The Luck of Roaring Camp | Page 4

to content himself with the success of
the "Luck," and not tempt criticism again; or that from that moment
ever after he was in receipt of that equally sincere contemporaneous
criticism which assured him gravely that each successive story was a
falling off from the last. Howbeit, by reinvigorated confidence in
himself and some conscientious industry, he managed to get together in
a year six or eight of these sketches, which, in a volume called "The
Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches," gave him that
encouragement in America and England that has since seemed to
justify him in swelling these records of a picturesque passing

civilization into the compass of the present edition.
A few words regarding the peculiar conditions of life and society that
are here rudely sketched, and often but barely outlined. The author is
aware that, partly from a habit of thought and expression, partly from
the exigencies of brevity in his narratives, and partly from the habit of
addressing an audience familar with the local scenery, he often assumes,
as premises already granted by the reader, the existence of a peculiar
and romantic state of civilization, the like of which few English readers
are inclined to accept without corroborative facts and figures. These he
could only give by referring to the ephemeral records of Californian
journals of that date, and the testimony of far-scattered witnesses,
survivors of the exodus of 1849. He must beg the reader to bear in
mind that this emigration was either across a continent almost
unexplored, or by the way of a long and dangerous voyage around Cape
Horn, and that the promised land itself presented the singular spectacle
of a patriarchal Latin race who had been left to themselves, forgotten
by the world, for nearly three hundred years. The faith, courage, vigor,
youth, and capacity for adventure necessary to this emigration
produced a body of men as strongly distinctive as the companions of
Jason. Unlike most pioneers, the majority were men of profession and
education; all were young, and all had staked their future in the
enterprise. Critics who have taken large and exhaustive views of
mankind and society from club windows in Pall Mall or the Fifth
Avenue can only accept for granted the turbulent chivalry that thronged
the streets of San Francisco in the gala days of her youth, and must read
the blazon of their deeds like the doubtful quarterings of the shield of
Amadis de Gaul. The author has been frequently asked if such and such
incidents were real,--if he had ever met such and such characters. To
this he must return the one answer, that in only a single instance was he
conscious of drawing purely from his imagination and fancy for a
character and a logical succession of incidents drawn therefrom. A few
weeks after his story was published, he received a letter, authentically
signed, correcting some of the minor details of his facts (!), and
enclosing as corroborative evidence a slip from an old newspaper,
wherein the main incident of his supposed fanciful creation was
recorded with a largeness of statement that far transcended his powers

of imagination.
He has been repeatedly cautioned, kindly and unkindly, intelligently
and unintelligently, against his alleged tendency to confuse recognized
standards of morality by extenuating lives of recklessness, and often
criminality, with a single solitary virtue. He might easily show that he
has never written a sermon, that he has never moralized or commented
upon the actions of his heroes, that he has never voiced a creed or
obtrusively demonstrated an ethical opinion. He might easily allege that
this merciful effect of his art arose from the reader's weak human
sympathies, and hold himself irresponsible. But he would be conscious
of a more miserable weakness in thus divorcing himself from his
fellow-men who in the domain of art must ever walk hand in hand with
him. So he prefers to say that, of all the various forms in which Cant
presents itself to suffering humanity, he knows of none so outrageous,
so illogical, so undemonstrable, so marvelously absurd, as the Cant of
"Too Much Mercy." When it shall be proven to him that communities
are degraded and brought to guilt and crime, suffering or destitution,
from a predominance of this quality; when he shall see pardoned
ticket-of-leave men elbowing men of austere lives out of situation and
position, and the repentant Magdalen supplanting the blameless virgin
in society,--then he will lay aside his pen and extend his hand to the
new Draconian discipline in fiction. But until then he will, without
claiming to be a religious man or a moralist, but simply as an artist,
reverently and humbly conform to the rules laid down by a Great Poet
who created the parable of the "Prodigal Son" and the "Good