TO MRS. OPIE. MY DEAR MADAM, So many years have elapsed since I had the pleasure of being most hospitably received by yourself and your lamented father at Norwich, that I should hardly venture to remind you thus publicly of myself, did I not wish to offer you my unfeigned thanks for the delight I have received from so many of your writings. Feeling that in treating of the heart, I could never dedicate a work of such a description to one who has more deeply searched its most hidden recesses, nor more powerfully depicted its feelings, than yourself, I venture to inscribe to you the following pages. Should you trace in them anything akin in spirit, however much inferior to your own admirable story of "The Confessions of an Odd-Tempered Man," or "The Simple Tales," I shall consider it the highest praise that could be bestowed on "Trials of the Heart.” Believe me, my dear Madam, with the most respectful esteem, very sincerely yours, ANNA ELIZA BRAY. The Vicarage, Tavistock, PREFACE. In a work which endeavours to trace and to develope the feelings of the human heart, under some of the most painful trials and circumstances to which it can be exposed in the chances of this world, it may be expected something more than that the writer has attempted to paint from nature should be said, as to the sources in real life whence she has drawn her observations and her experience, to enable her to perform her task. Some few of her personal friends, whose tried affection has stood the test of years of weal and woe, who have known her intimately from early youth, and who are well acquainted with many of the severe trials and calamities with which it pleased Almighty God to visit her, at various periods of her life, will be at no loss to guess whence she has derived her experience of the sufferings of the heart-of a heart that feels acutely all those ills "the flesh is heir to"-connected in divers ways with the deepest affections, and the dearest and most sacred ties, of our nature. And it has also so chanced, in her progress through life, that an intimate and affectionate intercourse with some of those very friends has been the means of affording her opportunities of experience, respecting the trials of the heart in others, which, though widely differing in circumstances, have, in some instances, been no less severe than her own. Friends, to whom these things are known, will feel that the writer has had for many years that book of nature spread before her, which is never studied without profit when the overruling providence of God is ever borne in mind as the comment and the key. These general observations will be sufficient to shew in what school she has studied "the deep things of the heart;" for the rest it may be asked (indeed it has been asked) who are the principal personages introduced in the following pages? Were they real, in part real, or altogether fictitious characters? Who, for instance, was Mary Armerage? who Charles Edwards? who Madame de Clairval? or who Phi lippe? To questions so minute as these, the writer does not think that an author is or ought to be expected to make answer; and the only reply which she has given (and she feels justified in giving it), is to say, that in depicting character, in the endeavour to shew its developement, the same as in the outpourings of the heart, she has still studied nature, and to the best of her ability attempted to copy after nature's works. Many characters in these and in her former writings (though introduced under fictitious names and events) have had living models, from which she has painted with freedom; but still, she trusts, without any unworthy or ungenerous motives. And she has sometimes been amused by the observations of critics, who have not unfrequently ascribed to fancy a sketch that was made from real life, and, vice versa, have pronounced to be facts and no fictions the coinages of her own brain. The truth is, and the experience of many years of authorship fully warrants her venturing to make the observation, that where an author takes truth as a basis for fiction, and mingles his own observations of nature, and the feelings of his own heart, with the creations of his fancy, it is not easy to trace the line of demarcation, or to detect the precise bounds where truth ends and fiction begins. If it were otherwise, the writer would be but a mere bungler in his craft, and would produce but an awkward piece of patchwork at the best. Nor is it any disparagement to the judgment and acumen of a critic that he should be at fault under such circumstances, and therefore sometimes fall into error; since those who paint from nature must, of necessity, frequently have to deal with marvellous inconsistencies; sometimes with such as would never have entered into the brain of the novelist in his wildest "imaginings:" nature herself alone presenting such fantastic stores in her inexhaustible combinations of good and bad, of the great and the little, the noble and the mean, the sane and the insane (for there are more mad people in the world than can with expediency be placed under wholesome discipline for the recovery of their reason), in all the orders, classes, and degrees of the great family of mankind. A. E. B. The Vicarage, Tavistock, Dec. 5th, 1838. |