|It would be ungracious to let this book go out into a preoccupied world
without some word of gratitude to those who have written regarding the
young Henry as he has appeared from month to month in a magazine. The
letters have been the kindliest and most stimulating imaginable; and
have surprised me, for I have never found it easy to picture Henry as a
popular hero of fiction.
He isn't, of course, a hero at all. His weaknesses are too plain--the
little evidences of vanity in him, his selfcentred moments, his errant
susceptibilities--and heroes can't have weaknesses. And heroes--in any
well-regulated pattern-story--must 'turn out well.' Henry, in this book,
doesn't really turn out at all. His success in Episode X is a rather
alarming accident. I think he'll do well enough, when he's forty or so.
At twenty, no. He has huge doses of life's medicine yet to swallow. And
all his problems are complicated by the touch of genius that is in him.
Another thing: there couldn't have been a Mamie Wilcox in our
pattern-story. And certainly not a Corinne. Hardly even a Martha. For
a 'divided love interest' destroys your pattern. Yet Marthas, Corinnes,
Mamies occur everywhere. So I can't very well apologise for their
presence here.
We might, of course, have had Henry overthrow the Old Cinch in Sunbury;
clean up the town. But he didn't happen to be a St George that summer.
And then, so many heroes of pattern-stories, these two decades, have
slain municipal dragons!
He might have listened in a deeper humility to the worldly wisdom of
Uncle Arthur. But he didn't. He had to live his own life, not Uncle
Arthur's. His way was the harder, but he couldn't help that.
I would have liked to pursue further the Mildred-Humphrey romance;
including Arthur V. and the curious triangle that resulted; but the
crisis didn't come in that year.
And against the temptation to dwell with Madame Watt and her husband I
have had, here, to set my face. Though something of that story will be
told in a book yet to come, dealing with an older, changed Henry.
The richly dramatic career of _Madame_ underlay the irony of Henry's
marriage; and we shall have to deal with that, or at least with the
events that grew out of it.
I have said that Henry would turn out well enough in time. From the
angle of the pattern-story this obviously couldn't be. It would be said
that if he _was_ ever to succeed he should have got started by this time
in habits of industry and so forth.
I won't say that this is nonsense, but instead will quote from the
autobiography of Charles Francis Adams (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916).
Mr Adams, from his fifteenth to his twenty-fifth year, kept a diary.
Then he sealed the volumes in a package. Thirty years later he opened
the package and read every word. He says:--
'The revelation of myself to myself was positively shocking.... It
wasn't that the thing was bad or that my record was discreditable; it
was worse! It was silly. That it was crude, goes without saying.
_That_ I didn't mind! But I did blush and groan and swear over its
unmistakable, unconscious immaturity and ineptitude, its conceit, its
weakness and its cant.... As I finished each volume it went into the
fire; and I stood over it until the last leaf was ashes.... I have never
felt the same about myself since. I now humbly thank fortune that I have
got almost through life without making a conspicuous ass of myself.'
Mr Adams, immediately after the period covered by the diary, plunged
into the Civil War, and emerged with the well-earned brevet rank
of brigadier-general. He was later eminent as publicist, author,
administrator, a recognised leader of thought in a troublous time. He
became president of the Union Pacific Railroad. And at the last he was
the subject of a memorial address by the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge.
As Henry is still several years short of twenty-five perhaps there is
hope for him.
Concord, Mass.