Basil

Basil, by Wilkie Collins

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Title: Basil
Author: Wilkie Collins
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4605] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 17,
2002]
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Etext by James Rusk, [email protected] Wilkie Collins web site:
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Basil

by Wilkie Collins

LETTER OF DEDICATION.
TO CHARLES JAMES WARD, ESQ.
IT has long been one of my pleasantest anticipations to look forward to
the time when I might offer to you, my old and dear friend, some such
acknowledgment of the value I place on your affection for me, and of
my grateful sense of the many acts of kindness by which that affection
has been proved, as I now gladly offer in this place. In dedicating the
present work to you, I fulfil therefore a purpose which, for some time
past, I have sincerely desired to achieve; and, more than that, I gain for
myself the satisfaction of knowing that there is one page, at least, of my
book, on which I shall always look with unalloyed pleasure--the page
that bears your name.
I have founded the main event out of which this story springs, on a fact
within my own knowledge. In afterwards shaping the course of the
narrative thus suggested, I have guided it, as often as I could, where I
knew by my own experience, or by experience related to me by others,
that it would touch on something real and true in its progress. My idea
was, that the more of the Actual I could garner up as a text to speak
from, the more certain I might feel of the genuineness and value of the
Ideal which was sure to spring out of it. Fancy and Imagination, Grace
and Beauty, all those qualities which are to the work of Art what scent
and colour are to the flower, can only grow towards heaven by taking
root in earth. Is not the noblest poetry of prose fiction the poetry of
every-day truth?
Directing my characters and my story, then, towards the light of Reality
wherever I could find it, I have not hesitated to violate some of the
conventionalities of sentimental fiction. For instance, the first
love-meeting of two of the personages in this book, occurs (where the
real love-meeting from which it is drawn, occurred) in the very last
place and under the very last circumstances which the artifices of

sentimental writing would sanction. Will my lovers excite ridicule
instead of interest, because I have truly represented them as seeing each
other where hundreds of other lovers have first seen each other, as
hundreds of people will readily admit when they read the passage to
which I refer?