Full text of "My first book; the experiences of Walter Besant, James Payn, W. Clark Russell, Grant Allen, Hall Caine, George R. Sims, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, M. E. Braddon, F. W. Robinson, H. Rider Haggard, R. M. Ballantyne, I. Zangwill, Morley Roberts, David Christie Murray, Marie Corelli, Jerome K. Jerome, John Strange Winter, Bret Harte, "Q", Robert Buchanan, Robert Louis Stevenson;"

LIBRARY

OF THE

I ^Accession No. fa./. y?.3

teRigaKEiHiaai^i^^

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

GIFT OF

GEORGE MOREY RICHARDSON.

Received, ^August, 1898.

Class No. I

-S&ZKXXXXXSSfr

M,
vt"-

MY FIRST BOOK

PRINTED HV

SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

Kiillili

MY FIRST BOOK

THE EXPERIENCES OF

WALTER ^ESANT R. M. BALLANTYNE

JAMES PAYX I. ZANGWILL

W. CLARK RUSSELL MORLEY ROBERTS

GRANT ALLEN DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

HALL CAINE MARIE CORELLI

GEORGE R. SIMS JEROME K. JEROME

RUDYARD KIPLING JOHN STRANGE WINTER

A. CONAN DOYLE BRET HARTE

M. E. BRADDON Q.

F. W. ROBINSON ROBERT BUCHANAN

H. RIDER HAGGARD ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JEROME K. JEROME

AND 1S5 ILLUSTRATIONS

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1894

PA// 7

INTRODUCTION

BY JEROME K. JEROME

PLEASE, sir, he said, could you tell me the
right time ?

Twenty minutes to eight, I replied, looking at
my watch.

Oh, he remarked. Then added for my informa
tion after a pause : I haven t got to be in till half-past
eight.

After that we fell back into our former silence, and
sat watching the murky twilight, he at his end of the
park seat, I at mine.

And do you live far away ? I asked, lest, he having
miscalculated, the short legs might be hard put to it.

4 Oh no, only over there, he answered, indicating
with a sweep of his arm the northern half of London
where it lay darkening behind the chimney-fringed
horizon ; I often come and sit here.

It seemed an odd pastime for so very small a
citizen. And what makes you like to come and sit
here ? I said.

viii MY FIRST BOOK

4 Oh, I don t know, he replied, I think.

And what do you think about ?

4 Oh oh, lots of things.

He inspected me shyly out of the corner of his eye,
but, satisfied apparently by the scrutiny, he sidled up
a little nearer.

Mama does not like this evening time, he con
fided to me ; it always makes her cry. But then, he
went on to explain, Mama has had a lot of trouble,
and that makes anyone feel different about things, you
know.

I agreed that this was so. And do you like this
evening time ? I enquired.

Yes, he answered ; don t you ?

1 Yes, I like it too, 1 admitted. * But tell me why
you like it, then I will tell you why I like it.

Oh, he replied, things come to you.

What things ? I asked.

Again his critical eye passed over me, and it raised
me in my own conceit to find that again the inspection
contented him, he evidently feeling satisfied that here
was a man to whom another gentleman might speak
openly and without reserve.

He wriggled sideways, slipping his hands beneath
him and sitting on them.

Oh, fancies, he explained ; I m going to be an
author when I grow up, and write books.

INTR OD UCTION

Then I knew why it was that the sight of his little
figure had drawn me out of my path to sit beside him,
and why the little serious face had seemed so familiar
to me, as of some one I had once known long ago.

So we talked of books and bookmen. He told me
how, having been born on the fourteenth of February,
his name had come to be Valentine, though privileged
parties, as for example Aunt Emma, and Mr. Dawson,
and Cousin Naomi, had shortened it to Val, and
Mama would sometimes call him Pickaniny, but that
was only when they were quite alone. In return I
confided to him my name, and discovered that he had
never heard it, which pained me for the moment, until
I found that of all my confreres, excepting only Mr.
Stevenson, he was equally ignorant, he having lived
with the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new
man and the new woman, the new pathos and the
new humour being alike unknown to him.

Scott and Dumas and Victor Hugo were his
favourites. * Gulliver s Travels, Robinson Crusoe,
Don Quixote, and the Arabian Nights, he knew
almost by heart, and these we discussed, exchanging
many pleasant and profitable ideas upon the same.
But the psychological novel, I gathered, was not to his
taste. He liked real stories, he told me, naively
unconscious of the satire, where people did things.

I used to read silly stuff once, he confessed

x MY FIRST BOOK

humbly, * Indian tales and that sort of thing, you
know, but Mama said I d never be able to write if I
read that rubbish.

So you gave it up, I concluded for him.

Yes, he answered. But a little sigh of regret, I
thought, escaped him at the same time.

And what do you read now ? I asked.

I m reading Marlowe s plays and De Ouincey s
Confessions (he called him Quinsy) just now, was his
reply.

And do you understand them ? I queried.

* Fairly well, he answered. Then added more
hopefully, Mama says I ll get to like them better as
I go on.

I want to learn to write very, very well indeed,
he suddenly added after a long pause, his little earnest
face growing still more serious, then I ll be able to
earn heaps of money.

It rose to my lips to answer him that it was not
always the books written very, very well that brought
in the biggest heaps of money ; that if heaps of money
were his chiefest hope he would be better advised to
devote his energies to the glorious art of self-advertise
ment and the gentle craft of making friends upon the
Press. But something about the almost baby face
beside me, fringed by the gathering shadows, silenced
my middle-aged cynicism. Involuntarily my gaze

INTRODUCTION xi

followed his across the strip of foot- worn grass, across
the dismal-looking patch of ornamental water, beyond
the haze of tangled trees, beyond the distant row of
stuccoed houses, and, arrived there with him, I noticed
many men and women clothed in the garments of all
ages and all lands, men and women who had written
very, very well indeed and who notwithstanding had
earned heaps of money, the hire worthy of the labourer,
and who were not ashamed ; men and women w r ho
had written true words which the common people had
read gladly ; men and women who had been raised to
lasting fame upon the plaudits of their day ; and before
the silent faces of these, made beautiful by Time, the
little bitter sneers I had counted truth rang foolish in
my heart, so that I returned with my young friend to
our green seat beside the foot-worn grass, feeling by no
means so sure as when I had started which of us twain
were the better fitted to teach wisdom to the other.

And what would you do, Valentine, with heaps
of money ? I asked.

Again for a moment his old shyness of me returned.
Perhaps it was not quite a legitimate question from a
friend of such recent standing. But his frankness
wrestled with his reserve and once more conquered.

Mama need not do any work then, he answered.
* She isn t really strong enough for it, you know, he
explained, and I d buy back the big house where she

xii Mlf FIRST BOOK

used to live when she was a little girl, and take her
back to live in the country the country air is so much
better for her, you know and Aunt Emma, too.

But I confess that as regards Aunt Emma his tone

was not enthusiastic.

I spoke to him less dogmatically than I might
have done a few minutes previously, and I trust not
discouragingly of the trials and troubles of the literary
career, and of the difficulties and disappointments
awaiting the literary aspirant, but my croakings terri
fied him not.

* Mama says that every work worth doing is diffi
cult/ he replied, and that it doesn t matter what
career we choose there are difficulties and disappoint
ments to be overcome, and that I must work very
hard and say to myself " I will succeed," and then in
the end, you know, I shall.

Though of course it may be a long time, he added
cheerfully.

Only one thing in the slightest daunted him, and
that was the weakness of his spelling.

And I suppose, he asked, you must spell very
well indeed to be an author.

I explained to him, however, that this failing was
generally met by a little judicious indistinctness of
caligraphy, and all obstacles thus removed, the busi
ness of a literary gent seemed to him an exceptionally
pleasant and ioyous one.

INTRODUCTION xii

Mama says it is a noble calling, he confided to
me, and that anyone ought to be very proud and
glad to be able to write books, because they give
people happiness and make them forget things, and
that one ought to be awfully good if one s going to be
an author, so as to be worthy to help and teach others.

And do you try to be awfully good, Valentine ? I
enquired.

Yes, he answered ; but it s awfully hard, you
know. I don t think anybody could ever be quite good
until, he corrected himself, they were grown up.

I suppose, he added with a little sigh, it s easy
for grown-up people to be good.

It was my turn to glance suspiciously at him, this
time wondering if the seeds of satire could have taken
root already in that tiny brain. But his eyes met
mine without flinching, and I was not loath to drift
away from the point.

4 And what else does your Mama say about litera
ture, Valentine ? I asked. For the strangeness of it
was that, though I kept repeating under my breath
Copy-book maxims, copy-book maxims, hoping by
such shibboleth to protect myself from their influence,
the words yet stirred within me old childish thoughts
and sentiments that I, in my cleverness, had long
since learnt to laugh at, and had thought forgotten. I,
with my years of knowledge and experience behind
me, seemed for the nonce to be sitting with Valentine

xiv MY FIRST BOOK

at the feet of this unseen lady, listening, as I again
told myself, to copy-book maxims and finding in
them in spite of myself a certain element of truth, a
certain amount of helpfulness, an unpleasant suggestion
of reproach.

He tucked his hands underneath him, as before,
and sat swinging his short legs.

Oh oh lots of things, he answered vaguely.

Yes ? I persisted.

Oh, that he repeated it slowly, recalling it
word for word as he went on, that he who can write
a great book is greater than a king ; that a good book
is better than a good sermon ; that the gift of being
able to write is given to anybody in trust, and that an
author should never forget that he is God s servant

I thought of the chatter of the clubs, and could not
avoid a smile. But the next moment something
moved me to take his hand in mine, and, turning his
little solemn face towards mine, to say :

If ever there comes a time, little man, when you
are tempted to laugh at your mother s old-fashioned
notions and such a time may come remember that
an older man than you once told you he would that he
had always kept them in his heart, he would have done
better work.

Then growing frightened at my own earnestness,
as we men do, deeming it, God knows why, something

INTRODUCTION xv

to be ashamed of, I laughed away his answering ques
tions, and led the conversation back to himself.

And have you ever tried writing anything ? I
asked him.

Of course he had, what need to question ! And it
was, strange to say, a story about a little boy who
lived with his mother and aunt, and who went to
school.

1 It is sort of, he explained, sort of auto bio
graphical, you know.

1 And what does Mama think of it ? was my next
question, after we had discussed the advantages of
drawing upon one s own personal experiences for one s
material.

Mama thinks it is very clever in parts, he told me.

1 You read it to her ? I suggested.

Yes, he acknowledged, in the evening, when
she s working, and Aunt Emma isn t there.

The room rose up before me, I could see the
sweet-faced lady in her chair beside the fire, her white
hands moving to and from the pile of sewing by her
side, the little flushed face of the lad bending over his
pages written in sprawling schoolboy hand. I saw
the love light in her eyes as every now and then she
stole a covert glance across at him, I heard his childish
treble rising and falling, as his small finger moved
slowly down the sheet.

xvi MY FIRST BOOK

Suddenly it said, a little more distinctly :

1 Please, sir, could you tell me the time ?

Just over the quarter, Valentine, I answered,
waking up and looking at my watch.

He rose and held out his hand.

I didn t know it was so late, he said, I must go
now.

But as our hands met another question occurred to
him.

Oh, he exclaimed, * you said you d tell me why
you likecl to come and sit here of an evening, like I do.
Why ?

So I did, Valentine, I replied, but I ve changed
my mincl. When you are a big man, as old as I am,
you come and sit here and you ll know. But it isn t
so pleasant a reason as yours, Valentine, and you
wouldn t understand it. Good-night.

He raised his cap with an old-fashioned courtesy
and trotted off, looking however a little puzzled. Some
distance down the path, he turned and waved his hand
to me, and I watched him disappear into the twilight.

I sat on for a while, thinking many thoughts, until
across the rising mist there rang a hoarse, harsh cry,
All out, All out, and slowly I moved homeward.

CONTENTS

I AGE

READY-MONK V MORTIBOY. BY WALTER BESANT . ... 3
THE FAMILY SCAPEGRACE. BY JAMES PAYX . . . .15

THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR. BY W. CLARK

RrssELi 29

v PHYSIOLOGICAL .ESTHETICS AND PHILISTIA. BY GRANT

ALLEN 43

THE SHADOW OF A CRIME. BY HALL CAINE . . . . 53
THE SOCIAL KALEIDOSCOPE. BY GEORGE R. SIMS ... 75
DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES. BY RUDYARD KIPLING . . . 91

JUYENILIA. BY A. CONAN DOYLE 99

THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT. BY M. E. BRADDON . . . 109
THE HOUSE OF ELMORE. BY F. W. ROHINSON . . . .123

DAWN. BY H. RIDER HAGGARD 135

HUDSON S BAY. BY R. M. BALLANTYNE 151

THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER. BY I. ZANGWILL . . 163
THE WESTERN AVERNUS. BY MORLEY ROBERTS . . .181
A LIFE S ATONEMENT. BY DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY . . . 193
A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS. BY MARIE CORELLI 206

xviii MY FIRST BOOK

PAGE

ON THE STAGE AND OEF. BY JEROME K. JEROME . . . 221

CAVALRY LIFE. BY JOHN STRANGE WINTER (MRS. ARTHUR

STANNARD) ........... 239

CALIFORNIAN VERSE. BY BRET HARTE 257

DEAD MAN S ROCK. BY Q. 269

UNDERTONES AND IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INYERBURN.

