The opening chapters were written in a fine,old fashioned apartment house which had once been a family house,and in an uppermost room of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St.George's Church.Then later in the spring of 1889the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on the Belmont border of Cambridge.There I must have written very rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended.It came,indeed,so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.
There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New York;and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as it was early in the last decade of the last century:I mean,the housing of people of such moderate means as the Marches.In my zeal for truth Idid not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other matters--that is,one was as precious to me as the other.But the types here portrayed are as true as ever they were,though the world in which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully,almost incredibly different.Yet it is not wholly different,for a young literary pair now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the Marches with their own,if not for so little money;many phases of New York housing are better,but all are dearer.Other aspects of the material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful.
I find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two millions,but now in twenty years it is twice as great,and the grandeur as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent.The transitional public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys,in honking and whirring motors;the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway,shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city's haste.From these feet let the witness infer our whole massive Hercules,a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies with innumerable tops--a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus,but not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.
Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed twenty years ago are not less dear,and they are by no means touched with despair,though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I would then have prophesied for them.Events have not wholly played them false;events have not halted,though they have marched with a slowness that might affect a younger observer as marking time.They who were then mindful of the poor have not forgotten them,and what is better the poor have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the material of tragedy and pathos in my story.In my quality of artist Icould not regret these,and I gratefully realize that they offered me the opportunity of a more strenuous action,a more impressive catastrophe than I could have achieved without them.They tended to give the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book.As a serial it had crept a sluggish course before a public apparently so unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptance or rejection reached the writer during the half year of its publication;but it rose in book form from that failure and stood upon its feet and went its way to greater favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed.I hope that my recognition of the fact will not seem like boasting,but that the reader will regard it as a special confidence from the author and will let it go no farther.
KITTERY POINT,MAINE,July,1909.
