THE YEMASSEE AUTHOR OF ROMANCE OF CAROLINA BY W. GILMORE SIMMS, Esq THE PARTISAN," 'GUY RIVERS," MARTIN FABER," NEW AND REVISED EDITION RICHARD NEW YORK: W. J. WIDDLETON, PUBLISHER. 18.66. Entered, according to the Ac: of Congress, in the year 1833. by J. S. REDFIELD, In the Clerk's Office of tho District Court for the Southern District of New York. It is now nearly twenty years since I first inscribed the Romance of "The Yemassee" with your name. The great good fortune which attended the publication in the favor of the public, the repeated editions which have been called for, and the favourable opinions of most of the critics, who, from time to time, have sat in judgment upon it, seem to justify me in endeavouring to retouch and perpetuate the old inscription in the new and improved edition of my various writings which it is meant to herald. You will see, if you do me the honour again to glance over the pages of this story, that I have done something towards making it more acceptable to the reader. I could not change the plan of the story in any wise. That is beyond my control. I could make no material alterations of any kind; since such a labor is always undertaken with pain, and implies a minuteness of examination which would be excessively tedious to a writer who has long since dismissed the book from his thoughts, in the more grateful occupation of fresh imaginings and new inventions. It is my great regret that I can now do so little towards rendering the story more worthy of the favor it has found. I am now fully conscious of its defects and crudities. No one can be more so than myself. In reading it over, for the small revision which I have made, I am absolutely angry with myself, as Scott is reported to have been with Hogg while reading one of the stories of the Shepherd, at having spoiled and botched so much excel lent material. I see now a thousand passages, through which had I the leisure, and could I muster courage for the effort, I should draw the pen, with the hope to substitute better thoughts, and improved situations, in a more appropriate and graceful style. But I need not say to you how coldly and reluctantly would such a task be undertaken, by one who has survived his youth, and who must economize all his enthusiasm for the new creations of his fancy. I can only bestow a touch of the pruning knife here and there, cutting off the more obtrusive excrescences, and leaving minor ones to the indifference or the indulgence of the reader. Something, perhaps, should be said of the story as a whole. When I wrote, there was little understood, by readers generally, in respect to the character of the red men; and, of the opinions entertained on the subject, many, according to my own experience, I knew to be incorrect. I had seen the red men of the south in their own homes, on frequent occasions, and had arrived at conclusions in respect to them, and their habits and moral nature, which seemed to me to remove much of that air of mystery which was supposed to disguise most of their ordinary actions. These corrections of the vulgar opinions will be found unobtrusively given in the body of the work, and need not be repeated here. It needs only that I should say that the rude portraits of the red man, as given by those who see him in degrading attitudes only, and in humiliating relation with the whites, must not be taken as a just delineation of the same being in his native woods, unsubdued, a fearless hunter, and without any degrading consciousness of inferiority, and still more degrading habits, to make him wretched and ashamed. My portraits, I contend, are true to the Indian as our ancestors knew him at early periods, and as our people, in certain situations, may know him still. What liberties I have taken with the subject, are wholly with his mythology. That portion of the story, which the reverend critics, with one exception, recognised as sober history, must be admitted to be a pure invention-one, however, based upon such facts and analogies as, I venture to think, will not discredit the proprieties of the invention. What I shall add to these statements, must be taken from the old preface, which I shall somewhat modify. You will note that I call "The Yemassee" a romance, and not a novel. You will permit me to insist upon the distinction. I am unwilling that the story shall be examined by any other than those standards which have governed me in its composition; and unless the critic is prepared to adopt with me those leading principles, in accordance with which the book has been written, the sooner we part company the better. Supported by the authority of common sense and practice, to say nothing of Pope "In every work regard the writer's end, Since none can compass more than they intend” I have surely a right to insist upon this particular. It is only when an author departs from his own standard (speaking of his labours as a work of art), that he offends against propriety and merits censure. Reviewing Atalantis," a fairy tale, full of fanciful machinery, and without a purpose, save the embodiment to the mind's eye of some of those one of my critics-then a very distinguished writer-gravely remarked, in a very popular periodical, "Magic is now beyond the credulity of eight years;" and yet the author set out to make a tale of magic, knowing it to be thus beyond the range of the probable-knowing that all readers were equally sagacious-and never, for a moment, contemplated the deception of any sober citizen. The question briefly is-What are the standards of the modern Romance? What is the modern Romance itself? The reply is immediate. The modern Romance is the substitute which the people of the present day offer for the ancient epic. The form is changed; the matter is very much the same; at all events, it differs much more seriously from the English novel than it does from the epic and the drama, because the difference is one of material, even more than of fabrication. The reader who, reading Ivanhoe, keeps Richardson and Fielding beside him, will be at fault in every step of his progress. The domestic novel of those writers, confined to the felicitous narration of common and daily occurring events, and the grouping and delineation of characters in ordinary conditions of society, is altogether a different sort |