BY ROBERT BUCHANAN 283

TREASURE ISLAND. BY ROBERT Louis STEVENSON . . .297

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

JEROME K. JEEOME Frontispiece

WALTER BESAXT 2

JAMES RICE 5

JULIA 7

MR. BESAXT S STUDY 9

THE OYSTER SHOP . . . . . . . . . .12

A BOOK PLATE 13

A WICKED SISTER 16

JAMES PAY.N 17

IT TOOK OFF FROM HIS SHOULDER ....... 18

MR. PAYX S STUDY . . . . . . . . . 19

COUNT GOTSUCHAKOFF 21

WOULD YOU MINI) JUST READING A BlT OF IT? 22

THE SERVANT CAME TO PUT COALS ON THE FIRE . . .23

MR. PAYX S OFFICE AT WATERLOO PLACE . . . . . . 24

KILLED IJY LIONS. .... . .... 25

CLARK RUSSELL 28

CLARK RUSSELL AS A MIDSHIPMAN OF SEVENTEEN .... 29

I WAS A CHILD OF THIRTEEN 30

NEATBY ...... .......31

ANCHORED IN THE DOWNS ......... 32

SOME OF THE CREW . ........ 33

THE MAGISTRATES . 34

THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR 35

MRS. CLARK RUSSELL 37

THE BOATSWAIN OF THE GROSVENOR ...... 38

THE HOUGOUMONT 39

xx MY FIRST BOOK

I AGE

POOR JACK ! 4

GRANT ALLEN ........ 4 2

FICTION ............. 44

SCIENCE 45

ANDREW CHATTO ........... 49

A SHELF IN THE STUDY 5

THANK YOU, SIR . . . . . . . , . . . 51

I LEFT IT 54

MALL CAINE 55

MY MS. WENT SPRAWLING OVER THE TAIILE 56

DERWENTVVATER ........... 57

STY HEAD PASS 58

WASTWATER FROM STY HEAD PASS . . . . . 59

THE HORSE BROKE AWAY ......... 60

SOMETHING STRAPPED ON ITS HACK 61

THE CASTLE ROCK, ST. JOHN S VALE ....... 62

THIRLMERE ............ 63

KOSSETTI WALKING TO AND FRO 64

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI ......... 65

MR. HALL CAINE IN HIS STUDY. . 68

MRS. HALL CAINE ........... 69

COMING UP IN THE TRAIN 71

12 CLARENCE TERRACE 75

THE HALL ............ 76

GEORGE R. SIMS ........... 77

GEORGE R. SIMS ........... 78

THE SOCIAL KALEIDOSCOPE . . . . . . . 79

THE SNUGGERY 80

MR. SIMS S LITTLE DAWG . . . . . . . . . 81

THE DINING-ROOM .......... 82

THE LIBRARY 83

SIR HUGO 84

THE BALCONY 85

BEAUTY, AN OLD FAVOURITE, TWENTY YEARS OLD .... 86

THE DRAWING-ROOM .......... 87

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xxi

PAGE

TATST ui&gt; TO DATE 88

MR. SIMS S DINNER PARTY 89

THE NEWSPAPER FILES . ......... 91

YOUR POTERY VERY GOOD, SIR ; JUST COMING PROPER LENGTH TO-DAY. 92

Run YARD KIPLING . . . . 93

SUNG TO THE BANJOES ROUND CAMP FIRES ..... 96

DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES 97

A. CON AN DOYLE 98

I \YAS Six ............ 99

ON THE PRAIRIES AND THE OCEANS .... . . 100

MY DEBUT AS A STORY-TELLER . . . . . . . . 101

Wrni THE EDITOR S COMPLIMENTS 102

HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT YOU? 103

MRS. THURSTON S LITTLE BOY WANTS TO SEE YOU, DOCTOR . . 105

MR. ANDREW LANG .......... 107

LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND no

THE HALL . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

THE DINING-ROOM . . . . . . . . . .112

THE DRAWING-ROOM 113

THE EVENING-ROOM . . . . . . . . . 115

THE SMOKING-ROOM . . . . . . . . . . 116

THE LIBRARY . . . . . . . . . . 117

Miss BRADDON S FAVOURITE MARE. . . . . . . . 119

THE ORANGERY . . . . . . . . . . .120

Miss BRADDON S COTTAGE AT LYNDHURST . . . . . . 121

Miss BRADDON S INKSTAND 122

AT TWENTY . . . . . . . . . . 124

F. W ROBINSON 125

ELMORE HOUSE . . . . . . . . . . . 126

AT THIRTY 127

MR. ROBINSON S LIBRARY 128

THE GARDEN 129

THE DRAWING-ROOM 130

AT FORTY . . . . . . . . . . . 131

MR. ROBINSON AT WORK 132

xxii MY FIRST BOOK

I AGE

H. RIDER HAGGARD 134

THE FRONT GARDEN 135

MR. RIDER HAGGARD AND HIS DAUGHTERS 137

THE HALI 139

MR. RIDER HAGGARD S STUDY 141

SOME CURIOS 143

A STUDY CORNER 145

MR. RIDER HAGGARD 147

THE FARM 149

WHERE I WROTE MY FIRST BOOK 151

R. M. BALLANTYNE 153

MR. BALLANTYNR S HOUSE AT HARROW 155

TROPHIES FROM MR. BALLANTYNE S TRAVELS . . . . 157

THE STUDY 159

MR. R. M. BALLANTYNE 161

LOOKING FOR TOOLE 164

I. ZANGWILL 165

I SAT DOWN AND WROTE SOMETHING . . . . . . . 1 66

ARTHUR GODDARD . . . . . . . . . .167

IT WAS HAWKED ABOUT THE STREETS . . . . . 1 68

A POLICEMAN TOLD HIM TO GET DOWN 169

SUCH STUFF AS LITTLE BOYS SCRIBBLE UPON WALLS . . . . 171

LIFE IN BETHNAL GREEN 173

WE SENT IT ROUND 175

MR. ZANGWILL AT WORK . . . . . . . . -177

EDITING A COMIC TAPER 178

A FAME LESS WIDESPREAD THAN A PRIZEFIGHTER S . . . .179

MR. MORLEY ROBERTS 180

BEFORE THE MAST 181

I MARRIED THEM ALL OFF AT THE END . . . . 1 82

AN AMERICAN SAW-MILL WHERE MR. ROBERTS WORKED . . -183

DEFYING THE UNIVERSE 185

COWBOY ROBERTS 186

THE VERY PRAIRIE DOGS TAUGHT ME 187

THE CALIFORNIA COAST RANGE 189

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xxiii

PAGE

Bv THE CAMP FIRE 190

D. CHRISTIE MURRAY 192

I HANDED HIM T\VO CHAPTERS 194

I SENT ALL MY PEOPLE INTO A COAL-MINE 195

THEY INVESTED HIM WITH THE MEDAL ....... 197

CONSULTING OLD ALMANACS . . . . . . . 199

SHE 1)RE\V FROM IT A BROWN-PAPER PARCEI 2OI

IF THERE HAD KEEN NO DAVID COPPERFIELD .... 2O2

THE STOCK WAS TRANSFERRED ........ 203

SOME NOVELS 204

THE DRAWING-ROOM .......... 209

THE LIBRARY 211

THE STUDY . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

FACSIMILE OF MARIE CORELLI S MS. AS PREPARED FOR THE PRESS . 217

MY FIRST-BORN ........... 222

JEROME K. JEROME .......... 223

HE AND YOU HAD TO CARRY LlSA WEBER ACROSS THE STAGE 5 . . 226

THAT BRILLIANT IDEA .......... 227

I HATED THE DISMAL LITTLE SLAVEY 230

THE STUDY . . . . . . . . . . . -231

I AM REMEMBERING 234

MR. JEROME K. JEROME ......... 237

THREE SOLDIERS AND A PIG ......... 239

JOHN STRANGE WINTER . . . . . . . . .241

MR. ARTHUR STANNARD .......... 243

THE FIRM CONSIDERING 246

HE SQUINTED ! ........... 247

Miss STANNARD 248

THE TWINS BOOTLES AND BETTY ....... 249

L^NG- LEGGED SOLDIERS 251

CAVALRY LIFE 253

I TOOK UP THE SATURDAY REVIEW 255

BRET HARTE ............ 256

WE SETTLED TO OUR WORK ........ 258

A CIRCULATION IT HAD NEVER KNOWN BEFORE 259

MY FIRST BOOK

CONSIDER THEM AT YOUR SERVICE .

I WAS INWARDLY RELIEVED 263

THE BOOK SOLD TREMENDOUSLY ........ 265

A. T. QUILLER COUCH 268

Q. JUNIOR . 269

THE HAVEN/ FOWEY 273

MR. AND MRS. QUILLER COUCH ........ 275

FOWEY GRAMMAR SCHOOL CREW AND MR. QUILLER COUCH . . 277

THE OLD STUDY 279

MR. AND MRS. QUILLER COUCH IN A CANADIAN CANOE . . . 281

ROBERT BUCHANAN .......... 285

MR. BUCHANAN S HOUSE 287

THE STUDY ............ 291

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN AND HIS FAVOURITE DOG . . . . 295

ROBXRT Louis STEVENSON 299

MR. STEVENSON S HOUSE IN SAMOA ....... 301

MRS. R. L. STEVENSON ......... 305

STEVENSON TELLING YARNS 307

MY FIRST BOOK

&lt; READ Y MONE Y MOR TIBO Y
BY WALTER BESANT

NOT the very first. That, after
causing its writer labour in
finite, hope exaggerated, and
disappointment dire, was con
signed, while still in manuscript,
to the flames. My little ex
perience, however, with this
work of Art, which never saw
the light, may help others to
believe, what is so constantly
denied, that publishers do con
sider MSS. sent to them. My
MS. was sent anonymously,

without any introduction, through a friend. It was not
only read and refused but it was read very conscientiously
and right through. So much was proved by the reader s
opinion, which not only showed the reasons good and suf
ficient reasons why he could not recommend the manuscript
to be published, but also contained, indirectly, certain hints
and suggestions, which opened up new ideas as to the Art of

B 2

4 MY FIRST BOOK

Fiction, and helped to put a strayed sheep in the right way.
Now it is quite obvious that what was done for me must be
constantly and consistently done for others. My very first
novel, therefore, was read and refused. Would that candidates
for literary honours could be made to understand that refusal
is too often the very best thing that can happen to them !
But the gods sometimes punish man by granting his prayers.
How heavy may be the burden laid upon the writer by his
first work ! If anyone, for instance, should light upon the
first novels written by Richard Jefferies, he will understand
the weight of that burden.

My first MS., therefore, was destined to get burned or
somehow destroyed. For some years it lay in a corner say,
sprawled in a corner occupying much space. At dusk I
used to see a strange, wobbling, amorphous creature in that
corner among those papers. His body seemed not made for
his limbs, nor did these agree with each other, and his head
was out of proportion to the rest of him. He sat upon the
pile of papers, and he wept, wringing his hands. Alas ! he
said : Not another like me. Don t make another like me.
I could not endure another like myself Finally, the crea
ture s reproaches grew intolerable ; so I threw the bundle of
papers behind the fire, and he vanished. One had discovered
by this time that for the making even of a tolerable novel it is
necessary to leave off copying other people, to observe on your
own account, to study realities, to get out of the conventional
groove, to rely upon one or other of the great emotions of
human nature, and to try to hold the reader by dramatic pre
sentation rather than by talk. I do not say that this discover}
came all at once, but it came gradually, and it proved valuable.

One more point. A second assertion is continually being
heard concerning editors. It is said that they do not read
contributions offered to them. When editors publicly adver
tise that they do not invite contributions, or that they will
not return contributions, it is reasonable to suppose that they

6 MY FIRST BOOK

do not read them. Well, you have heard my first experience
with a publisher. Hear next an experience with editors. It
is, first, to the fact that contributions are read by editors that
I owe my introduction to James Rice and my subsequent
collaboration with him. It was, next, to an unsolicited con
tribution that I owed a connection of many years with a
certain monthly magazine. It was, lastly, through an un
solicited contribution that I became and continued for some
time a writer of leading articles for a great London daily.
Therefore, when I hear that editors will not read contribu
tions, I ask if things have changed in twenty years and why ?
I sent a paper, then, unasked, and without introduction,
to the editor of Once a Week. The editor read it, accepted
it, and sent it to the press. Immediately afterwards he left
the journal because it was sold to Rice, then a young man,
not long from Cambridge, and just called to the Bar. He
became editor as well as proprietor. The former editor
forgot to tell his successor anything about my article. Rice,
finding it in type, and not knowing who had written it,
inserted it shortly after he took over the journal, so that the
first notice that I received that the paper was accepted was
when I saw it in the magazine, bristling with printer s errors.
Of course I wrote indignantly to the editor. I received a
courteous reply begging me to call. I did so, and the matter
was explained. Then for a year or two I continued to send
things to Once a Week. But the paper was anything but
prosperous. Indeed, I believe there was never any time
during its existence of twenty years when it could be called
prosperous. After three years of gallant struggle, Rice con
cluded to give it up. He sold the paper. He would never
confess how much he lost over it ; but the ambition to
become proprietor and editor of a popular weekly existed no
longer in his bosom, and he was wont to grow thoughtful in
after years when this episode was recalled to his memory.
During this period, however, I saw a great deal of the

WALTER BESANT

management, and was admitted behind the scenes, and saw
several remarkable and interesting people. For instance,
there was a certain literary hack, a pure and simple hack, who
i was engaged at a salary to furnish so many
M columns a week to order. He was clever,
something of a scholar, something of a poet,
and could write a very readable paper on
almost any subject. In fact,
he was not in the least proud,
and would under
take anything that
was proposed. It
was not his duty
to suggest, nor did
he show the least
interest in his
work, nor had he
the least desire to
write better or to
advance himself. In most cases,
I believe, he simply * conveyed
the matter ; and if the thing was
found out, he would be the first
to deplore that he had forgotten
the quotes. He was a thirsty
soul ; he had no enthusiasm ex
cept for drink ; he lived, in fact,
only for drink ; in order to get
more money for drink he lived in one squalid room, and
went in rags. One day he dismissed himself after an incident
over which we may drop a. veil. Some time after it was
reported that he was attempting the stage as a pantomime
super. But fate fell upon him ; he became ill ; he was carried
to a hospital ; and pneumonia opened for him the gates of
the other world. He was made for better things.

JULIA

8 MY FIRST BOOK

Again, it was in the editor s small back room that I made
the acquaintance of a young lady named Julia, whose
biography I afterwards related. She was a bookbinder s
accountant all the day, and in the evening she was & figurante
at one of the theatres. I think she was not a very pretty
girl, but she had good eyes of the soft, sad kind, which seem
to belong to those destined to die young ; and in the evening,
when she was dressed, she looked very well indeed, and was
placed in the front.

To the editor s office came in multitudes seedy and
poverty-stricken literary men ; there were not, twenty-four
years ago, so many literary women as at present, but there
were many more seedy literary men, because in those days
the great doors of journalism were neither so wide nor so
wide open as they are now. Every one, I remember, wanted
to write a series of articles. Each in turn proposed a series
as if it was a new and striking idea. A certain airy, rollick
ing, red-nosed person, who had once walked the hospitals,
proposed, I remember, to catch science on the Wing on
the Wing, sir in a series of articles ; a heavy, conscientious
person, also red-nosed, proposed, in a series of articles, to set
the world right in Economics ; an irresponsible, fluttering,
elderly gentleman, with a white waistcoat and a red nose,
thought that a series of articles on say the Vestries of our
Native Land, would prove enormously popular ; if not the
Vestries, then the Question of Education, or of Emigration,
or or something else. The main point with all was not
the subject, but the series. As it happened, nobody ever was
allowed to contribute a series at all. Then there were the
people who sent up articles, and especially the poor ladies who
were on the point of starving. Would the editor only only
take their article ? Heavens ! what has become of all these
ladies ? It was twenty-four years ago ; these particular ladies
must have perished long since ; but there are more and more
and more still starving, as every editor knows full well.

WALTER BESANT

Sometimes, sitting in that sanctum, I looked through
their MSS. for them. Sometimes the writers called in person,
and the editor had to see them, and if they were women, they

^/rf&gt;

MR. BESANT S STUDY

went away crying, though he was always as kind as possible.
Poor things ! Yet what could one do ? Their stuff was too
too terrible.

Another word as to the contributions. In most cases a

io MY FIRST BOOK

glance at the first page was sufficient. The MS. was self-
condemned. Oh ! says the contributor ; if the editor
would only tell me what is wrong, I would alter it. Dear
contributor, no editor has time for teaching. You must send
him the paper complete, finished, and ready for press ; else it
either goes back or lies on the shelf. When Rice handed
over the paper to his successor, there were piles of MSS.
lying on all the shelves. Where are those MSS. now? To
be sure, I do not believe there was one among them all worth
having.

Rice wrote a novel by himself, for his own paper. It was
a work which he did not reproduce, because there were certain
chapters which he wished to re-write. He was always going
to re-write these chapters, but never did, and the work remains
still in the columns of Once a Week, where it may be hunted
out by those who are curious. One day, when he was
lamenting the haste with which he had been compelled to
send off a certain instalment, he told me that he had an idea
of another novel, which seemed to him not only possible, but
hopeful. He proposed that we should take up this idea
together, work it out, if it approved itself to me as it did to
him, and write a novel upon it together.

His idea, in the first crude form, was simple so simple
that I wonder it had never occurred to anybody before. The
prodigal son was to come home again apparently repentant
really with the single intention of feigning repentance and
getting what he could out of the old man and then going back
to his old companions. That was the first germ.

When we came to hammer this out together, a great many
modifications became necessary. The profligate, stained with
vice, the companion of scoundrels, his conscience hardened
and battered and reckless, had yet left, hitherto undiscovered,
some human weakness. By this weakness he had to be led
back to the better life. Perhaps you have read the story,
dear reader. One may say without boasting that it attracted

WALTER BESANT n

some attention from the outset. I even believe that it gave
an upward turn a last gasp to the circulation of the dying
paper.

When to anticipate a little the time came for publish
ing it, we were faced with the fact that a new and anonymous
novel is naturally regarded with doubt by publishers. Nothing
seems more risky than such a venture. On the other hand,
we were perfectly satisfied that there was no risk in our novel
at all. This, of course, we had found out, not only from the
assurances of Vanity, but also from the reception the work
had met with during its progress through the magazine.
Therefore, we had it printed and bound at our own expense,
and we placed the book, ready for publication, in the hands
of Mr. William Tinsley. \Ve so arranged the business that
the printer s bill was not due till the first returns came from
the publisher. By this artful plan we avoided paying any
thing at all. We had only printed a modest edition of 600,
and these all went off, leaving, of course, a very encouraging
margin. The cheap edition was sold to Henry S. King &
Co. for a period of five years. Then the novel was purchased
outright by Chatto & Windus, who still continue to publish
it and, I believe, to sell it. As things go, a novelist has
reason to be satisfied with an immortality which stretches
beyond the twenty-first year.

In another place I am continually exhorting young writers
never to pay for production. It may be said that I broke
my own rule.

But it will be observed that this case was not one in which
production was paid for, in the ordinary sense of the term-
it was one of publication on commission of a book concerning
which, we were quite certain, there was neither doubt nor
risk. And this is a very good way indeed to publish, pro
vided you have such a book, and provided your publisher will
push the book with as much vigour as his own.

Now, since the origin of the story cannot be claimed as
my own, I may be allowed to express an opinion upon it.

MY FIRST BOOK

The profligate, with his dreadful past behind him, dragging
him down ; the low woman whom he has married ; the gambler,
his associate ; the memory of robbery and of prison ; and
with the new influences around him the girl he loves, pure
and sweet, and innocent ; the boy whom he picks out of the
gutter; the wreck of his old father form together a group
which I have always thought to be commanding, strong,

I HE OYSTER SHOP

attractive, interesting, much beyond any in the ordinary run
of fiction. The central figure, which, I repeat, is not my own,
but my partner s initial conception, has been imitated since
in fiction and on the stage which shows how strong he is.
I do not venture to give an opinion upon the actual present
ment or working out of that story. No doubt it might have
been better told. But I wish I was five-and-twenty years

WALTER J3ESANT 13

younger, sitting once more in that dingy little office where we
wrangled over this headstrong hero of ours, and had to sup
press so many oh ! so very many of the rows and troubles
and fights into which he fell even after he became respectable.
The office was handy for Rule s and oysters. We would ad
journ for the delicious mollusc, and then go back again to
the editor s room to resume the wrangle. Here we would be

A BOOK PLATE

interrupted by Julia, who brought the bookbinder s account ;
or by the interesting but thirsty hack, who brought his copy,
and with it an aroma of rum ; or by the airy gentleman who
w r anted to catch science on the Wing, sir on the Wing ; or
by the Economic man ; or by the irresponsible man, ready for
anything. In the evening we would dine together, or go to a
theatre, or sit in my chambers and play cards before resuming

14 MY FIRST BOOK

the wrangle we used to take an hour of Vingt-un, by way of
relaxation. And always during that period, whatever we
did, wherever we went, Dick Mortiboy sat between us. Dear
old Dick grew quiet towards the end. The wrangling was
finished. The inevitable was before him ; he must pay for
the past. Love could not be his, nor honour, such as comes
to most men, nor the quiet vie de famille, which is all that life
really has to give worth having. His cousin Frank might
have love and honour. For him Dick s brave eyes looked
straight before he had no illusions ; for him, the end that
belongs to the nineteenth-century ruffler, the man of the
West, the sportsman and the gambler, the only end the
bullet from the revolver of his accomplice, was certain and
inevitable. So it ended. Dick died. The novel was
finished.

Dick died ; our friend died ; he had his faults but he
was Dick ; and he died. And alas ! his history was all told
and done with ; the manuscript finished ; the last wrangle
over ; the fatal word, the melancholy word, Finis, written
below the last line.

