Strange Stories

(1884)

Preface:

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.

Grant Allen,

The Nook, Dorking,

October 12, 1884.