A monument to Frederic Remington will undoubtedly rise some day; the artist who more than any one has gathered up in a grand grasp an entire era of this country’s history, and handed it down visible, living, picturesque, for coming generations to see—such man will have a monument. But in the manner of commemorating national benefactors, I would we resembled the French who celebrate their great ones—not soldiers and statesmen alone, but all their great ones—by naming public places in their honor: the Quai Voltaire, the Rue Bizet, the Rue Auber—to mention the first that come to memory. Everywhere in France you will meet with these instances of a good custom. In this country we seem to value even third-rate politicians more than first-rate men of art and letters. If Paris can by her streets perpetuate the memory of the composers of Carmen and Fra Diavolo, would it not be fitting that Denver, Cheyenne, Tucson, and other western cities, should have a Remington street? I am glad I did not wait until he was dead to pay my tribute to him. The two opportunities that came to me in his life I took, nor has my opinion of his work changed since then. If he never quite found himself in color, he was an incomparable draftsman; best of all, he was a great wholesome force making for independence, and he taught to our over-imitative American painters the needed lesson that their own country furnishes subjects as worthy as any that Delacroix or Millet ever saw. I have lived to see what I did not expect, the desert on canvas; for which I thank Fernand Lungren. Tributes to the dead seem late to me, and I shall take this chance to acknowledge my debt to some more of the living.
Four years after that night vigil with Sargent, the tenderfoot had still written no word about the West. It was in 1891, after repeated sojournings in camp, ranch, and military post, that his saturation with the whole thing ran over, so to speak, in the form of fiction. Writing had been a constant pastime since the school paper; in 1884 Mr. Howells (how kind he was!) had felt my literary pulse and pronounced it promising; a quickening came from the pages of Stevenson; a far stronger shove next from the genius of Plain Tales from the Hills; during an unusually long and broad wandering through the Platte valley, Powder River, Buffalo, Cheyenne, Fort Washakie, Jackson’s Hole, and the Park, the final push happened to be given by Prosper Mérimée; I had the volume containing Carmen with me. After reading it in the Park I straightway invented a traveller’s tale. This was written down after I got home—I left some good company at a club dinner table one night to go off to a lonely library and begin it. A second followed, both were sent to Franklin Square and accepted by Mr. Alden. Then I found my pretty faithfully-kept Western diaries (they would now fill a shelf) to be a reservoir of suggestion—and at times a source of despair; as, for instance, when I unearthed the following abbreviations: Be sure to remember Green-hides—perpendicular—sediment—Tuesdays as a rule.
Aware of Mérimée’snot highly expansive nature, I should hesitate, were he alive, to disclose my debt to his Carmen—my favorite of all short stories; but Mr. Howells and Mr. Kipling will be indulgent, and there is another who will have to bear with my gratitude. In 1896 I sat with him and he went over my first book, patiently, minutely pointing out many things. Everything that he said I could repeat this moment, and his own pages have continued to give me hints without end. That the pupil in one or two matters ventures to disagree with his benefactor may be from much lingering ignorance, or because no two ever think wholly alike: tot homines quot sententiæ, as the Latin grammar used so incontrovertibly to remark. It is significant to note how this master seems to be teaching a numerous young generation. Often do I pick up some popular magazine and read a story (one even of murder, it may be, in tropic seas or city slums) where some canny bit of foreshortening, of presentation, reveals the spreading influence, and I say, Ah, my friend, never would you have found out how to do that if Henry James hadn’t set you thinking!
It can happen, says Montesquieu, that the individual through pursuing his own welfare contributes to the general good; Mr. Herbert Croly admirably and sagaciously applies this thought to the case of the artist and the writer. Their way to be worthy citizens and serve the State, he says, is to see to it that their work be reverently thorough, for thus they set high the standard of national excellence. To which I would add, that a writer can easily take himself too seriously, but he can never take his art too seriously. In our country, the painter and writer have far outstripped the working-man in their ideal of honest work. This is (partly) because painter and writer have to turn out a good product to survive, while the working-man manages to survive with the least possible of personal effort and skill. Did I offer my publisher such work as the plumber and carpenter offer me, I should feel myself disgraced. Are we to see the day when the slovenly, lazy poet shall enact that the careful, industrious poet must work no longer and sell no more than he?