THE FAMILY SCAPEGRACE
BY JAMES PAYN

HAD written a great many short
stories and articles in all sorts
of publications, from Eliza Cook s
Journal to the Westminster
Review, before I ventured upon
writing a novel ; and the appear
ance of them I have since had
cause to regret. Not at all
because they were immature,
and still less because I am
ashamed of them on the con
trary, I still think them rather
good but because the majority

of them were not made the most of from a literary point of
view, and also went very cheap. As a friend observed to me,
who was much my senior, and whose advice was therefore
treated with contempt, You are like an extravagant cook,
who wastes too much material on a single dish. The entrees
of the story-teller his early and tentative essays in Fiction
if he has really any turn for his calling, are generally open
to this criticism. Later on, he becomes more economical
(sometimes, indeed, a good deal too much so, because, alas !
there is so little in the cupboard), and has a much finer sense
of proportion.

&gt;

MY FIRST BOOK

I don t know how many years I went on writing narra
tives of school and college life, and spinning short stones, like
a literary spider, out of my own interior, but I don t remember
that it was ever borne in upon me that the reservoir could
hardly hold out for ever, and that it was time to be doing
something on a more permanent and extended scale. The
cause of that act of prudence and sagacity was owing mainly

to a travelling menagerie. I
had had in my mind, for
some time, to write a sort
of autobiography (of which
character first novels almost
always consist, or at least
partake), but had in truth
abstained from doing so on
the not unreasonable ground
that my life had been wholly
destitute of incidents of
public interest. True, I had
mended that matter by the
wholly gratuitous invention
of a cheerless home and a
wicked sister, but I had
hitherto found nothing more
attractive to descant upon than my own
domestic wrongs. Even if they had existed,
it was doubtful whether they would have
aroused public indignation, and I mis
trusted my powers of making them exist. What I wanted
was a dramatic situation or two (a plot, the evolution of
which by no means comes by nature, though the germ is
often an inspiration, was at that time beyond me), and
especially the opportunity of observation.

My own slender experiences were used up, and imagina
tion had no material to work upon ; one can t blow even glass

A WICKED SISTER

MY FIRST BOOK

out of nothing at all. Just in the nick of time arrived in
Edinburgh, where I was then editing Chambers^ Journal,
Tickeracandua, the African Lion Tamer. At that time
(though I have seen a great deal of them since) lions were
entirely out of my line, and also tamers ; but this gentleman
was a most attractive specimen of his class. Handsome,
frank, and intelligent, he took my fancy from the first,
and we became great friends. His
N. actual height/ says my notebook, could
scarcely have been less than six feet
two, while it was artificially increased
by a circlet of cock s feathers set in a
coronet, which the majority of enrap
tured beholders believed to be of virgin
gold. A leopard skin, worn after the
fashion of a Scotch plaid, set off a jerkin
of green leather, while his legs were
encased in huge jack boots. This, of
course, was his performing dress, and I
used to wonder how the leopards (with
whom he had a great deal to do) liked
his wearing their relative s cast-off cloth
ing. In the * leopard-hunt (twice a
day) these animals raced over him as he
stood erect, and each, as it took off
from his shoulder, left its mark there
with its claws. He was so good as
to show me his shoulder, which looked
as if he had been profusely vaccinated
A much more dangerous, if less painful,
experience was his daily (and nightly) doings with the lions.
There were two of them, with a lioness of an uncertain temper,
who jumped through hoops at his imperious bidding with
many a growl and snarl of remonstrance.

Are you never afraid ? I once asked him tentatively.

IT TOOK OFF FROM HIS
SHOULDER

in the wrong place.

JAMES PAYN 19

If I was, he answered, quietly, but not contemptuously,
I might count myself from that moment a dead man. Then,
you see, I have my whip. It was a carter s whip, good to
keep off a dog, but scarcely a lion. The handle is loaded,
he explained, and I know exactly where to hit em with it, if

MR. PAYN S STUDY

the worst comes to the worst. If I remember right, it was
the tip of the nose.

His conversation was delightful, and he often honoured
me with his company at supper, when the toils and perils of
the day were o er. Upon the whole, though I have since
known many other eminent persons, he has left a more marked
impression on me than any of them, and it is no wonder that
in those youthful days he influenced my imagination. His

c 2

20 MY FIRST BOOK

autobiography, without his having the least suspicion of the
appropriation, became in fact my autobiography, as maybe read
(if there is anybody who has not enjoyed that treat) in The
Family Scapegrace. But, as my predecessors in the field of
Fiction were wont to exclaim, I am anticipating.

Another official connected with the menagerie gave daily
lectures upon the animals, so curiously dry and grave that
they filled me with admiration ; he was like an embodiment
of the answers to * Hangnail s Questions. Whatever suspicions
Tickeracandua may have subsequently entertained of me, I
am quite sure that Mr. Mopes would no more have seen
himself in the portrait I drew of him than would the animals
under his charge, if their attention had been drawn to them,
have recognised their counterfeit presentments outside the
show. I also became acquainted with the Earthman and
Earthwoman, the slaughterman of the establishment, Mr. and
Mrs. Tredgold (its proprietors), and other individuals seldom
met with in ordinary society.

The adventures of Richard Arbour were, therefore, cut
out for me in a most convenient and unexpected fashion, but
I had the intelligence to perceive that though the interest
they might excite would be dramatic enough, they would be
in danger of dealing too much with the animal world to
interest adult readers ; nor would the narrative have made an
attractive book for boys, since I felt it would be too full of
fun (for my spirits were very high in those days) to suit
juvenile tastes. I knew little of the world, but had seen
much of boys (though I had never belonged to the species),
and was well aware that, except as regards practical jokes, the
boy is not gifted with humour. I accordingly looked about me
for some dramatic material of a wholly different kind, and
eventually found it in the person of Count Gotsuchakoff.

It was a mistake to call such a sombre and serious indi
vidual by so ludicrous a name, but it was a characteristic one.
My disposition was at that time lively (not to say frivolous),

JAMES PAYN

and the atmosphere I usually lived in was one of mirth, but,
as often happens, it had another side to it, which was melan
choly almost to melodrama. In after years I found this to be
the case in an infinitely greater story-teller, who, while he
delighted all the world with humour and pathos, in reality
nourished a taste for the weird and terrible, which, though its
ghastly face but very rarely showed itself in his writings, was
the favourite topic of his familiar and confidential talk.
Tickeracandua himself was not dearer
to me than the Count, who was almost
entirely the offspring of my own in
vention ; and though I have since seen
in Nihilist novels a good many gentle
men of the same type, I venture to
think that, slightly as he is sketched,
he will bear comparison with the best
of them. The conception of his long
years of enforced silence, and even of
the terrible moment in which he
forgot that he was dumb, owed its
origin, if I remember right, to a
child s game that was popular in our
nursery. It consisted in resisting the
temptation to laugh, and the resolu
tion to reply in tones of gravity when
such questions as Have you heard
the Emperor of Morocco is dead ?
were put. The adaptation of it, in

the substitution of speech for laughter, suddenly suggested
itself, like any other happy thought.

Instead of writing straight ahead, as the fancy prompted,
which, in my less ambitious attempts at Fiction (like all
young writers) I had hitherto done, I had all these materials
pretty well arranged in my mind before sitting down to write
my first book. It was, after all, only a string of adventures,

COUNT GOTSUCHAKOFF

MY FIRST BOOK

but it is still, and I think deservedly, a popular book. The
question with its author, however, was how, when it was
finished, he was to get it published. I took it to my friend,
Robert Chambers, and asked for
his opinion about it. He looked
at the manuscript, which was cer
tainly not in such good hand-

WOULD YOU MIND JUST READING
A BIT OF IT ?

writing as his own, and observed
slyly-

Would you mind just read
ing a bit of it ?

I had never done such a thing before, nor have I since,
and the proposal was a little staggering, not to my amour
propre, but to my natural modesty. Moreover, I mistrusted
my ability to do justice to it, remembering what the poet has
said about reading one s own productions :

The chariot wheels jar in the gates through which we drive
them forth.

However, I started with it, and notwithstanding that we were
subjected to jars (one by the servant, who came to put
coals on the fire, just at a crisis, and made me at heart a
murderer), the specimen was pronounced satisfactory.

JAMES PAVN

I think it will suit nicely for the Jcmrnal^ said my friend,
which I think were the pleasantest words I ever heard from
the mouth of man. I might have taken them, indeed, as a
good omen ; for though I have since written more novels than
I can count, I have never failed to secure serial publication
for every one of them. This gentleman s novels are suitable
enough for serial publication, once wrote a critic of them,
intending to be very particularly disagreeable, but it aroused
no emotion in my breast warmer than gratitude.

grace came out in
remember whether it

So The Family Scape-
Chambers s Journal. I do not
had any effect upon its circu
lation, but it was well spoken
of, and there was at least one
person in the world who thought
it a masterpiece. The difficulty,
which no one but a young and
unknown writer can estimate,
was to get a publisher to share
in this belief. For many years
afterwards I published my
books anonymously (i.e., by
the author of so and so), and
many a humorous interview I
had with various denizens of
Paternoster Row, to whom I
(very strongly) recommended them, by proxy. If I were
speaking to the author, they said, it would be unpleasant
to say this (that, and the other of a deprecatory character),
but with you we can be quite frank. And they were some
times very frank ; and, though I didn t much like it at the
time, their candour (when I had sold the book tolerably well)
tickled me afterwards immensely. For persons who have
enjoyed this experience, mere literary criticism has hence
forth no terrors.

THE SERVANT CAME TO PUT
COALS ON THE FIRE

24 MY FIRST BOOK

1 The Family Scapegrace, however, had appeared under
my own name, so that concealment was out of the question ;
it was in one volume, a form of publication which, at that
time at all events (though I see they now affirm the
contrary), was unpopular with the libraries, and I was quite
an unknown novelist. Under these circumstances, I have

MR. PAYN S OFFICE AT WATERLOO PLACE

never forgotten the kindness of Mr. Douglas (of the firm of
Edmonston & Douglas), who gave me fifty pounds for the
first edition of the book by which enterprise he lost his
money. There were many reasons for it, no doubt, though
the story has since done well enough, but I think the chief
of them was the alteration of the title to Richard Arbour,
which, contrary to the wishes both of myself and my

JAMES FAYN

2 5

publisher, was insisted upon by a leading librarian. It is
difficult, nowadays, to guess his reason, but people were more

KILLED BY LIONS

* square- toed in those times, and I fancy he thought his highly
respectable customers would scent something Bohemian, if

26 MY FIRST BOOK

not absolutely scampish, in a Scapegrace. A mere name is
not an attractive title for a book ; though many books so
called such as Martin Chuzzlewit and Robinson Crusoe
have become immensely popular, they owed nothing to
their baptism ; and certainly Richard Arbour prospered
better when he got rid of his rather commonplace name.

A rather curious incident took place with respect to this
book, which annoyed me greatly at the time, because I was
quite unacquainted with the queer crotchets and imaginary
grievances that would-be literary persons often take into their
heads. Somebody wrote to complain that he had written
(not published) a story upon the same lines, and even
incidents, as The Family Scapegrace, just before its ap
pearance in the columns of Chambers s Journal, and the
delicate inference he drew was that, whether in my capacity
of editor or otherwise, I must have somehow got hold of it.
He gave the exact date of the conclusion of his own com
position, which was prior to the commencement of my story
in the Journal.

Conscious of innocence, but troubled by so disagreeable
an imputation, I laid the matter before Robert Chambers.

You are not so versed in the ways of this class of person
as I am, he said, smiling ; but since he has been so in
judicious as to give a date, I think we can put him out of
court. I am one of those methodical individuals who keep a
diary. And on reference to it, he found that I had read him
my story long before that of my traducer, according to his
own account, had left his hands.

It was a small matter, but proved a useful lesson to me,
for there is a great deal of imposture of this kind going on in
the literary world ; sometimes, as perhaps in this case, the
result of mere egotistic fancy, but also sometimes begotten by
the desire to levy blackmail.

The above, so far as I can remember them, are the cir
cumstances under which I published my first novel. I am

JAMES PAYN 27

sorry to add that poor Tickeracandua, to whom it owed so
much, subsequently met the very fate in reality which I had
assigned to him in fiction ; though as good a fellow as many
I have met out of a show, he came to the same end as Don t
Care did in the nursery story, and was eaten (or at all
events killed) by lions.

2 C)

THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR
Bv \V. CLARK RUSSELL

AM complimented by an
invitation to tell what I
can recollect of the
writing, publication, and
reception of the earliest of
my sea books, The Wreck
of the " Grosvenor."
I approach the subject
with diffidence, and ask
the reader to forgive me
if he thinks or finds me
unduly egotistical. John
Holdsworth : Chief Mate/
preceded * The Wreck of
the " Grosvenor." I do
not regard that story as
a novel of the sea. I was
reluctant and timid in

dealing with ocean topics when the scheme of that tale came
into my head ; I contented myself with pulling off my shoes
and socks and walking about ankle deep into the ripples.
But in the * Grosvenor I went to sea like a man ; I signed
articles aboard her as second mate ; I had ruffians for ship
mates, and the stench of the harness-cask was the animating

CI.ARK RUSSELL AS A MIDSHIPMAN OF
SKY EN TEEN

MY FIRST BOOK

influence of the narrative. It is the first sea book I ever
wrote, in the sense, I mean, that its successors are sea books :
what I have to say, therefore, agreeably to the plan of these
personal contributions, will refer to it.

And first, I must write a few words
about my own experience as a sailor.
I went to sea in the year 1858, when
I was a child of thirteen years and a
few months old. My first ship was a
well-known Australian liner, the Dun-
can Dunbar, commanded by an old salt,
named Neatby, who will always be
memorable to me for his habit of wear
ing the tall chimney-pot hat of the
London streets in all weathers and
parallels, whether in the roasting calms
of the Equator, or in the snow-darkened
hurricanes of the Horn. I went to sea
as a midshipman, as it is termed,
though I never could persuade myself
that a lad in the Merchant Service, no
matter how heavy might be the premium
his friends paid for him, has a right to
a title of grade or rating that belongs
essentially and peculiarly to the Royal
Navy. I signed for a shilling a month,
and with the rest of us (there were ten)
was called * young gentleman ; but we
were put to work which an able seaman
would have been within his rights in

refusing, as being what is called boys duty. I need not be
particular. Enough that the discipline was as rough as
though we had been lads in the forecastle, with a huge boat
swain and brutal boatswain s mates to look after us. We paid
ten guineas each as a contribution to some imagination of a

I WAS A CHILD OF
THIRTEEN

CLARK RUSSELL

3 1

stock of eatables for the midshipmen s berth ; but my memory
carries no more than a few tins of preserved potatoes, a great
number of bottles of pickles, and a cask of exceedingly moist
sugar. Therefore, we were thrown upon the ship s provisions,
and I very soon became intimately acquainted with the
quality and nature of the stores served out to forecastle
hands.

I made, but not after the
manner of Gulliver, several
voyages into remote nations
of the world, and in the eight
years I was at sea I picked up
enough knowledge to qualify
me to give the public a few
new ideas about the ocean
life. Yet when the scribbling
mania possessed me it was
long before I could summon
courage to write about the
sea and sailors. I asked my
self, Who is interested in the
Merchant Service ? What
public shall I find to listen
to me ? Those who read
novels want stories about love
and elopements, abductions,
and the several violations of
the sanctities of domestic life,
those who support the circulating libraries are ladies.
Will it be possible to interest ladies in forecastle life and in
the prosaics of the cabin ?

Then, again, I was frightened by the Writer for Boys.
He was very much at sea. I never picked up a book of his
without lighting upon some hideous act of piracy, some
astounding and unparalleled shipwreck, some marvellous

NEAT BY

The great mass of readers

MY FIRST BOOK

island of treasure. This writer, of a clan numerous as
Wordsworth s * little lot of stars, warned me off and affrighted

me. His paper ship had so long
and successfully filled the public
eye that I shrank from launch
ing anything real, anything with
strakes and treenails, anything
with running rigging so leading
that a sailor would exactly know
what to let go when the order
was given. In plain English, I
judged that the sea story
had been irremediably de
pressed, and rendered wholly

ridiculous by the strenuous
periodic and Christmas la
bours of the Writer for Boys.
Had he not sunk even
Marry at and Michael Scott,
who, because they wrote about
the sea, were compelled in
due course by the publishers
to address themselves exclusively to boys ! The late George
Cupples a man of fine genius in the course of a letter to

ANCHORED IN THE DOWNS

CLARK RUSSELL

me, complained warmly of being made to figure as Captain
George Cupples upon the title-page of his admirable work,
The Green Hand. He assured me that he was no captain.
and that his name thus written was merely a bookseller s
dodge to recommend his story to boys.

And, still, I would sometimes think that if I would but
take heart and go afloat in imagination, under the old red
flag, I should find within the circle of the horizon such
materials for a book as might recommend it, at all events on
the score of freshness. Only two writers had dealt with the
mercantile side of the ocean life Dana, the author of Two

OF THE CRKW

Years before the Mast, and Herman Melville, both of them,
it is needless to say, Americans. I could not recollect a
book, written by an Englishman, relating, as a work of fic
tion, to shipboard life on the high seas under the flag of the
Merchant Service. I excluded the Writer for Boys. I could
recall no author who, himself a practical seaman, one who
had slept with sailors, eaten with them, gone aloft with them,
and suffered with them, had produced a book, a novel call
it what you will wholly based on what I may term the inner
life of the forecastle and the cabin.

