"Publish it? Of course you ought to publish it. Aside from such sordid considerations as the profits which are certain to accrue you owe it to yourself as a responsible member of the human race to give this glorious thing circulation among the reading public of North America. If I were you I'd print thirty thousand copies in the first batch before I released any copies among the reviewers or sent any copies as samples to the trade. And after that I'd keep the presses running steadily in the hope of being able to keep up with the demand which is sure to follow on the heels of publication. This is almost the funniest book that was ever written and it is all the funnier because the writer was so desperately in earnest, so tremendously serious all the while she was writing it."
"It has made a big hit in England already," he said. "But over there some people are saying that the author must have been a grown-up person—that no child of nine could have written such a thing. The suggestion is even being advanced that Barrie himself wrote it. I know better, because I have seen the original script in a child's handwriting on old and faded paper, and I met Miss Ashford some weeks ago in London and I have had all the proof one needs that this is the authentic product of a nine-year-old mind."
To which I said:
"No doubt some people will be saying the same thing over here and they'll be wrong just as these English skeptics are and if they'll only stop to think for a moment they'll know why they're wrong. No grown person, not even the creator of a Wendy and a Peter Pan, could have done this thing. It exhales the perfume of an authoritative genuineness in every line of it. It had to be a child who wrote it—a child with a child's imagination and a child's viewpoint and a child's ignorance of the things she wrote about. In a way of speaking it is like those unintentionally humorous obituary poems which appear in the papers. No professional humorist can hope to equal them because when he writes one he does it with deliberate intent to be funny and invariably he betrays his hand. It is when some poor mourning amateur dips a 'prentice pen in the very blood of his or her heart and writes such a poem that it becomes so pathetically and so tragically side-splitting."
This was what I said. Not in these words exactly, but to this effect.
Mind you, I am not proclaiming that I am the only person who has said this. Between chuckles thousands and thousands of others since that day have thought and have said it. What I am proud of is that I was the first person in America to say it, and so to this extent I count myself a discoverer and I feel a sort of proprietary sense in being permitted here to introduce "Daisy Ashford: Her Book." I am mindful of the distinction because of the reason I have just stated and because also in a way of speaking it qualifies me for some sort of literary kinship with Sir James M. Barrie.
Even so I do not aspire to the presumptuous hope that any one may say "Well, I see this man Cobb is doing for Miss Ashford's second book what Barrie did for her first one." I have no such ambition. A minnow always errs when he undertakes to swim in the company of a whale. If he tries to swim alongside he is unnoticed; if he swims in the wake he is swamped. He makes other minnows jealous or contemptuous as the case may be, and he is properly ignored by the whale.
Miss Ashford's own preface, accompanying this volume, gives the chronological sequences of its contents. The first story of all, "A Short Story of Love and Marriage," she wrote when she was eight years old. "The True History of Leslie Woodcock" was written three years later, after "The Young Visiters" had been written. "Where Love Lies Deepest" trickled from the busy pen of the young person when she was twelve years old; and "The Hangman's Daughter," the most pretentious of them all and to my way of thinking the best of her preserved works next only to "The Young Visiters," was undertaken when she was about thirteen, she says, and finished in the following year. Also included in this book is a story by Miss Ashford's sister Angela, done at the age of eight and entitled "The Jealous Governes; or The Granted Wish." In this we learn the real facts regarding the coming of babies. Babies are not fetched by storks. Medical men bring them in boxes and afterward render bills for the same, as note the following: (page 330) "Miss Junick Dr. to doctor Paulin for one baby delivered as per agreement £1," a low enough price truly. If a child of eight (who in point of years is so very much closer to being a baby than most of the writers on the subject are) cannot be trusted to recall the circumstances of this mystery, who can? We can only regret that a second sister, Vera, the artist of this talented nursery, did not save her one contribution to the literary output of the Ashford family. It was entitled "Little Mary and The Angle." Angle did not refer to a worm but to a visitor from a celestial domain; we have the word of Miss Daisy Ashford for it that this story was of a pious character. What a wonderful household the Ashford household must have been with Daisy and Angela writing romances and Vera illustrating them and between times doing a bit of writing herself. Can't you see the pencils flying? Can't you see three little pink tongues sticking out from between three pairs of purposeful lips and wriggling in time to the pencils? Can't you see the small brows furrowed with thought? And the proud parents? And the startled nursemaid?
To my mind the very finest thing about Miss Daisy Ashford's present book is the opportunity it gives us, reading it, to follow the growth of her genius for observation. For surely the faculty to observe and, having observed, to set down in words the results of that observation is a genius. It is more than that, it is two phases of genius harmoniously coupled.
At the age of eight, as we shall note, she begins her career as a writer by knowing very little of certain phases of life largely dealt with by older writers; and this little she knows by reason of what she has read or by reason of what she has heard read. Rapidly, though, she progresses to the point where, along with these borrowed second-hand impressions, she incorporates impressions which are all her own. Reading what she wrote in the first year of her authorship, we can figure, approximately, when she learned her first French word; when to her there came those vague appreciations of the Roman Catholic faith which are so fascinating to the children of non-Catholics—or perhaps the Ashford family were Romanists. Influenced by these alluring ecclesiastical mysteries, we find her causing a prospective bridegroom to address the Rev. Father Fanty as "your kindness" and begging the reverend gentleman "to excuse my craving for matrimony." Through these pages one sees how travel broadened the young person's fund of experience, which in her favored case meant her fund of material, for unlike many writers, old enough to know better, little Miss Ashford was, by the virtue of a miraculous intuition, inspired to write, sometimes at least, of things that she actually knew about, rather than to deal exclusively with topics which other writers before her had professed to know about. Early in her opening story she speaks of "Cracknels." Reading this word, my memory ran back to my own childhood when we knew but three standard varieties of crackers—soda-crackers, animal crackers and cracknels which last were round, slickish objects rather like glazed oak-galls, somewhat dusty to the taste and warranted to create a tremendous thirst for licorice water and lemonade. I had entirely forgotten cracknels until Miss Ashford came along yesterday and reminded me of them.