A Strange Story | Page 2

fantastic often incur to reasoners the most serious and profound.
But I here construct a romance which should have, as a romance, some
interest for the general reader. I do not elaborate a treatise submitted to
the logic of sages. And it is only when "in fairy fiction drest" that
Romance gives admission to "truths severe."
I venture to assume that none will question my privilege to avail myself
of the marvellous agencies which have ever been at the legitimate
command of the fabulist.
To the highest form of romantic narrative, the Epic, critics, indeed,
have declared that a supernatural machinery is indispensable. That the
Drama has availed itself of the same license as the Epic, it would be
unnecessary to say to the countrymen of Shakspeare, or to the
generation that is yet studying the enigmas of Goethe's "Faust." Prose
Romance has immemorially asserted, no less than the Epic or the
Drama, its heritage in the Realm of the Marvellous. The interest which
attaches to the supernatural is sought in the earliest Prose Romance
which modern times take from the ancient, and which, perhaps, had its
origin in the lost Novels of Miletus; [4] and the right to invoke such
interest has, ever since, been maintained by Romance through all
varieties of form and fancy,--from the majestic epopee of "Telemaque"
to the graceful fantasies of "Undine," or the mighty mockeries of
"Gulliver's Travels" down to such comparatively commonplace
elements of wonder as yet preserve from oblivion "The Castle of
Otranto" and "The Old English Baron."
Now, to my mind, the true reason why a supernatural agency is
indispensable to the conception of the Epic, is that the Epic is the
highest and the completest form in which Art can express either Man or
Nature, and that without some gleams of the supernatural, Man is not
man nor Nature, nature.
It is said, by a writer to whom an eminent philosophical critic justly
applies the epithets of "pious and profound:" [5]

"Is it unreasonable to confess that we believe in God, not by reason of
the Nature which conceals Him, but by reason of the Supernatural in
Man which alone reveals and proves Him to exist?... Man reveals God:
for Man, by his intelligence, rises above Nature; and in virtue of this
intelligence is conscious of himself as a power not only independent of,
but opposed to, Nature, and capable of resisting, conquering, and
controlling her."[6]
If the meaning involved in the argument, of which I have here made but
scanty extracts, be carefully studied, I think that we shall find deeper
reasons than the critics who dictated canons of taste to the last century
discovered,--why the supernatural is indispensable to the Epic, and why
it is allowable to all works of imagination, in which Art looks on
Nature with Man's inner sense of a something beyond and above her.
But the Writer who, whether in verse or prose, would avail himself of
such sources of pity or terror as flow from the Marvellous, can only
attain his object in proportion as the wonders he narrates are of a kind
to excite the curiosity of the age he addresses.
In the brains of our time, the faculty of Causation is very markedly
developed. People nowadays do not delight in the Marvellous
according to the old childlike spirit. They say in one breath, "Very
extraordinary!" and in the next breath ask, "How do you account for
it?" If the Author of this work has presumed to borrow from science
some elements of interest for Romance, he ventures to hope that no
thoughtful reader--and certainly no true son of science--will be
disposed to reproach him. In fact, such illustrations from the masters of
Thought were essential to the completion of the purpose which
pervades the work.
That purpose, I trust, will develop itself in proportion as the story
approaches the close; and whatever may appear violent or
melodramatic in the catastrophe, will, perhaps, be found, by a reader
capable of perceiving the various symbolical meanings conveyed in the
story, essential to the end in which those meanings converge, and
towards which the incidents that give them the character and interest of
of fiction, have been planned and directed from the commencement.

Of course, according to the most obvious principles of art, the narrator
of a fiction must be as thoroughly in earnest as if he were the narrator
of facts. One could not tell the most extravagant fairy-tale so as to
rouse and sustain the attention of the most infantine listener, if the tale
were told as if the taleteller did not believe in it. But when the reader
lays down this "Strange Story," perhaps he will detect, through all the
haze of romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason:
Firstly,