It chanced one day that a big ship, with a mastheaded

UNIVERSITY

MY FIRST BOOK

colour, telling of trouble on board, let go her anchor in the
Downs. I then lived in a town which overlooks those
waters. The crew of the ship had mutinied : they had carried
the vessel halfway down Channel, when, discovering by that
time what sort of provisions had been shipped for them, they
forced the master to shift his helm for the inwards course.
The crew of thirteen or fourteen hairy, queerly attired fellows,
in Scotch caps, divers-coloured shirts, dungaree breeches
stuffed into half Wellingtons, were brought before the magis
trates. The bench consisted of an old sea captain, who had
lost a ship in his day through the ill conduct of his crew, and

THE MAGISTRATE.

whose hatred of the forecastle hand was strong and peculiar ;
a parson, who knew about as much of the sea as his wife ; a
medical practitioner, and a schoolmaster. I was present, and
listened to the men s evidence, and I also heard the captain s
story. Samples of the food were produced. A person with
whom I had some acquaintance found me an opportunity to
examine and taste samples of the forecastle provisions of the
ship whose crew had mutinied. Nothing more atrociously
nasty could be found amongst the neglected putrid sweepings
of a butcher s back premises. Nothing viler in the shape of
food ever set a famished mongrel hiccoughing. Nevertheless,

U-\ CLARK RUSSELL 35

this crew of thirteen or fourteen men, for refusing to sail in
the vessel unless fresh forecastle stores were shipped, were
sent to gaol for terms ranging from three to six weeks.

Some time earlier than this there had been legislation
helpful to the seaman through the humane and impassioned
struggles^ of Mr. Samuel Plimsoll. The crazy, rotten old
coaster had been knocked into staves. The avaricious owner
had been compelled to load with some regard to the safety of
sailors. But I could not help thinking that the shore-going

^V^-7 ; ;.:__. -.,, , /,&gt;*

THE WRECK OF THE GROSVEXOR

menace of the sailor s life did not lie merely in overloaded
ships, and in crazy, porous hulls. Mutinies were incessantly
happening in consequence of the loathsome food shipped for
sailors use, and many disasters attended these outbreaks.
When I came away from the magistrates court, after hearing
the men- sentenced, I found my mind full of that crew s
grievance. I reflected upon what Mr. Plimsoll had done, and
how much of the hidden parts of the sea life remained to be
exposed to the public eye, to the advantage of the sailor,
providing the subject should be dealt with by one who had

D 2

36 MY FIRST BOOK

himself suffered, and very well understood what he sat down
to write about. This put into my head the idea of the tale
which I afterwards called The Wreck of the " Grosvenor."
I said to myself, I ll found a story on a mutiny at sea, occa
sioned entirely by the shipment of bad provisions for the
crew. No writer has as yet touched this ugly feature of the
life. Dana is silent. Herman Melville merely drops a joke
or two as he rolls out of the caboose with a cube of salt horse
in his hand. It has never been made a serious canvas of.
And yet deeper tragedies lie in the stinking harness-cask than
in the started butt. There are wilder and bloodier possibilities
in a barrel of rotten pork, and in a cask of worm-riddled
ship s bread, than in a whole passage of shifting cargoes, and
in a long round voyage of deadweight that sinks to the wash-
streak.

But if I was to find a public I must make my book a
romance. I must import the machinery of the petticoat.
The pannikin of rum I proposed to offer must be palatable
enough to tempt the lips of the ladies to sip it. My pub
lisher would want a market, and if Messrs. Mudie and Smith
would have none of me I should write in vain ; for assuredly
I was not going to find a public among sailors. Sailors don t
read : a good many of them cant read. Those who can have
little leisure, and they do not care to fill up their spare hours
with yarns of a calling which eighty out of every hundred of
them loathe. So I schemed out a nautical romance and went
to work, and in two months and a week I finished the story
of The Wreck of the " Grosvenor."

Whilst I was writing it an eminent publisher, a gentleman
whose friendship I had been happy in possessing for many
years, asked me to let him have a sea story. I think he had
been looking into John Houldsworth : Chief Mate/ which
some months before this time had been received with much
kindness by the reviewers. I sent him the manuscript of
The Wreck of the u Grosvenor." One of his readers was a

CLARK RUSSELL

lady, and to this lady my friend the publisher forwarded the
manuscript, with a request for a report on its merits. Now to
send the manuscript of a sea book to a woman ! To submit
a narrative abounding in marine terms, thunder-charged with
the bully- in-our-alley passions of the forecastle, throbbing
with suppressed oaths, clamorous with rolling oceans, the like
of which no female would ever
dream of leaving her bunk to be
hold to submit all this, and how
much more, to a lady for an
opinion on its merits ! Of course,
the poor woman barely under
stood a third of what she looked
at, and as, obviously, she couldn t
quite collect the meaning of the
remainder, she pronounced
acrainst the whole. She called it

a catalogue of ship s furniture,

and the manuscript came back

to rne. I never regret this. I

do not believe that this sea book

would ever have cut a figure in

my old and esteemed friend s list.

Publishers are well known by the

public for the sorts of intellectual

wares they severally deal in. If

I desired a charming story about

flirtation, divorce, inconvenient

husbands, the state of the soul

when it has flown out of the body, the passions of the female

heart whilst it still beats hot in the breast, I should turn to

my friend s list, well assured of handsome satisfaction. But

I don t think I could read a sea book published by him. I

should suspect the marine qualities of a Jack who had run

foul of, and got smothered up in, a whole wardrobe of female

MRS. CLARK RUSSELL

MY FIRST BOOK

apparel, grinning with a scarcely sunburnt face through the
horse-collar of a crinoline, the deep sea roll of his gait hampered
and destroyed by the clinging folds of a flannel petticoat.

Be this as it may, I sent the manuscript of The Wreck
of the " Grosvenor " to my old friend Edward Marston, of the
firm of Sampson Low & Co. The firm offered me fifty
pounds for it ; I took the money and signed the agreement,
in which I disposed of all rights. Do I murmur over the

recollection of this fifty pounds
which, with another ten pounds
kindly sent to me by Mr. Marston
as the whole of, or a part of, a
cheque received from Messrs. Har
per & Brothers, was all I ever got
for this sea book ? Certainly not.
The transaction was absolutely
fair, and what leaning there was
was in my favour. The book was
an experiment ; it was published
anonymously ; it might have fallen
dead. Happily for publisher and
author, the book made its way.
I believe it was immediately suc
cessful in America, k and that its
reception there somewhat in
fluenced inquiry here. American

critics who try to vex me say that my books never would
have been read in this country but for what was said of them
in the States, and for the publicity provided for them there
by the twenty-cent editions. How far this is true I don t
know ; but certainly the Yankees are handsomer and prompter
in their recognition of what pleases them than we are on our
side. What they like they raise a great cry over, and the
note of so mighty a concourse, I don t doubt, fetches an echo
out of distances below the horizon.

THE BOATSWAIN OF THE
GROSVENOR

CLARK RUSSELL

It is many years now since The Wreck of the " Grosvenor"
was written, and I do not very clearly recollect its reception
in this country. I believe it speedily went into a second
edition. But before we talk of an edition seriously we must
first learn the number of copies which make it. Since this
was written, my friend, Mr. R. B. Marston, of the firm of
Sampson Low & Co., has been good enough to look into

THE HOUGOUMONT

the sales of The Wreck of the " Grosvenor," and he informs
me that down to 1891 there had been sold 34,950 copies.
One of the most cordial welcomes the story received was
from Vanity Fair. I supposed that the review was written
by the editor, Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, until I learnt

1 In this ship, the Hougoumont, I served three years. She was a transport,
and was in the China war, 1860-1. Her burden was about 1,000 tons. This
picture represents her as a sheer hulk employed in the construction of the Forth
Bridge. I saw her towing down Channel in this state in 1889 she drew abreast
of my house at Deal and I could have wept to witness my old floating home in
so miserable a condition. C. R.

40 MY FIRST BOOK

that the late Mr. James Runciman was the author. The
critics on the whole were generous. They thought the book
fresh. They judged that it was an original piece of work
wrought largely out of the personal experiences of the writer.
One gentleman, indeed, said that he had crossed the Channel
on several occasions between Boulogne and Folkestone, but
had never witnessed such seas as I described ; and another
that he had frequently travelled to Plymouth on the Great

POOR JACK !

Western Railway in company with sailors, but had never met
such seamen as the forecastle hands I depicted. The book
is considered my best this, perhaps, because it was my first,
and its reputation lies in the memory and impression of its
freshness. It is far from being my best. Were it my property
I would re-write it. I had quitted the sea some years when
I wrote the story, and here and there my memory played me
false ; that is to say, in the direction of certain minute techni
calities and in accounts of the internal discipline of the ship.

W. CLARK RUSSELL 41

Yet, on the whole, the blunders are few considering how very
complicated a fabric a vessel is, and how ceaselessly one needs
to ^o on living the life of the sea to hold all parts of it clear
to the sight of the mind. Professionally, the influence of the
book has been small. I have heard that it made one ship
owner sorry and rather virtuous, and that for some time his
harness-casks went their voyages fairly sweet. He is, how
ever, but a solitary figure, the lonesome Crusoe of my little
principality of fancy. As a piece of literature, * The Wreck
of the "Grosvenor" has been occasionally imitated. Mr.
Plimsoll, I understand, has lately been dealing with the
subject of sailors food. I heartily wish success to his efforts.

u^U

PHYSIOLOGICAL ESTHETICS AND
PHILISTIA

BY GRANT ALLEN

THE story of my first book is a good deal mixed, and,
like many other stories, cannot be fully understood
without some previous allusion to what historians call the
causes which led to it. For my first book was not my first
novel, and it is the latter, I take it, not the former, that an
expectant world, as represented by the readers of this volume,
is anxious to hear about. I first blossomed into print with
Physiological ^Esthetics in 1877 the title alone will be
enough for most people and it was not till seven years later
that I wrote and published my earliest long work of fiction,
which I called Philistia. I wasn t born a novelist, I was
only made one. Philosophy and science were the first loves
of my youth. I dropped into romance as many men drop
into drink, or opium-eating, or other bad practices, not of
native perversity, but by pure force of circumstances. And
this is how fate (or an enterprising publisher) turned me from
an innocent and impecunious naturalist into a devotee of the
muse of shilling shockers.

When I left Oxford in 1870, with a decent degree and
nothing much else in particular to brag about, I took perforce
to that refuge of the destitute, the trade of schoolmaster. To
teach Latin and Greek verse at Brighton College, Chelten
ham College, Reading Grammar School, successively, was the

MY FIRST BOOK

extremely uncongenial task imposed upon me by the chances
of the universe. But in 1873, Providence, disguised as the
Colonial Office, sent me out in charge of a new Government
College at Spanish Town, Jamaica. I had always been
psychological, and in the space and leisure of the lazy
Tropics I began to excogitate by slow degrees various
expansive works on the science of mind, the greater number

of which still remain unwritten.
Returning to England in 76 I found
myself out of work, and so com
mitted to paper some of my views
on the origin of the higher pleasure
we derive from natural or artistic
products ; and I called my book
1 Physiological /-Esthetics/ It was
not my very first attempt at litera
ture ; already I had produced about
a hundred or more magazine articles
on various philosophical and scien
tific subjects, every one of which I
sent to the editors of leading re
views, and every one of which was
punctually Declined with thanks,
or committed without even that
polite formality to the editorial waste
paper basket. Nothing daunted by
failure, however, I wrote on and on,

and made up my mind, in my interval of forced idleness, to
print a book of my own at all hazards.

I wrote * Physiological /Esthetics in lodgings at Oxford.
When it was finished and carefully revised, I offered it to
Messrs. Henry S. King & Co., who were then leading pub
lishers of philosophical literature. Mr. Kegan Paul, their
reader, reported doubtfully of the work. It was not likely
to pay, he said, but it contained good matter, and the firm

FICTION

GRANT ALLEN

would print it for me on the usual commission. I was by no
means rich for fear of exaggeration I am stating the case
mildly but I believed somehow in Physiological /Esthetics.
I was young then, and I hope the court of public opinion
will extend to me, on that ground, the indulgence usually
shown to juvenile offenders. But I happened to possess a
little money just at that moment, granted me as compensation
for the abolition of my office in Jamaica. Messrs. King
reported that the cost of production
(that mysterious entity so obnoxious
to the soul of the Society of Authors)
would amount to about a hundred
guineas. A hundred guineas was a
lot of money then ; but, being young,
I risked it. It was better than if I
had taken it to Monte Carlo, anyway.
So I wrote to Mr. Paul with heedless
haste to publish away right off, and
he published away right off accord
ingly. When the bill came in, it was,
if I recollect aright, somewhere about
12O/. I paid it without a mur
mur ; I got my money s worth.
The book appeared in a stately
green cover, with my name in
front, and looked very philo
sophical, and learned, and psy
chological.

Poor Physiological ^Esthetics had a very hard fate.
When I come to look back upon the circumstances calmly and
dispassionately now, I m not entirely surprised at its unhappy
end. It was a good book in its way, to be sure, though it s
me that says it as oughtn t to say it, and it pleased the few
who cared to read it ; but it wasn t the sort of literature the
public wanted. The public, you know, doesn t hanker after

SCIENCE

46 MY FIRST BOOK

philosophy. Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, and the Editor
of j\Iiiid&gt; and people of that sort, tried my work and liked it ;
in point of fact, my poor little venture gained me at once, an
unknown man, the friendship of not a few whose friendship
was worth having. But financially, Physiological ^Esthetics
was a dead failure ; it wasn t the sort of work to sell briskly
at the bookstalls. Mr. Smith would have none of it. The
reviews, indeed, were, almost without exception, favourable ;
the volume went off well for a treatise of its kind that is to
say, we got rid of nearly 300 copies ; but even so, it left a
deficit of some forty or fifty pounds to the bad against me.
Finally, the remaining stock fell a victim to the flames in
Mr. Kegan Paul s historical fire, when many another stout
volume perished : and that was the end of my magnum opus.
Peace to its ashes! Mr. Paul gave me i5/. as compensation
for loss sustained, and I believe I came out some 3O/. a loser
by this, my first serious literary venture. In all these matters,
however, I speak from memory alone, and it is possible I
may be slightly wrong in my figures.

But though Physiological /Esthetics was a financial
failure, it paid me in the end, both scientifically and com
mercially. Not only did it bring me into immediate contact
with several among the leaders of thought in London, but
it also made my name known in a very modest way, and
induced editors those arbiters of literary fate to give a
second glance at my unfortunate manuscripts. Almost im
mediately after its appearance, Leslie Stephen (I omit the
Mr., honoris causa) accepted two papers of mine for pub
lication in the Cornhill. Carving a Cocoanut was the first,
and it brought me in twelve guineas. That was the very
first money I earned in literature. I had been out of work
for months, the abolition of my post in Jamaica having
thrown me on my beam-ends, and I was overjoyed at so
much wealth poured suddenly in upon me. Other magazine
articles followed in due course, and before lon&lt;r I was earning

o o

GRANT ALLEN 47

a modest a very modest and precarious income, yet
enough to support myself and my family. Moreover, Sir
William Hunter, who was then engaged on his gigantic
1 Gazetteer of India, gave me steady employment in his office
at Edinburgh, and I wrote with my own hand the greater
part of the articles on the North- West Provinces, the Punjaub,
and Sind, in those twelve big volumes.

Meanwhile, I was hard at work in my leisure moments
(for I have sometimes some moments which I regard as
leisure) on another ambitious scientific work, which I called
The Colour-Sense. This book I published on the half-
profits system with Triibner. Compared with my first un
happy venture, The Colour-Sense might be counted a dis
tinct success. It brought me in, during the course of about
ten years, something like 25/. or 3&lt;D/. As it only took me
eighteen months to write, and involved little more than five
or six thousand references, this result may be regarded as
very fair pay for an educated man s time and labour. I
have sometimes been reproached by thoughtless critics for
deserting the noble pursuit of science in favour of fiction and
filthy lucre. If those critics think twenty pounds a year
a sufficient income for a scientific writer to support himself
and a growing family upon well, they are perfectly at
liberty to devote their own pens to the instruction of their
kind without the slightest remonstrance or interference on
my part.

I won t detail in full the history of my various inter
mediate books, most of which were published first as news
paper articles, and afterwards collected and put forth on a
small royalty. Time is short, and art is long, so I ll get on
at once to my first novel. I drifted into fiction by the
sheerest accident. My friend, Mr. Chatto, most generous of
men, was one of my earliest and staunchest literary sup
porters. From the outset of my journalistic days, he printed
my articles in Belgravia and the Gentleman s Magazine \vith

48 MY FIXST BOOK

touching fidelity ; and I take this opportunity of saying in
public that to his kindness and sympathy I owe as much as
to anyone in England. Some people will have it there is no
such thing as generosity in publishers. I beg leave to differ
from them. I know the commercial value of literary work
as well as any man, and I venture to say that both from
Mr. Chatto and from Mr. Arrowsmith, of Bristol, I have met,
time and again, with what I cannot help describing as most
generous treatment. One day it happened that I wanted to
write a scientific article on the impossibility of knowing
one had seen a ghost, even if one saw one. For convenience
sake, and to make the moral clearer, I threw the argument
into narrative form, but without the slightest intention
of writing a story. It was published in Belgravia under
the title of Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost/ and
was reprinted later in my little volume of Strange
Stories. A little while after, to my immense surprise,
Mr. Chatto wrote to ask me whether I could supply him
with another story, like the last I had written, for the
Belgravia Annual. I was rather taken aback at this singular
request, as I hadn t the slightest idea I could do anything at
all in the way of fiction. Still, like a good journalist, I never
refuse an order of any sort ; so I sat down at once and wrote
a tale about a mummy on the ghastliest and most approved
Christmas number pattern. Strange to say, Mr. Chatto again
printed it, and, what was still more remarkable, asked for more
of the same description. From that time forth, I went on
producing short stories for Belgravia ; but I hardly took them
seriously, being immersed at the time in biological study. I
looked upon my own pretensions in the way of fiction as an
amiable fad of my kind friend Chatto ; and not to prejudice
any little scientific reputation I might happen to have earned,
I published them all under the carefully veiled pseudonym of
J. Arbuthnot Wilson.

