PITIABLE case, when one's book, in the hour of birth, must wear steel on dimpled shoulders and grasp swordhilt with chubby fingers; must be laid into a battle as into a cradle, like Hercules among the serpents; must be its own accoucheur, nurse, and defender! If each child, immediately after finding itself sprawling on this earth, were required to stand up in swaddling-clothes and pronounce some raison d'être satisfactory to the world at large, --what a bore were life to the living, what a dread to the unborn, what a regret to most of the dead! A man has seventy years in which to explain his life: but a book must accomplish its birth and its excuse for birth in the same instant; it must renounce all fair prerogatives of babyhood; it must scorn the power of weakness; it must enter life as a certain emperor enters his carriage, --at once smiling to the smiling people, and sternly frowning into the set eyes of assassins in the crowd. And so, protesting against an exaction in which humanity has outrageously discriminated in favor of itself -- this book declares itself an unpretending one, whose interest, if it have any, is not a thrill of many murders nor a titillation of dainty crimes. That it has dared to waive this interest, must be attributed neither to youthful temerity nor to the seduction that lies singing in the grass of all rarely-trodden paths, but wholly to a love, strong as it is humble, for what is beautiful in God's Nature and in Man's Art. This love, with love's vehemence, swears that it is not well to multiply those horrible piquancies of quaint crimes and of white-handed criminals, with which so many books have recently stimulated the pruriency of men; and begs that the following pages may be judged only as registering a faint cry, sent from a region where there are few artists to happier lands that own many; calling on these last for more sunshine and less night in their art, more virtuous women and fewer Lydia Gwilts, more household sweetness and less Bohemian despair, clearer chords and fewer suspensions, broader quiet skies and shorter grotesque storms; since there are those, even here in the South, who still love beautiful things with sincere passion, and who fear that if the artists give us more fascinating female-devils, we too will fall in love with them as school-girls do with Milton's Satan and Bailey's Festus; whereupon the old sweet order of things will be reversed, and, instead of fair marriages between the sons of Heaven and the daughters of Earth, we shall have free-love alliances between the sons of Earth and the daughters of Hell, --the hybrid consequences of which sad event one has neither heart nor breath to pursue. This book's chief difficulty has been to avoid enriching reality at the expense of truth; a difficulty well known by those who have been astonished to find how the descriptions of eye-witnesses may contain nothing but facts and yet express nothing but falsehood.
