Home as Found

Home as Found

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Home as Found, by James Fenimore
Cooper
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Title: Home as Found
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Release Date: November 20, 2003 [eBook #10149]
Language: English
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Home as Found.
Sequel to "Homeward Bound."
By J. Fenimore Cooper.

Complete in one volume.
1871.

"Thou art perfect." PR. HON

Preface

Those who have done us the favour to read "Homeward Bound" will at
once perceive that the incidents of this book commence at the point
where those of the work just mentioned ceased. We are fully aware of
the disadvantage of dividing the interest of a tale in this manner; but in
the present instance, the separation has been produced by
circumstances over which the writer had very little control. As any one
who may happen to take up this volume will very soon discover that
there is other matter which it is necessary to know it may be as well to
tell all such persons, in the commencement, therefore, that their reading
will be bootless, unless they have leisure to turn to the pages of
Homeward Bound for their cue.
We remember the despair with which that admirable observer of men,
Mr. Mathews the comedian, confessed the hopelessness of success, in
his endeavours to obtain a sufficiency of prominent and distinctive
features to compose an entertainment founded on American character.
The whole nation struck him as being destitute of salient points, and as
characterized by a respectable mediocrity, that, however useful it might
be in its way, was utterly without poetry, humour, or interest to the
observer. For one who dealt principally with the more conspicuous
absurdities of his fellow-creatures, Mr. Mathews was certainly right;
we also believe him to have been right in the main, in the general tenor
of his opinion; for this country, in its ordinary aspects, probably
presents as barren a field to the writer of fiction, and to the dramatist, as
any other on earth; we are not certain that we might not say the most
barren. We believe that no attempt to delineate ordinary American life,

either on the stage, or in the pages of a novel, has been rewarded with
success. Even those works in which the desire to illustrate a principle
has been the aim, when the picture has been brought within this homely
frame, have had to contend with disadvantages that have been
commonly found insurmountable. The latter being the intention of this
book, the task has been undertaken with a perfect consciousness of all
its difficulties, and with scarcely a hope of success. It would be indeed
a desperate undertaking, to think of making anything interesting in the
way of a _Roman de Société_ in this country; still useful glances may
possibly be made even in that direction, and we trust that the fidelity of
one or two of our portraits will be recognized by the looker-on,
although they will very likely be denied by the sitters themselves.
There seems to be a pervading principle in things, which gives an
accumulating energy to any active property that may happen to be in
the ascendant, at the time being.--Money produces money; knowledge
is the parent of knowledge; and ignorance fortifies ignorance.--In a
word, like begets like. The governing social evil of America is
provincialism; a misfortune that is perhaps inseparable from her
situation. Without a social capital, with twenty or more communities
divided by distance and political barriers, her people, who are really
more homogenous than any other of the same numbers in the world
perhaps, possess no standard for opinion, manners, social maxims, or
even language.
Every man, as a matter of course, refers to his own particular
experience, and praises or condemns agreeably to notions contracted in
the circle of his own habits, however narrow, provincial, or erroneous
they may happen to be. As a consequence, no useful stage can exist; for
the dramatist who should endeavour to delineate the faults of society,
would find a formidable party arrayed against him, in a moment, with
no party to defend. As another consequence, we see individuals
constantly assailed with a wolf-like ferocity, while society is
everywhere permitted to pass unscathed.
That the American nation is a great nation, in some particulars the
greatest the world ever saw, we hold to be true, and are as ready to

maintain as any one can be; but we are also equally ready