I would probably never have gone any further on my

GRANT ALLEN

downward path had it not been for the accidental intervention
of another believer in my powers as a story-writer. I had
sent to Belgravia a little tale about a Chinaman, entitled
Mr. Chung, and written perhaps rather more seriously and
carefully than my previous efforts. This happened to attract
the attention of Mr. James Payn, who had then just succeeded
to the editorship of the CornJiill. I had been a constant
contributor to the CornJiill
under Leslie Stephen s man
agement, and by a singular
coincidence I received almost
at the same time two letters
from Mr. Payn, one of them
addressed to me in my own
name, and regretting that he
would probably be unable to
insert my scientific papers in
his magazine in future ; the
other, sent through Chatto
& Windus to the imagi
nary J. Arbuthnot Wilson,
and asking for a short story
somewhat in the style of my
admirable Mr. Chung.

Encouraged by the dis
covery that so good a judge

of fiction thought well of my humble efforts at story-writing, I
sat down at once and produced two pieces for the Cornhill.
One was The Reverend John Creedy a tale of a black
parson who reverted to savagery which has perhaps attracted
more attention than any other of my short stories. The
other, which I myself immensely prefer, was The Curate of
Churnside. Both were so well noticed that I began to think
seriously of fiction as an alternative subject. In the course
of the next year I wrote several more sketches of the same

50 MY FIRST BOOK

sort, which were published, either anonymously or still under
the pseudonym, in the Cornhill, Longmans, T/ie Gentleman s,
and Belgravia. If I recollect aright, the first suggestion to
collect and reprint them all in a single volume came from
Mr. Chatto. They were published as Strange Stories, under
my own name, and I thus, for the first time, acknowledged
my desertion of my earliest loves science and philosophy
for the less profound but more lucrative pursuit of literature.

A SHELF IN THE STUDY

Strange Stories was well received and well reviewed.
Its reception gave me confidence for future ventures. Acting
upon James Payn s advice, I set to work seriously upon a
three-volume novel. My first idea was to call it Born out
of Due Time, as it narrated the struggles of a Socialist
thinker a century in front of his generation ; but, at Mr.
Chatto s suggestion, the title was afterwards changed to
* Philistia. I desired, if possible, to run it through the
Cornhill, and Mr. Payn promised to take it into his most
favourable consideration for that purpose. However, when

GRANT ALLEN

the unfinished manuscript was submitted in due time to his
editorial eye, he rightly objected that it was far too socialistic
for the tastes of his public. He said it would rather repel
than attract readers. I was disappointed at the time. I see
now that, as an editor, he was perfectly right ; I was giving
the public what I felt and thought and believed myself, not
what the public felt and thought and wanted. The education

THANK YOU, SIR

of an English novelist consists entirely in learning to sub
ordinate all his own ideas and tastes and opinions to the
wishes and beliefs of the inexorable British matron.

Mr. Chatto, however, was prepared to accept the undoubted
risk of publishing Philistia. Only, to meet his views, the
denoiiment was altered. In the original version, the hero
came to a bad end, as a hero in real life who is in advance of

E 2

52 MY FIRST BOOK

his age, and consistent and honest, must always do. But the
British matron, it seems, likes her novels to end well ; so I
married him off instead, and made him live happily ever
afterward. Mr. Chatto gave me a lump sum down for serial
rights and copyright, and ran Philistia through the pages
of The Gentleman s. When it finally appeared in book form,
it obtained on the whole more praise than blame, and, as it
paid a great deal better than scientific journalism, it decided
me that my role in life henceforth must be that of a novelist.
And a novelist I now am, good, bad, or indifferent.

If anybody gathers, however, from this simple narrative,
that my upward path from obscurity to a very modest
modicum of popularity and success was a smooth and easy
one, he is immensely mistaken. I had a ten years hard
struggle for bread, into the details of which I don t care to
enter. It left me broken in health and spirit, with all the
vitality and vivacity crushed out of me. I suppose the object
of this series of papers is to warn off ingenuous and aspiring
youth from the hardest worked and worst paid of the profes
sions. If so, I would say earnestly to the ingenuous and
aspiring Brain for brain, in no market can you sell your
abilities to such poor advantage. Don t take to literature if
you ve capital enough in hand to buy a good broom, and
energy enough to annex a vacant crossing.

THE SHADOW OF A CRIME
BY HALL CAINE

I CANNOT follow Mr. Besant with any pitiful story of
rejection at the hands of publishers. If refusal is quite
the best thing that can happen to the candidate for literary
honours, my fate has not been favourable. No tale of mine
has yet passed from publishing house to publishing house.
Except the first of the series, my stories have been accepted
before they have been read. In two or three instances they
have been bought before they have been written. It has
occurred to me, as to others, to have two or three publishers
offering terms for the same book. I have even been offered
half payment in hand on account of a book which I could
not hope to write for years, and might never write at all.
Thus the most helpful confession which the more or less suc
cessful man of letters can make for the comfort and cheer of
his younger and less fortunate brethren, it is out of my power
to offer.

But I reflect that this is true of my literary experiences
in the character of a novelist only. I had an earlier and
semi-subterranean career that was very different. At eighteen
I wrote a poem of a mystical sort, which was printed (not at
my own risk) and published under a pseudonym. Happily,
no man will ever identify me behind the romantic name
wherein I hid my own. Only one literary man knew my
secret. That was George Gilfillan, and he is dead. Then

MY FIRST BOOK

at twenty I wrote an autobiography for another person,
and was paid ten pounds for it. These were really my
first books, and I grow quite hot when I think of them. At
five-and-twenty I came up to London with the manuscript ot
a critical work, which I had written while at Liverpool.
Somebody had recommended that I should submit it to a
certain great publishing house, and I took it in person. At
the door of the office I was told to write my own name, and
the name of the person whom I wished to see, and to state
the nature of my business I did so, and the boy who took

my message brought back word
that I might leave my manu
script for consideration. It
seemed to me that somebody
micrht have seen me for a

minute, but I had expected too
much. The manuscript was
carefully tied up in brown paper,
and so I left it.

After waiting three torturing
weeks for the decision of the
publishers, I made bold to call
again. At the same little box
at the door of the office I had once more to fill up the same
little document. The boy took it in, and I was left to sit on
his table, to look at the desk which he had been whittling
away with his penknife, to wait and to tremble. After a time
I heard a footstep returning. I thought it might be the pub
lisher or the editor of the house. It was the boy back again.
He had a pile of loose sheets of white paper in his hands.
They were the sheets of my book. The editor s compli
ments, sir, and thank you, said the boy, and my manuscript
went sprawling over the table. I gathered it up, tucked it as
deep as possible into the darkness, under the wings of my
Inverness cape, and went downstairs ashamed, humiliated,

I LEFT IT

MY FIRST BOOK

crushed, and broken-spirited. Not quite that, either, for I
remember that, as I got to the fresh air at the door, my gorge
rose within me, and I cried in my heart, By God ! you shall
- and something proud and vain.

I dare say it was all right and proper and in good order.
The book was afterwards published, and I think it sold well.
I hardly know whether I ought to say that the editor should
have shown me more courtesy. It was all a part of the
anarchy of things which Mr. Hardy considers the rule of
life. But the sequel is worth telling. That editor became

my personal friend. He is dead,
and he was a good and able man.
Of course he remembered nothing
of this incident, and I never
poisoned one hour of our inter
course by telling him how, when
1 was young and a word of cheer
would have buoyed me up, he
made me drink the waters of
Marah. And three times since
that day the publishing house I
speak of has come to me with
the request that I should write a
book for them. I have never
been able to do so, but I have
outgrown my bitterness, and, of course, I show no malice.
Indeed, I have now the best reasons for wishing the great
enterprise well. But if literary confessions are worth any
thing, this one may perhaps be a seed that will somewhere
find grateful soil. Keep a good heart, even if you have to
knock in vain at many doors, and kick about the backstairs
of the house of letters. There is room enough inside.

I wrote and edited sundry things during my first years in
London, but not until I had published a story did I feel that
I had so much as touched the consciousness of the public.

MY MS. WENT SPRAWLING OVER
THE TABLE

HALL CAINE

Hence, my first novel may very properly be regarded as my
first book, and if I have no tale to tell of heart-broken im
pediments in getting it published, I have something to say of
the difficulty of getting it written. The novel is called The
Shadow of a Crime, but title it had none until it was finished,
and a friend christened it. I cannot remember when the
story was begun, because I cannot recall a time when the
idea of it did not exist in my mind. Something of the same
kind is true of every talc I have ever written or shall ever

DERWENTWATER

write. I think it must
be in the nature of imagina
tion that an imaginative idea
does not spring into being, that it has no
spontaneous generation, but, as a germi
nating conception, a shadow of a vision,
always comes floating from somewhere out of the back
chambers of memory. You are waiting for the central
thought that shall link together incidents that you have
gleaned from among the stubble of many fields, for the
motif that shall put life and meaning into the characters that
you have gathered and grouped, and one morning, as you
awake, just at that moment when you are between the land
of light and the mists of sleep, and as your mind is grappling
back for the vanishing form of some delicious dream, a dim

58 MY FIRSI^ BOOK

but familiar ghost of an idea comes up unbidden for the hun
dredth time, and you say to yourself, with surprise at your
own stupidity, That s it !

The idea of my first novel moved about me in this way
for many years before I recognised it. As usually happens,
it came in the shape of a story. 1 think it was, in actual
fact, first of all, a tale of a grandfather. My mother s

STY HEAD PASS

father was a Cumberland man, and he was full of the lore of
the hills and dales. One of the oldest legends of the Lake
mountains tells of the time of the plague. The people were
afraid to go to market, afraid to meet at church, and afraid to
pass on the highway. When any lonely body was ill, the
nearest neighbour left meat and drink at the door of the
afflicted house, and knocked and ran away. In these days,
a widow with two sons lived in one of the darkest of the

HALL CA1NE

valleys. The younger son died, and the body had to be
carried over the mountains to be buried. Its course lay
across Sty Head Pass, a bleak and * brant place, where the
winds are often high. The eldest son, a strong-hearted lad,
undertook the duty. He strapped the coffin on to the back
of a young horse, and they started away. The day was wild,
and on the top of the pass, where the path dips into Wastdale,
between the breast of Great Gable and the heights of Scawfell,
the wind rose to a gale. The horse was terrified. It broke

WASTWATER FROM STY HEAD PASS

away and galloped over the fells, carrying its burden with it.
The lad followed and searched for it, but in vain, and he
had to go home at last, unsatisfied.

This was in the spring, and nearly all the summer through
the surviving son of the widow was out on the mountains,
trying to recover the runaway horse, but never once did he
catch sight of it, though sometimes, as he turned homeward
at night, he thought he heard, in the gathering darkness,
above the sough of the wind, the horse s neigh. Then winter

MY FIRST BOOK

came, and the mother died. Once more the dead body had
to be carried over the fells for burial, and once again the coffin
was strapped on the back of a horse. It was an old mare
that was chosen this time, the morher of the young one that
had been lost. The snow lay deep on the pass, and from the

THE HORSE KROKE AWAY

cliffs of the Scawfell pikes it hung in great toppling masses.
All went well with the little funeral party until they came to
the top of the pass, and though the day was dead calm the
son held the rein with a hand that was like a vice. But just
as the mare reached the spot where the wind had frightened

HALL CAINE

the young horse, there was a terrific noise. An immense
body of the snow had parted at that instant from the beetling
heights overhead, and rushed down into the valley with the
movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening

SOMETHING STRAPPED ON ITS BACK

sound as of a peal of thunder. The dale echoed and re
echoed from side to side, and from height to height. The old
mare was affrighted ; she reared, leapt, flung her master away,
and galloped off. When they had recovered from their con
sternation, the funeral party gave chase, and at length, down

MY FIRST BOOK

in a hollow place, they thought they saw what they were in
search of. It was a horse with something strapped on its
back. When they came up with it they found it was the
young horse, with the coffin of the younger son. They led it
away and buried the body that it had carried so long, but the
old mare they never recovered, and the body of the mother
never found sepulchre.

Such was the legend, sufficiently terrible, and even ghastly,
which was the germ of my first novel. Its fascination for
me lay in its shadow and suggestion of the supernatural. I

thought it had all

without

ever

ghost story

the grip of a
passing out of the world
reality.

Imagination

THE CASTLE ROCK, ST. JOHN S VALE

played about the position of that elder son, and ingenuity
puzzled itself for the sequel to his story. What did he think ?
What did he feel ? What were his superstitions ? What be
came of him ? Did he die mad, or was he a MAN, and did he
rise out of all doubt and terror ? I cannot say how many years
this ghost of a conception (with various brothers and sisters of
a similar complexion) haunted my mind before I recognised it
as the central incident of a story, the faggot for a fire from
which other incidents might radiate and imaginary characters
take life. When I began to think of it in this practical way
I was about six-and-twenty, and was lodging in a lonely
farmhouse in the Vale of St. John.

HALL CAINE 63

Rossetti was with me, for I had been up to London at his
request, and had brought him down to my retreat. The story
of that sojourn among the mountains I have told elsewhere.
It lives in my memory as a very sweet and sad experience.
The poet was a dying man. He spent a few hours of every
day in painful efforts to paint a picture. His nights were
long, for sleep never came to him until the small hours of the

THIRLMERE

morning ; his sight was troublesome, and he could not read
with ease ; he was in that condition of ill-health when he
could not bear to be alone, and thus he and I were much
together. I was just then looking vaguely to the career of a
public lecturer, and was delivering a long course of lectures
at Liverpool. The subject was prose fiction, and to fortify
myself for the work I was reading the masterpieces over

64 MY FIRST BOOK

again. Seeing this, Rossetti suggested that I should read
aloud, and I did so. Many an evening we passed in this
way. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a fell by the side
of the lowest pool of a ghyll, Fishers Ghyll, and the roar of

ROSSETTI WALKING TO AND FRO

falling waters could be heard from within. On the farther
side of the vale there were black crags where ravens lived,
and in the unseen bed of the dale between lay the dark waters
of Thirlmere. The surroundings were striking to the eye
and ear in the daylight, but when night came, and the lamp

HALL CAINE

was lit, and the curtains were drawn, and darkness covered
everything outside, they were yet more impressive to the imagi
nation. I remember those evenings with gratitude and some
pain. The little oblong room, the dull thud of the ghyll like
faint thunder overhead, the crackle of the wood fire, myself
reading aloud, and Rossetti in a long sack painting coat, his
hands thrust into its upright pockets, walking with his heavy
and uncertain step to and fro, to and fro, laughing sometimes
his big deep laugh, and sometimes sitting down to wipe his
moist spectacles and clear
his dim eyes. The autumn
was far spent, and the nights
were long. Not rarely the
dead white gleams of the
early dawn before the coming
of the sun met the yellow
light of our candles as we
passed on the staircase going
to bed a little window that
looked up to the mountains,
and over them to the east.

Perhaps it was not all
pleasure, so far as I was con
cerned, but certainly it was
all profit. The novels we
read were * Tom Jones, in

four volumes, and * Clarissa, in its original eight, one or
two of Smollett s, and some of Scott s. Rossetti had not,
I think, been a great reader of fiction, but his critical judg
ment was in some respects the surest and soundest I have
known. He was one of the only two men I have ever met
with who have given me in personal intercourse a sense
of the presence of a gift that is above and apart from talent
in a word, of genius. Nothing escaped him. His alert
mind seized upon everything. He had never before, I think,

DAXTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI

66 MY FIRST BOOK

given any thought to fiction as an art, but his intellect played
over it like a bright light. It amazes me no\v, after ten years
close study of the methods of story-telling, to recall the
general principles which he seemed to formulate out of the
back of his head for the defence of his swift verdicts. Now
why ? I would say, when the art of the novelist seemed to
me to fail, or when the poet s condemnation appeared
extreme. * Because so-and-so must happen/ he would answer.
He was always right. He grasped with masterly strength
the operation of the two fundamental factors in the novelist s
art the sympathy and the tragic mischief. If these were
not working well, he knew by the end of the first chapters
that, however fine in observation, or racy in humour, or true in
pathos, the work as an organism must fail.

It was an education in literary art to sharpen one s wits on
such a grindstone, to clarify one s thought in such a stream,
to strengthen one s imagination by contact with a mind that
was * of imagination all compact.

Now, down to that time, though I had often aspired to the
writing of plays, it had never occurred to me that I might
write a novel. But I began to think of it then as a remote
possibility, and the immediate surroundings of our daily life
brought back recollection of the old Cumberland legend. I
told the story to Rossetti, and he was impressed by it, but he
strongly advised me not to tackle it. The incident did not
repel him by its ghastliness, but he saw no way of getting
sympathy into it on any side. His judgment disheartened
me, and I let the idea go back to the dark chambers of
memory. He urged me to try my hand at a Manx story.
" The Bard of Manxland " it s worth while to be that, he
said he did not know the author of Foc s le Yarns. I
thought so, too, but the Cumbrian statesman had begun to
lay hold of my imagination. I had been reviving my recol
lection and sharpening my practice of the Cumbrian dialect

HALL CAINE 67

which had been familiar to my ear, and even to my tongue,
in childhood, and so my Manx ambitions had to wait.

Two years passed, the poet died, I had spent eighteen
months in daily journalism in London, and was then settled
in a little bungalow of three rooms in a garden near the
beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight. And there, at
length, I began to write my first novel. I had grown im
patient of critical work, had persuaded myself (no doubt
wrongly) that nobody would go on writing about other
people s writing who could do original writing himself, and
was resolved to live on little and earn nothing, and never go
back to London until I had written something of some sort.
As nearly as I can remember, I had enough to keep things
going for four months, and if, at the end of that time, nothing
had got itself done, I must go back bankrupt.

