

Produced by David Widger





THE GUARDIAN ANGEL

By Oliver Wendell Holmes




TO MY READERS.

"A new Preface" is, I find, promised with my story. If there are any
among my readers who loved Aesop's Fables chiefly on account of the
Moral appended, they will perhaps be pleased to turn backward and learn
what I have to say here.

This tale forms a natural sequence to a former one, which some may
remember, entitled "Elsie Venner." Like that,--it is intended for two
classes of readers, of which the smaller one includes the readers of the
"Morals" in Aesop and of this Preface.

The first of the two stories based itself upon an experiment which some
thought cruel, even on paper. It imagined an alien element introduced
into the blood of a human being before that being saw the light. It
showed a human nature developing itself in conflict with the ophidian
characteristics and instincts impressed upon it during the pre-natal
period. Whether anything like this ever happened, or was possible,
mattered little: it enabled me, at any rate, to suggest the limitations
of human responsibility in a simple and effective way.

The story which follows comes more nearly within the range of common
experience. The successive development of inherited bodily aspects
and habitudes is well known to all who have lived long enough to see
families grow up under their own eyes. The same thing happens, but less
obviously to common observation, in the mental and moral nature. There
is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic
qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from
generation to generation. Jonathan Edwards the younger tells the story
of a brutal wretch in New Haven who was abusing his father, when the old
man cried out, "Don't drag me any further, for I didn't drag my father
beyond this tree." [The original version of this often-repeated story
may be found in Aristotle's Ethics, Book 7th, Chapter 7th.] I have
attempted to show the successive evolution of some inherited qualities
in the character of Myrtle Hazard, not so obtrusively as to disturb the
narrative, but plainly enough to be kept in sight by the small class of
preface-readers.

If I called these two stories Studies of the Reflex Function in its
higher sphere, I should frighten away all but the professors and the
learned ladies. If I should proclaim that they were protests against
the scholastic tendency to shift the total responsibility of all human
action from the Infinite to the finite, I might alarm the jealousy of
the cabinet-keepers of our doctrinal museums. By saying nothing
about it, the large majority of those whom my book reaches, not being
preface-readers, will never suspect anything to harm them beyond the
simple facts of the narrative.

Should any professional alarmist choose to confound the doctrine of
limited responsibility with that which denies the existence of any
self-determining power, he may be presumed to belong to the class of
intellectual half-breeds, of which we have many representatives in our
new country, wearing the garb of civilization, and even the gown of
scholarship. If we cannot follow the automatic machinery of nature into
the mental and moral world, where it plays its part as much as in the
bodily functions, without being accused of laying "all that we are evil
in to a divine thrusting on," we had better return at once to our
old demonology, and reinstate the Leader of the Lower House in his
time-honored prerogatives.

As fiction sometimes seems stranger than truth, a few words may
be needed here to make some of my characters and statements appear
probable. The long-pending question involving a property which had
become in the mean time of immense value finds its parallel in the great
De Haro land-case, decided in the Supreme Court while this story was in
progress (May 14th, 1867). The experiment of breaking the child's
will by imprisonment and fasting is borrowed from a famous incident,
happening long before the case lately before one of the courts of
a neighboring Commonwealth, where a little girl was beaten to death
because she would not say her prayers. The mental state involving utter
confusion of different generations in a person yet capable of forming
a correct judgment on other matters, is almost a direct transcript
from nature. I should not have ventured to repeat the questions of
the daughters of the millionaires to Myrtle Hazard about her family
conditions, and their comments, had not a lady of fortune and position
mentioned to me a similar circumstance in the school history of one of
