Before I tell you my own story, however--the story of what happened
in the Blue Chamber--I would wish to preface it with -
A PERSONAL EXPLANATION
I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my
own. You see it is not a story like the other stories that I have
been telling you, or rather that Teddy Biffles, Mr. Coombes, and my
uncle have been telling you: it is a true story. It is not a
story told by a person sitting round a fire on Christmas Eve,
drinking whisky punch: it is a record of events that actually
happened.
Indeed, it is not a 'story' at all, in the commonly accepted
meaning of the word: it is a report. It is, I feel, almost out of
place in a book of this kind. It is more suitable to a biography,
or an English history.
There is another thing that makes it difficult for me to tell you
this story, and that is, that it is all about myself. In telling
you this story, I shall have to keep on talking about myself; and
talking about ourselves is what we modern-day authors have a strong
objection to doing. If we literary men of the new school have one
praiseworthy yearning more ever present to our minds than another
it is the yearning never to appear in the slightest degree
egotistical.
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