_Night and Morning_ had not appeared.

For the original idea, which, with humility, I will venture to call the
philosophical design of a moral education or apprenticeship, I have left
it easy to be seen that I am indebted to Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_.
But, in _Wilhelm Meister_, the apprenticeship is rather that of
theoretical art. In the more homely plan that I set before myself, the
apprenticeship is rather that of practical life. And, with this view,
it has been especially my study to avoid all those attractions lawful in
romance, or tales of pure humour or unbridled fancy, attractions
that, in the language of reviewers, are styled under the head of "most
striking descriptions," "scenes of extraordinary power," etc.; and are
derived from violent contrasts and exaggerations pushed into caricature.
It has been my aim to subdue and tone down the persons introduced, and
the general agencies of the narrative, into the lights and shadows of
life as it is. I do not mean by "life as it is," the vulgar and the
outward life alone, but life in its spiritual and mystic as well as
its more visible and fleshly characteristics. The idea of not only
describing, but developing character under the ripening influences
of time and circumstance, is not confined to the apprenticeship of
Maltravers alone, but pervades the progress of Cesarini, Ferrers, and
Alice Darvil.

The original conception of Alice is taken from real life--from a person
I never saw but twice, and then she was no longer young--but whose
history made on me a deep impression. Her early ignorance and home--her
first love--the strange and affecting fidelity that she maintained, in
spite of new ties--her final re-meeting, almost in middle-age, with one
lost and adored almost in childhood--all this, as shown in the novel, is
but the imperfect transcript of the true adventures of a living woman.

In regard to Maltravers himself, I must own that I have but inadequately
struggled against the great and obvious difficulty of representing an
author living in our own times, with whose supposed works or alleged
genius and those of any one actually existing, the reader can establish
no identification, and he is therefore either compelled constantly to
humour the delusion by keeping his imagination on the stretch, or lazily
driven to confound the Author _in_ the Book with the Author _of_ the
Book.* But I own, also, I fancied, while aware of this objection, and
in spite of it, that s