NOTE
On the suggestion of my publisher I have collected in one volume the six stories that follow: "A Fragment of Life," "The White People," "The Great God Pan," "The Inmost Light," "The Three Impostors," and "The Red Hand." Three of these have already been published in book form; the rest will, I think, be new to the great majority of my readers.
My fellow-authors will, I am sure, sympathize with me in the difficult task of finding a general title which is not obviously impertinent. The difficulty of the task will appear when it is recollected that Mr. Kipling, the inventor of some of the most wonderful and admirable tales that have ever been written, has been content (or compelled) to shirk the issue with such titles as "Life's Handicap" and "Many Inventions"; and Poe was not conspicuously happy in qualifying his tales as "Arabesque and Grotesque." Failure, then, is not altogether disgraceful; and the title I have chosen, "The House of Souls," will at all events hint at the nature of the contents.
And here, by the way, I may, perhaps, be permitted to say a word in defence of the method and milieu of these tales. In a frivolous community, such as the French, this would be pure impertinence; since in Paris it is agreed that imagination and fantasy are to work as they will and as they can, and are to be judged by their own laws. He who carves gurgoyles admirably is praised for his curious excellence in the invention and execution of these grinning monsters; and if he is blamed it is for bad carving, not because he has failed to produce pet lambs. In England, of course, we judge very differently; we lay stress on usefulness and serious aims, and Imagination itself is expected to improve the occasion, to reform while it entertains, and to instruct under the guise of story-telling. This, doubtless, is one of the many benefits which we owe to our sturdy Puritan ancestors, those architects of England's true greatness, fathers of huge banking accounts, of flourishing industrial communities, of Gower Street, of Manchester and its environs, of "substitutes" in every trade, of the "open Bible"—in short, of all the blessings of civil and religious liberty. But, indeed, I think we scarcely realize the debt that our English Art owes to English Puritanism. We have all learnt the story of its more tangible benefits; we know how Hampden died that England might be free, first under the martial law of the Great Protector, and afterwards under the Whig Oligarchy. We have read how Cromwell secured Representative Institutions from the attack of Tyrants, firstly by "Pride's Purge," and then by the sterner, simpler method of abolishing the House of Commons. There must be few members of the great Anglo-Saxon family who have not thrilled at the story of the "Mayflower" and its Pilgrims, of those brave men who left their homes in England and settled on the dreary inhospitable shores of the Massachusetts, martyrs in the cause of Humanity. We know how these foes of superstition hanged witches in Salem, how these friends of religious freedom flogged and hanged the Quakers, how the enemies of the cruel Star Chamber caused the savage Indian to disappear from the land; while their allies at home baptized foals in cathedrals, hewed down the statues of the saints, shut up the theatres, and gave us the English Sunday.
All this is common knowledge, but I scarcely think we realize how the Puritan "seriousness" has penetrated all our artistic conceptions. It is this seriousness which has made the success of many recent works of fiction, the names of which I need not mention; it has tacitly, if not openly, ordered that the English Novel is only great when it is a sermon, a tract, or a pamphlet in disguise. The hard-headed men of business, whose judgment is, very properly, supreme in all questions of art and letters, have never disguised their intolerance of imagination qua imagination, since they have rightly felt that in the imaginative world, pure and simple, they have no part. He whose mind is occupied throughout the hours of business with, say, the complicated and scientific operation of brewing, who knows the strange rich alchemy by which a beverage still called (out of respect for antiquity) by the name of beer is extracted from glucose, sulphuric acid, arsenic, and many other chemicals, such a man will be little inclined to waste his leisure in perusing idle fantasies. Rather he will desire to keep abreast with serious contemporary thought, with the movements of the day, with the trend of politics; or at all events, if he desire fiction pure and simple, he will be more pleased with a plain unvarnished transcript of plain English Life as he knows it than with matter that is dream and fantasy. In a word, English fiction must justify itself either as containing useful doctrine and information, or as a manifest transcript of life as it is known to the average reader; due regard being had, of course, to the salutary conventions of the social order.
