place for romance itself. For many years all the events leading up
to the great war were realistic, and the war itself was horribly
realistic, and the aftermath is likewise. Romance is only another
name for idealism; and I contend that life without ideals is not
worth living. Never in the history of the world were ideals needed
so terribly as now. Walter Scott wrote romance; so did Victor Hugo;
and likewise Kipling, Hawthorne, Stevenson. It was Stevenson,
particularly, who wielded a bludgeon against the realists. People
live for the dream in their hearts. And I have yet to know anyone
who has not some secret dream, some hope, however dim, some storied
wall to look at in the dusk, some painted window leading to the soul.
How strange indeed to find that the realists have ideals and dreams!
To read them one would think their lives held nothing significant.
But they love, they hope, they dream, they sacrifice, they struggle
on with that dream in their hearts just the same as others. We all
are dreamers, if not in the heavy-lidded wasting of time, then in the
meaning of life that makes us work on.

It was Wordsworth who wrote, "The world is too much with us"; and if
I could give the secret of my ambition as a novelist in a few words
it would be contained in that quotation. My inspiration to write has
always come from nature. Character and action are subordinated to
setting. In all that I have done I have tried to make people see how
the world is too much with them. Getting and spending they lay waste
their powers, with never a breath of the free and wonderful life of
the open!

So I come back to the main point of this foreword, in which I am
trying to tell why and how I came to write the story of a feud
notorious in Arizona as the Pleasant Valley War.