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In a place so universally rich, there is even a certain piquancy in being a pauper. My little trashy love-stories seemed to them the fruits of genius, and they were convinced, the poor simpletons, that the big magazines were banded in a conspiracy to block my way to fame.
Pieces that are now despised at the large theatres, but which thirty years ago the public ran to see, and cried over those pieces I now make use of. I now present them before the young folks; and the young folks they cry just as their fathers and mothers used to do. I give 'Johanna Montfakon' and 'Dyveke, but abbreviated; for the little folks do not like long, twaddling love-stories.
"And then came the furious landlord, demanding restitution. But close behind the landlord came the good fairy of all love-stories, with Pactolus in her pocket. Ah, yes, there is always a providence for true lovers." I had passed away by this time from the barren moor to the regions of cultivation. The trimly-cut hedges on each side of the way showed me that my road now lay between farm lands.
This opinion of our great scholar is one with which I cheerfully coincide and would refer my readers to the fact that love-stories were written before the Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients.
Fiction in this form is now considered universally allowable; and some conscientious persons, who would not allow themselves or others the relaxation of a novel of any kind, will indulge unhesitatingly in the same sort of love-stories, rendered still more exciting through the medium of poetry.
'Come, auntie, he would say, 'tell me some love-stories. And my mother, as a joke, would tell him all the old legends of the family, all the passionate adventures of his forefathers, for thousands of them were current, some true and some false.
"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank on the level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-glass. These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but what they pile 'em up on me. No good can come out of an international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us fresh Americans.
At Kharkhov I have a friend, a literary man. I shall go to him and I shall say, 'now, my friend, give up your rotten little love-stories and descriptions of nature, and expose the vileness of the human biped.... There's a subject for you." He thought for a moment and then he said: "Goussiev, do you know how I swindled them?" "Who, Pavel Ivanich?"
Read Tasso's poem by this gentle light of his genius, and you pity him twentyfold, and know not what excuse to find for his jailer. The stories translated in the present volume, though including war and magic, are all love-stories. They were not selected on that account. They suggested themselves for selection, as containing most of the finest things in the poem.
Bunner's "Love in Old Clothes;" but more of them are not love-stories at all. If we were to pick out the ten best Short-stories, I think we should find that fewer than half of them made any mention at all of love.
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