it is with some little trepidation that i venture to submit to the critical world this small collection of short stories. i feel that in doing so i owe some apology both to my readers and to the regular story-tellers. being by trade a psychologist and scientific journeyman, i have been bold enough at times to stray surreptitiously and tentatively from my proper sphere into the flowery fields of pure fiction. some of these my divarications from the strict path of sterner science, however, having been already publicly performed under the incognito of "j. arbuthnot wilson," have been so far condoned by generous and kindly critics that i am emboldened to present them to the judgment of readers under a more permanent form, and even to dispense with the convenient cloak of a pseudonym, under which one can always so easily cover one's hasty retreat from an untenable position. i can only hope that my confession will be accepted in partial extenuation of this culpable departure from the good old rule, "ne sutor ultra crepidam;" and that older hands at the craft of story-telling will pardon an amateur novice his defective workmanship on the general plea of his humble demeanour.
i may perhaps also venture to plead in self-defence that though these stories do not profess to be anything more than mere short sensational tales, i have yet endeavoured to give to most of them some slight tinge of scientific or psychological import and meaning. "the reverend john creedy," for example, is a study from within of a singular persistence of hereditary character, well known to all students of modern anthropological papers and reports. members of barbarous or savage races, trained for a time in civilized habits, are liable at any moment to revert naturally to their primitive condition, especially under the contagious influence of companionship with persons of their own blood, and close subjection to the ancestral circumstances. the tale which i have based upon several such historical instances in real life endeavours briefly to hint at the modes of feeling likely to accompany such a relapse into barbarism in an essentially fine and sensitive savage nature. to most european readers, no doubt, such a sheer fall from the pinnacle of civilization to the nethermost abysses of savagery, would seem to call for the display of no other emotion than pure disgust and aversion; but those who know intimately the whole gamut of the intensely impressionable african mind will be able to treat its temptations and its tendencies far more sympathetically. in "the curate of churnside," again, i have tried to present a psychical analysis of a temperament not uncommon among the cultured class of the italian renaissance, and less rare than many people will be inclined to imagine among the colder type of our own emancipated and cultivated classes. the union of high intellectual and ?sthetic culture with a total want of moral sensibility is a recognized fact in many periods of history, though our own age is singularly loth to admit of its possibility in its own contemporaries. in "ram das of cawnpore," once more, i have attempted to depict a few circumstances of the indian mutiny as they must naturally have presented themselves to the mind and feelings of a humble native actor in that great and terrible drama. accustomed ourselves to looking always at the massacres and reprisals of the mutiny from a purely english point of view, we are liable to forget that every act of the mutineers and their aiders or abettors must have been fully justified in their own eyes, at the moment at least, as every act of every human being always is to his own inner personality. in his conscience of conscience, no man ever really believes that under given circumstances he could conceivably have acted otherwise than he actually did. if he persuades himself that he does really so believe, then he shows himself at once to be a very poor introspective psychologist. "the child of the phalanstery," to take another case, is a more ideal effort to realize the moral conceptions of a community brought up under a social and ethical environment utterly different from that by which we ourselves are now surrounded. in like manner, almost all the stories (except the lightest among them) have their germ or prime motive in some scientific or quasi-scientific idea; and this narrow link which thus connects them at bottom with my more habitual sphere of work must serve as my excuse to the regular story-tellers for an otherwise unwarrantable intrusion upon their private preserves. i trust they will forgive me on this plea for my trespass on their legitimate domains, and allow me to occupy in peace a little adjacent corner of unclaimed territory, which lies so temptingly close beside my own small original freehold.
i should add that "the reverend john creedy," "the curate of churnside," "dr. greatrex's engagement," and "the backslider," have already appeared in the cornhill magazine; while "the foundering of the fortuna" was first published in longman's magazine. the remainder of the tales comprised in this volume have seen the light originally in the pages of belgravia. i have to thank the courtesy of the publishers and editors of those periodicals for kind permission to reprint them here.
g. a.
the nook, dorking,
october 12, 1884.