Something did get done, but at a heavy price of labour
and heart-burning. When I began to think of a theme, I
found four or five subjects clamouring for acceptance. There
was the story of the Prodigal Son, which afterwards became
The Deemster ; the story of Jacob and Esau, which in the
same way turned into The Bondman ; the story of Samuel
and Eli, which, after a fashion, moulded itself ultimately into
The Scapegoat ; and half-a-dozen other stories, chiefly
Biblical, which are still on the forehead of my time to come.
But the Cumbrian legend was first favourite, and to that I
addressed myself. I thought I had seen a way to meet
Rossetti s objection. The sympathy was to be got out of the
elder son. He was to think God s hand was upon him. But
whom God s hand rested on had God at his right hand ; so
the elder son was to be a splendid fellow brave, strong, calm,
patient, long-suffering, a victim of unrequited love, a man
standing square on his legs against all weathers. It is said
that the young nqvelist usually begins with a glorified version
of his own character ; but it must interest my friends to see

MY FIRST BOOK

how every quality of my first hero was a rebuke to my own
peculiar infirmities.

MR. HALL CA1NE IX HIS STUDY
(From a photograph by A. M Petti f)

Above this central figure and legendary incident I grouped
a family of characters. They were heroic and eccentric, good
and bad, but they all operated upon the hero. Then I began
to write.

HALL CAfNE

Shall I ever forget the agony of the first efforts ? There
was the ground to clear with necessary explanations. This
I did in the way of Scott in a long prefatory chapter.
Having written it I read it aloud, and found it unutterably

MRS. HALL CAINE
(From a photograph by A. M. l\ttit)

slow and dead. Twenty pages were gone, and the interest
was not touched. Throwing the chapter aside I began with
an alehouse scene, intending to work back to the history in a
piece of retrospective writing. The alehouse was better, but
to try its quality I read it aloud, after the Rainbow scene in

70 MY FIRST BOOK

Silas Marner, and then cast it aside in despair. A third
time I began, and when the alehouse looked tolerable the
retrospective chapter that followed it seemed flat and poor.
How to begin by gripping the interest, how to tell all and
yet never stop the action these were agonising difficulties.

It took me nearly a fortnight to start that novel, sweating
drops as of blood at every fresh attempt. I must have
written the first half volume four times at the least. After
that I saw the way clearer, and got on faster. ? At the end of
three months I had written nearly two volumes, and then in
good spirits I went up to London.

My first visit was to J. S. Cotton, an old friend, and to
him I detailed the lines of my story. His rapid mind saw a
new opportunity. You want peine forte et dure] he said.
What s that ? I said. An old punishment a beautiful
thing/ he answered. Where s my dear old Blackstone ?
and the statute concerning the punishment for standing mute
was read to me. It was just the thing I wanted for my hero,
and I was in rapture, but I was also in despair. To work
this fresh interest into my theme, half of what I had written
would need to be destroyed !

It was destroyed, the interesting piece of ancient juris
prudence took a leading place in my scheme, and after two
months more I got well into the third volume. Then I took
my work down to Liverpool, and showed it to my friend, the
late John Lovell, a most able man, first manager of the Press
Association, but then editing the local Mercury. After he
had read it he said, I suppose you want my candid opinion ?
Well, ye s, I said. It s crude, he said. .But it only wants
sub-editing. Sub-editing !

I took it back to London, began again at the first line,
and wrote every page over again. At the end of another
month the story had been reconstructed, and was shorter by
some fifty pages of manuscript. It had drawn my heart s
blood to cut out my pet passages, but they were gone, and I

HALL CA1NE

knew the book was better. After that I went on to the end
and finished with a tragedy. Then the story was sent back
to Lovell, and I waited for his verdict.

My home (or what served for it) was now on the fourth
floor of New Court, in Lincoln s Inn, and one morning Lovell
came puffing and blowing and steaming (the good fellow was
a twenty-stone man) into my lofty nest. He had re-read my
novel coming up in the train. Well ? I asked, nervously.
It s magnificent, he said. That was all the favourable
criticism he offered. All save
one practical and tangible bit.
We ll give you ioo/. for the
serial right of the story for
the Weekly:

He offered one unfavour
able criticism. The death of
your hero will never do, he
said. If you kill that man
Ralph, you ll kill your book.
What s the good ? Take no
more than the public will
give you to begin with, and
by-and-by they ll take what
you give them: It was prac
tical advice, but it went sorely against my grain. The death
of the hero was the natural sequel to the story ; the only end
that gave meaning, and intention, and logic to its motif. I had a
strong predisposition towards a tragic climax to a serious story.
To close a narrative of disastrous events with a happy ending it
always seemed necessary to turn every incident into accident.
That was like laughing at the reader. Comedy was comedy,
but comedy and tragedy together was farce. Then a solemn
close was so much more impressive. A happy end nearly
always frayed off into rags and nothingness, but a sad one
closed and clasped a story as with a clasp. Besides, a tragic

COMINc; UP IX THE TRAIN

72 MY FIRST BOOK

end might be a glorious and satisfying one, and need by no
means be squalid and miserable. But all these arguments
went down before my friend s practical assurance : Kill that
man, and you kill your book.

With much diffidence I altered the catastrophe and made
my hero happy. Then, thinking my work complete, T asked
Mr. Theodore Watts (a friend to whose wise counsel I owed
much in those days) to read some galley slips of it. He
thought the rustic scenes good, but advised me to moderate
the dialect, and he propounded to me his well-known views
on the use of patois in fiction. * It gives a sense of reality/
he said, and often has the effect of wit, but it must not stand
in the way. The advice was sound. A man may know
over much of his subject to write on it proper!} . I had
studied Cumbrian to too much purpose, and did not realise
that some of my scenes were like sealed books to the
general reader. So once again I ran over my story, taking
out some of the nobbuts and the dustas and the wiltas.

My first novel was now written, but I had still to get it
published. In my early days in London, while trying to live
in the outer court of a calling wherein the struggle for

o oo

existence is keenest and bitterest and cruellest, I conceived
one day the idea of offering myself as a reader to the
publishers. With this view I called on several of that ilk,
who have perhaps no recollection of my early application. I
recall my interview with one of them. He was sitting at a
table when I was taken into his room, and he never once
raised his head from his papers to look at me. I just
remember that he had a neck like a three-decker, and a voice
like a peahen s. Well, sir ? he said. I mentioned the
object of my visit. What can you read ? Novels and
poems, I answered. Don t publish either good day, he
said, and I went out.

But one of the very best, and quite, I think, the very
oldest of publishers now living, received me differently.

HALL CAINE 73

Come into my own room, he said. It was a lovely little
place, full of an atmosphere that recalled the publishing house
of the old days, half office, half study ; a workshop where
books might be made, not turned out by machinery. I read
many manuscripts for that publisher, and must have learned
much by the experience. And now that my novel was finished
I took it to him first. He offered to publish it the following
year. That did not suit me, and I took my book elsewhere.
Next day I was offered 5O/. for my copyright. That was
wages at the rate of about four shillings a day for the time I
had been actually engaged upon the work, sweating brain
and heart and every faculty. Nevertheless, one of my friends
urged me to accept it. Why ? I asked. Because it is a
story of the past, and therefore not one publisher in ten will
look at it. I used strong language, and then took my novel
to Chatto & Windus. Within a few hours Mr. Chatto
made me an offer which I accepted. The book is now, I
think, in its fifteenth edition.

The story I have told of many breakdowns in the attempt
to write my first novel may suggest the idea that I was
merely serving my apprenticeship to fiction. It is true that
I was, but it would be wrong to conclude that the writing of
a novel has been plain sailing with me ever since. Let me
throw a crust to my critics/ and confess that I am serving
my apprenticeship still. Every book that I have written
since has offered yet greater difficulties. Not one of the little
series but has at some moment been a despair to me. There
has always been a point of the story at which I have felt
confident that it must kill me. I have written six novels
(that is to say, about sixteen), and sworn as many oaths that
I would never begin another. Three times I have thrown up
commissions in sheer terror of the work ahead of one. Yet
here I am at this moment (like half-a-dozen of my fellow-
craftsmen), with contracts in hand which I cannot get
through for three years. The public expects a novel to be

74 MY FIRST BOOK

light reading. It may revenge itself for occasional dis
appointments by remembering that a novel is not always
light writing.

Let me conclude with a few words that may be timely.
Of all the literary cants that I despise and hate, the one I
hate and despise the most is that which would have the world
believe that greatly gifted men who have become distinguished
in literature and are earning thousands a year by it, and have
no public existence and no apology apart from it, hold it in
pity as a profession and in contempt as an art. For my own
part, I have found the profession of letters a serious pursuit,
of which in no company and in no country have I had need
to be ashamed. It has demanded all my powers, fired all my
enthusiasm, developed my sympathies, enlarged my friend
ships, touched, amused, soothed, and comforted me. If it
has been hard work, it has also been a constant inspiration,
and I would not change it for all the glory and more than all
the emoluments of the best-paid and the most illustrious
profession in the world.

THE SOCIAL KALEIDOSCOPE
BY GEORGE R. SIMS

Y first book hardly de
served the title. I have
only a dim remembrance of it
now, because it is one of those
things which I have studiously
set myself to forget-
I was very proud
of it before I saw
it. After I had
seen it, I realised in
one swift moment s
anguish the concen
trated truth of the
word vanity as ap
plied to human
wishes. Hidden

away in the bottom corner of an old box, which is not to be
opened until after I am dead, that first book lies at the
present moment ; that is to say, unless the process of decay,
which had already set in upon the paper on which it was
printed, has gone on to the bitter end, and the book has dis
appeared entirely of its own accord.

Before that book was published, I used to lie awake at
night and fancy how great and how grand a thing it would

12 CLARENCE TERRACE

7 6

MY FIRST BOOK

be for me to see a book with my name on the cover lying on
Smith s bookstalls, and staring me in the face from the book
sellers windows. After it was published, I felt that I owed
Messrs. Smith & Sons a deep debt of gratitude for refusing
to take it, and my heart rejoiced within me greatly that the
only booksellers who exhibited it lived principally in old back
streets and half-finished suburban thoroughfares.

THE HALL

Stay I will go upstairs to my lumber room, I will open
that box, I will dig deep down among the buried memories of
the past, and I will find that book, and I will summon up my
courage and ask the publishers of this volume to kindly allow
the cover of that book to be reproduced here. It is only
by looking at it as I looked at it that you will thoroughly
appreciate my feelings on the subject.

I have found the box, but my heart sinks within me as I
try to open the lid. All my lost youth lies there. The key
is rusty and will hardly turn in the lock.

; n-

^&gt;

78 MY FIRST BOOK

So so so, at last ! Ghosts of the long ago, come forth
from your resting-places and haunt me once again.

Dear me ! dear me ! how musty everything smells ; how
old, and worn, and time-stained everything is. A folded
poster :

GRECIAN THEATRE

Mr. G. R. Sims will positively not appear
this evening at the entertainment held in the
Hall.

Yes, I remember. I had been announced, entirely with
out my consent or knowledge, to appear at a hall attached

to the Grecian Theatre with Mrs.
Georgina Weldon, and take part in
an entertainment. This notice was
stuck about outside the theatre in
consequence of my indignant remon
strance. My old friend Mr. George
Conquest had, I need hardly say,
nothing to do with that bill. Some
one had taken the hall for a special
occasion. I think it was something
remotely connected with lunatics.
v My first play ! Poor little play-

GEORGE R. SIMS a burlesque written for my brothers

and sisters, and played by us in the Theatre Royal Day
Nursery. There were some really brilliant lines in it, I
remember. They were taken bodily from a burlesque of
H. J. Byron s, which I purchased at Lacy & Son s (now
French s) in the Strand a new and original burlesque by
Master G. R. Sims. My misguided parents actually had the
playbill printed and invited friends to witness the performance.
They little knew what they were doing by pandering to my
boyish vanity in such a way. But for that printed playbill,
and that public performance in my nursery, I might never have

GEORGE R. SIMS

SOCIAL KALEIDOSCOPE.

TWENTY-FIVE FIGURES.

taken to the stage, and inflicted upon a long-suffering public
Adelphi melodrama and Gaiety burlesque, farcical comedy and
comic opera ; I might have remained all my life an honest,
hard-working City man, relieving my feelings occasionally by
joining in the autumn discussions in the Daily Telegraph, I
was still in the City when my first book was published. I
used, in those days, to get to the City at nine and leave it at
six, but I had a dinner hour, and in that dinner hour I wrote
short stories and little things that I fancied were funny, and

I used to put them in -^ __,,., _ .._,.. .. . ._...^ -

big envelopes and send
them to the different
magazines. I sent
about twenty out in
that way. I never had
one accepted, but seve
ral returned.

I wrote my first
book in my dinner hour,
in a City office. I have
just found it. Here is
the cover. You will
observe that it has my
portrait on it. I look
very ill and thin and
haggard. That was,
perhaps, the result of
going without my din
ner in order to devote myself to literature.

If you could look inside that book, if you could see the
paper on which it is printed, you would understand the shock
it was to me when they laid it in my arms and said : * Behold
your firstborn.

All the vanity in me (and they tell me that I have a good
deal) rose up as I gazed at the battered wreck upon the cover

Priw SIXPENCE.

S.J. SPRANCIS&CO., WJXE OFFICE COURT, E.C.

MY FIRST BOOK

the man with the face that suggested a prompt subscription

to a burial club.

But I shouldn t have minded that so much if the people

who bought my book hadn t written to me personally to

complain. One gentleman sent me a postcard to say that

his volume fell to pieces while he was carrying it home.

Another assured me that he had picked enough pieces of

straw out of the leaves to make
a bed for his horse with, and
a third returned a copy to me
without paying the postage,
and asked me kindly to put it
in my dustbin, because his
cook was rather proud of the
one he had in his back garden.
Still the book sold (the
sketches had all previously
appeared in the Weekly Dis-
patc/i), and when the first edi
tion was exhausted, a new and
better one was prepared (with
out that haggard face upon
the cover), and I was happy.
The sale ran into thirty thou-
THE SNUGGERY sand the first year of publica

tion, and as I was fortunate

enough to have published it on a royalty, I am glad to say

it is still selling.

The Social Kaleidoscope was my first book. With it I

made my actual debut between covers.

I hadn t done very well before then ; since then I have,

from a worldly point of view, done remarkably well far

better than I deserved to do, my good-natured friends assure

me, and I cordially agree with them.

But I had made a good fight for it, and I had suffered

years of disappointment and rebuff. I began to send contri-

GEORGE R. SIMS 81

butions to periodicals when I was fourteen years old, and a
boy at Hanwell College. Fun was the first journal I favoured
with my effusions, and week after week I had a sinking at the
heart as I bought that popular periodical and searched in
vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my
smart paragraphs.

It took me thirteen years to get something printed and
paid for, but I succeeded at last, and it was Fun, my early
love, that first took me by the hand. When I was on the
staff of Fun, and its columns were open to me for all I cared
to write, I used often to
look over the batch of boy
ish efforts that littered the
editor s desk, and let my
heart go out to the writers
who were suffering the

pangs that I had known " j A

so well.

I had had effusions of
mine printed before that,
but I didn t get any money
for them. I had the plea-

MR. SIMS S LITTLE DAWG

sure of seeing my signature

more than once in the columns of certain theatrical journals,
in the days when I was a constant first-nighter, and a deter
mined upholder of the privileges of the pit. And I even
had some of my poetry printed. In the old box to which
I have gone in search of the first edition of my first book,
there are two papers carefully preserved, because they were
once my pride and glory. One is a copy of the Halfpenny
Journal, and the other is a copy of the Halfpenny Welcome
Guest. On the back page of the correspondence column
of the former there is a poem signed G. R. S., addressed
to a young lady s initials in affectionately complimentary
terms. Alas ! I don t know what has become of that young

MY FIRST BOOK

lady. Probably she is married, and is the mother of a
fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten that I ever
wrote verses in her honour. I think I sent her a copy of
the Halfpenny Journal, but a few weeks after a coldness
sprang up between us. She was behind the counter of a
confectioner s shop in Camden Town, and I found her one
afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine who used to buy
his butterscotch there. My friend and I had words, but

THE DINING-ROOM

between myself and that fair confectioner the rest was
silence.

I was really very much distressed that my pride com
pelled me never again to cross the threshold of that
establishment. There wasn t a confectioner s in all Camden
Town that could come within measurable distance of it for
strawberry ices.

In the correspondence column of the Halfpenny Welcome
Guest, which is among my buried treasures, there is an
answer instead of the poem which I had fondly hoped to

GEORGE R. SIMS

see inserted in its glorious pages. And this is the answer :
G. R. S. Your poem is not quite up to our standard, but it
gives decided promise of better things. We should advise
you to persevere.

I am quoting from memory, for after turning that box
upside down, I can t lay my hand on this particular Welcome
Guest, though I know that it is there. I don t know who the
editor was who gave me that kindly pat on the head, but
whoever he was he earned my
undying gratitude. At the time
I felt I should have liked him
better had he printed my poem.
I was no more fortunate with
my prose than I was with my
poetry. I began to tell stories
at a very early age, but it was
not until after I had succeeded
in getting a poem printed among
the f Answers to Correspondents
that I took seriously to prose
with a view of publication. I
was encouraged to try my hand
at writing stories by the remem
brance of the success which had
attended my efforts at romantic
narrative when I was a school-
boy.

