University of Virginia Library

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PREFACE.

PREFACE.

A SERIES of designs — suggested, I think, by
Hogarth's familiar cartoons of the Industrious
and Idle Apprentices — I remember as among the
earliest efforts at moral teaching in California. They
represented the respective careers of The Honest and
Dissolute Miners: the one, as I recall him, retrograding
through successive planes of dirt, drunkenness,
disease, and death; the other advancing by corresponding
stages to affluence and a white shirt. Whatever
may have been the artistic defects of these
drawings, the moral at least was obvious and distinct.
That it failed, however, — as it did, — to produce the
desired reform in mining morality may have been
owing to the fact that the average miner refused to
recognize himself in either of these positive characters;
and that even he who might have sat
for the model of the Dissolute Miner was perhaps
dimly conscious of some limitations and circumstances
which partly relieved him from responsibility. “Yer
see,” remarked such a critic to the writer, in the untranslatable
poetry of his class, “it ain't no square
game. They 've just put up the keerds on that chap
from the start.”

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iv

With this lamentable example before me, I trust
that in the following sketches I have abstained from
any positive moral. I might have painted my villains
of the blackest dye, — so black, indeed, that the originals
thereof would have contemplated them with the
glow of comparative virtue. I might have made it
impossible for them to have performed a virtuous or
generous action, and have thus avoided that moral
confusion which is apt to arise in the contemplation
of mixed motives and qualities. But I should have
burdened myself with the responsibility of their
creation, which, as a humble writer of romance and
entitled to no particular reverence, I did not care
to do.

I fear I cannot claim, therefore, any higher motive
than to illustrate an era of which Californian history
has preserved the incidents more often than the character
of the actors, — an era which the panegyrist was
too often content to bridge over with a general compliment
to its survivors, — an era still so recent that in
attempting to revive its poetry, I am conscious also
of awakening the more prosaic recollections of these
same survivors, — and yet an era replete with a certain
heroic Greek poetry, of which perhaps none were more
unconscious than the heroes themselves. And I shall
be quite content to have collected here merely the
materials for the Iliad that is yet to be sung.