Even if such a task were within my province, I should not venture to make any critical estimate of Miss M.'s work. I am not a writer: and, as a reader, have an inveterate preference to be allowed to study and enjoy my authors with as little external intervention as possible. The perusal of the Memoirs has afforded me the deepest possible pleasure. The serious-minded may none the less dismiss a midget's lucubrations as trifling; and no doubt—it could hardly be otherwise—a more practised taste than mine will discover many faults, crudities, and inconsistencies in them, though certain little prejudices on Miss M.'s side may not be so easily detectable. Whatever their merits or imperfections may be, I should be happy to think that the following pages may prove as interesting to other readers—however few—as they have been to myself.
My own prejudices, I confess, are in Miss M.'s favour. Indeed, she herself assured me in the covering letter to which reference has been made, that a chance word of mine had been her actual incentive to composition—the remark, in fact, that "the truth about even the least of things—e. g., your Self, Miss M.!—may be a taper in whose beam one may peep at the truth about everything." I cannot recall the occasion, or this little apophthegm. Indeed, only with extreme reluctance would I have helped to launch my small friend on her gigantic ordeal. As a matter-of-fact, she had a little way of carrying off scraps of the conversation of the "common-sized," as a bee carries off a drop of nectar, and of transforming them into a honey all her own.
As characteristic of her is the fact that during the whole time she was engaged on her writing (and there is ample evidence in her manuscript that, whether in fatigue, disinclination, or despair, she sometimes left it untouched for weeks together) she never made the faintest allusion to it. Authors, I believe—if I may take the elder Disraeli for my authority—are seldom so secretive concerning their activities. No less characteristically, her letter to me was dated February 14th. Her Memoirs were to be my Valentine.
"'Little drops of water ...' my dear Sir Walter," she wrote; "you know the rest. Nevertheless, if only I had been given but one sharp spark of genius, what 'infinite pains' I should have been spared. Yet what is here concerns only my early days, and chiefly one long year of them. I might have written on—almost ad infinitum. But I did not, because I feared to weary us both—of myself. The years that have followed my 'coming of age' have been outwardly uneventful; and other people's thoughts, I find, are not so interesting as their experiences. There's much to forgive in what I have written—the rawness, the self-consciousness, the vanity, the folly. I am older now; but am I wiser—or merely not so young?
"Just as it stands, then, I shall leave my story to, and for, you.... Again and again, as I have pored over the scenes of my memory, I have asked myself: What can life be about? What does it mean? What was my true course? Where my compass? How many times, too, have I vainly speculated what inward difference being a human creature of my dimensions really makes. What is—deep, deep in—at variance between Man and Midget? You may discover this; even if I never shall. For after all, life's beads are all on one string, however loosely threaded they may seem to be.
"I have tried to tell nothing but the truth about myself. But I realize that it cannot be the whole truth. For while so engaged (just as when one peers into a looking-glass in the moonlight) a something has at times looked out of some secret den or niche in me, and then has vanished. Supposing, then, my dear Sir W., my story convinces you that all these years you have unawares been harbouring in your friendship not a woman, scarcely a human being, but an ASP! Oh dear, and oh dear! Well, there are three and-thirty ingredients (ingrediments as I used to call them, when I was a child) in that sovran antidote, Venice Treacle. Scatter a pennyweight of it upon my tombstone; and so lay my in-fi-ni-te-si-mal ap-pa-ri-ti-on!
"Maybe though, there are not so very many vital differences between 'midgets' and people of the common size; no more, perhaps, than there are between them and 'the Great.' Even then it is possible that after reading my small, endless story you may be very thankful that you are not a Midget too.
"Whether or not, I have tried to be frank, if not a Warning. Keep or destroy what I have written, as you will. But please show it to nobody until nobody would mind. And now, good-bye.
"M."
There was a tacit compact between Miss M. and myself that I should visit her at Lyndsey about once a month. Business, indisposition, advancing age, only too frequently made the journey impracticable. But in general, I would at such intervals find myself in her company at her old house, Stonecote; drinking tea with her, gossiping, or reading to her, while she sat in her chair beside my book, embroidering her brilliant tiny flowers and beetles and butterflies with her tiny needle, listening or day-dreaming or musing out of the high window at the prospect of Chizzel Hill.