For now some ten or twelve years I have been asking every good writer
whom I knew, to write some part of what was exactly true, in the
greatest of the sciences, that of Humanity. It seemed to me time that
the Poet and Romance-writer should become now the strict historian of
days which, professing the openest proclamation of themselves, kept
yet in secrecy all that was most beautiful, all that was most woful,
in the multitude of their unshepherded souls. And, during these years
of unanswered petitioning, I have become more and more convinced that
the wholesomest antagonism to whatever is dangerous in the temper,
or foolish in the extravagance, of modern Fiction, would be found in
sometimes substituting for the artfully-combined improbability, the
careful record of providentially ordered Fact.
Providentially, I mean, not in the fitting together of evil so as to
produce visible good,--but in the enforcement, though under shadows
which mean but the difference between finite and infinite knowledge,
of certain laws of moral retribution which enough indicate for our
guidance, the Will, and for our comfort the Presence, of the Judge and
Father of men.
It might be thought that the function of such domestic history was
enough fulfilled by the frequency and full detail of modern biography.
But lives in which the public are interested are scarcely ever worth
writing. For the most part compulsorily artificial, often affectedly
so,--on the whole, fortunate beyond ordinary rule,--and, so far as
the men are really greater than others, unintelligible to the common
reader,--the lives of statesmen, soldiers, authors, artists, or any one
habitually set in the sight of many, tell us at last little more than
what sort of people they dealt with, and of pens they wrote with; the
personal life is inscrutably broken up,--often contemptibly, and the
external aspect of it merely a husk, at the best. The lives we need to
have written for us are of the people whom the world has not thought
of,--far less heard of,--who are yet doing the most of its work, and of
whom we may learn how it can best be done.
The following story of a young Florentine girl’s too short life is
absolutely and simply true: it was written only for memorial of her
among her friends, by the one of them that loved her best, and who
knew her perfectly. That it was _not_ written for publication will be
felt after reading a few sentences; and I have had a certain feeling
of desecrating its humility of affection, ever since I asked leave to
publish it.
In the close of the first lecture given on my return to my duties
in Oxford, will be found all that I am minded at present to tell
concerning the writer, and her friends among the Italian poor; and
perhaps I, even thus, have told more than I ought, though not in the
least enough to express my true regard and respect for her, or my
admiration of her powers of rendering, with the severe industry of
an engraver, the most pathetic instants of action and expression in
the person she loves. Her drawing of Ida, as she lay asleep in the
evening of the last day of the year 1872, has been very beautifully
and attentively, yet not without necessary loss, reduced in the
frontispiece, by Mr. W. Roffe, from its own size, three-quarters
larger;--and thus, strangely, and again let me say, providentially,
I can show, in the same book, examples of the purest truth, both in
history, and picture. Of invented effects of light and shade on
imaginary scenes, it seems to me we have admired too many. Here is a
real passage of human life, seen in the light that Heaven sent for it.
One earnest word only I have to add here, for the reader’s sake,--let
it be noted with thankful reverence that this is the story of a
Catholic girl written by a Protestant one, yet the two of them so
united in the Truth of the Christian Faith, and in the joy of its Love,
that they are absolutely unconscious of any difference in the forms or
letter of their religion.