On the Lightship
BY Herman Knickerbocker Vielé

Author of "The Inn of the Silver Moon," "Myra of
the Pines," "The Last of the Knickerbockers,"
"Heartbreak Hill," etc.

Introduction by
THOMAS A. JANVIER

DUFFIELD & COMPANY
1909

Copyright, 1909, by
DUFFIELD & COMPANY
——
Published September, 1909

THE PREMIER PRESS
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

"On Board the Light-Ship" is the title—retained in loving deference to his intention—that would have been given to this collection of stories by their author. Had Vielé lived but a little while longer, he would have justified it by placing them in a setting characteristically fantastic and characteristically original.

He had planned to frame them in an encircling story describing, and duly accounting for, the chance assemblage aboard a vessel of that unusual type of a heterogeneous company; and—having in his own fanciful way convincingly disposed of conditions not precisely in line with the strictest probability—so to dovetail the several stories into their encirclement that the telling of them, in turn, would have come easily and naturally from those upcasts of the sea.

It was a project wholly after his own heart. I can imagine the pleasure that he would have found in working his machinery—always out of sight, and always running with a silent smoothness—for getting together in that queer place his company of story-tellers. He would have used, of course, the Light-ship and the light-keepers as his firmly real ground-work. Ship and crew would have been presented in a matter-of-fact way, in keeping with their recognized matter-of-fact existence, that subtly would have instilled the habit of belief into the minds of his readers: and so would have led them onward softly, being in a way hypnotized, to an equal belief—as he slipped lightly along, with seemingly the same simplicity and the same ingenuousness—in what assuredly would not have been matter-of-fact explanations of how those story-tellers happened to be at large upon the ocean before they were taken on board!

That far I can follow him: but the play of fancy that he would have put into his explanations—as he accounted in all manner of quite probable impossible ways for such flotsam being adrift, and for its salvage aboard the Light-ship—would have been so wholly the play of his own alert individual fancy that it is beyond my ken. All that I can be sure of—and be very sure of—is that his explanations of that marine phenomenon, and of the coming of its several members up out of the sea and over the ship's rail, would have been very delightfully and very speciously satisfying. That the explanations might have been less convincing when critically analyzed is a negligible detail: the only essential requirement of a fantastic tale being that it shall be convincing as it goes along.

Even my bald outline of this story—that now never will be told—shows how harmoniously in keeping it is with Vielé's literary method. He delighted in creating delicately fantastic conditions lightly bordering upon the impossible; and, having created them, in so re-solving their elements into the seemingly commonplace and the apparently probable that the fine art with which he worked his transmutations was veiled by the very perfection of its accomplishment.

Such was the method that he employed in the making of what I cherish as his master-piece: "The Inn of the Silver Moon"—a story told so simply and so directly, and with such a color of engaging frankness, that each turn in its series of airily-adjusted impossible situations is accepted with an unquestioning pleasure; and that leaves upon the mind of the reader—even when released from the spell that compels belief throughout the reading of it—a lasting impression of verity. It was the method, precisely, of an exquisite form of literary art that has not flowered more perfectly, I hold with submission, since the time of the so-called Romantic School in Germany: when de la Motte Fouqué created "Undine," and Eichendorff created the "Good-for-Nothing," and all the world went at a gay quick-step to bright soft music that had been silent for nearly