SIX OF ONE BY HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER. AN EVERY DAY NOVEL.
BYHARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
ADELINE D. T. WHITNEY,
LUCRETIA P. HALE,
FREDERIC W. LORING,
FREDERIC B. PERKINS,
EDWARD E. HALE.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1872.Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by ROBERTS BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. CAMBRIDGE: PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON.
SIX PREFACES.
FIRST PREFACE.
THE history of this composition is precisely told in the November number of OLD AND NEW, in which it was first announced to the public.
"What is this," said Anna Haliburton, "about a new serial in OLD AND NEW? 'Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other,'—is that the name?"
The Editor of OLD AND NEW was not present; but Colonel Ingham answered for him, as, at a pinch, he does sometimes.
"What you saw was one of the unconscious prophecies which give the world a hint of its best blessings in advance."
"Would it please you, dear padre, to abandon the method of the pulpit for a moment, and, in somewhat clearer language, to tell us what our chief does intend, in an enterprise in which he has not enlisted our endeavors?"
"He has not enlisted you," said Ingham, "because, as it is, the Editor has enlisted our five best home story-writers,—Mr. McDonald being, alas! too far away, to unite their forces,—and it being, alas! evident that even in our seventeen hundred annual pages we cannot print a whole novel by each of them, and at the same time take care of all the world of literature, art, and religion beside."
"Once more," said Felix Carter again, "will you please to abandon the method of the bar, and state explicitly what the chief proposes?"
page: iv-v[View Page iv-v]"And will you tell us how the plot is constructed?"
"No; nor will I tell you the plot. All I know is, that it grew, novel and plot, much as I remember to have seen Signor Blitz's plates start from the table when he was spinning them. He announced that he would spin six earthen dinner-plates at one time. He began with one, spinning it as you spin a penny for a child; when that was well going, he started number two; and then, from a side-table started the third. If he saw one faint and weary he encouraged it by a touch of his finger at the point of revolution; and when these three were happily gyrating, like so many interior planets, he let loose in succession numbers four, five, and six. I think the chief started the novel in much the same way. He spoke to Mrs. Stowe first, and consulted Mr. Loring. Then he went to Mrs. Whitney, and sent a brief of the plot to Miss Hale. The four principals had what the Friends call 'a solid sitting;' and in the equally happy phrase of those charming people they were 'baptized into each other's spirit.' They possessed themselves mutually of the best plot, the best moral, the locale, and the atmosphere of the story. They selected the names,—actually changed Mary Yates into Rachel Holley, after Mary had been tried and found wanting. Meanwhile, our philosophical Devil-Puzzling friend, Mr. Perkins, had come cordially into the combination, so that the story is to have the benefit of his universal information, and, I suppose, of his conferences with Apollo Lyon, Esq. Thus it is that we are to publish the first chapter of 'Six of One' in December."
"Whose chapter is that?" said everybody, even the sluggish gentlemen taking out their cigars for the inquiry.
"I have told you that it is everybody's chapter."
"Do you mean to say," said Haliburton, "that Mr. Hale locked all these people up, as if he were Ptolemy Philadelphus with the seventy translators,—that he shut them into-five cells in the attic of 143 Washington Street, and himself retired into a sixth, and that at the end of six months they all came out, a little haggard, bearing six manuscripts, which on examination by Rand & Avery's proof-reader, proved to be identical, even to the use of semicolons instead of comma-dashes?"
This was a very long sentence for Haliburton, or for anybody.
Ingham said that he did not mean so. But he meant that the high contracting powers had come to no dead-locks in the management of the story. "The public will undoubtedly know better than the authors themselves do who wrote what or who contributed which. All I know is, that we are to have the critical period of the life of Six of Them by Half a Dozen of the Others."
The plan having been once suggested, copies of the following sketch of a plot were submitted to each of the six contributors:—
page: vi-vii[View Page vi-vii]SIX OF THEM BY SIX OF US.
CHAPTERS I. AND II.
John Bryant and Jane Gaylord grew up in District No. 1 of Marston, went to the same school, of course, &c., &c. Henry Eyre and Henrietta Silva grew up in District No. 2, &c., &c. Mark Hinsdale and Mary Yates grew up in District No. 3, &c., &c.
In all dances, frolics, sleigh-rides, &c., they paired off as above. The town supposed they were mated for life. Perhaps they supposed so themselves. But
CHAPTERS III. AND IV.
John Bryant went to Boston,
Henry Eyre to Norwich, and
Mark Hinsdale to New York to try their fortunes.
Henrietta Silva went to Boston,
Mary Yates to Norwich, and
Jane Gaylord to New York.
The law of "propinquities" affected them. The letter-writers of Marston concluded, perhaps they concluded themselves, that the old cast of parts had not been the right one, and that other destinies were over them, mating them again by residence; when
CHAPTER V.
