A Hazard of New Fortunes | Page 2

story
began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the
love-affairs common to fiction. I was in my fifty-second year when I
took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, of my powers. The scene
which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed
as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think
such things happen.
The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment
house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room
of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in
Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George's Church. Then later in
the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house
on the Belmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very
rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended. It

came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I
always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.
There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the
house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in
New York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to
the pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may
trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as it
was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housing of
people of such moderate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth I
did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other
matters--that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the types
here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in which
they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly
different. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair now
adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the
Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of New
York housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of the material
city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I find that
in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two millions,
but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur as well as
grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitional public that
then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and
forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated
road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway,
shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city's
haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole massive Hercules,
a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through the tunnels
piercing their beds and that towers into the skies with innumerable
tops--a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not so bad a
monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.
Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was
fixed twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means
touched with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment
which I would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly
played them false; events have not halted, though they have marched
with a slowness that might affect a younger observer as marking time.
They who were then mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and

what is better the poor have not often forgotten themselves in violences
such as offered me the material of tragedy and pathos in my story. In
my quality of artist I could not regret these, and I gratefully realize that
they offered me the opportunity of a more strenuous action, a more
impressive catastrophe than I could have achieved without them. They
tended to give the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its
success as a book. As a serial it had crept a sluggish course before a
public apparently so unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptance or
rejection reached the writer during the half year of its publication; but it
rose in book form from that failure and stood upon its feet and went its
way to greater favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed. I hope that
my recognition of the fact will not seem like boasting, but that the
reader will regard it as a special confidence from the author and will let
it go no farther.
KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

PART FIRST
A HAZARD OF