University of Virginia Library

TO MY READERS.

“A NEW PREFACE” is, I find, promised
with my story. If there are any among
my readers who loved æsop's Fables chiefly on
account of the Moral appended, they will perhaps
be pleased to turn backward and learn what I
have to say here.

This tale forms a natural sequence to a former
one, which some may remember, entitled “Elsie
Venner.” Like that, it is intended for two classes
of readers, of which the smaller one includes the
readers of the “Morals” in æsop and of this
Preface.

The first of the two stories based itself upon an
experiment which some thought cruel, even on paper.
It imagined an alien element introduced into
the blood of a human being before that being saw
the light. It showed a human nature developing
itself in conflict with the ophidian characteristics
and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
period. Whether anything like this ever happened,

or was possible, mattered little: it enabled me, at
any rate, to suggest the limitations of human responsibility
in a simple and effective way.

The story which follows comes more nearly within
the range of common experience. The successive
development of inherited bodily aspects and
habitudes is well known to all who have lived
long enough to see families grow up under their
own eyes. The same thing happens, but less
obviously to common observation, in the mental
and moral nature. There is something frightful
in the way in which not only characteristic qualities,
but particular manifestations of them, are repeated
from generation to generation. Jonathan
Edwards the younger tells the story of a brutal
wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father,
when the old man cried out, “Don't drag me any
further, for I did n't drag my father beyond this
tree.” I have attempted to show the successive
evolution of some inherited qualities in the character
of Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to
disturb the narrative, but plainly enough to be kept
in sight by the small class of preface-readers.

If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex
Function in its higher sphere, I should frighten

away all but the professors and the learned ladies.
If I should proclaim that they were protests against
the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility
of all human action from the Infinite to the
finite, I might alarm the jealousy of the cabinet-keepers
of our doctrinal museums. By saying
nothing about it, the large majority of those whom
my book reaches, not being preface-readers, will
never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
simple facts of the narrative.

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound
the doctrine of limited responsibility with
that which denies the existence of any self-determining
power, he may be presumed to belong to
the class of intellectual half-breeds, of which we
have many representatives in our new country,
wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown
of scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic
machinery of nature into the mental and moral
world, where it plays its part as much as in the
bodily functions, without being accused of laying
“all that we are evil in to a divine thrusting on,”
we had better return at once to our old demonology,
and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House
in his time-honored prerogatives.

As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth,
a few words may be needed here to make some
of my characters and statements appear probable.
The long-pending question involving a property
which had become in the mean time of immense
value finds its parallel in the great De Haro land-case,
decided in the Supreme Court while this story
was in progress (May 14th, 1867). The experiment
of breaking the child's will by imprisonment
and fasting is borrowed from a famous incident, happening
long before the case lately before one of the
courts of a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little
girl was beaten to death because she would not
say her prayers. The mental state involving utter
confusion of different generations in a person yet
capable of forming a correct judgment on other
matters, is almost a direct transcript from nature.
I should not have ventured to repeat the questions
of the daughters of the millionnaires to Myrtle
Hazard about her family conditions, and their
comments, had not a lady of fortune and position
mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the
school history of one of her own children. Perhaps
I should have hesitated in reproducing Myrtle
Hazard's “Vision,” but for a singular experience

of his own related to me by the late Mr. Forceythe
Willson.

Gifted Hopkins (under various aliases) has been
a frequent correspondent of mine. I have also
received a good many communications, signed with
various names, which must have been from near
female relatives of that young gentleman. I once
sent a kind of encyclical letter to the whole family
connection; but as the delusion under which
they labor is still common, and often leads to the
wasting of time, the contempt of honest study or
humble labor, and the misapplication of intelligence
not so far below mediocrity as to be incapable of
affording a respectable return when employed in
the proper direction, I thought this picture from
life might also be of service. When I say that
no genuine young poet will apply it to himself,
I think I have so far removed the sting that few
or none will complain of being wounded.

It is lamentable to be forced to add that the
Reverend Joseph Bellamy Stoker is only a softened
copy of too many originals to whom, as a regular
attendant upon divine worship from my childhood
to the present time, I have respectfully listened,
while they dealt with me and mine and the bulk

of their fellow-creatures after the manner of their
sect. If, in the interval between his first showing
himself in my story and its publication in a separate
volume, anything had occurred to make me
question the justice or expediency of drawing and
exhibiting such a portrait, I should have reconsidered
it, with the view of retouching its sharper
features. But its essential truthfulness has been
illustrated every month or two, since my story has
been in the course of publication, by a fresh example
from real life, stamped in darker colors than
any with which I should have thought of staining
my pages.

There are a great many good clergymen to one
bad one, but a writer finds it hard to keep to the
true proportion of good and bad persons in telling
a story. The three or four good ministers I have
introduced in this narrative must stand for many
whom I have known and loved, and some of
whom I count to-day among my most valued
friends. I hope the best and wisest of them will
like this story and approve it. If they cannot all
do this, I know they will recognize it as having
been written with a right and honest purpose.