There were eight other boys in the dormitory I slept in
at Han well (the College, not the Asylum), and they used to
make me tell them stories every night until they fell asleep,
and woe betide me if I cut my narrative short while one of
them remained awake. I wasn t much of a boy with a
bolster or a boot, but they were all champions, and many a
time when I had married the hero and heroine and wound up
my story did I have to start a fresh complication in a hurry

THE LIBRARY

8 4

MY FIRST BOOK

to save myself from chastisement. I remember on one
occasion, when I was dreadfully sleepy, and I had got into a
fearful fog as to who committed the murder, I made a wild
plunge at a ghost to get me out of the difficulty, and the
whole dormitory rose to a boy and set about me with bolsters
in their indignation at such a lame and impotent conclusion.
Night after night did those maddening words, Tell us
a story, salute my ears as I laid my weary little head
upon the pillow, and I had to tell one or run the gauntlet of
eight bolsters and sixteen slippers, to say nothing of the

SIR HUGO

biggest boy of all, who kept a reserve pair of boots hidden
away under his bed for purposes not altogether unconnected
with midnight excursions to a neighbouring orchard.

It was the remembrance of my early story-telling days
that prompted me, when poetry seemed a drug in the market,
to try my hand at what is now, I believe, called The
Complete Novelette/

I set myself seriously to work, laid in a large stock of
apples and jumbles, and spent several consecutive afternoons
in completing a story which I called A Pleasant Evening.
After I had written it I copied it out in my best hand,

GEORGE R. SIMS 85

and then, with fear and trembling, I sent it to the Family
Herald.

I sent it to the Family Herald because I had heard a
lady who visited at our house say that she knew a lady who
knew a lady who had sent a story to the Family Herald,
never having written anything before in her life, and the
story had been accepted, and the writer had received five
pounds for it by return of post.

THE BALCONY

I didn t receive anything by return of post, but in about
a fortnight my manuscript came back to me. Nothing
daunted, I carefully cut off the corner on which Declined
with thanks had been written, and I sent the story to
Chambers s Journal. Here it met with a similar fate, but I
fancy it took a little longer to come back, and it bore signs
of wear and tear. I knew, or I had read, that it was not
wise to let your manuscript have the appearance of being
rejected, so I spent several unpleasant evenings in writing A
Pleasant Evening outagain, and I sent it to All the Year Round.

MY FIRST BOOK

It came back ! This time I didn t take the trouble to
open it. I knew it directly I saw it, and as it reached me so
I flung it in my desk and bit my lips, and made up my mind
that after all it was better to be accepted as a poet in the
* Answers to Correspondents column of the Halfpenny

Journal than to be
rejected as a story-
writer by the edi
tors of higher-
priced periodicals.
But though I
played with poetry
again, I didn t even
succeed in getting
into the * Answers to Correspondents. My vaulting ambition
o erleaped its selle, and I sent my verses to journals which
didn t correspond. In those days I kept a little book, in
which I entered all the manuscripts I sent to editors, and from
it now I copy the following instructive record. R stands
for Returned :

The Minstrel s Curse . . R.
After the Battle . R.

( After the Battle . R.

Nearer and Dearer R.

An Unfortunate Attachment . R,
A Song of May . R.

Nearer and Dearer R.

An Unfortunate Attachment . R.
The Minstrel s Curse R.

Nearer and Dearer

Once a Week
Belgravia

Broadway

Fun

Banter .

Judy .

London Society

Owl

. R.

Returned ! Returned ! Returned ! All I got for my
pains was the chance of making a joke in my diary on my
birthday. In those days of my wild struggles with Fate I
find written against the 2nd of September, Many unhappy
Returns.

GEORGE R. SIMS 87

I believe that I should have flung up authorship in
despair, and never have had a first book, but for the chance
remark of the dear old doctor who looked after my health in
the days when I hadn t to pay my own doctor s bills.

He was talking about me one day in my father s private
office, and I happened to be passing, and I heard him say,
He s a nice lad what a pity he scribbles ! Scribbles ! the

IHK DRAWING -ROOM

word burnt itself into my brain, it seared my heart, it brought
the hot blood to my cheeks, and the indignant tears to my
eyes. Was I not ready to write an acrostic at a moment s
notice on the name of the sweetheart of any fellow who asked
me to do it ? Had I not written a poem on the fall of
Napoleon, which my eldest sister had read aloud to her
schoolfellows, and made them all mad with jealousy to think

88 MY FIRST BOOK

there wasn t a brother among the lot of them who could even
rhyme decently ? Had I not had stories rejected by the
Family Herald^ All the Year Round, and Chambers s Journal,
and a letter on the subject of the crossing opposite St. Mark s
Church, Hamilton Terrace, printed in the Marylebone
Mercury ? And was I to be dubbed a scribbler, and pitied
for my weakness ? It is nearly twenty years since those
words were uttered, and my dear old doctor rests beyond the
reach of all human ills, but I can hear them now. They
have never ceased to ring in my ears as they rang that day.

FAUST UP TO DATE

My pride was wounded, my vanity was hurt, I was put
upon my mettle. I registered a silent vow there and then
that some day I would have a noble revenge on my friendly
detractor, and make him confess that he was wrong when he
said that it was a pity I scribbled.

From that hour I set myself steadily to be an author. I
wrote poetry by the mile, prose by the acre, and I sent it to
every kind of periodical that I could find in the Post Office
Directory.

I had to pass through years of rejection, but still I wrote

GEORGE R. SIMS

on, and still I spent all my pocket-money on books, and
postage-stamps, and paper.

And at last the chance came. I was allowed to write
paragraphs in the Weekly Dispatch by a friend who was a real
journalist, and had a column at his disposal to fill with
gossip.

After doing the work for a month for nothing, I had the
whole column given to me, and one day I received my first
guinea earned by scribbling.

MR. SIMS S DINNER PARTY

I was a proud man when I went out of the Dispatch office
that day with a sovereign and a shilling in my hand. I had
forced the gates of the citadel at last. I had marched in with
the honours of war, and I was marching out with the price of
victory in my hand.

Soon afterwards there came another chance. The editor
of the Dispatch wanted a series of short complete stories. I
asked to be allowed to try if I could do them. Under the
title of The Social Kaleidoscope/ I wrote a series of short
stories or sketches, and from that day no week has passed

90 MY FIRST BOOK

that I have not contributed something to the columns of a
weekly journal.

When the sketches were complete, the publisher of the
Dispatcli offered to bring them out in book form for me and
publish them in the office.

The Social Kaleidoscope was my first book, and that is
how it came into the world.

Years afterwards, my chance came with the dear old
fellow who had said that it was a pity I scribbled so. Fortune
had smiled upon me in one way then, and I was earning an
excellent income with my pen. But my health had broken
down, and it was thought necessary that I should place
myself in the hands of a celebrated surgeon. I had not seen
my old doctor for some years, but my people wished that he
should be consulted, because he had known me so well in the
days of my youth.

So I submitted, and he came, and he shook his head and
agreed that so-and-so was the man to take me in hand.

I think he ll cure you, my dear fellow/ said the doctor ;
he s the most skilful surgeon we have for cases like yours,
but^his fee is a heavy one. Still, you can afford it.

Yes, doctor/ I replied, thanks to my scribbling, I can.

That was the hour of my triumph. I had waited for it
for fifteen years, but it had come at last.

The dear old boy gripped my hand. I was wrong/ he
said, with a quiet smile, and I confess it ; but we ll get you
well, and you shall scribble for many a year to come.

And I am scribbling still.

DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES
BY RUDYARD KIPLING

S there is only one man in
charge of a steamer, so
there is but one man
in charge of a news
paper, and he is the
editor. My chief
taught me this on an
Indian journal, and he further
explained that an order was an
order, to be obeyed at a run, not
a walk, and that any notion or
notions as to the fitness or unfit-
ness of any particular kind of
work for the young had better be

held over till the last page was locked up to press. He was
breaking me into harness, and I owe him a deep debt of
gratitude, w r hich I did not discharge at the time. The path
of virtue was very steep, whereas the writing of verses allowed
a certain play to the mind, and, unlike the filling in of reading
matter, could be done as the spirit served. Now, a sub-editor
is not hired to write verses : he is paid to sub-edit. At the
time, this discovery shocked me greatly ; but, some years
later, when I came to be a sort of an editor in charge, Provi
dence dealt me for my subordinate one saturated with Elia.

HE NEWSPAPER FILES

9 2

MY FIRST BOOK

He wrote very pretty, Lamblike essays, but he wrote them
when he should have been sub-editing. Then I saw a little
of what my chief must have suffered on my account. There
is a moral here for the ambitious and aspiring who are
oppressed by their superiors.

YOUR POTERY VERY GOOD, SIR ; JUST COMING
PROPER LENGTH TO-DAY

This is a digression, as all my verses were digressions from
office work. They came without invitation, unmanneredly,
in the nature of things ; but they had to come, and the
writing out of them kept me healthy and amused. To the
best of my remembrance, no one then discovered their
grievous cynicism, or their pessimistic tendency, and I was
far too busy, and too happy, to take thought about these things.

94 MY FIRST BOOK

So they arrived merrily, being born out of the life about
me, and they were very bad indeed, and the joy of doing
them was payment a thousand times their worth. Some, of
course, came and ran away again, and the dear sorrow of
going in search of these (out of office hours, and catching
them) was almost better than writing them clear. Bad as
they were, I burned twice as many as were published, and of
the survivors at least two-thirds were cut down at the last
moment. Nothing can be wholly beautiful that is not useful,
and therefore my verses were made to ease off the perpetual
strife between the manager extending his advertisements and
my chief fighting for his reading-matter. They were born to
be sacrificed. Rukn-Din, the foreman of our side, approved
of them immensely, for he was a Muslim of culture. He
would say : Your potery very good, sir ; just coming proper
length to-day. You giving more soon ? One-third column
just proper. Always can take on third page.

Mahmoud, who set them up, had an unpleasant way of
referring to a new lyric as Ek aur cliiz one more thing
which I never liked. The job side, too, were unsympathetic,
because 1 used to raid into their type for private proofs with
old English and Gothic headlines. Even a Hindoo does not
like to find the serifs of his f s cut away to make long s s.

And in this manner, week by week, my verses came to be
printed in the paper. I was in very good company, for there
is always an undercurrent of song, a little bitter for the most
part, running through the Indian papers. The bulk of it is
much better than mine, being more graceful, and is done
by those less than Sir Alfred Lyall to whom I would
apologise for mentioning his name in this gallery Pekin,
Latakia, Cigarette, O., T.W., * Foresight, and others,
whose names come up with the stars out of the Indian Ocean
going eastward.

Sometimes a man in Bangalore would be moved to song,
and a man on the Bombay side would answer him, and a

RUDYARD KIPLING 95

man in Bengal would echo back, till at last we would all be
crowing- together like cocks before daybreak, when it is too
dark to see your fellow. And, occasionally, some unhappy
Chaaszee, away in the China Ports, would lift up his voice
among the tea-chests, and the queer-smelling yellow papers
of the Far East brought us his sorrows. The newspaper
files showed that, forty years ago, the men sang of just the
same subjects as we did of heat, loneliness, love, lack of
promotion, poverty, sport, and war. Further back still, at the
end of the eighteenth century, Rickey s Bengal Gazette, a
very wicked little sheet in Calcutta, published the songs of
the young factors, ensigns, and writers to the East India
Company. They, too, wrote of the same things, but in those
days men were strong enough to buy a bullock s heart for
dinner, cook it with their own hands because they could not
afford a servant, and make a rhymed jest of all the squalor
and poverty. Lives were not worth two monsoons purchase,
and perhaps the knowledge of this a little coloured the
rhymes when the}- sang :

In a very short time you re released from all cares
If the Padri s asleep, Mr. Oldham reads prayers !

The note of physical discomfort that runs through so
much Anglo-Indian poetry had been struck then. You will
find it most fully suggested in The Long, Long Indian Day/
a comparatively modern affair ; but there is a set of verses
called Scanty Ninety-five, dated about Warren Hastings s
time, which gives a lively idea of what our seniors in the
Service had to put up with. One of the most interesting
poems I ever found was written at Meerut, three or four days
before the Mutiny broke out there. The author complained
that he could not get his clothes washed nicely that week,
and was very facetious over his worries.

My verses had the good fortune to last a little longer than
some others, which were more true to facts and certainly

9 6

MY FIRST BOOK

better workmanship. Men in the Army, and the Civil
Service, and the Railway, wrote to me saying that the rhymes
might be made into a book. Some of them had been sung
to the banjoes round camp fires, and some had run as far
down coast as Rangoon and Moulmein, and up to Mandalay.
A real book was out of the question, but I knew that Rukn-
Din and the office plant were at my disposal at a price, if I
did not use the office time. Also, I had handled in the
previous year a couple of small books, of which I was part

SUNG TO THE BANJOES ROUND CAMP FIRES

owner, and had lost nothing. So there was built a sort of a
book, a lean oblong docket, wire-stitched, to imitate a D.O.
Government envelope, printed on one side only, bound in
brown paper, and secured with red tape. It was addressed
to all heads of departments and all Government officials, and
among a pile of papers would have deceived a clerk of twenty
years service. Of these books we made some hundreds,
and as there was no necessity for advertising, my public being
to my hand, I took reply-postcards, printed the news of the
birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the

RUDYARD KIPLING

other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden
to Singapore, and from Quetta to Colombo. There was no
trade discount, no reckoning twelves as thirteens, no commis
sion, and no credit of any kind whatever. The money came
back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the
publisher, the left-hand pocket, direct to the author, the right-
hand pocket. Every copy sold in a few weeks, and the ratio
of expenses to profits, as I remember it, has since prevented
my injuring my health by sympathising with publishers who
talk of their risks and advertisements. The down-country
papers complained of the form
of the thing. The wire binding
cut the pages, and the red tape
tore the covers. This was not
intentional, but Heaven helps
those who help themselves. Con
sequently, there arose a demand
for a new edition, and this time I
exchanged the pleasure of taking
in money over the counter for
that of seeing a real publisher s
imprint on the title-page. More verses were taken out and
put in, and some of that edition travelled as far as Hong-
Kong on the map, and each edition grew a little fatter, and,
at last, the book came to London with a gilt top and a stiff
back, and was advertised in the publishers poetry depart
ment.

But I loved it best when it was a little brown baby with a
pink string round its stomach ; a child s child, ignorant that
it was afflicted with all the most modern ailments ; and
before people had learned, beyond doubt, how its author
lay awake of nights in India, plotting and scheming to
write something that should take with the English public.

rr THK

( TTNIVERS

I WAS SIX

JUVENILIA

BY A. CONAN DOYLE

T is very well for the master crafts
man with twenty triumphs be
hind him to look down the vista
of his successes, and to recall how
he picked out the path which has
led him to fame, but for the tiro
whose first book is perilously near
to his last one it becomes a more
invidious matter. His past presses
too closely upon his present, and

his reminiscences, unmellowed by the flight of years, are apt
to be rawly and crudely personal. And yet even time helps
me when I speak of my first work, for it was written seven-and-
twenty years ago.

I was six at the time, and have a very distinct recollection
of the achievement. It was written, I remember, upon fools
cap paper, in what might be called a fine bold hand four
words to the line, and was illustrated by marginal pen-and-ink
sketches by the author. There was a man in it, and there
was a tiger. I forget which was the hero, but it didn t matter
much, for they became blended into one about the time when
the tiger met the man. I was a realist in the age of the
Romanticists, I described at some length, both verbally and
pictorially, the untimely end of that wayfarer. But when

H 2

IOO

MY FIRST BOOK

the tiger had absorbed him, I found myself slightly embar
rassed as to how my story was to go on. It is very easy to
get people into scrapes, and very hard to get them out again/
I remarked, and I have often had cause to repeat the pre
cocious aphorism of my childhood. On this occasion the
situation was beyond me,
and my book, like my man,
was engulfed in my tiger.
There is an old family bureau
with secret drawers, in which
lie little locks of hair tied
up in circles, and black sil
houettes and dim daguerreo
types, and letters
which seem to have
been written in the
lightest of straw-

ON THE PRAIRIES AND THE OCEANS

coloured inks. Somewhere there lies my primitive manu
script, where my tiger, like a many-hooped barrel with a
tail to it, still envelops the hapless stranger whom he has
taken in.

A. CONAN DOYLE

TOT

Then came my second book, which was told and not
written, but which was a much more ambitious effort than
the first. Between the two, four years had elapsed, which
were mainly spent in reading. It is rumoured that a special
meeting of a library committee was held in my honour, at
which a bye-law was passed that no subscriber should be per
mitted to change his book more than three times a day. Yet,

, even with these limitations,
by the aid of a well-stocked
bookcase at home, I managed

MY DEBUT AS A STORY-TELLER

to enter my tenth year with a good deal in my head that I
could never have learned in the class-rooms.

I do not think that life has any joy to offer so com
plete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative
lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle
down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour
is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is ! Your very
heart and soul are out on the prairies and the oceans with
your hero. It is you who act and suffer and enjoy. You carry
the long small-bore Kentucky rifle with which such egregious

102

MY FIRST BOOK

things arc done, and you lie out upon the topsail yard, and
get jerked by the flap of the sail into the Pacific, where you
cling on to the leg of an albatross, and so keep afloat until
the comic boatswain turns up with his crew of volunteers to
handspike you into safety. What a magic it is, this stirring
of the boyish heart and mind ! Long ere I came to my teens
I had traversed every sea and knew the Rockies like my own
back garden. How often had I sprung upon the back of the

charging buffalo and so escaped
him! It was an everyday emer
gency to have to set the prairie
on fire in front of me in order
to escape from the fire behind, or
to run a mile down a brook to
throw the bloodhounds off my
trail. I had creased horses, 1
had shot down rapids, I had
strapped on my mocassins hind-
foremost to conceal my tracks,
I had lain under water with a
reed in my mouth, and I had
feigned madness to escape the
torture. As to the Indian braves
whom I slew in single combats,
I could have stocked a large
graveyard, and, fortunately enough, though I was a good deal
chipped about in these affairs, no real harm ever came of it,
and I was always nursed back into health by a very fasci
nating young squaw. It was all more real than the reality.
Since those days I have in very truth both shot bears and
harpooned whales, but the performance was flat compared with
the first time that I did it with Mr. Ballantyne or Captain
Mayne Reid at my elbow.

