The Preface

A preface is more than an author can resist, for it is the reward of his labours. When the foundation stone is laid, the architect appears with his plans, and struts for an hour before the public eye. So with the writer in his preface : he may have never a word to say, but he must show himself for a moment in the portico, hat in hand, and with an urbane demeanour. - ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, An Inland Voyage.

GOOD old Jeremy Taylor, in the preface to A Dissuasive from Popery, tells the story of a “ Roman Gentleman [who] had to please himself written a book in Greek and presented it to Cato; he desired him to pardon the faults of his expressions, since he wrote in Greek, which was a tongue in which he was not perfect Master. Cato told him he had better then to have let it alone, and written in Latine, by how much it is better not to commit a fault then to make apologies. For if the thing be good, it needs not to be excus’d, if it be not good, a crude apologie will do nothing but confess the fault, but never make amends.” Whereupon the Lord Bishop of Down, pointing the moral of his own tale, devotes eleven pages to his prefatory apologies.

The case is typical; for forewords, be they the poetic prologue of the drama, or the prose preliminaries of philosopher, poet, essayist, or novelist, are not infrequently fraught with more danger to the author than is the book which they would excuse. Hours of Idleness, had it appeared anonymously, might have won at least the safety of oblivion, and the noble author might have been spared more than one mauvais quart d’heure. But young George Gordon, Lord Byron, wrote a preface apologizing for his poetry on the score of his youth and inexperience, and quite went out of his way to provide a peg for the Edinburgh reviewer to hang a gibe on. “As an extenuation of this offence” (the publication of the poems) remarks Brougham in the Edinburgh, “the noble author is peculiarly forward in pleading minority. . . . Much stress is laid upon it in the preface, and the poems are connected with this general statement of the case by particular dates substantiating the age at which each was written. Now the law upon the point of minority, we hold to be perfectly clear. It is a plea available only to the defendant; no plaintiff can offer it as a supplementary ground of action. Thus, if any suit could be brought against Lord Byron for the purpose of compelling him to put into court a certain quantity of poetry; and if judgment were given against him; it is highly probable that an exception would be taken, were he to deliver for poetry the contents of this volume. To this, he might plead minority; but as he now makes voluntary tender of the article, he hath no right to sue, on that ground, for the price in good current praise, should the goods be unmarketable. This is our view of the law on the point, and, we dare to say, so will it be ruled. Perhaps however, in reality, all that he tells us about his youth is rather with a view to increase our wonder than to soften our censures. He possibly means to say, ‘ See how a minor can write! This poem was actually composed by a young man of eighteen, and this by one of only sixteen!’”

O acrid Brougham! O writhing Noble Minor! One can imagine the young poet wishing that he had been compelled, like exiled Ovid, to say: Sine me, liber, ibis in urbem.

No less fatal was Keats’s deprecatory plea when Endymion was offered to the world. “Knowing within myself,” he says, “the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. — What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, who must perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished.” On this boyish apology the fiend of the Quarterly seizes with avidity; but it is a subsequent admission which seals the author’s doom. “The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press.” Here indeed is an opening in the victim’s wavering guard. “ Je touche,” cries Mr. Reviewer-Cyrano, triumphantly. “Thus ‘the two first books’ are, even in his [Keats’s] own judgment, unfit to appear, and ‘the two last’ are, it seems, in the same condition, — and as two and two make four, and as that is the whole number of books, we have a clear and, we believe, a very just estimate of the entire work.”

Nor is it unusual for the author quite unconsciously to suggest in his prefatory remarks the basis for the most deservedly severe criticism of his work. The creator of Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy never came to realize that he was programmeridden, and that much of his best writing was done when he was most oblivious of his thesis. The preface to the Lyrical Ballads was not only an epoch-making pronunciamento; it was also a confession of a mechanical method. To Wordsworth’s way of thinking the poems of the edition of 1798 were not primarily poems; they were experiments, — written “ chiefly with a view to ascertain how far ” (in his now famous phrase) “ the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.”

Just two years before the future English Laureate pronounced his arduous programme, a Scottish poet brought to its troubled close a life whose ideal had been much the same, — who had done because he could not help it what Wordsworth did because it could be done. Oddly the prefatory explanations contrast. “None of the following works,” Burns had written in the preface to the collection of 1786, “were ever composed with a view to the press. To amuse myself with the little creations of my own fancy, amid the toils and fatigues of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears in my own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mind, — these were my motives for courting the muses, and in these I found poetry its own reward.”

