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The weary old nineteenth century had advanced into the last twenty years of its life. Towards two o’clock in the afternoon, Ovid Vere (of the Royal College of Surgeons) stood at the window of his consulting-room in London, looking out at the summer sunshine, and the quiet dusty street. He had received a warning, familiar to the busy men of our time — the warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive work. With a prosperous career before him, he had been compelled (at only thirty-one years of age) to ask a colleague to take charge of his practice, and to give the brain which he had cruelly wearied a rest of some months to come. On the next day he had arranged to embark for the Mediterranean in a friend’s yacht.
Preface
You are the children of Old Mother England, on both sides of the Atlantic; you form the majority of buyers and borrowers of novels; and you judge of works of fiction by certain inbred preferences, which but slightly influence the other great public of readers on the continent of Europe.
The two qualities in fiction which hold the highest rank in your estimation are: Character and Humour. Incident and dramatic situation only occupy the second place in your favour. A novel that tells no story, or that blunders perpetually in trying to tell a story - a novel so entirely devoid of all sense of the dramatic side of human life, that not even a theatrical thief can find anything in it to steal - will nevertheless be a work that wins (and keeps) your admiration, if it has Humour which dwells on your memory, and characters which enlarge the circle of your friends.
I have myself always tried to combine the different merits of a good novel, in one and the same work; and I have never succeeded in keeping an equal balance. In the present story you will find the scales inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and Humour. This has not happened accidentally.
Advancing years, and health that stands sadly in need of improvement, warn me - if I am to vary my way of work - that I may have little time to lose. Without waiting for future opportunities, I have kept your standard of merit more constantly before my mind, in writing this book, than on some former occasions.
Still persisting in telling you a story - still refusing to get up in the pulpit and preach, or to invade the platform and lecture, or to take you by the buttonhole in confidence and make fun of my Art - it has been my chief effort to draw the characters with a vigour and breadth of treatment, derived from the nearest and truest view that I could get of the one model, Nature. Whether I shall at once succeed in adding to the circle of your friends in the world of fiction - or whether you will hurry through the narrative, and only discover on a later reading that it is the characters which have interested you in the story - remains to be seen. Either way, your sympathy will find me grateful; for, either way, my motive has been to please you.
During its periodical publication correspondents, noting certain passages in "Heart and Science," inquired how I came to think of writing this book. The question may be readily answered in better words than mine. My book has been written in harmony with opinions which have an indisputable claim to respect. Let them speak for themselves.
SHAKESPEARE'S OPINION.-"It was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common." (King Henry IV., Part II.)
WALTER SCOTT'S OPINION-"I am no great believer in the extreme degree of improvement to be derived from the advancement of Science; for every study of that nature tends, when pushed to a certain extent, to harden the heart." (Letter to Miss Edgeworth.)
FARADAY'S OPINION.-"The education of the judgment has for its first and its last step - Humility." (Lecture on Mental Education, at the Royal Institution.)
Having given my reasons for writing the book, let me conclude by telling you what I have kept out of the book.
It encourages me to think that we have many sympathies in common; and among them, that most of us have taken to our hearts domestic pets. Writing under this conviction, I have not forgotten my responsibility towards you, and towards my Art, in pleading the cause of the harmless and affectionate beings of God's creation. From first to last, you are purposely left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape - but I never once open the door and invite you to look in. I trace, in one of my characters, the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man - and I leave the picture to speak for itself. My own personal feeling has throughout been held in check. Thankfully accepting the assistance rendered to me by Miss Frances Power Cobbe, by Mrs. H. M. Gordon, and by Surgeon–General Gordon, C.B., I have borne in mind (as they have borne in mind) the value of temperate advocacy to a good cause.
With this, your servant withdraws, and leaves you to the story.
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