If certain distinguished minds have chosen to regard this drama as no more than the account of a strange case, and its hero as a sick man; if they have failed to see that some very urgent ideas of very general interest may nonetheless be found in it—that is not the fault of these ideas nor of this drama, but of the author, and I mean: of his clumsiness—though he has put into this book all his passion, all his tears, and all his care. But the real interest of a work and the interest taken in it by the public of the moment are two very different things. One may without too much conceit, I think,
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