Editors have at times lamented to me that good work isn’t distinguished from bad by our multifarious millions. I have the happiness to know the editors to be wrong. Let the subject of a piece of fiction contain a simple, broad appeal, and the better its art, the greater its success; although the noble army of readers will not suspect that their pleasure is largely due to the skill. Such a book as The Egoist, where the subject is rarefied and complex, of course no height of art will render acceptable, save to the rehearsed few. Thanks to certain of our more robust editors, the noble army grows daily more rehearsed, reads “harder” books than it did, accepts plainer speech and wider range of subject than the skittish spinster generation of a while ago. But mark here an underlying principle. The plain speech in Richardson was in his day nothing to start back from; to-day it is inhibited by a change in our circumambient reticence. The circumambient reticence varies in degree with each race, and almost with every generation of each race. Something like a natural law, it sets the limits for what can be said aloud in grown-up company—and Art is speaking aloud in grown-up company; it consists no more of the professional secrets of the doctor than it does of the prattle of the nursery. Its business is indeed to take notice of everything in life, but always subject to the circumambient reticence. Those gentlemen (and ladies) who utter that gaseous shibboleth about Art for Art (as well cry Beefsteak for Beefsteak) and would have our books and plays be foul because Ben Jonson frequently was and Anatole France frequently is, are out of their reckoning; and generally they may be suspected not so much of an abstract passion for truth as of a concrete letch for animalism. Almost the only advice for the beginner is, Clearly feel what you intend to express, and then go ahead, listening to nobody, unless to one who also perceives clearly your intention. Great and small things does this rule fit. Once in an early tale I sought to make our poor alphabet express the sound of cow-bells, and I wrote that they tankled on the hillside. In the margin I stated my spelling to be intentional. Back it came in the galley, tinkled. A revised proof being necessary, I restored my word with emphasis—and lo, tinkle was returned me again. I appealed to the veteran and well-loved sage at the head of Harper’s Magazine. He supported me. Well, in the new Oxford dictionary, behold Tankle and me, two flies in amber, perpetuated by that Supreme Court; I have coined a new acknowledged word for the English language. This should not be told, but for its small moral, and if I could not render a final set of thanks to the living. Countless blunders have been saved me by the watchful eye of the printer and proofreader, those friends I never see, whose names I do not know. For twenty years they have marked places where through carelessness or fatigue I have slipped; may some of them know through this page that I appreciate their service.
This book is three years late; the first tale designed for it was published in 1901. Its follower should even now be ready. It is not yet begun; it exists merely in notes and intentions. Give me health and a day, sighs Emerson; and I am sorry for all who have to say that. When you see the new moon over your left shoulder, wish always for health; never mind all the other things. I own to an attachment for the members of this family; I would fain follow their lives a little more, into twentieth century Wyoming, which knows not the cow-boy, and where the cow-boy feels at times more lost than ever he was on the range. Of all the ills that harass writing, plans deferred seem at times the worst; yet great pleasures offset them—the sight of one’s pages in a foreign tongue, meeting horses in the Rocky Mountains named after the members of one’s family, being asked from across the world for further news of some member. Lately a suggestion full of allurement came from one who had read of Sir Francis, the duchess, and the countess, in the Saturday Evening Post. (There, by the way, is an intrepid editor!) Why not add, said the reader, a third lady to the group in Jimsy’s pond, and see what they would all do then? Only consider the possibilities! But I dare not. Life, without whose gifts none of us could have a story to tell—not even Scheherezadè—life presented to me Sir Francis and his adoring household. Never could I risk trusting to invention in a matter so delicate. Would the duchess and the countess unite to draw the line at the added sister? Would Sir Francis rise to the emergency? and if so, what line would he take? The added sister might prove a lamb, a minx, or a vixen. You see the possibilities. Dearly should I like to return this summer to the singing waters of Buffalo Horn, and place a third lady in that pond of Jimsy’s; then we might have another story if others are ever to be. My science in the third tale is of course out of date; since Kelvin, energy is immortal no longer, and a lower form of it was transmitted to the Secretary than was originally stored in Captain Stone.