Preface

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at
which they profess to aim their works. Not to be deficient in this
particular, the author has provided himself with a moral,--the truth,
namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the
successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage,
becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief; and he would feel it a
singular gratification if this romance might effectually convince
mankind--or, indeed, any one man--of the folly of tumbling down an
avalanche of ill-gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an
unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the
accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms. In
good faith, however, he is not sufficiently imaginative to flatter
himself with the slightest hope of this kind. When romances do really
teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually
through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author
has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to
impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by
sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life,
and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A
high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out,
brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work
of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and
seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first.