In one of the old-fashioned books for children there was a story of the
adventures of a cent (or perhaps that coin of older lineage, a penny)
told by itself, which came into my mind when the publishers suggested
that the readers of a new edition of this book might like to know how
it happened to be written. I promptly fancied the book speaking, and
taking upon itself the burden of autobiography, which we none of us
find very heavy; and no sooner had I done so than I began actually to
hear from it in a narrative of much greater distinctness than I could
have supplied for it.
"You must surely remember," it protested to my forgetfulness, "that you
first thought of me in anything like definite shape as you stood
looking on at the trotting-races of a county fair in Northern Ohio, and
that I began to gather color and character while you loitered through
the art-building, and dwelt with pitying interest upon the forlorn,
unpromising exhibits there.
"But previous to this, my motive existed somewhere in that nebulous
fore-life where both men and books have their impalpable beginning; for
even you cannot have forgotten that when a certain passionately
enterprising young editor asked you for a novel to be printed in his
journal, you so far imagined me as to say that I would be about a girl.
When you looked over those hapless works of art at the Pymantoning
County Fair, you thought, 'What a good thing it would be to have a nice
village girl, with a real but limited gift, go from here to study art
in New York! And get in love there! And married!' Cornelia and her
mother at once stepped out of the inchoate; Ludlow advanced from
another quarter of Chaos, and I began really to be.
"The getting me down on paper was a much later affair--nearly two years
later. There were earlier engagements to be met; there was an exciting
editorial episode to be got behind you; and there was material for a
veridical representation of the ardent young life of the New York
Synthesis of Art Studies to be gathered as nearly at first hands and as
furtively as possible.
"I should be almost ashamed to remind you of the clandestine means you
employed before you were forced to a frankness alien to your nature,
and went and threw yourself on the mercy of a Member who, upon your
avowing your purpose, took you through the schools of the Synthesis and
instructed you in its operation. Not satisfied with this, you got an
undergraduate of the Synthesis to coach you as to its social side, and
while she was consenting to put it all down in writing for your
convenience, you were shamelessly making notes of her boarding-house,
as the very place to have Cornelia come to.
"Your methods were at first so secret and uncandid that I wonder I ever
came to be the innocent book I am; and I feel that the credit is far
less due to you than to the friends who helped you. But I am glad to
remember how you got your come-uppings when, long after, a student of
the Synthesis whom you asked, in your latent vanity, how she thought
that social part of me was managed, answered, 'Well, any one could see
that it was studied altogether from the outside, that it wasn't at all
the _spirit_ of the Synthesis.'
"It was enough almost to make me doubt myself, but I recovered my
belief in my own truth when I reflected that it was merely a just
punishment for you. I could expose you in other points, if I chose, and
show what slight foundations you built my facts and characters upon;
but perhaps that would be ungrateful. You were at least a doting
parent, if not a wise one, and in your fondness you did your best to
spoil me. You gave me two heroines, and you know very well that before
you were done you did not know but you preferred Charmian to Cornelia.
And you had nothing whatever to build Charmian upon, not the slightest
suggestion from life, where you afterwards encountered her Egyptian
profile! I think I ought to say that you had never been asked to a
Synthesis dance when you wrote that account of one in me; and though
you have often been asked since, you have never had the courage to go
for fear of finding out how little it was like your description.
"But if Charmian was created out of nothing, what should you say if I
were frank about the other characters of my story? Could you deny that
the drummer who was first engaged to Cornelia was anything more than a
materialization from seeing a painter very long ago make his two
fingers do a ballet-dance? Or that Ludlow was not at first a mere
pointed beard and a complexion glimpsed in a slim young Cuban one night
at Saratoga? Or that Cornelia's mother existed by any better right than
your once happening to see a poor lady try to hide the gap in her teeth
when she smiled?
"When I think what a thing of shreds and patches I am, I wonder that I
have any sort of individual temperament or consciousness at all. But I
know that I have, and that you wrote me with pleasure and like me
still. You think I have form, and that, if I am not very serious, I am
sincere, and that somehow I represent a phase of our droll American
civilization truly enough. I know you were vexed when some people said
I did not go far enough, and insisted that the coast of Bohemia ought
to have been the whole kingdom. As if I should have cared to be that!
There are shady places inland where I should not have liked my girls to
be, and where I think my young men would not have liked to meet them;
and I am glad you kept me within the sweet, pure breath of the sea. I
think I am all the better book for that, and, if you are fond of me,
you have your reasons. I----"
"Upon my word," I interrupted at this point, "it seems to me that you
are saying rather more for yourself than I could say for you, if you
_are_ one of my spoiled children. Don't you think we had both better
give the reader a chance, now?"
"Oh, if there are to be any readers!" cried the book, and lapsed into
the silence of print.
[Illustration: W. D. Howells.]
Transcriber's Note: The Table of Contents has been added for the
convenience of the reader.