"Education, as deliberate moulding of people into set forms, is sterile, illegitimate, and impossible."
TOLSTOI.
AUTHOR'S FOREWORD
Few novelists, if any, can have escaped the sprightly idiocy of a reproach couched in somewhat the following terms:
"Aha! I recognized the people in your last book. You can't deceive ME! The minute I came to that part about the old lady feeding the cat, I saw at once that you meant it for poor Aunt Jane."
And also, spoken several semi-tones lower:
"All the same, it seems rather a shame to have put poor old GRANDPAPA into a book, now that he's dead."
In an endeavour to forestall these intelligent criticisms, I wish to point out that Philip and Eleanor Stellenthorpe, Miss Melody, Aunt Clotilde, the Hardinges, etc., merely represent types—that I fear to be far from extinct—of amateur educationalists.
There are no individual indictments in HUMBUG, the book is not an autobiography, and Lily Stellenthorpe is not an attempt at foisting upon the reader a portrait of the writer as she would fain have herself considered, and as she is not.