Excerpt......."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 ... Read more

Excerpt......."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. Less