PREFACE.
When in 1880 the author published ‘Mehalah,’ his critics, public and private, attacked him or remonstrated with him because there was no moral to the story—because ‘Mehalah’ was not, as the Germans would say, a Tendenzroman.[1] No doubt that life is but an acted Æsop’s Fables, in which the actors are human, but it is surely allowable in an author to take wings occasionally, and fly away from the stings and goads of moral applications which prog one in everyday life, into the region of unmoralising fancy. However, in his second attempt, ‘John Herring,’ he did have a moral purpose throughout his story, and his critics, public and private, with one accord—only excepting a couple of Scottish reviewers—failed to see it. He complained of this one day to one of his critics, who replied, ‘We have no time to dive for purposes, we skim for story.’ That is true generally of the English reader, specially of the novel reader, who dips but does not plunge. Therefore the author acknowledges that he made a mistake. A purpose, a moral, must not be sunk in the depths like a pearl, but tossed up on the margin as the amber, conspicuous to the first passer-by.
His object in ‘John Herring’ was to show that man’s character is only moulded by mistakes. His reviewers objected that his hero was characterless: that was his purpose—to show an amiable, well-intentioned man, shaped by his misfortunes. There was another, and deeper, purpose in the story, which was to show how a noble character can only be formed which has before it an ideal, and that the ideal which elevates character is ever, and ever must be, unattainable. The man without an ideal sinks; the man with one rises; but in so rising passes through agonies. This life is his purgatory. Only the man without an ideal is happy—brutally happy.
And now the author will correct his previous error, and expose the purpose of this new story at the outset. To do this, he will tell the story of its inception.
In the summer of 1883, as he was returning from his holiday in Tyrol, he came across an account of a Croatian mother who, in a state of absolute destitution, pawned her child to save its life and long her own. He occupied and amused himself, during his railway journey home, in trying to work out what would be the moral and mental result in such an instance, supposing the child to be a girl endowed by nature with generous emotions and considerable shrewdness. It struck him that such a character, so developed, would be typical of the individualism and impatience of restraint, social, moral, and religious, combined with impulsive generosity, which is the feature of the new civilisation, about also to be the motive force of the future, that is coming everywhere to the front.
He had read recently a Polish story, entitled ‘Morituri,’ which depicted the decay of a Polish princely race, and it occurred to the author to take such a family, steeped in traditional culture, infused with feudal-Christian morality, as the representative of the old civilisation which is melting and disappearing everywhere, as the other becomes concrete and asserts itself.
Again, the author asked himself, What would be the result, what the mutual action and reaction, if such a line of life as that which he had ideally traced in one of his heroines—the representative of the Coming Age—were run athwart the threads of old culture and ethics? Would each act on the other at all, to modify its peculiarities and broaden its view of life? To take another simile, would such a vein of molten, fiery, nineteenth century individuality, operating vertically, do other than shatter the superincumbent, horizontal social beds? Would it be itself at all metamorphosed in the process?
The author was teased by the problem that rose continually in his brain. He felt that he could only work it out by calling his representative characters out of the vasty deep of conjecture, and setting them on the table giving them souls and letting them move and act towards each other automatically, and work out the problem for themselves. Such, then, is the history of the genesis of this story, and the reader is requested to bear its purpose in mind as he skims it. Two types in two groups are opposed to each other; each group represents a set of ideas, social and moral, the one coming on, conquering, overwhelming, the other disappearing and likely soon to be looked back upon as having become extinct in the moral world like asceticism and mysticism. There are two heroines each the focusing of the good qualities of the two groups, and two heroes each the concentration of the infirmities of the same.
- ↑ Tendenzroman means “tendency novel” in English and refers to a novel written or produced in order to promote a cause or serve a rhetorical purpose that the writing itself never makes explicit. These purposes are typically social, political, or moral.