Produced by James Rusk
HEART AND SCIENCE
A Story of the Present Time
By Wilkie Collins
TO
SARONY
(OF NEW YORK)
ARTIST; PHOTOGRAPHER,
AND
GOOD FRIEND
I. PREFACE TO READERS IN GENERAL
You are the children of Old Mother England, on both sides of the
Atlantic; you form the majority of buyers and borrowers of novels; and
you judge of works of fiction by certain inbred preferences, which but
slightly influence the other great public of readers on the continent of
Europe.
The two qualities in fiction which hold the highest rank in your
estimation are: Character and Humour. Incident and dramatic situation
only occupy the second place in your favour. A novel that tells no
story, or that blunders perpetually in trying to tell a story--a novel
so entirely devoid of all sense of the dramatic side of human life,
that not even a theatrical thief can find anything in it to steal--will
nevertheless be a work that wins (and keeps) your admiration, if it has
Humour which dwells on your memory, and characters which enlarge the
circle of your friends.
I have myself always tried to combine the different merits of a good
novel, in one and the same work; and I have never succeeded in keeping
an equal balance. In the present story you will find the scales
inclining, on the whole, in favour of character and Humour. This has not
happened accidentally.
Advancing years, and health that stands sadly in need of improvement,
warn me--if I am to vary my way of work--that I may have little time
to lose. Without waiting for future opportunities, I have kept your
standard of merit more constantly before my mind, in writing this book,
than on some former occasions.
Still persisting in telling you a story--still refusing to get up in the
pulpit and preach, or to invade the platform and lecture, or to take you
by the buttonhole in confidence and make fun of my Art--it has been
my chief effort to draw the characters with a vigour and breadth of
treatment, derived from the nearest and truest view that I could get of
the one model, Nature. Whether I shall at once succeed in adding to
the circle of your friends in the world of fiction--or whether you will
hurry through the narrative, and only discover on a later reading that
it is the characters which have interested you in the story--remains to
be seen. Either way, your sympathy will find me grateful; for, either
way, my motive has been to please you.
During its periodical publication correspondents, noting certain
passages in “Heart and Science,” inquired how I came to think of writing
this book. The question may be readily answered in better words than
mine. My book has been written in harmony with opinions which have an
indisputable claim to respect. Let them speak for themselves.
SHAKESPEARE’S OPINION.--“It was always yet the trick of our
English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.”
_(King Henry IV., Part II.)_
WALTER SCOTT’S OPINION--“I am no great believer in the extreme
degree of improvement to be derived from the advancement of Science; for
every study of that nature tends, when pushed to a certain extent, to
harden the heart.” _(Letter to Miss Edgeworth.)_
FARADAY’S OPINION.--“The education of the judgment has for its
first and its last step--Humility.” _(Lecture on Mental Education, at
the Royal Institution.)_
Having given my reasons for writing the book, let me conclude by telling
you what I have kept out of the book.
It encourages me to think that we have many sympathies in common; and
among them, that most of us have taken to our hearts domestic pets.
Writing under this conviction, I have not forgotten my responsibility
towards you, and towards my Art, in pleading the cause of the harmless
and affectionate beings of God’s creation. From first to last, you are
purposely left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The
outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape--but I
never once open the door and invite you to look in. I trace, in one of
my characters, the result of the habitual practice of cruelty (no matter
under what pretence) in fatally deteriorating the nature of man--and
I leave the picture to speak for itself. My own personal feeling has
throughout been held in check. Thankfully accepting the assistance
rendered to me by Miss Frances Power Cobbe, by Mrs. H. M. Gordon, and by
Surgeon-General Gordon, C.B., I have borne in mind (as they have borne
in mind) the value of temperate advocacy to a good cause.
With this, your servant withdraws, and leaves you to the story.
II. TO READERS IN PARTICULAR.
If you are numbered among those good friends of ours, who are especially
capable of understanding us and sympathising with us, be pleased to
accept the expression of our gratitude, and to pass over the lines that
follow.
But if you open our books with a mind soured by distrust; if you
habitually anticipate inexcusable ignorance where the course of the
story happens to turn on matters of fact; it is you, Sir or Madam, whom
I now want.
