Though the script of this
manuscript is extremely difficult to read, the speculation had
evidently been done before taking up the pen. I am not sure but that
my father sometimes destroyed first drafts, of which his family knew
nothing. Indeed, we have his own word for it that "he passed the day
in writing stories and the night in burning them." Nevertheless, his
tendency we know to have been that of thinking out his plots and
scenes and characters, and transcribing them rapidly without further
change.
Since he did not write anything wholly for the pleasure of creative
writing, but had moral motives and perfect artistic harmony to
consider, he could not have indulged in the spontaneous, passionate
effusions which are the substance of so much other fiction. He was
obliged to train his mind to reflection and judgment, and therefore he
never tasted luxury of any kind. The mere enjoyment of historical
settings in all their charm and richness, rehabilitated for their own
sake or for worldly gain; and that of caricatures of the members of
the human family, because they are so often so desperately funny; the
gloating over realistic pictures of life as it is found, because life
as it is found is a more absorbing study than that of geology or
chemistry; the tasting of redundant scenes of love and intrigue, which
flatter the reader like experiences of his own,--these excesses he was
not willing to admit to his art, a magic that served his literary
palate with still finer food.
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