Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/laughingmillando00hawtiala Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). THE LAUGHING MILL And Other Stories. by JULIAN HAWTHORNE. London: Macmillan and Co. 1879. [The right of Translation is reserved.] CHARLES DICKENS AND EVANS, CRYSTAL PALACE PRESS. PREFACE. What is called the human interest in fiction is doubtless more absorbing than any other, but other legitimate sources of interest exist. The marvellous always possesses a fascination, and justly; for while it is neither human nature nor fact, it ministers to an æsthetic appetite of the mind which neither fact nor human nature can gratify. Superstition has been well abused; but that were a sad day which should behold the destruction in us of the quality which keeps superstition alive. Fortunately that day can never come--least of all under a Positivist administration. Such works as "The Tempest," "Faust," and "Consuelo" show their authors at their best, because, being obliged by the subject to soar above the level of vulgar possibility, the writers catch a gleam of transcendent sunlight on their wings. And he who would mirror in his works the whole of man must needs include the impossible along with the rest. Whoever has lived thoughtfully feels that there has been something in his experience beyond what appears in "Tom Jones," "Adam Bede," and "Vanity Fair." They are earth without sky. I do not refer to that goody-goody Sunday-school sky which weeps and smirks over the mimic worlds of so many worthy novelists, male and female; but to that unfathomed mystery opening all around us--the sky of Shakespeare and Dante, of Goethe and Georges Sand. A reader with a healthy sense of justice feels that an occasional excursion mystery-ward is no more than he has a right to demand. And such excursions are wholesome for literature no less than for him. For the story-teller, sensible of the risk he runs of making his supernatural element appear crude and ridiculous, exerts himself to the utmost, and his style and method purify and wax artistic under the strain.