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In spite of obstacles and strictures, the book met with success surpassing the author's expectations. It found its way not only into Russia, Poland, and Germany, but even into France, Italy, England, Holland, and Palestine. An edition of two thousand copies was entirely exhausted, unusual at a time when books were costly and money was scarce, and another edition was issued.
The artistic quality of the author's mind has obliged him to make his heroine more true to nature than his theories have allowed him to make his hero. And his theories about girls are quite as good and quite as different from the fashionable practice of his day as those about boys. It is curious how his ideas approach the American customs.
He was primarily a moralist, an observer of life, which he saw as a thing of the outside, and he was keen in observation, cool, interested. If there was any mystery in his tales, it was in the object, not in the author's breast; he makes no confessions either direct or indirect, he describes the thing he sees.
"'They run! but who? 'The Frenchmen! Such Was the report conveyed to the dying hero. 'Thank Heaven! he cried, 'I thought as much. In Canada the glass is frequently below zero." On hearing the author's name and my description of Miss Plinlimmon, she fell into deep thought. "I suppose, now, she'd look higher than Ben?" I told her that, so far as I knew, Miss Plinlimmon had no desire to marry.
A young author's power of accurate imitation is, after all, the primary and indispensable test of his having even the capability of becoming a poet. He who cannot write in a style which he does know, will certainly not be able to invent a new style for himself.
In such living Russian writers as I have read, in Kuprin, Gorky, and others, I still see and welcome this peculiar quality of rendering life through but not veiled by the author's temperament; so that the effect is almost as if no ink were used.
About the same time the whole stock of the author's books was destroyed by fire, keeping them out of print at a critical moment; and public interest, which until then had been on the increase, gradually began to diminish. After this Mr. Melville contributed several short stories to Putnam's Monthly and Harper's Magazine.
Usually in all works of art that have been conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the author's mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one of extreme perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort once for all; and, having formed a style, adhere to it through life.
The character of Puff, as I have already shown, was our author's first dramatic attempt; and, having left it unfinished in the porch as he entered the temple of Comedy, he now, we see, made it worthy of being his farewell oblation in quitting it. Like Eve's flowers, it was his "Early visitation, and his last."
Bacon's Essays first appeared as a set of ten in 1597, became a set of forty in the revised edition of 1612, and of fifty-eight in the edition of 1625, published a year before their author's death.
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