PREFACE.
When a book is finished, and the weary hand lays down the
pen, a writer is apt to lean back in his chair, fall into reverie, and
ask himself what will be the probable fate of his venture when
launched on the often stormy ocean of letters. The moment is an
anxious one if his temperament is timid—an interesting one, however
cool and philosophic he may be. The last page deposited on
the pile containing so many other pages completes a task which
has absorbed more or less of his life. And if he is a conscientious
laborer—an architect who will not leave any portion of his building
incomplete, or filled up with rubbish—he has not shrunk from
this exhausting toil. Day after day and week after week—month
after month, it may be, and even year after year, sometimes—he
has forgotten the outer world, with all its allurements, to live in
the world of his imagination. Time has passed for him like a
dream, and he has seen only the figures of his Dreamland. While
the sun has been shining, and happy idlers have been basking in
its light and warmth, he has not seen it, or has closed his eyes to
it, absorbed in his ever-recurring toil. The birds have not sung
for him, or the flowers bloomed—nor has night, even, brought him
rest. The wind sighing around the gables has lulled others to
healthful sleep—he has watched, and not slept, hearing the old
clock mark the hours one by one as they passed away; a solitary
toiler, recording the histories of the men and women of his fancy,
who have been to him the real men and women of his life—far
more real than those of his actual acquaintance. He has seen their
smiles or their frowns—entered into all their feelings—sympathized
with their joys and sorrows, their tears and their laughter,
until these persons of his imagination have come to be real persons,
nay, old friends, whom he loves and would not part with.
But the moment has come at last when he must bid them farewell—when
he will no longer hear their voices or see their faces
smile on him alone. They are known only to him now: to-morrow
they will be known to the world—or at least to a small portion
of it. What will that world think of them?—that they are agreeable
people, or dull people? Will they make friends everywhere,
or enemies instead? What will be their fate in the great world
which they are about to enter?
An author who has labored conscientiously to produce something
worthy to be read—which can do no harm and may do some
good—must muse after some such fashion as this on the reception
of his work, anticipating the probable criticisms it will arouse.
In the case of the volume before the reader, this criticism may
be foretold with tolerable accuracy. The incidents are singular,
and may be styled improbable—a term which means, colloquially,
untrue to nature—and the truth of this criticism, as applied to such
works, is worthy of a brief examination.
What, after all, is improbable in this world? What occurrence
is singular? The singular is not the improbable. Men rise and
make their toilettes, and go to their affairs, and return home to
sleep—and this routine goes on year after year, with little or no
interruption. But are there no other lives which are subjected
to greater vicissitudes? Is life always commonplace, and the current
untroubled? Alas! it is tragic and frightful, often; it does
not always flow quietly; it is broken into foam, and rushes violently
under the influence of subterranean forces—the passions of
wrath, hatred, the greed of gold, or of lust, or murder. You take
up a newspaper, and there is a crime in every column; or a volume
of memoirs, and an “improbable” incident occurs in every chapter.
Most men who have passed forty have heard private family histories
so strange and terrible that they affect the mind like a nightmare.
And yet these crimes, “improbabilities,” and deeds so fearful
that they are only whispered under the breath, were actual
occurrences, and not distortions of an unbridled fancy—as real
events in the lives of human beings as the most commonplace incidents
of every-day existence.
The experience or the reading of every one must have proved to
him the existence of this “night side” of human nature—this
strange phase of life—and it is difficult to understand why a writer
should be forbidden to delineate it. If he ventures to do so, nevertheless,
his work is styled “sensational,” and he is ranked with
the “exciting” school of writers. And yet no writers are more
exciting than the great masters of the art—let us say Shakespeare
and Scott. The one paints in Hamlet a human being warned by a
ghost, stabbing a councillor, fighting in a grave, and killed by a
poisoned rapier; in Macbeth a soldier wading through blood to the
crown promised him by witches; while Scott shows us the Countess
of Leicester dashed to death on the stones of Cumnor, and
Ravenswood engulphed in the treacherous quicksand, while Lucy
Ashton crouches with the bloody knife in her hand, raving mad,
after murdering her husband. In the dramas and romances of
these two great masters of the art of writing, the passions of the
human heart run riot and are drawn in vivid colors. The incidents
are no less strange and tragic, too, than the passions. That
the passions and incidents are more violent than those of every-day
life does not make the writings improbable, if the meaning of
the term be untrue to nature.
The theory of criticism here briefly urged seems to the writer to
be based on just principles, and necessarily involves a defence of
certain modern writers from the charge of exaggeration and unnaturalness
in their books. This charge may be true in many instances—it
is true unquestionably of many of the bad and corrupting
novels of the French “literature of desperation;” but it does
not seem fair when applied to other productions of the so-called
“exciting” school.
Against the works of these writers, however, and perhaps, in
some measure, against the volume here presented to the reader,
may be urged a very dangerous criticism—that they depend largely
for their interest on the element of mystery, introduced to excite
the reader's curiosity. This may not be a “crime,” and unfortunately
the general reader seems to prefer above all things this
gross flavor of mystery. That the proceeding, however, is a “blunder,”
if the writer looks to the best audience, and to permanent
fame, there is very little reason to doubt. From the moment when
a drama depends for its interest solely on this “mystery,” and the
writer expends his force in laying a trap to catch the reader's curiosity,
the true end of dramatic composition is lost sight of, and the
book becomes ephemeral. It is read for the plot, and the plot once
unravelled, it is thrown aside—the reader, absorbed in it but now,
and unable to lay down the volume, wishes never to lay his eyes
upon it again!
Such is the fatal mistake of those writers depending solely upon
curiosity—the curiosity once satisfied, all interest vanishes, and the
volume is suddenly forgotten. The fact will be acknowledged by
every reader, and is noticed by an eminent European critic.
“Whence this sudden and profound silence,” he says, “following
a renown mounting to the stars—this indifference after so many
passions? That is easily explained. Curiosity will not suffice to make
a work endure. It must contain, in addition, pity, love and terror,
rising in eternal tears from the very depths of the human heart.”
Words as true as they, are eloquent! The book depending for its
interest on the curiosity alone of the reader, is destined to a brief
career; no one re-reads it, and it is speedily forgotten. Love, pity
and terror are necessary to the drama that is to last—for they come
from the heart of the writer and speak to the heart of the reader.
They entered into the dramas of a few Greek writers more than
two thousand years ago; and these dramas still live and move the
world, while the “mystery” novel of the last month is already
forgotten.
