Tales of Illusion

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - THERE are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill for example with the most intense of pleasurable pain over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina of the Earthquake at Lisbon of the Plague at London of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact - it is the reality - it is the history which excites. As inventions we should regard them with simple abhorrence. I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities on record; but in these it is the extent not less than the character of the calamity which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind the reader that from the long and weird catalogue of human miseries I might have selected many individual instances more replete with essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster.