d that is, what your own name is doing in this place, cropping up (as
it were uncalled-for) on the stern of our poor ship? If you were not
born in Arcadia, you linger in fancy on its margin; your thoughts are
busied with the flutes of antiquity, with daffodils, and the classic
poplar, and the footsteps of the nymphs, and the elegant and moving
aridity of ancient art. Why dedicate to you a tale of a caste
so modern;--full of details of our barbaric manners and unstable
morals;--full of the need and the lust of money, so that there is scarce
a page in which the dollars do not jingle;--full of the unrest and
movement of our century, so that the reader is hurried from place to
place and sea to sea, and the book is less a romance than a panorama--in
the end, as blood-bespattered as an epic?

Well, you are a man interested in all problems of art, even the most
vulgar; and it may amuse you to hear the genesis and growth of _The
Wrecker_. On board the schooner Equator, almost within sight of the
Johnstone Islands (if anybody knows where these are) and on a moonlit
night when it was a joy to be alive, the authors were amused with
several stories of the sale of wrecks. The subject tempted them; and
they sat apart in the alley-way to discuss its possibilities. "What a
tangle it would make," suggested one, "if the wrong crew were aboard.
But how to get the wrong crew there?"--"I have it!" cried the other;
"the so-and-so affair!" For not so many months before, and not so many
hundred miles from where we were then sailing, a proposition almost
tantamount to that of Captain Trent had been made by a British skipper
to some British castaways.

Before we turned in, the scaffolding of the tale had been put together.
But the question of treatment was as usual more obscure. We had long
been at once attracted and repelled by that very modern form of the
police novel or mystery story, which consists in beginning your yarn
anywhere but at the beginning, and finishing it anywhere but at the
end; attracted by its peculiar interest when done, and the peculiar
difficulties that attend its execution; repelled by that appearance
of insincerity and shallowness of tone, which seems its inevitable
drawback. For the mind of the reader, always bent to pick up clews,
receives no impression of reality or life, rather of an airless,
elaborate mechanism; and the book remains enthralling, but
insignificant, like a game of chess, not a work of human art. It s