The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my
present business it is to be its biographer.
When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central
idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally
derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a
glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of
beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he
sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.
At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again;
and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into
the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time,
an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then
he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst
frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely
spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.
This seemed good enough for a beginning; but, when I woke up, I was not
long in perceiving that it would require various modifications before
being suitable for a novel; and the first modifications must be in the way
of rendering the plot plausible.
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