Laudataque virtus crescit
* * * *
*
“Buttons, a farthing
a pair!
Come, who could buy them of
me?
They’re round and sound
and pretty,
And fit for girls of the city.”
(Agent of the New York Society for the Suppression
of Vice)
For no short while my indebtedness to you has been
such as to require some sort of public acknowledgment,
which may now, I think, be tendered most appropriately
by inscribing upon the dedication page of this small
volume the name to which you are daily adding in significance.
It is a tribute, however trivial, which serves at
least to express my appreciation of your zeal in re-establishing
what seemed to the less optimistic a lost cause.
I may to-day confess without much embarrassment that
after fifteen years of foiled endeavors my (various)
publishers and I had virtually decided that the printing
of my books was not likely ever to come under the
head of a business venture, but was more properly
describable as a rather costly form of dissipation.
People here and there would praise, but until you,
unsolicited, had volunteered to make me known to the
general public, nobody seemed appreciably moved to
purchase.
One by one my books had “fallen dead”
with disheartening monotony: then—through
what motive it would savor of ingratitude to inquire,—you
came to remedy all this in the manner of a philanthropic
sorcerer, brandishing everywhither your vivifying wand,
and the dead lived again. At once, they tell
me, the patrons of bookstores began to ask, not only
in whispers for the Jurgen which you had everywhere
so glowingly advertised, but with frank curiosity
for “some of the fellow’s other books.”
Whereon we of course began to “reprint,”
with, I rejoice to say, results which have been very
generally acceptable. Barring a few complaints
as to the exiguousness of my writing’s salacity,—a
salacity which even I confess you amiably exaggerated
in attributing to my literary manner all qualities
which the average reader most desires in novelists,—there
has proved to be in point of fact, as my publishers
and I had dubiously believed for years, a gratifying
number of persons, living dispersedly about America,
prepared to like my books when these books were brought
to their attention. The difficulty had been that
we did not know how to reach these widely scattered,
congenial readers. But you—like Sir
James Barrie’s hero—“found a
way.”
I cannot say, in candor, that your method of exegetical
criticism has always and in every respect appealed
to me. Its applicability, for one thing, seems
so universal that it might, for aught I know, be employed
to interpret the dicta of Ackermann and Macrobius,
or even the canons of Doctors Matthews and Sherman
herein cited, and thus open dire vistas wherein critic
would prey on critic, and the most respectable would
be locked in fratricidal strife. Moreover, I have
applied your method to many of the Mother Goose rhymes
with rather curious results.... But happily,
I have here to confess to you, not any disputable
literary standards I may harbor, but only my unarguable
debt.
