The Hoosier Schoolmaster | Page 7

not make any but minor changes in this novel. The author of "The Hoosier School-Master" is distinctly not I; I am but his heir and executor; and since he is a more popular writer than I, why should I meddle with his work? I have, however, ventured to make some necessary revision of the diction, and have added notes, mostly with reference to the dialect.
A second grudge against this story is that somehow its readers persist in believing it to be a bit of my own life. Americans are credulous believers in that miracle of the imagination whom no one has ever seen in the flesh--the self-made man. Some readers of "The Hoosier School-Master" have settled it for a certainty that the author sprang from the rustic class he has described. One lady even wrote to inquire whether my childhood were not represented in Shocky, the little lad out of the poor-house. A biographical sketch of me in Italian goes so far as to state that among the hard resorts by which I made a living in my early life was the teaching of a Sunday-school in Chicago.
No one knows so well as I the faults of immaturity and inexperience that characterize this book. But perhaps after all the public is right in so often preferring an author's first book. There is what Emerson would have called a "central spontaneity" about the work of a young man that may give more delight to the reader than all the precision of thought and perfection of style for which we strive as life advances.
JOSHUA'S ROCK ON LAKE GEORGE, 1892.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Since writing the passage in the text, I have met with the following in The Speaker, of London: "Everybody knows that when an important work is published in history, philosophy, or any branch of science, the editor of a respectable paper employs an expert to review it; . . . indeed, the more abstruse the subject of the book, the more careful and intelligent you will find the review. . . . It is equally well known that works of fiction and books of verse are not treated with anything like the same care. . . . A good poem, play, or novel is at least as fine an achievement as a good history; yet the history gets the benefit of an expert's judgment and two columns of thoughtful pimse or censure, while the poem, play, or novel is treated to ten skittish lines by the hack who happens to be within nearest call when the book comes in."]

PART OF THE PREFACE TO THE
FIRST EDITION.
I may as well confess, what it would be affectation to conceal, that I am more than pleased with the generous reception accorded to this story as a serial in the columns of Hearth and Home. It has been in my mind since I was a Hoosier boy to do something toward describing life in the back-country districts of the Western States. It used to be a matter of no little jealousy with us, I remember, that the manners, customs, thoughts, and feelings of New England country people filled so large a place in books, while our life, not less interesting, not less romantic, and certainly not less filled with humorous and grotesque material, had no place in literature. It was as though we were shut out of good society. And, with the single exception of Alice Gary, perhaps, our Western writers did not dare speak of the West otherwise than as the unreal world to which Cooper's lively imagination had given birth.
I had some anxiety lest Western readers should take offence at my selecting what must always seem an exceptional phase of life to those who have grown up in the more refined regions of the West. But nowhere has the School-master been received more kindly than in his own country and among his own people.
Some of those who have spoken generous words of the School-master and his friends have suggested that the story is an autobiography. But it is not, save in the sense in which every work of art is an autobiography: in that it is the result of the experience and observation of the writer. Readers will therefore bear in mind that not Ralph nor Bud nor Brother Sodom nor Dr. Small represents the writer, nor do I appear, as Talleyrand said of Madame de Sta?l, "disguised as a woman," in the person of Hannah or Mirandy. Some of the incidents have been drawn from life; none of them, I believe, from my own. I should like to be considered a member of the Church of the Best Licks, however.
It has been in my mind to append some remarks, philological and otherwise, upon the dialect, but Professor Lowell's admirable and erudite preface to the