n.
It is none the worse for the knowledge of truth. It only tries to make
the best of it, hard as it may be; and in this hardness discovers a
certain aspect of beauty.

I am speaking here of romanticism in relation to life, not of
romanticism in relation to imaginative literature, which, in its early
days, was associated simply with mediaeval subjects, or, at any rate,
with subjects sought for in a remote past. My subjects are not mediaeval
and I have a natural right to them because my past is very much my own.
If their course lie out of the beaten path of organized social life, it
is, perhaps, because I myself did in a sort break away from it early in
obedience to an impulse which must have been very genuine since it has
sustained me through all the dangers of disillusion. But that origin of
my literary work was very far from giving a larger scope to my
imagination. On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters
outside the general run of everyday experience laid me under the
obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own
sensations. The problem was to make unfamiliar things credible. To do
that I had to create for them, to reproduce for them, to envelop them in
their proper atmosphere of actuality. This was the hardest task of all
and the most important, in view of that conscientious rendering of truth
in thought and fact which has been always my aim.

The other utterance of the two I have alluded to above consisted in the
observation that in this volume of mine the whole was greater than its
parts. I pass it on to my readers merely remarking that if this is
really so then I must take it as a tribute to my personality since those
stories which by implication seem to hold so well together as to be
surveyed en bloc and judged as the product of a single mood, were
written at different times, under various influences and with the
deliberate intention of trying several ways of telling a tale. The hints
and suggestions for all of them had been received at various times and
in distant parts of the globe. The book received a good deal of varied
criticism, mainly quite justifiable, but in a couple of instances quite
surprising in its objections. Amongst them was the critical charge of
false realism brought against the opening story: The Planter of Malata.
I would have regarded it as serious enough if I had not discovered on
reading further that the distinguished critic was accusing me simply of
havin