But if the preface has occasionally served no higher purpose than to furnish a theme for the “chorus of insolent reviewers” or to point out the weak spots in the champion’s armor, it has also at times thrown more than one fascinating sidelight upon the personality of the author. It has not infrequently been a medium of naïve self-confession, as when Charles Kingsley, setting out to write an historical novel of fifth-century Christianity, confesses to his somewhat prudish public that though he has endeavored “to sketch the age, its manners, and its literature” as he found them, his Anglican conscience has rather balked at telling the whole truth. “Oh, don’t be shocked at this or that, ” — so Mr. Gosse rather flippantly interprets the author’s preface. “It is nothing to what I could tell you if I chose. You think that Orestes was a very wicked man, do you ? Shall I make your flesh creep by explaining, — but no, I won’t; your dear little Early Victorian ears would n’t stand it.”

Or, to make a leap back over the centuries, one finds Lord Berners, in the prologue to his translation of “The Hystorye of the moost noble and valiaunt Knyght Arthur of lytell Brytayne,” quaintly admitting that he set out to translate the book before he had read it, and that, as he proceeded, he had been so staggered by its “unpossibilities” that he had more than once been of a mind to lay it down. Treacherous as are the seas upon which he finds himself embarked, however, he takes comfort in the thought that the book has been put together probably “not without some measure of truth and virtuous intent.”

One is reminded of Caxton’s skeptical preface to the Morte Darthur: “For to pass the time, this book shall be pleasant to read in, but for to give faith and belief that all is true that is contained herein, ye be at your liberty.” And indeed this same honest Caxton, “simple person” as he confesses himself to be, set type to no better purpose in the Morte Darthur itself than in the modest preface with which he gave it to the world: “Wherefore ... I have under the simple conning that God hath sent to me, under the favour and correction of all noble lords and gentlemen, enprised to imprint a book of the noble histories of the said King Arthur, and of certain of his knights ... to the intent that noble men may see and learn the noble acts of chivalry, the gentle and virtuous deeds that some knights used in those days, by which they came to honour, and how they that were vicious were punished and oft put to shame and rebuke; humbly beseeching all noble lords and ladies, with all other estates of what other estate or degree they been of, that shall see and read in this said book and work, that they take the good and honest acts in their remembrance, and to follow the same. Wherein they shall find many joyous and pleasant histories, and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness and chivalry. For herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue and sin. Do after the good and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee.”

It was with equal sincerity if perhaps less charm of style that Defoe in his prefaces used to point the moral of his adventurous yarns. That remarkable personage, Colonel Jacque, — “who was born a Gentleman, put ’prentice to a Pickpocket, flourished six and twenty years as a Thief, and was then kidnapped to Virginia; came back a Merchant, . . . went into the Wars, behaved bravely, got preferment, was made Colonel of a Regiment, came over and fled with the Chevalier, is still Abroad completing a Life of Wonders, and resolves to die a General,” — enjoy his rascality as we may to-day, was conceived by the author in a spirit of the most commendable piety. “ The various turns of his fortune in the world make a delightful field for the reader to wander in; a garden where he may gather wholesome and medicinal fruits, none noxious or poisonous; where he will see virtue and the ways of wisdom everywhere applauded, honoured, encouraged, rewarded; vice and all kinds of wickedness attended with misery, many kinds of infelicities; and at last, sin and shame going together, the persons meeting with reproof and reproach, and the crimes with abhorrence.

“Every wicked reader ” (this is refreshing; the class has apparently ceased to exist to-day) “ will here be encouraged to a change, and it will appear that the best and only good end of an impious, misspent life is repentance; that in this there is comfort, peace and oftentimes hope, and that the penitent shall be returned like the prodigal, and his latter end be better than his beginning.”

The italics are Defoe’s, — which leaves no doubt about his pious intentions, whatever we may think of the fact that, so far as the book is concerned, the beginning is much better than the latter end. The old Adam in Defoe rather loses zest in the redoubtable Colonel after the latter’s reformation is effected.

But not all the prefaces of former times are marked by such a sweet humility as Caxton’s or such a worthy piety as Defoe’s. Burly Ben Jonson is never burlier than in the poetic forewords to his plays; and in the first of them — that the prologue of Every Man in his Humour may have been composed at a later date is of no moment — his prefatory remarks are of no uncertain tenor. Not for him the base truckling of those poets who would serve the “ill customs of the age.” Rather

wherein, instead of the crudities and impossibilities of the romantic drama, you shall find

Izaak Walton, as became his calling, was not so self-assertive as the author of Every Man in his Humour, but he is every whit as indifferent to criticism; and nowhere in the Compleat Angler proper is the cool self-sufficiency of the true brother of the angle better brought out than in these words from the preface: “And though this Discourse may be liable to some exceptions, yet I cannot doubt but that most Readers may receive so much pleasure or profit by it, as may make it worthy the time of their perusal, if they be not too grave or too busy men. . . . And I wish the Reader also to take notice, that in writing of it, I have made myself a recreation of a recreation; and that it may prove so to him, and not read dull and tediously, I have in several places mixed, not any scurrility, but some innocent, harmless mirth, of which, if thou be a severe, sour complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge.”