Not to dispute with you--far from it! I own with sorrow that your
severity does occasionally encounter us on assailable ground. But there
are exceptions, even to the stiffest rules. Some of us are not guilty
of wilful carelessness: some of us apply to competent authority, when
we write on subjects beyond the range of our own experience. Having thus
far ventured to speak for my colleagues, you will conclude that I am
paving the way for speaking next of myself. As our cousins in the United
States say--that is so.
In the following pages, there are allusions to medical practice at the
bedside; leading in due course to physiological questions which connect
themselves with the main interest of the novel. In traversing this
delicate ground, you have not been forgotten. Before the manuscript went
to the printer, it was submitted for correction to an eminent London
surgeon, whose experience extends over a period of forty years.
Again: a supposed discovery in connection with brain disease, which
occupies a place of importance, is not (as you may suspect) the
fantastic product of the author’s imagination. Finding his
materials everywhere, he has even contrived to make use of Professor
Ferrier--writing on the “Localisation of Cerebral Disease,” and closing
a confession of the present result of post-mortem examination of brains
in these words: “We cannot even be sure, whether many of the changes
discovered are the cause or the result of the Disease, or whether the
two are the conjoint results of a common cause.” Plenty of elbow room
here for the spirit of discovery.
On becoming acquainted with “Mrs. Gallilee,” you will find her
talking--and you will sometimes even find the author talking--of
scientific subjects in general. You will naturally conclude that it is
“all gross caricature.” No; it is all promiscuous reading. Let me spare
you a long list of books consulted, and of newspapers and magazines
mutilated for “cuttings”--and appeal to examples once more, and for the
last time.
When “Mrs. Gallilee” wonders whether “Carmina has ever heard of
the Diathermancy of Ebonite,” she is thinking of proceedings at a
conversazione in honour of Professor Helmholtz (reported in the _Times_
of April 12, 1881), at which “radiant energy” was indeed converted into
“sonorous vibrations.” Again: when she contemplates taking part in
a discussion on Matter, she has been slily looking into Chambers’s
Encyclopaedia, and has there discovered the interesting conditions on
which she can “dispense with the idea of atoms.” Briefly, not a word of
my own invention occurs, when Mrs. Gallilee turns the learned side of
her character to your worships’ view.
I have now only to add that the story has been subjected to careful
revision, and I hope to consequent improvement, in its present form of
publication. Past experience has shown me that you have a sharp eye for
slips of the pen, and that you thoroughly enjoy convicting a novelist,
by post, of having made a mistake. Whatever pains I may have taken to
disappoint you, it is quite likely that we may be again indebted to each
other on this occasion. So, to our infinite relief on either side, we
part friends after all.
W. C.
London: April 1883
CHAPTER I.
The weary old nineteenth century had advanced into the last twenty years
of its life.
Towards two o’clock in the afternoon, Ovid Vere (of the Royal College of
Surgeons) stood at the window of his consulting-room in London, looking
out at the summer sunshine, and the quiet dusty street.
He had received a warning, familiar to the busy men of our time--the
warning from overwrought Nature, which counsels rest after excessive
work. With a prosperous career before him, he had been compelled (at
only thirty-one years of age) to ask a colleague to take charge of his
practice, and to give the brain which he had cruelly wearied a rest of
some months to come. On the next day he had arranged to embark for the
Mediterranean in a friend’s yacht.
An active man, devoted heart and soul to his profession, is not a man
who can learn the happy knack of being idle at a moment’s notice. Ovid
found the mere act of looking out of window, and wondering what he
should do next, more than he had patience to endure.
He turned to his study table. If he had possessed a wife to look after
him, he would have been reminded that he and his study table had nothing
in common, under present circumstances. Being deprived of conjugal
superintendence, he broke though his own rules. His restless hand
unlocked a drawer, and took out a manuscript work on medicine of his own
writing. “Surely,” he thought, “I may finish a chapter, before I go to
sea to-morrow?”
His head, steady enough while he was only looking out of window, began
to swim before he had got to the bottom of a page. The last sentences of
the unfinished chapter alluded to a matter of fact which he had not yet
verified. In emergencies of any sort, he was a patient man and a man of
resource. The necessary verification could be accomplished by a visit to
the College of Surgeons, situated in the great square called Lincoln’s
Inn Fields. Here was a motive for a walk--with an occupation at the end
of it, which only involved a question to a Curator, and an examination
of a Specimen. He locked up his manuscript, and set forth for Lincoln’s
Inn Fields.