Jane Gaylord being appointed, teacher in a Chicago School, Henrietta Silva detained there in travelling, and Mary Yates on a visit there, it proved
CHAPTER VI.
That the fore-ordained mates were:
John and Mary.
Henry and Jane.
Mark and Henrietta. And so the story ends.
MEM.—Note as an aide-mémoire,—that the original initials are J. and J., H. and H., M. and M.
It is impossible to say whether the plan would ever have gone further, but that our dear friend Mr. Frederic Wadsworth Loring, who had enlisted joyfully in the scheme, and with fun ever new descanted on it, took it into his charge and keeping. No one who talked with him about it could resist him. He compelled the authors to their duty; and soon after he left Boston for that expedition to the Pacific slope which terminated so fatally, 1 they had their first "solid sitting," four out of the remaining five being present.
1Mr. Loring was killed by a body of outlaws, supposed to be Apache Indians, on his return toward San Francisco, from a summer of adventure with Lieutenant Wheeler's survey.
The ladies protested against the names. After great canvassing, they agreed on the respective characters to be maintained by the heroes and heroines. New names were then selected to match these characters, and the briefs were altered thus:—
- 1. JEFF FLEMING, dashing fellow, go ahead; begins with JANE BURGESS, she a pattern. He ends with RACHEL HOLLEY.
- 2. HORACE VANZANDT, inventor, begins with HENRIETTA SYLVA, called NETTIE, attractive but coquettish; but ends with JANE BURGESS.
- 3. MARK HINSDALE, bookish, and given to clouds and scenery; begins with RACHEL HOLLEY, regular beauty and good; ends with NETTIE SYLVA.
- MEM.—They are to be common-place, not very high-flying, people.
On this agreement the four selected their parts, Mr. Loring's was assigned to him, and absent author number page: viii-ix[View Page viii-ix] ber six took Hobson's choice. It was tacitly agreed (by the Editor) that each of the partners should be entirely and personally responsible for all the imaginings, opinions, and statements of all the other partners.
Only a part of Mr. Loring's work was finished by him; and the other authors have, with a sad interest, completed the unfinished sketches received from him.
One and another meeting has since been held, and the result is before the readers, the original name having been changed by the distinguished Nomenclator of OLD AND NEW to
SECOND PREFACE.
UNQUESTIONABLY the tap-root of American growth, whether it be palmetto or pine, is of the shortest. You transplant it very easily. And why not? The Americans have ample room and verge enough. Our English friends may naturally think that "home" is a place where the inmates stay, and twirl industriously round, like squirrels inside of their trundling tin domicile. Not but what the Englishman travels to every part of the world, and takes his home-comforts with him, enjoys his sponging bath on his way to the Albert N'yanza, and his ale in the Himalaya. But he always finds it necessary to send his children and wife "home" every year or two, to pick up the English constitution in climate, and the English "accent" in education. Our American on the other hand, wandering over the extent of our great continent, has no occult tie that fetches him back to live in the home of his childhood. His home is where his business is, where he can make his fortune. He begins his career a stern Northerner, with a theory that life is nothing but work, and by and by he turns up a lazy Southerner, smoking his pipe all day on the open veranda. From a quiet country home, he passes through college life, breasts the passions of one of our great cities, then calms off on a western farm. But do not think that you have him rooted there. If he has a good offer for his wheat-fields, he has no particular reason for holding on to them, and you may see him next in South America, or setting up a chocolate mill in New England.
Perhaps toward the end of life some sentiment leads him to take his grandchildren to look at his native village. He talks to them of its quiet, of the old homestead with broad roof sloping to the ground, with the grass coming up to the front door, and a red rosebush against the old stone-wall, and the stream rippling behind the house. But, alas! at the end of his pilgrimage, he finds a row of tenements set up across the front-door yard, the old homestead is an Irish shanty, and a grimy factory makes a hideous noise by the side of the "quiet stream." The old man sighs with regret; page: x-xi[View Page x-xi] not for the calm scenes of his youth, indeed, "but" he says, "if I had only held on to the land, what a fortune I might have made!"
Yet is there not a matter of education in this? We cannot boast of a strong American physical constitution, equal to that of the Englishman, but in the facility with which the American adapts himself to the various climates and soils in which he places himself, does he not gain a largeness of character, a liberality of spirit, and freedom of soul?
Our young American people find out how to centre all their home interests in any spot where they live, in country or city, on the farm or the plantation. When the time comes in which they must choose their places in life, they are not detained by considering if it is within the circle of their birthplace. They live where their life is. For them it is,—
THIRD PREFACE.
A PIECE of a preface? Very well; with all my heart. Though why preface, as Dickens would say, I'm sure I don't know; seeing that prefaces are always postscripts.