“A recreation of a recreation!” — happy the man who can confess to such a cheerful spontaneity of composition! So Bunyan, in the quaintly rhymed preface to Pilgrim’s Progress, testifies that the work was done, “mine own self to gratifie: ” —

When Ben Jonson blustered, he also “made good;” and Bunyan could afford to thank Providence that his neighbor’s “John, print it,” had decided his uncertain course; but it is not uncommon to follow the preface through its throes of parturition only to find that the product is little more than a ridiculous mouse. Dr. Johnson’s cynical reference to his early instructor in English, who “published a spelling book and dedicated it to the universe,” will be remembered; and I have before me an ancient grammar which makes its bow to the waiting world with no less pomposity. Published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1854, it purports to be “ A Compendious Treatise on the Languages English, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and French, founded on the immutable principle of the relation which one word sustains to another.” By way of frontispiece rises a gigantic tree-trunk from which juts out a massive limb. Upon the trunk in great black letters is the word “God,” and along the limb in print of equal magnitude are the words “hath spoken.” “God hath spoken!” Could a more effective preface be imagined ? It is true that, upon closer examination, lettered twigs devolving from trunk and limb resolve themselves into a pictorial grammatical analysis of the first verse of the first chapter of Hebrews; but the primary impression, the awful sensation of Jupiter tonans, remains unimpaired.

The worthy author of this forgotten grammar threw the responsibility for its fate upon the Almighty, with apparently no doubt that, between author and Sponsor, the days of the Compendious Treatise would be long in the land. Other and more mundane support had he, too, for upon the fly-leaves clusters a very musterroll of the great names of his day, — Millard Fillmore, H. Clay, Winfield Scott, William H. Seward, Hamilton Fish, Bayard Taylor, Henry W. Longfellow, Jared Sparks, and a score of others — all the signatures in unmistakably authentic facsimile. With such stately inaugural the Compendious Treatise takes its oath of office. How the little barefooted poets and novelists-to-be must have climbed the lamp posts to catch a glimpse of the majestic figure! How the man who had been made Laureate of England four years before, had chance of traffic brought a copy to his hand, — how Tennyson would have smiled! and perhaps turned back musingly to the preface of a thin little volume entitled Poems by Two Brothers, — “Haec novimus esse nihil” had been its modest motto, — and the preface: “We have passed the Rubicon and we leave the rest to fate, though its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever emerged from the shade and courted notoriety.”

The prefatory pronouncement of the Compendious Treatise had at least the merit of brevity; and, indeed, unless the nature of the case calls for an elaborate disquisition, or unless, as in the case of Scott, the book in question has already won a recognition which warrants unlimited personalia, the proud author has generally been content to “ show himself for a moment in the portico,” and then turn the public loose in his vaulted corridors. “If brevity is the soul of wit anywhere, it is most especially so in a preface,” remarks Dickens, who did live up to this principle in his prefaces, however he violated it in his stories; “firstly, because those who do read such things as prefaces prefer them, like grace before meat, in an epigrammatic form; and secondly, because nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of every thousand never read a preface at all;” and to this brevity the hopeful author must add a special savor of personality, if he do not wish to be a candidate for the obliviousness of the nine hundred and ninety-nine. It is the rare preface which inspires in the breast of the reader the hope of Nick Bottom, the weaver, — “I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb.”

After all, it was a fellow countryman and contemporary of the forgotten author of the Compendious Treatise who could most skillfully compound his prefaces of these two indispensable elements, and put the gentle reader into the best possible humor with himself, the world, the author, and the volume in hand; and of Dr. Holmes’s many genial prefaces, one likes best to recall that which ushered the delightful series of Autocrat papers to an audience even larger than the Atlantic could furnish. “I cannot make the book over again,” wrote the old Doctor, twenty-five years after the papers had appeared in the magazine, “ and I will not try to mend old garments with new cloth. Let the sensible reader take it for granted that the author would agree with him in changing whatever he would alter; in leaving out whatever he would omit.”

Could anything be more urbane ?