I have revised "The Island," and added some chapters, to make it more truly of its time. I republish it with the more pleasure as it was the first result of my attempt to open a new path in romance.
I have ever thought that our modern problems of human destiny should bear an emotional setting. All spring from the heart, and must return to it for their final appeal. Why should the great moving causes which stir so much the passion of pity, on the one side, the passion of the sense of wrong, on the other, be shut out of romantic literature - Democracy, the cause of our age, above all? It is to think poorly of fiction to narrow its bounds in any such way. We do it wrong, being so majestical.
They tell me that my islanders are beginning to degenerate by inbreeding, both in body and in mind. Are they quite sure that the evil, in so far as it affects the spiritual part, does not lie rather with the observers than with the observed? I once read a French story in which it suited the purpose of the hero to feign insanity for a while.