Are there to be five prefaces? or one, conglomerate like the story of five paragraphs? Shall we put in "the wit of the staircase,"—the things we might have said and didn't? Shall we supplement, or explain, or excuse, or gently deprecate, or mystify? And shall we do it all together, or one at a time, dividing round again? The Colonel has sent no special orders; he has, in fact, gone off the field, leaving his regiment to manœuvre for itself in this final charge upon the public, in any pell-mell fashion that it may devise. But then that shows only the great and merited confidence he reposes in us.
Well, the dear critics know all the joints in our armor: we told them at the outset where to look for them. To glance off to a different simile suggested by the word,—the ribs of the roast are all cracked before-hand: they will be poor carvers if they can't cut us up.
But that is not the metaphor that will carry me through either.
There were six balls to wind; there were six pairs of hands set to do the work. I will not pause upon that "were;" this is not the place, nor is this light preface in the vein, for speaking of how we were left to be only five.
But what wonder if, with one or two ends of our yarn out on the Highlands, one in Boston, one in Cambridge, and trailing off thence to Florida, and the other—where not? the threads should get curiously mixed and crossed and tangled, not to say broken in the process? If we have tied clumsy weaver's knots anywhere,—if we have changed and twisted more than page: xii-xiii[View Page xii-xiii] you expected or than seemed reasonable,—before you say hastily, "That's what comes of patchwork; of course it would be a disjointed, distracted medley;" look around you at the real live threads that twist and cross and snarl and break, and are tied in the wrong places, and coming unfastened all the time in this perplexed and jumbled world, and see if you can trace any one of them, that you discern the most of, further on a clear, uncomplicated line than you can these of ours?
I find I have done the "gentle deprecation" business, though I did not know I should when I began: if I could, without trespassing on my neighbor's division, I should just say one thing more. You need not come down upon us with the conclusion that we have not known at all, from one hand—or head—to the other, what it was to be about; how drift and turn, or how fall out. There, too, is a deep moral, and a subtle correspondence.
Somebody who set us to work did know, and it has all ended precisely as it was meant to do. There has been rough-hewing, but there has been shaping also, and a clear intent.
But it is not my province to "explain;" I pass the pen—to whom? Will you take it, queen of the clever chessmen?
FOURTH PREFACE.
IT must of course be difficult for one who thinks seriously, to put forth even a story without embodying some moral truth in it. The thoughts turn so easily to inner meanings; we ask ourselves so constantly what is the real significance, the real value, the real importance of souls or emotions or persons or things or actions,—or of the whole universe,—that a story which is only a story seems very unsubstantial. Thus, the careful reader will not find it difficult to analyze six types of character in the three heroes and three heroines of this book; and if such reader love mystical numbers, Mrs. Worboise will make up the Semitic seven. Nor will it demand too much meditation to unravel the trains of thought and emotion which moved our little company of personages; nor to detect the single practical lesson which the story teaches,—one so obvious, indeed, that it may as well be stated plainly, for it is greatly needed in this dear country of ours. It is, that engagements to marry should not be carelessly made, lest youth and love be wasted in three when one is enough. And when they are made, they should be quickly ended by marriage.
page: xiv-xv[View Page xiv-xv]FIFTH PREFACE.
THIS story offers six numbers by as many different authors. Is there nothing to choose between the six?
Some voices answer, "Indeed there is!" Already the admirers of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," have pointed out their favorite chapters. The enthusiasts for Leslie Goldthwaite know well their own, and Fred Ingham can no longer humbug his readers.
Six planned to write these few chapters for the amusement of the public. But one has been called to a higher destiny, leaving behind some fragrant traces of his memory.
But there are six principal characters. The title of the book may have something to do with them. It seems to have been indifferent which either of them chose to marry.
Gentle public, decide it either way: to us, it is
SIXTH PREFACE.
THE original brief of the plot of this story was drawn early in the summer of 1871. The "stage direction" was simply that the parties should meet at Chicago in the autumn of that year, to find their destiny. Little did the innocent augurs and gypsy-women who foretold this fate for heroes and heroines know then in what tempest of fire that destiny would be fulfilled. Doubtful as they were—as any augur must be—of the way in which life shall solve the mystery of life, all that the story-tellers could do was to let the characters grow as the conditions of their being permitted,—let them come and go as these conditions directed,—and leave the issue to that decision which may always be trusted, when youth, faithful and loyal, determines for itself what is right, and abandons the proprieties and etiquettes suggested by Mrs. Grundy. To their dismay, when the 9th of October came, a conflagration such as never will be described, devastated the beautiful city which had been chosen for the scene where their little story should end. This conflagration took place at the moment these young people were there. Born and cradled and trained to do their duty, if they could find it, Jeff Fleming, Horace Vanzandt, and Mark Hinsdale did not shrink from duty in the horrors of that dreadful night and day,—and Jane Burgess, Henrietta Sylva, and Rachel Holley were as true to theirs. It was in the midst of duty well done, in the catastrophe of unexpected calamity, that, as the augurs and gypsy-women had ignorantly predicted, the story ended, and they met their destiny.
