I would give a good deal now, reader, to know exactly how long I could keep a heroine floating in the air, before you would, during my description of a castle, throw my book down in disgust without waiting till the poor creature came down to the ground. If in my story I required such a leap from the blue, I should certainly, by way of precaution, choose a first floor as starting-point for her jump, and a castle about which there was not much to say. However, make yourself easy: Havelaar’s house had no storeys, and the heroes of my book—good heavens! dear, trusty, irreproachable Tine, a heroine! she never vaulted out of a window.
When I closed the last chapter with a hint of some variety in the next one, it really was more an oratorical trick, with the object of making an ending that caught on, than that I actually intended you to believe that the next chapter would have no other value than “variety.” A writer is vain, just like a . . . man. Speak ill of his mother or of the colour of his hair, say that he speaks with an Amsterdam accent—which fault no Amsterdammer ever admits—perhaps he will pardon you. But . . . never touch the outside of the smallest subdivision of a subordinate particle of something that has lain by the side of his writing . . . for then he will not forgive you! If, therefore, you don’t think my book beautiful, and you should meet me, pretend that we don’t know each other.
No, even a chapter “for variety” appears to me, through the magnifying-glass of my writer’s vanity, highly important and even indispensable; and if you were to skip it, and after that showed no due appreciation of my book, I should not hesitate to reproach you with this skipping as the cause of your being unable to pronounce an opinion on my work, since it was exactly the essential portion
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