The Snow-Image
and Other Twice-Told Tales
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Contents
PREFACE
TO HORATIO BRIDGE, ESQ., U. S. N.
MY DEAR BRIDGE:—Some of the more crabbed of my critics, I understand,have pronounced your friend egotistical, indiscreet, and even impertinent, onaccount of the Prefaces and Introductions with which, on several occasions, hehas seen fit to pave the reader’s way into the interior edifice of abook. In the justice of this censure I do not exactly concur, for the reasons,on the one hand, that the public generally has negatived the idea of unduefreedom on the author’s part, by evincing, it seems to me, rather moreinterest in those aforesaid Introductions than in the stories which followed;and that, on the other hand, with whatever appearance of confidential intimacy,I have been especially careful to make no disclosures respecting myself whichthe most indifferent observer might not have been acquainted with, and which Iwas not perfectly willing that my worst enemy should know. I might furtherjustify myself, on the plea that, ever since my youth, I have been addressing avery limited circle of friendly readers, without much danger of being overheardby the public at large; and that the habits thus acquired might pardonablycontinue, although strangers may have begun to mingle with my audience.
But the charge, I am bold to say, is not a reasonable one, in any view which wecan fairly take of it. There is no harm, but, on the contrary, good, inarraying some of the ordinary facts of life in a slightly idealized andartistic guise. I have taken facts which relate to myself, because they chanceto be nearest at hand, and likewise are my own property. And, as for egotism, aperson, who has been burrowing, to his utmost ability, into the depths of ourcommon nature, for the purposes of psychological romance,—and who pursueshis researches in that dusky region, as he needs must, as well by the tact ofsympathy as by the light of observation,—will smile at incurring such animputation in virtue of a little preliminary talk about his external habits,his abode, his casual associates, and other matters entirely upon the surface.These things hide the man, instead of displaying him. You must make quiteanother kind of inquest, and look through the whole range of his fictitiou