in nothing else under the latter-day sun-not even in the mysterious department of woman’s attire-has fashion been more variable, or more eccentric in its variations, than in the matter of prefaces. the eternal revolution of letters devours its own children so rapidly that for the hardiest of them ten years count as a generation; each succeeding decade has whims of its own about prefaces. now it has been the rule to make them long and didactic, and now brief and with a twist toward flippancy. upon occasion it has been thought desirable to throw upon this introductory formula the responsibility of explaining everything that was to follow in the book, and, again, nothing has seemed further from the proper function of a preface than elucidation of any sort. sometimes the prevalent mode has discouraged prefaces altogether—and thus it happens that the present author, doomed to be doing in england at least something of what the english do, has never before chanced to write one. yet now it seems that in america prefaces are much in vogue-and this is an american edition.
the apology of the exile ends abruptly, however, with this confession that the preface is strange ground. the four volumes under comment were all, it is true, written in england, but they do not belong to the old world in any other sense.
in three of them the very existence of europe is scarcely so much as hinted at. the fourth concerns itself, indeed, with events in which europeans took an active part; but what they were doing, on the one side and on the other, was in its results very strictly american.
the idea which finally found shape and substance in this last-named book, “in the valley,” seems now in retrospect to have been always in my mind. all four of my great-grandfathers had borne arms in the revolutionary war, and one of them indeed somewhat indefinitely expanded this record by fighting on both sides. my earliest recollections are of tales told by my grandmother about local heroes of this conflict, who were but middle-aged people when she was a child. she herself had come into curious relation with one of the terrible realities of that period. at the age of six it was her task to beat linen upon the stones of a brook running through the valley farm upon which she was reared, and the deep-hole close beside where she worked was the spot in which the owner of the farm had lain hidden in the alders, immersed to his chin, for two days and nights while brant’s indians were looking for him. thus, by a single remove, i came myself into contact with the men who held tryon county against the king, and my boyish head was full of them. before i left school, at the age of twelve, i had composed several short but lurid introductions to a narrative which should have for its central feature the battle of oriskany; for the writing of one of these, indeed, or rather for my contumacy in refusing to give up my manuscript to the teacher when my crime was detected, i was expelled from the school.
the plan of the book itself dated from 1877, the early months of which i busied myself greatly in inciting my fellow-citizens to form what is now the oneida historical society, and to prepare for a befitting celebration of the coming hundredth anniversary of oriskany. the circumstance that i had not two dollars to spare prevented my becoming a member of the society, but in no way affected the marked success of the celebration it organized and superintended. it was at this time that i gathered the first materials for my projected work, from members of the fonda and other families. eight years later i was in the position of having made at least as many attempts to begin this book, which i had never ceased to desire to write, and for which i had steadily collected books and other data; one of these essays ran to more than twenty thousand words, and several others were half that length, but they were all failures.
in 1885, after i had been a year in london, the fact that a journalist friend of mine got two hundred and fifty dollars from the weekly echo for a serial story, based upon his own observations as a youngster in ireland, gave me a new idea. he seemed to make his book with extreme facility, never touching the weekly instalment until the day for sending it to the printer’s had arrived, and then walking up and down dictating the new chapters in a very loud voice, to drown the racket of his secretary’s typewriter. this appeared to be a highly simple way of earning two hundred and fifty dollars, and i went home to start a story of my own at once. when i had written the opening chapter, i took it to the editor of the weekly echo, who happened to be a friend of mine as well. he read it, suggested the word “comely” instead of some other on the first page, and said it was too american for any english paper, but might do well in america. the fading away of the two hundred and fifty dollars depressed me a good deal, but after a time a helpful reaction came. i realized that i had consumed nearly ten years in fruitless mooning over my revolutionary novel, and was no nearer achievement than at the outset, simply because i did not know how to make a book of any kind, let alone a historical book of the kind which should be the most difficult and exacting of all. this determined me to proceed with the contemporary story i had begun—if only to learn what it was really like to cover a whole canvas. the result was “seth’s brother’s wife”—which still has the echo man’s suggested “comely” in its opening description of the barn-yard.
