Preface

(_underscores_ denote italics)

A preface generally begins with a truism; and I may set out with the
admission that it is not always expedient to bring to light the
posthumous work of great writers. A man generally contrives to publish,
during his lifetime, quite as much as the public has time or
inclination to read; and his surviving friends are apt to show more
zeal than discretion in dragging forth from his closed desk such
undeveloped offspring of his mind as he himself had left to silence.
Literature has never been redundant with authors who sincerely
undervalue their own productions; and the sagacious critics who
maintain that what of his own an author condemns must be doubly
damnable, are, to say the least of it, as often likely to be right as
wrong.

Beyond these general remarks, however, it does not seem necessary to
adopt an apologetic attitude. There is nothing in the present volume
which any one possessed of brains and cultivation will not be thankful
to read. The appreciation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's writings is more
intelligent and wide-spread than it used to be; and the later
development of our national literature has not, perhaps, so entirely
exhausted our resources of admiration as to leave no welcome for even
the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As
regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"--the title which, for lack of a
better, has been given to this Romance,--it can scarcely be pronounced
deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne
written out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could
not have failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had
looked forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary
career. In the Preface to "Our Old Home" he alludes to it as a work
into which he proposed to convey more of various modes of truth than he
could have grasped by a direct effort. But circumstances prevented him
from perfecting the design which had been before his mind for seven
years, and upon the shaping of which he bestowed more thought and labor
than upon anything else he had undertaken. The successive and
consecutive series of notes or studies [Footnote: These studies,
extracts from which will be published in one of our magazines, are
hereafter to be added, in their complete form, to the Appendix of this
volume.] which he wrote for this Romance would of themselves make a
small volume, and one of autobiographical as well as literary interest.
There is no other instance, that I happen to have met with, in which a
writer's thought reflects itself upon paper so immediately and
sensitively as in these studies. To read them is to look into the man's
mind, and see its quality and