Daisy Ashford: Her Book

Excerpt

PREFACE

By Irvin S. Cobb

Therôle of discoverer is pleasing, nearly always, and more especially in its reactions is it pleasing. The actual performance of discovery may be fraught with hardships and with inconveniences and even with perils; as witness Christopher Columbus making his first voyage over this way in a walloping window-blind of a tub of a ship and his last one back with chains at his wrists and ankles; as witness Hendrick Hudson; as witness Dr. Harvey's unfortunate position in the eye of constituted authority after he had discovered the circulation of the blood; as witness the lamentable consequences to whoever it was who, probably by the process of eating a mess of miscellaneous wild fungoids, disclosed to a bereaved family and a benefited world the important fact that certain mushrooms were nourishing and certain toadstools were fatal.

To your true discoverer the compensations of his trade come when he points with pride to the continent or the great natural fact or the new author he discovered and cries aloud before all creation: "See what I have found!"

So, aside from the compliment and the honor of it, I feel added gratification and added pleasure that I should be invited to write a foreword for the first American edition of Miss Daisy Ashford's second book. You see, I claim the distinction of having been the first person in America other than its publisher and my friend Mr. George H. Doran to read the manuscript of that immortal work "The Young Visiters." If I did not actually discover Miss Ashford, at the age of nine when she wrote "The Young Visiters"—for indeed no one appears to have discovered her then excepting perhaps her parents—at least I had a hand in discovering her on this side of the Atlantic ocean at a time when mention of her name, which now is so famous a name, meant nothing to the casual hearer.

After the lapse of nearly a year the event stands in my memory as marking one of those hours of pure and perfect joy which come but too rarely to human beings. At the request of Mr. Doran I read the manuscript which he had just brought with him from Europe. I read the story itself first and afterwards the preface, or foreword. This, I think, was as it should be. By rights a preface however sprightly and well done—and a preface by Sir James Barrie would have to be well done—should be served with a book as cheese is served with a dinner: at its finish and not at the beginning.

When I had read the story through to the last delicious sentence of the last delectable paragraph and when I had caught up with my breath which I had lost by laughing or rather when my breath had caught up with me, I sapiently said to him:

"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....