What is called the human interest in fiction is doubtless more absorbing than any other, but other legitimate sources of interest exist. The marvellous always possesses a fascination, and justly; for while it is neither human nature nor fact, it ministers to an Æsthetic appetite of the mind which neither fact nor human nature can gratify. Superstition has been well abused; but that were a sad day which should behold the destruction in us of the quality which keeps superstition alive. Fortunately that day can never come—least of all under a Positivist administration.
Such works as “The Tempest,” “Faust,” and “Consuelo” show their authors at their best, because, being obliged by the subject to soar above the level of vulgar possibility, the writers catch a gleam of transcendent sunlight on their wings. And he who would mirror in his works the whole of man must needs include the impossible along with the rest. Whoever has lived thoughtfully feels that there has been something in his experience beyond what appears in “Tom Jones,” “Adam Bede,” and “Vanity Fair.” They are earth without sky. I do not refer to that goody-goody Sunday-school sky which weeps and smirks over the mimic worlds of so many worthy novelists, male and female; but to that unfathomed mystery opening all around us—the sky of Shakespeare and Dante, of Goethe and Georges Sand. A reader with a healthy sense of justice feels that an occasional excursion mystery-ward is no more than he has a right to demand. And such excursions are wholesome for literature no less than for him. For the story-teller, sensible of the risk he runs of making his supernatural element appear crude and ridiculous, exerts himself to the utmost, and his style and method purify and wax artistic under the strain.
These remarks must smooth the way to the confession that in the present volume no “human interest” will be found, or has been attempted. The gist of the work (or at least of three-fourths of it) is to show how the impossible might occur. Now, in order to appreciate the delicate flavour of a ghost, it is indispensable that the palate should not be cloyed by a contemporary diet of flesh and blood. In other words, the reality of the personages amidst whom the disembodied spirit appears should be insisted upon no further than is necessary to the telling them apart; only that side of the human figures which is most in accord with the superhuman should be made prominent. If the writer has managed this part of his business properly, he is open to criticism only in so far as he may have sinned in the way of conception and literary execution; and upon those points he is happily spared the necessity of pronouncing judgment. He may however be permitted to observe that the following stories are among the very lightest and least profound of their class; there are no tears or terrors in them; barely even a smile or a sigh; and, in short, their success—should they achieve any—will be mainly due to the fact that with such small pretensions failure would actually become difficult.
One of the tales, it should be added, is a mere jeu d’esprit, the presence of which in the collection is justifiable only on the plea that it makes believe to be what the others are—relieving a note too monotonously sounded by lowering it to the key of mockery. Possibly, nevertheless, it may turn out to be the float which will save the weightier portion of the cargo from going too speedily to the bottom. All the stories have appeared, during the last four years, in various periodicals, to the editors of which my acknowledgments are due for leave to reproduce them.
January, 1879.
