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Heart and Science A Story of the Present Time By: Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) |
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A Story of the Present Time By Wilkie Collins TO SARONY (OF NEW YORK) ARTIST; PHOTOGRAPHER, AND GOOD FRIEND I. PREFACE TO READERS IN GENERAL
You are the children of Old Mother England, on both sides of the
Atlantic; you form the majority of buyers and borrowers of novels; and
you judge of works of fiction by certain inbred preferences, which but
slightly influence the other great public of readers on the continent of
Europe. The two qualities in fiction which hold the highest rank in your
estimation are: Character and Humour. Incident and dramatic situation
only occupy the second place in your favour. A novel that tells no
story, or that blunders perpetually in trying to tell a story a novel
so entirely devoid of all sense of the dramatic side of human life,
that not even a theatrical thief can find anything in it to steal will
nevertheless be a work that wins (and keeps) your admiration, if it has
Humour which dwells on your memory, and characters which enlarge the
circle of your friends. I have myself always tried to combine the different merits of a good
novel, in one and the same work; and I have never succeeded in keeping
an equal balance. In the present story you will find the scales
inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and Humour. This has not
happened accidentally. Advancing years, and health that stands sadly in need of improvement,
warn me if I am to vary my way of work that I may have little time
to lose. Without waiting for future opportunities, I have kept your
standard of merit more constantly before my mind, in writing this book,
than on some former occasions. Still persisting in telling you a story still refusing to get up in the
pulpit and preach, or to invade the platform and lecture, or to take you
by the buttonhole in confidence and make fun of my Art it has been
my chief effort to draw the characters with a vigour and breadth of
treatment, derived from the nearest and truest view that I could get of
the one model, Nature. Whether I shall at once succeed in adding to
the circle of your friends in the world of fiction or whether you will
hurry through the narrative, and only discover on a later reading that
it is the characters which have interested you in the story remains to
be seen. Either way, your sympathy will find me grateful; for, either
way, my motive has been to please you. During its periodical publication correspondents, noting certain
passages in "Heart and Science," inquired how I came to think of writing
this book. The question may be readily answered in better words than
mine. My book has been written in harmony with opinions which have an
indisputable claim to respect. Let them speak for themselves.
SHAKESPEARE'S OPINION. "It was always yet the trick of our
English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common."
(King Henry IV., Part II.) WALTER SCOTT'S OPINION "I am no great believer in the extreme
degree of improvement to be derived from the advancement of Science; for
every study of that nature tends, when pushed to a certain extent, to
harden the heart." (Letter to Miss Edgeworth.) FARADAY'S OPINION. "The education of the judgment has for its
first and its last step Humility." (Lecture on Mental Education, at
the Royal Institution.) Having given my reasons for writing the book, let me conclude by telling
you what I have kept out of the book. It encourages me to think that we have many sympathies in common; and
among them, that most of us have taken to our hearts domestic pets.
Writing under this conviction, I have not forgotten my responsibility
towards you, and towards my Art, in pleading the cause of the harmless
and affectionate beings of God's creation. From first to last, you are
purposely left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The
outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape but I
never once open the door and invite you to look in. I trace, in one of
my characters, the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter
under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man and
I leave the picture to speak for itself... Continue reading book >>
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