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PREFACE.
Those who have done us the favour to read `Homeward
Bound' will at once perceive that the incidents
of this book commence at the point where those of the
work just mentioned ceased. We are fully aware
of the disadvantage of dividing the interest of a tale
in this manner; but in the present instance, the separation
has been produced by circumstances over which
the writer had very little control. As any one who may
happen to take up this volume will very soon discover
that there is other matter which it is necessary to know,
it may be as well to tell all such persons, in the commencement,
therefore, that their reading will be bootless,
unless they have leisure to turn to the pages
of Homeward Bound for their cue.
We remember the despair with which that admirable
observer of men, Mr. Mathews the comedian, confessed
the hopelessness of success, in his endeavours to
obtain a sufficiency of prominent and distinctive features
to compose an entertainment founded on American
character. The whole nation struck him as being
destitute of salient points, and as characterized by a
respectable mediocrity, that, however useful it might be
in its way, was utterly without poetry, humour, or
interest to the observer. For one who dealt principally
with the more conspicuous absurdities of his fellow-creatures,
Mr. Mathews was certainly right; we also
general tenor of his opinion; for this country, in its ordinary
aspects, probably presents as barren a field to the
writer of fiction, and to the dramatist, as any other on
earth; we are not certain that we might not say the
most barren. We believe that no attempt to delineate
ordinary American life, either on the stage, or in the
pages of a novel, has been rewarded with success. Even
those works in which the desire to illustrate a principle
has been the aim, when the picture has been brought
within this homely frame, have had to contend with
disadvantages that have been commonly found insurmountable.
The latter being the intention of this
book, the task has been undertaken with a perfect
consciousness of all its difficulties, and with scarcely a
hope of success. It would be indeed a desperate undertaking,
to think of making anything interesting
in the way of a Roman de Société in this country;
still useful glances may possibly be made even in
that direction, and we trust that the fidelity of one
or two of our portraits will be recognized by the
looker-on, although they will very likely be denied by
the sitters themselves.
There seems to be a pervading principle in things,
which gives an accumulating energy to any active property
that may happen to be in the ascendant, at the
time being.—Money produces money; knowledge is the
parent of knowledge; and ignorance fortifies ignorance.
—In a word, like begets like. The governing social
evil of America is provincialism; a misfortune that is
perhaps inseparable from her situation. Without a
social capital, with twenty or more communities divided
by distance and political barriers, her people, who are
numbers in the world perhaps, possess no standard for
opinion, manners, social maxims, or even language.
Every man, as a matter of course, refers to his own
particular experience, and praises or condemns agreeably
to notions contracted in the circle of his own habits,
however narrow, provincial, or erroneous they may
happen to be. As a consequence, no useful stage can
exist; for the dramatist who should endeavour to delineate
the faults of society, would find a formidable
party arrayed against him, in a moment, with no party
to defend. As another consequence, we see individuals
constantly assailed with a wolf-like ferocity, while society
is everywhere permitted to pass unscathed.
That the American nation is a great nation, in some
particulars the greatest the world ever saw, we hold to
be true, and are as ready to maintain as any one can
be; but we are also equally ready to concede, that it
is very far behind most polished nations in various essentials,
and chiefly, that it is lamentably in arrears to its
own avowed principles. Perhaps this truth will be
found to be the predominant thought, throughout the
pages of “Home As Found.”
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