University of Virginia Library

PREFACE.

Some of the more crabbed of my critics, I understand, have
pronounced your friend egotistical, indiscreet, and even impertinent,
on account of the Prefaces and Introductions with which,
on several occasions, he has seen fit to pave the reader's way
into the interior edifice of a book. In the justice of this censure
I do not exactly concur, for the reasons, on the one hand,
that the public generally has negatived the idea of undue
freedom on the author's part, by evincing, it seems to me,
rather more interest in these aforesaid Introductions than in the
stories which followed, — and that, on the other hand, with
whatever appearance of confidential intimacy, I have been
especially careful to make no disclosures respecting myself
which the most indifferent observer might not have been
acquainted with, and which I was not perfectly willing that
my worst enemy should know. I might further justify myself,
on the plea that, ever since my youth, I have been addressing
a very limited circle of friendly readers, without much danger
of being overheard by the public at large; and that the habits
thus acquired might pardonably continue, although strangers
may have begun to mingle with my audience.

But the charge, I am bold to say, is not a reasonable one, in
any view which we can fairly take of it. There is no harm,
but, on the contrary, good, in arraying some of the ordinary
facts of life in a slightly idealized and artistic guise. I have
taken facts which relate to myself, because they chance to be
nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as

for egotism, a person, who has been burrowing, to his utmost
ability, into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes
of psychological romance, — and who pursues his researches in
that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact of
sympathy as by the light of observation, — will smile at incurring
such an imputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk
about his external habits, his abode, his casual associates, and
other matters entirely upon the surface. These things hide
the man, instead of displaying him. You must make quite
another kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of
his fictitious characters, good and evil, in order to detect any
of his essential traits.

Be all this as it may, there can be no question as to the propriety
of my inscribing this volume of earlier and later sketches
to you, and pausing here, a few moments, to speak of them, as
friend speaks to friend; still being cautious, however, that the
public and the critics shall overhear nothing which we care
about concealing. On you, if on no other person, I am entitled
to rely, to sustain the position of my Dedicatee. If anybody
is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself.
I know not whence your faith came; but, while we
were lads together at a country college, — gathering blue-berries,
in study-hours, under those tall academic pines; or
watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of
the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in
the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching
trouts in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still
wandering riverward through the forest, — though you and I will
never cast a line in it again, — two idle lads, in short (as we
need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things
that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse
for us, — still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny,
that he was to be a writer of fiction.

And a fiction-monger, in due season, he became. But, was
there ever such a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition
from the public, as in my case? I sat down by the wayside

of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery
sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and
the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible,
through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there,
perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on
the imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more
than a score of autumns piled above me, if it had not been for
you. For it was through your interposition, — and that, moreover,
unknown to himself, — that your early friend was brought
before the public, somewhat more prominently than theretofore,
in the first volume of Twice-told Tales. Not a publisher
in America, I presume, would have thought well enough of
my forgotten or never noticed stories, to risk the expense of
print and paper; nor do I say this with any purpose of casting
odium on the respectable fraternity of book-sellers, for their
blindness to my wonderful merit. To confess the truth, I
doubted of the public recognition quite as much as they could
do. So much the more generous was your confidence; and
knowing, as I do, that it was founded on old friendship rather
than cold criticism, I value it only the more for that.

So, now, when I turn back upon my path, lighted by a transitory
gleam of public favor, to pick up a few articles which
were left out of my former collections, I take pleasure in making
them the memorial of our very long and unbroken connection.
Some of these sketches were among the earliest that I
wrote, and, after lying for years in manuscript, they at last
skulked into the Annuals or Magazines, and have hidden themselves
there ever since. Others were the productions of a later
period; others, again, were written recently. The comparison
of these various trifles — the indices of intellectual condition
at far separated epochs — affects me with a singular
complexity of regrets. I am disposed to quarrel with the earlier
sketches, both because a mature judgment discerns so many
faults, and still more because they come so nearly up to the
standard of the best that I can achieve now. The ripened
autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls.

It would, indeed, be mortifying to believe that the summer-time
of life has passed away, without any greater progress and
improvement than is indicated here. But, — at least, so I would
fain hope, — these things are scarcely to be depended upon, as
measures of the intellectual and moral man. In youth, men
are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel;
and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing
and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered
long ago. The truth that was only in the fancy then may
have since become a substance in the mind and heart.

I have nothing further, I think, to say; unless it be that the
public need not dread my again trespassing on its kindness,
with any more of these musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old
periodicals, transformed, by the magic arts of my friendly publishers,
into a new book. These are the last. Or, if a few
still remain, they are either such as no paternal partiality could
induce the author to think worth preserving, or else they have
got into some very dark and dusty hiding-place, quite out of my
own remembrance and whence no researches can avail to unearth
them. So there let them rest.