Such is the régime under which Literature, as obedient and useful to its masters as any good civil servant, exists in England; the journalism of our less strenuous moments—the leading article, the social column, the Divorce Report of those serious morning half-hours in the train, reduced to a more attractive form, in which Fancy gilds the shape of the Higher Critic, and Marriage Reform appears in even more attractive colours than it had assumed in the Divorce Court or the Police Column. Art, it has been well observed, excels and surpasses life; so while the hard truth of the newspaper seems at times almost a history of blackguards and wantons, fiction with gentle, serious hand shows us virtually the same characters as the Luthers and Calvins of a new social era, as hedonist philosophers or priestesses of Humanity. And on the lighter side of the literary art; who has not enjoyed a letter from an aunt in the country, giving the last news of six parishes, with births, marriages, deaths, dances, and engagements, to say nothing of the hunting? What more delightful than a book which is practically just such a letter extended to five hundred pages, breathing the calm of the vicarage, exuding, as it were, the quinta essentia of all county families? It may be said that there are exceptions to these canons, but they will be found of little weight. Dickens, it is true, has strange fantasies: but these have been forgiven him for the sake of his zeal for reform in Church and State. Hawthorne has kindled a light not altogether of this world that shines on his pages; but how true the moral of the "Scarlet Letter"! How clearly we may deduce from its chapters the conclusion that no blessing can attend the unhallowed amours of an Independent minister! Let us always remember that Longfellow, besides translating the works of Dante and of other foreign Romanists, gave us the "Psalm of Life."
These, then, are the conditions under which imagination works in our happy country; and for these conditions I say that we have to thank our sturdy Puritan ancestors. No doubt the popular mind has, as I have noted, been captured by the tangible and contemporary achievements of the stout Commonwealth's men. It has remembered that in the seventeenth century England stood at the parting of the ways: the flunkey's motto—"Honour the King"—was being reasserted with renewed force, with much superstitious and absurd nonsense about the "Lord's Anointed." Laud was clearing away the wholesome deposit of honest English dirt and filth which the glorious Elizabethans had allowed to gather in the churches, and the Sabbath itself was menaced by the royal authority. The Puritans saved us from disaster in those directions; but they did much more. For it must never be forgotten that the very root and essence of Puritanism is the denial of all Sacraments and of all Mysteries; so that at the present day we find the legitimate and accredited representatives of these great men applauding and quoting such enlightened French thinkers as Combes and Gambetta. Now, after the victory has been won, we can hardly realize the bondage, the Egyptian darkness, from which we have been delivered. What was it that Laud and Charles endeavoured to restore? Here is Longfellow's only too faithful picture:
And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires
O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!
We can hardly conceive, perhaps, how in the Dark Ages man lived in a world of mystery and love and adoration, how sacraments stood about all his ways, how the Veil of the Temple grew thin before his gaze, and he saw the Great Sacrifice offered in the Holy Place. The Puritans did not live in vain: they gave us the works of George Eliot and the profound studies of Mrs. Humphry Ward in place of the mysteries and mummeries of the Quest of the San Graal; and it is by their work that the enlightened man of to-day perceives that the stench of chlorine gas is really a holier, better thing than the fume of incense.
Now, it is entirely from the Puritan standpoint that I wish to rest my plea for these tales of mine. In the first place, I may say that only a very thoughtless reader will fail to note the moral which underlies each story. How plain, for instance, is the warning in the tale of "The White People," where we see the necessity of the careful supervision of young females; while in "The Great God Pan" the dangers of unauthorized research are clearly and terribly indicated.
But this is not the only point on which I rest my defence of this collection. I think it will dawn on many of my readers that almost every page contains a hint (under varied images and symbols) of a belief in a world that is not that of ordinary, everyday experience, that in a measure transcends the experience of Bethel and the Bank. I confess that it has been my design to convey some such hint as this; and I contend that as an English Novelist I am within my rights in doing so; since Science, the guide of Life, has done as much, has admitted many transcendental conceptions into her scheme of things. Now we know that Science can never be mistaken, though she may now and then restate some of her doctrines; and this being the case, I venture to plead for my stories, not as idle exercises of the imagination, but as attempts to place before the earnest reader, in attractive guise, some of the conclusions of our greatest scientific thinkers. I may mention, indeed, that distinguished Theosophists have recognized in my work careful study of some of their first authorities; and I submit that the witness of Theosophy, which appeals to atheists, men about town, journalists, hard-headed men of affairs, in fine to the thinking classes, is not to be lightly dismissed.
Such are the grounds, then, on which I base my claim to the consideration of serious and practical people, who have no time to waste on idle reverie or flimsy fancies; and it is in the character of a sober portrayer of a certain side of life that I hope to add to the pleasure of many pleasant Sunday afternoons.