt his imagination. In all of these four books, I have been careful to present only types, but I have tried to endow each type with character, and each character has assumed a living personality in my own mind. I have used no person and no event that was isolated; but, having individualized my types and chosen my typical events, I have felt free to employ the latter in whatever way seemed to me best fitted to enforce my argument, and at liberty to imagine what the former would think and do under the stress of the latter. I have heard of a dozen women in real life designated as the originals of Mary Denbigh, three wives selected as Muriel Stainton, and one man—myself—named as Dan Barnes. The discoverers of these prototypes only flattered my powers of detection and portraiture at the expense of my imagination and good taste.

I intended to present, and I have presented, simply certain types produced by our civilization and working in the media of our economic system. I spent considerable time in New York last winter to procure certain data; I found the data, selected what was typical as I saw it, and made my story. "The Spider's Web," whether well done or ill, has been done by my own imagination.

Help I have had and eagerly sought. An historian always cites his authorities and acknowledges his assistants; I could never see why a novelist should be less honest or less courteous, since every realist must delegate some of his research-work, and even the writer of that fiction farthest from life must take something from the fancy of his acquaintances. I know, and I shall not soon forget, how much "The House of Bondage" owes to the encouragement given my work by its publishers. During the latter part of the actual writing of "The Spider's Web," it was impossible for either my wife or me to be in New York, and I taxed the generous patience of many a friend by inquiries. I exacted tribute from Max Eastman's editorials in "The Masses," Walter Lippmann's papers in "The Forum," and C. P. Connolly's in "Everybody's Magazine" as expressing three current phases of American opinion; I even seized a picture from Mary Macdonald Brown's accounts of New York and secured from an editorial in "The Nation" my reference to the past of the Astor House. Molière took his own where he found it; I have taken other men's at my need. To all of these my score is long; to those few and fine newspaper and magazine critics and reviewers who have seen my purpose and helped it—who, when they have differed or blamed, blamed or differed honestly—to them, from whom I have learned so much, my obligation is still greater.

No opinions that are worth while are unalterable; only the insincere have fixed convictions: my cycle of four books expresses an attitude toward life that I may some day very well change. This series completed, I am left with my conscience free and my brain at liberty to turn toward work that I may try to design only by the more lasting standards of Art, but no change of belief or work will make me regret having expressed what I believed. I am thoroughly aware of how, if they understood it, the condemners of "The Sentence of Silence" and "Running Sands" would condemn this book. I am equally aware of how many persons that are my comrades, friends, and well-wishers will alter their relations toward me when they have read "The Spider's Web"; but, though I shall be sorry to lose these, I shall not be sorry for the reason of their loss. Horace Traubel, who puts most things well, has put this well:

"I have tried to stay in the house of comfort,

to sleep in my bed of ease,

But something not outside of me, something inside of me says:

This will not do....

I have tried the easy way: it was hard:

Now I will try the hard way: I guess it will be easier."

REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN.

POSCHIAVO, SWITZERLAND,

8th September, 1913.