 | Dashes at life with a free pencil |  |
PREFACE.
It has been with difficult submission to
marketableness that the author has broken up
his statues at the joints, and furnished each
fragment with head and legs to walk alone.
Continually accumulating material, with the
desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as
continually tempted by extravagant prices to
shape these separate forms of society and character
into tales for periodicals; and between
two persuaders—the law of copyright, on the
one hand, providing that American books at
fair prices should compete with books to be
had for nothing, and necessity on the other
hand, pleading much more potently than the
ambition for an adult stature in literary fame—
he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing
off for a magazine any chance view of life that
turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary
chapters what should have been kept together
and moulded into a proportionate work of imagination.
So has gradually accumulated the
large collection of tales which follow—literally
dashes at life with a free pencil—each one,
though a true copy of a part, conveying, of
course, no portion of the meaning and moral
of a whole. It is as a parcel of fragments—as
a portfolio of sketches for a picture never painted—that
he offers them to the public. Their
lack of what an English critic cleverly calls the
“ponderous goodness of a didactic purpose,”
must be balanced, if at all, by their truth to life,
for they have been drawn mostly from impressions
freshly made, and with no record of what
they were a part of. In proportion to his power
of imagination, the reader will supply the
back-ground and adjuncts—some, no doubt (if
the author may judge by himself), preferring
the sketch to the finished picture.
A word explanatory of the character of Part
I. Most of the stories in it are illustrative of
the distinctions of English society. As a republican
visiting a monarchical country for the
first time, and traversing the barriers of different
ranks with a stranger's privilege, the author's
curiosity was most on the alert to know
how nature's nobility held its own against nobility
by inheritance, and how heart and judgment
were modified in their action by the thin
air at the summit of refinement. Circumstances
in the career of men of genius now living, and
feelings in titled and exclusive circles which
the author had opportunities to study, furnished
hints for the storied illustrations of the distinctions
that interested him, and he has thought
it worth while to present these together, as
bearing upon those relations of aristocratic
life which first interest republican curiosity
abroad.
With these explanations, the author commits
his book to the reader's kind allowance.
| Dashes at life with a free pencil | |