at the time, i thought of this novel almost wholly in the light of preparation for the bigger task i had to do, and it is still easiest for me to so regard it. certainly its completion, and perhaps still more the praise which was given to it by those who first saw it, gave me a degree of confidence that i had mastered the art of fiction which i look back upon now with surprise—and not a little envy. it was in the fine flush of this confidence that i hastened to take up the real work, the book i had been dreaming of so long, and, despite the immense amount of material in the shape of notes, cross-references, dates, maps, biographical facts, and the like, which i had perforce to drag along with me, my ardor maintained itself to the finish. “in the valley” was written in eight months—and that, too, at a time when i had also a great deal of newspaper work to do as well.
“the lawton girl” suggested itself at the outset as a kind of sequel to “seth’s brother’s wife,” but here i found myself confronted by agencies and influences the existence of which i had not previously suspected. in “seth’s brother’s wife” i had made the characters do just what i wanted them to do, and the notion that my will was not altogether supreme had occurred neither to them nor to me. the same had been true of “in the valley,” where indeed the people were so necessarily subordinated to the evolution of the story which they illustrated rather than shaped, that their personalities always remained shadowy in my own mind. but in “the lawton girl,” to my surprise at first, and then to my interested delight, the people took matters into their own hands quite from the start. it seemed only by courtesy that i even presided over their meetings, and that my sanction was asked for their comings and goings. as one of many examples, i may cite the interview between jessica and horace in the latter’s office. in my folly, i had prepared for her here a part of violent and embittered denunciation, full of scornful epithets and merciless jibes; to my discomfiture, she relented at the first sight of his gray hair and troubled mien, when i had brought her in, and would have none of my heroics whatever. once reconciled to the posture of a spectator, i grew so interested in the doings of these people that i lost sight of a time-limit; they wandered along for two years, making the story in leisurely fashion as they went. at the end i did assert my authority, and kill jessica—she who had not deserved or intended at all to die—but i see now more clearly than any one else that it was a false and cowardly thing to do.
there remains the volume of collected stories, long and short, dealing with varying aspects of home life in the north—or rather in my little part of the north—during the civil war. these stories are by far closer to my heart than any other work of mine, partly because they seem to me to contain the best things i have done or ever shall do, partly because they are so closely interwoven with the personal memories and experiences of my own childhood—and a little also, no doubt, for the reason that they have not had quite the treatment outside that paternal affection had desired for them. of all the writers whose books affected my younger years, i think that mm. erckmann-chatrian exerted upon me the deepest and most vital influence. i know that my ambition to paint some small pictures of the life of my valley, under the shadow of the vast black cloud which was belching fire and death on its southern side, in humble imitation of their studies of alsatian life in the days of the napoleonic terror, was much more powerful than any impulse directly inspired by any other writers. by this confession i do not at all wish to suggest comparisons. the french writers dealt with a period remote enough to be invested with a haze of romance, and they wrote for a reading public vehemently interested in everything that could be told them about that period. these stories of mine lack these aids—and doubtless much else beside. but they are in large part my own recollections of the dreadful time—the actual things that a boy from five to nine saw and heard about him, while his own relatives were being killed, and his school-fellows orphaned, and women of his neighborhood forced into mourning and despair—and they had a right to be recorded.
a single word in addition to an already over-long preface. the locality which furnishes the scenes of the two contemporary novels and all the war stories may be identified in a general way with central new york, but in no case is it possible to connect any specific village or town with one actually in existence. the political exigencies of “seth’s brother’s wife” made it necessary to invent a congressional district, composed of three counties, to which the names of adams, jay, and dearborn were given. afterwards the smaller places naturally took names reflecting the quaint operation of the accident which sprinkled our section, as it were, with the contents of a classical pepper-box. thus octavius, thessaly, tyre, and the rest came into being, and one tries to remember and respect the characteristics they have severally developed, but no exact counterparts exist for them in real life, and no map of the district has as yet been drawn, even in my own mind.
h. f.
london, february 16, 1897.
