University of Virginia Library

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

It is now more than ten years since “Margaret” was commenced.
To-day is the revision of the work ended. Not without sensibility
has such a retrospect been gone through with. Old acquaintances
and familiar scenes of the imagination are not less impressive than
those of the actual world. The author cannot retrace the ground of
these pages without being reminded of some things he would forget,
and others that he is too fearful of losing. The book was written
out of his heart and hope. Has a decade of years and experience
vitiated or overset aught of that heart and hope?—Going over the
book at this time is not precisely like a call on old friends; it becomes
a species of self-examination.

In the result, as to the general character and drift of the work, the
author finds little to alter. Not that he could write just such a book
again—he could not. But he cleaves to the ideas according to which,
and the objects for which, this was written.

In the revision sentences have been changed, not sentiments, and
the expunging process has respected words more than things.

“Margaret” was never designed for railroads; it might, peradventure,
suit a canal boat. Rather is it like an old-fashioned ride on
horseback, where one may be supposed to enjoy leisure for climbing
hills, and to possess curiosity for the trifles of the way.

It is proper that some answer be given to observations that have
been freely, and it will not be doubted, kindly bestowed on the author
and his labors.

“He is too minute; he seems to be making out a ship's manifest,
instead of telling a plain story.”—This book was written for the love
of the thing, and each item has been introduced with a love of it.
Every bird has been watched, every flower pursued, every footpath
traversed. No author can, indeed, expect the public to share his tastes
or join his recreations; he does solicit a charitable construction of his
spirit and purpose.

“He is vulgar.”—A popular tradition declares tastes to be indisputable,

and imparts to them an authority which belongs only to revelation.
We are inclined to think there is a dispute about them; and
the issue may as well be made up first as last. Is what we call common
life, are what pass for illiterate, uncultivated, ignorant people, their
properties and reminiscences, here in New England, to be regarded as
vulgar?—using the word in a certain odious sense. To take an instance
from the following pages—and that is where the question is carried—
is Obed vulgar? We aver that he is not. He is an unrefined, rude,
simple youth; but in all his relations to Margaret, in all the little part
he acts in the scene, he is courteous, gentle, delicate, disinterested,
pure. At least he seems so to us. We may have failed to report him
fairly. But, allowing him to be such, are we justified in pronouncing
him vulgar? Is Nimrod to be accounted a vulgar-spoken youth?

“He is unequal, grotesque, mermaiden, abrupt.”—Here are involved
the same questions as before, What is vulgar, and what refined,
what noble, what mean? There are standards of taste valid
and needful. But is not the range of their application too limited?
May not rough rocks have a place in the fairest landscapes of nature
or art? May not a dark pool of water in a forest, with its vegetable
and animal adjuncts mirror the stars? Have we not seen or heard of
a cascade that starts, say, from the blue of the skies, pours down a
precipice of rusty rock, and terminates in drift-wood and bog? Is that
water bathetic? These are questions we do not care to argue here
and now. Are they not worthy of considration? Have they no pertinence
to the subject in hand?

“He is no artist.”—If what every body says be true, and what almost
every body says be almost true, to this iterated charge, we ought to
gasp out a peccavi, and be silent. But, good friends all, a moment's
indulgence. May there not be a moral as well as a material plot—a
plot of ideas as well as of incidents? “Margaret” is a tale not of
outward movement, but of internal development. An obvious part
of its plan is the three epochs of the life of its principal personage.
Another part is the times in which the scene lies. Rose belongs to
the plot of the book, so does the Indian. Master Elliman has been
called a sort of a diluted imitation of Dominie Sampson! The plot
of the book involved this, that while Margaret grew up in, or contiguous
to, a religious and civilized community, she should remain for the
most part unaffected by these influences; yet that she should not
mature in ignorance, but should receive quite an amount of a species
of erudition. To effect this the Master is introduced. The management

of this part of the tale, it need not be said, was one of the most
difficult problems the author had to encounter. To the general thread
of the drama a variety of things are attached, not one of which, in the
main, is not conceived to be tributary to the gradual evolution of the
whole. The purely material accessories of the story being deemed
quite insubordinate, are thrown in corners by themselves.

The book takes our country as it emerges from the Revolution, and
does not bring it down to what now is, but carries it up, or a portion
of it, to what it is conceived should be; and the final denouement may
be found in the last Part. In all this is system, arrangement, precedent,
effect, and due relation of things. We have wished herein to
be artistical; certainly our feelings are not whimsical, neither is our
method governed by any conscious caprice. How far we have succeeded
it is not for us to say. We would thank certain ones, assayers
of literature, at least to consider what we have attempted to do.

To those who have been glad at what the author has written he extends
the hope that they may never regret their gladness.

Those that disrelish his productions he knows can find things
enough in the bookstores to their liking; and he is sufficiently generous
to wish them joy in whatever line of reading their fancies or
feelings may adopt.