Dream Life | Page 8

reader will allow me to say--is an impertinent one. It is but a
shabby truth that wants an author's affidavit to make it trustworthy. I
shall not help my story by any such poor support. If there are not
enough elements of truth, honesty, and nature in my pictures to make
them believed, they shall have no oath of mine to bolster them up.
I have been a sufferer in this way before now; and a little book that I
had the whim to publish a year since, has been set down by many as an
arrant piece of imposture. Claiming sympathy as a Bachelor, I have
been recklessly set down as a cold, undeserving man of family! My
story of troubles and loves has been sneered at as the sheerest gammon.
But among this crowd of cold-blooded critics, it was pleasant to hear of
one or two pursy old fellows who railed at me for winning the
affections of a sweet Italian girl, and then leaving her to pine in
discontent! Yet in the face of this, an old companion of mine in Rome,
with whom I accidentally met the other day, wondered how on earth I
could have made so tempting a story out of the matronly and
black-haired spinster with whom I happened to be quartered in the
Eternal City!
I shall leave my critics to settle such differences between themselves;
and consider it far better to bear with slanders from both sides of the
house, than to bewray the pretty tenderness of the pursy old gentlemen,
or to cast a doubt upon the practical testimony of my quondam
companion. Both give me high and judicious compliment,--all the more
grateful because only half deserved. For I never yet was conscious--alas,

that the confession should be forced from me!--of winning the heart of
any maiden, whether native or Italian; and as for such delicacy of
imagination as to work up a lovely damsel out of the withered remnant
that forty odd years of Italian life can spare, I can assure my
middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a caveat,) I can lay no claim
to it whatever.
The trouble has been, that those who have believed one passage, have
discredited another; and those who have sympathized with me in trifles,
have deserted me when affairs grew earnest. I have had sympathy
enough with my married griefs, but when it came to the perplexing
torments of my single life--not a weeper could I find!
I would suggest to those who intend to believe only half of my present
book, that they exercise a little discretion in their choice. I am not
fastidious in the matter, and only ask them to believe what counts most
toward the goodness of humanity, and to discredit--if they will persist
in it--only what tells badly for our common nature. The man, or the
woman, who believes well, is apt to work well; and Faith is as much
the key to happiness here, as it is the key to happiness hereafter.
I have only one thing more to say before I get upon my story. A great
many sharp-eyed people, who have a horror of light reading,--by which
they mean whatever does not make mention of stocks, cottons, or moral
homilies,--will find much fault with my book for its ephemeral
character.
I am sorry that I cannot gratify such: homilies are not at all in my habit;
and it does seem to me an exhausting way of disposing of a good moral,
to hammer it down to a single point, so that there shall be only one
chance of driving it home. For my own part, I count it a great deal
better philosophy to fuse it, and rarefy it, so that it shall spread out into
every crevice of a story, and give a color and a taste, as it were, to the
whole mass.
I know there are very good people, who, if they cannot lay their finger
on so much doctrine set down in old-fashioned phrase, will never get
an inkling of it at all. With such people, goodness is a thing of

understanding, more than of feeling, and all their morality has its action
in the brain.
God forbid that I should sneer at this terrible infirmity, which
Providence has seen fit to inflict; God forbid too, that I should not be
grateful to the same kind Providence for bestowing upon others among
his creatures a more genial apprehension of true goodness, and a hearty
sympathy with every shade of human kindness.
But in all this I am not making out a case for my own correct teaching,
or insinuating the propriety of my tone. I shall leave the book, in this
regard, to speak for itself; and whoever feels himself growing