The Professor

I said to myself that my hero should work his way through life as I had seen real living men work theirsthat he should never get a shilling he had not earnedthat no sudden turns should lift him in a moment to wealth and high station; that whatever small competency he might gain, should be won by the sweat of his brow; that, before he could find so much as an arbour to sit down in, he should master at least half the ascent of "the Hill of Difficulty;" that he should not even marry a beautiful girl or a lady of rank. As Adam's son he should share Adam's doom, and drain throughout life a mixed and moderate cup of enjoyment. In the sequel, however, I find that publishers in general scarcely approved of this system, but would have liked something more imaginative and poeticalsomething more consonant with a highly wrought fancy, with a taste for pathos, with sentiments more tender, elevated, unworldly. Indeed, until an author has tried to dispose of a manuscript of this kind, he can never know what stores of romance and sensibility lie hidden in breasts he would not have suspected of casketing such treasures. Men in business are usually thought to prefer the real; on trial the idea will be often found fallacious: a passionate preference for the wild, wonderful, and thrillingthe strange, startling, and harrowingagitates divers souls that show a calm and sober surface. Such being the case, the reader will comprehend that to have reached him in the form of a printed book, this brief narrative must have gone through some struggleswhich indeed it has. And after all, its worst struggle and strongest ordeal is yet to come but it takes comfortsubdues fearleans on the staff of a moderate expectationand mutters under its breath, while lifting its eye to that of the public, "He that is low need fear no fall." CURRER BELL

Dettagli