In the fulness of time I was packed off to a public school,
and in some way it was discovered by my playmates that I

WITH THE EDITOR S
COMPLIMENTS

A. CO NAN DOYLE

103

had more than my share of the lore after which they
hankered. There was my debut as a story-teller. On a wet
half-holiday I have been elevated on to a desk, and with an
audience of little boys all squatting on the floor, with their
chins upon their hands, I have talked myself husky over the
misfortunes of my heroes. Week in and week out those
unhappy men have battled and striven and groaned for the
amusement of that little circle. I
was bribed with pastry to continue
these efforts, and I remember that
I always stipulated for tarts down
and strict business, which shows
that I was born to be a member
of the Authors Society. Some
times, too, I would stop dead in the
very thrill of a crisis, and could
only be set agoing again by apples.
When I had got as far as With
his left hand in her glossy locks,
he was waving the blood-stained
knife above her head, when

HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT THEY
SAY ABOUT YOU ?

Slowly, slowly, the door turned
upon its hinges, and with eyes which
were dilated with horror, the wicked

Marquis saw I knew that I

had my audience in my power. And
thus my second book was evolved.

It may be that my literary experiences would have ended
there had there not come a time in my early manhood when
that good old harsh-faced schoolmistress, Hard Times, took
me by the hand. I wrote, and with amazement I found that
my writing was accepted. CJiainbers s Journal it was which
rose to the occasion, and I have had a kindly feeling for its
mustard-coloured back ever since. Fifty little cylinders of
manuscript did I send out during eight years, which described

io4 My FIRST BOOK

irregular orbits among publishers, and usually came back like
paper boomerangs to the place that they had started from.
Yet in time they all lodged somewhere or other. Mr. Hogg,
of London Society , was one of the most constant of my patrons,
and Mr. James Payn wasted hours of his valuable time in en
couraging me to persevere. Knowing as I did that he was
one of the busiest men in London, I never received one of his
shrewd and kindly and most illegible letters without a feeling
of gratitude and wonder.

I have heard folk talk as though there were some hidden
back door by which one may creep into literature, but I can
say myself that I never had an introduction to any editor or
publisher before doing business with them, and that I do not
think that I suffered on that account. Yet my apprentice
ship was a long and trying one. During ten years of hard
work, I averaged less than fifty pounds a year from my pen.
I won my way into the best journals, CornJiill, Temple Bar,
and so on ; but what is the use of that when the contributions
to those journals must be anonymous ? It is a system which
tells very hardly against young authors. I saw with astonish
ment and pride that Habakuk Jephson s Statement in the
CornJiill was attributed by critic after critic to Stevenson, but,
overwhelmed as I was by the compliment, a word of the most
lukewarm praise sent straight to my own address would have
been of greater use to me. After ten years of such work I
was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen into an ink-
bottle. Sometimes, of course, the anonymous system may
screen you from blame as well as rob you of praise. How
well I can see a dear old friend running after me in the street,
waving a London evening paper in his hand ! Have you
seen what they say about your CornJiill story ? he shouted.
, No, no. What is it ? Here it is ! Here it is ! Eagerly
he turned over the column, while I, trembling with excite
ment, but determined to bear my honours meekly, peeped
over his shoulder. The CornJiill this month, said the critic,

A. CONAN DOYLE

I0 5

has a story in it which would have made Thackeray turn in
his grave. There were several witnesses about, and the
Portsmouth bench are severe upon assaults, so my friend
escaped unscathed. Then first I realised that British criticism
had fallen into a shocking state of decay, though when some
one has a pat on the back for you you understand that,

MRS. THURSTON S LITTLE BOY \VA.NTS TO SEE YOU, DOCTOR

after all, there are some very smart people upon the literary
Press.

And so at last it was brought home to me that a man
may put the very best that is in him into magazine work for
years and years and reap no benefit from it, save, of course,
the inherent benefits of literary practice. So I wrote another
of my first books and sent it off to the publishers. Alas for
the dreadful thing that happened ! The publishers never

OF THK

UNIVERSITY ]

106 MY FIXST BOOK

received it, the Post Office sent countless blue forms to say that
they knew nothing about it, and from that day to this no word
has ever been heard of it. Of course it was the best thing I ever
wrote. Who ever lost a manuscript that wasn t ? But I must
in all honesty confess that my shock at its disappearance would
be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again
in print. If one or two other of my earlier efforts had also
been lost in the post, my conscience would have been the
lighter. This one was called The Narrative of John Smith,
and it was of a personal-social-political complexion. Had it
appeared I should have probably awakened to find myself
infamous, for it steered, as I remember it, perilously near to
the libellous. However, it was safely lost, and that was the
end of another of my first books.

Then I started upon an exceedingly sensational novel,
which interested me extremely at the time, though I have
never heard that it had the same effect upon anyone else
afterwards. I may urge in extenuation of all shortcomings
that it was written in the intervals of a busy though ill-paying
practice. And a man must try that and combine it with
literary work before he quite knows what it means. How
often have I rejoiced to find a clear morning before me, and
settled down to my task, or rather, dashed ferociously at it,
as knowing how precious were those hours of quiet ! Then
to me enter my housekeeper, with tidings of dismay. Mrs.
Thurston s little boy wants to see you, doctor. Show him
in, say I, striving to fix my scene in my mind that I may
splice it when this trouble is over. Well, my boy ?
Please, doctor, mother wants to know if she is to add water
to that medicine. Certainly, certainly. Not that it matters
in the least, but it is well to answer with decision. Exit the
little boy, and the splice is about half accomplished when he
suddenly bursts into the room again. Please, doctor, when
I got back mother had taken the medicine without the water.
Tut, tut ! I answer. It really does not matter in the

A. CON AN DOYLE 107

least. The youth withdraws with a suspicious glance, and
one more paragraph has been written when the husband puts
in an appearance. There seems to have been some misun
derstanding about that medicine, he remarks coldly. Not
at all, I say, it really didn t matter. Well, then, why did
you tell the boy that it should be taken with water ? And then
I try to disentangle the business, and the husband shakes his
head gloomily at me. She feels very queer, says he ; we
should all be easier in our minds if you came and looked at

MR. ANDREW LANC

her. So I leave my heroine in the four-foot way with an
express thundering towards her, and trudge sadly off, with
the feeling that another morning has been wasted, and
another seam left visible to the critic s eye in my unhappy
novel. Such was the genesis of my sensational romance, and
when publishers wrote to say that they could see no merit in
it, I was, heart and soul, of the same way of thinking.

And then, under more favourable circumstances, I wrote

io8 MY FIRST BOOK

1 Micah Clarke, for patients had become more tractable, and
I had married, and in every way I was a brighter man. A
year s reading and five months writing finished it, and I
thought I had a tool in my hands that would cut a path for
me. So I had, but the first thing that I cut with it was my
finger. I sent it to a friend, whose opinion I deeply respected,
in London, who read for one of the leading houses, but he
had been bitten by the historical novel, and very naturally
he distrusted it. From him it went to house after house, and
house after house would have none of it. Blackwood found
that the people did not talk so in the seventeenth century ;
Bentley that its principal defect was that there was a com
plete absence of interest ; Cassells that experience had shown
that an historical novel could never be a commercial success.
I remember smoking over my dog-eared manuscript when it
returned for a whiff of country air after one of its descents
upon town, and wondering what I should do if some sporting,
reckless kind of publisher were suddenly to stride in and
make me a bid of forty shillings or so for the lot. And then
suddenly I bethought me to send it to Messrs. Longmans,
where it was fortunate enough to fall into the hands of Mr.
Andrew Lang. From that day the way was smoothed to it,
and, as things turned out, I was spared that keenest sting of
ill-success, that those who had believed in your work should
suffer pecuniarily for their belief. A door had been opened
for me into the temple of the Muses, and it only remained
that I should find something that was worthy of being borne
through it.

109

THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT
BY M. E. BRADDON

Y first novel ! Far back in the distinctness of childish
-1VJL memories I see a little girl who has lately learnt to
write, who has lately been given a beautiful brand-new
mahogany desk, with a red velvet slope, and a glass ink-
bottle, such a desk as might now be bought for three-and-
sixpence, but which in the forties cost at least half a guinea.
Very proud is the little girl, with the Kenwigs pigtails and
the Kenwigs frills, of that mahogany desk, and its infinite
capacities for literary labour, above all, gem of gems, its stick
of variegated sealing-wax, brown, speckled with gold, and its
little glass seal with an intaglio representing two doves
Pliny s doves, perhaps, famous in mosaic, only the little girl
had never heard of Pliny, or his Laurentine Villa.

Armed with that desk and its supply of stationery, Mary
Elizabeth Braddon very fond of writing her name at full
length, and her address also at full length, though the word
* Middlesex offered difficulties began that pilgrimage on the
broad high road of fiction, which was destined to be a longish
one. So much for the little girl of eight years old, in the
third person, and now to become strictly autobiographical.

My first story was based on those fairy tales which first
opened to me the world of imaginative literature. My first
attempt in fiction, and in round-hand, on carefully pencilled
double lines, was a story of two sisters, a good sister and a

MY FIRST BOOK

wicked, and I fear adhered more faithfully to the lines of the
archetypal story than the writer s pen kept to the double
fence which should have ensured neatness.

The interval between the ages of eight and twelve was a
prolific period, fertile in unfinished MSS., among which I
can now trace an historical novel on the Siege of Calais, an
Eastern story, suggested by a passionate love of Miss Pardoe s
Turkish tales, and Byron s Bride of Abydos, which my
mother, a devoted Byron worshipper, allowed me to read
aloud to her and doubtless murder in the reading a story

LICHFIELD HOUSE, RICHMOND

of the Hartz Mountains, with audacious flights in German
diablerie ; and lastly, very seriously undertaken, and very
perseveringly worked upon, a domestic story, the outline of
which was suggested by the same dear and sympathetic
mother.

Now it is a curious fact, which may or may not be
common to other story-spinners, that I have never been able
to take kindly to a plot or the suggestion of a plot offered
to me by anybody else. The moment a friend tells me that
he or she is desirous of imparting a series of facts strictly
true as if truth in fiction mattered one jot ! which

J/. E. BRAD DON

in his or her opinion would make the ground plan of an
admirable, startling, and altogether original three-volume
novel, I know in advance that my imagination will never
grapple with those startling circumstances that my thoughts
will begin to wander before my friend has got half through
the remarkable chain of events, and that if the obliging pur
veyor of romantic incidents were to examine me at the end
of the story, I should be spun ignominiously. For the most
part, such subjects as have
been proposed to me by
friends have been hopeless!}
unfit for the circulating li
brary ; or, where not immoral, ,.
have been utterly dull ; but it
is, I believe, a fixed idea in
the novel-reader s mind that
any combination of events
out of the beaten way of life
will make an admirable sub
ject for the novelist s art.

My dear mother, taking
into consideration my tender
years, and perhaps influenced
in somewise by her own love
of picking up odd bits of She
raton or Chippendale furni
ture in the storehouses of the less ambitious second-hand dealers
of those simpler days, offered me the following scenario for a
domestic story. It was an incident which, I doubt not, she had
often read at the tail of a newspaper column, and which cer
tainly savours of the gigantic gooseberry, the sea-serpent, and
the agricultural labourer who unexpectedly inherits half a
million. It was eminently a Simple Story, and far more
worthy of that title than Mrs. Inchbald s long and involved
romance.

THE HALL

T 12 MY FIRST BOOK

An honest couple, in humble circumstances, possess among
their small household gear a good old easy chair, which has
been the pride of a former generation, and is the choicest of
their household gods. A comfortable cushioned chair, snug
and restful, albeit the chintz covering, though clean and tidy,
as virtuous people s furniture always is in fiction, is worn thin
by long service, while the dear chair itself is no longer the
chair it once was as to legs and framework.

THE DINING-ROOM

Evil days come upon the praiseworthy couple and their
dependent brood, among whom I faintly remember the love
interest of the story to have lain ; and that direful day arrives
when the average landlord of juvenile fiction, whose heart is
of adamant and brain of brass, distrains for the rent. The
rude broker swoops upon the humble dovecot ; a cart or
hand-barrow waits xDn the carefully hearth-stoned doorstep

M. E. BRADDON

for the household gods ; the family gather round the cherished
chair, on which the rude broker has already laid his grimy
fingers ; they hang over the back and fondle the padded arms ;
and the old grandmother, with clasped hands, entreats that,
if able to raise the money in a few days, they may be allowed
to buy back that loved heirloom.

THE DRAWING-ROOM

The broker laughs the plea to scorn ; they might have
their chair, and cheap enough, he had no doubt. The cover
was darned and patched as only the virtuous poor of fiction
do darn and do patch and he made no doubt the stuffing
was nothing better than brown wool ; and with that coarse
taunt the coarser broker dug his clasp-knife into the cushion
against which grandfatherly backs had leaned in happier
days, and lo ! an avalanche of banknotes fell out of the much-

ii4 MY FIRST BOOK

maligned horsehair, and the family was lifted from penury
to wealth. Nothing more simple or more natural. A pru
dent but eccentric ancestor had chosen this mode of putting
by his savings, assured that, whenever discovered, the money
would be useful to somebody.

So ran the scenario ; but I fancy my juvenile pen hardly
held on to the climax. My brief experience of boarding
school occurred at this time, and I well remember writing The
Old Arm Chair in a penny account book, in the schoolroom
of Cresswell Lodge, and that I was both surprised and offended
at the laughter of the kindly music-teacher who, coming into
the room to summon a pupil, and seeing me gravely occupied,
inquired what I was doing, and was intensely amused at my
stolid method of composition, plodding on undisturbed by the
voices and occupations of the older girls around me. The
Old Arm Chair was certainly my first serious, painstaking
effort in fiction ; but as it was abandoned unfinished before
my eleventh birthday, and as no line thereof ever achieved
the distinction of type, it can hardly rank as my first novel.

There came a very few years later the sentimental period,
in which my unfinished novels assumed a more ambitious
form, and were modelled chiefly upon Jane Eyre, with oc
casional tentative imitations of Thackeray. Stories of gentle
hearts that loved in vain, always ending in renunciation.
One romance there was, I well remember, begun with resolute
purpose, after the first reading of Esmond, and in the
endeavour to give life and local colour to a story of the
Restoration period, a brilliantly wicked interval in the social
history of England, which, after the lapse of thirty years, I
am still as bent upon taking for the background of a love
story as I was when I began Master Anthony s Record in
Esmondese, and made my girlish acquaintance with the
reading-room of the British Museum, where I went in quest
of local colour, and where much kindness was shown to my
youth and inexperience of the book world. Poring over a

M. E. BRADDON 115

folio edition of the State Trials at my uncle s quiet rectory
in sleepy Sandwich, I had discovered the passionate romantic
story of Lord Grey s elopement with his sister-in-law, next in
sequence to the trial of Lawrence Braddon and Hugh Speke
for conspiracy. At the risk of seeming disloyal to my own
race, I must add that it seemed to me a very tinpot order of
plot to which these two learned gentlemen bent their legal
minds, and which cost the Braddon family a heavy fine in
land near Camelford confiscation which I have heard my
father complain of as especially unfair Lawrence being a
younger son. The romantic story of Lord Grey \vas to be

THE EVENING ROOM

the subject of Master Anthony s Record, but Master
Anthony s sentimental autobiography went the way of all my
earlier efforts. It was but a year or so after the collapse
of Master Anthony, that a blindly enterprising printer of
Beverley, who had seen my poor little verses in the Beverley
Recorder, made me the spirited offer of ten pounds for a serial
story, to be set up and printed at Beverley, and published on
commission by a London firm in Warwick Lane. I cannot
picture to myself, in my after-knowledge of the bookselling
trade, any enterprise more futile in its inception or more
feeble in its execution ; but to my youthful ambition the
actual commission to write a novel, with an advance payment

I 2

MY FIRST BOOK

fc MS f

of fifty shillings to show good faith on the part of my York
shire speculator, seemed like the opening of that pen-and-ink
paradise which I had sighed for ever since I could hold a
pen. I had, previously to this date, found a Maecenas in
Beverley, in the person of a learned gentleman who
volunteered to foster my love of the Muses by buying the
copyright of a volume of poems and publishing the same at

his own expense which he
did, poor man, without stint,
and by which noble patron
age of Poet s Corner verse he
must have lost money. He
had, however, the privilege of
dictating the subject of the
principal poem, which was to
sing however feebly Gari
baldi s Sicilian campaign.

The Beverley printer sug
gested that my Warwick Lane
serial should combine, as far
as my powers allowed, the
human interest and genial
humour of Dickens with the
plot-weaving of G. W. R. Rey
nolds ; and, furnished with
these broad instructions, I
filled my ink-bottle, spread

out my foolscap, and, on a hopelessly wet afternoon, began my
first novel now known as The Trail of the Serpent but
published in Warwick Lane, and later in the stirring High
Street of Beverley, as Three Times Dead. In Three Times
Dead I gave loose to all my leanings to the violent in melo
drama. Death stalked in ghastliest form across my pages :
and villainy reigned triumphant till the Nemesis of the last
chapter. I wrote with all the freedom of one who feared not

^^^%.J^~

THE SMOKING-ROOM

M. E. BRAD DON

117

the face of a critic ; and, indeed, thanks to the obscurity of
its original production, and its re-issue as the ordinary two-
shilling railway novel, this first novel of mine has almost
entirely escaped the critical lash, and has pursued its way
as a chartered libertine. People buy it and read it, and its
faults and follies are forgiven as the exuberances of a pen

THE LIP.RARY

unchastened by experience ; but faster and more facile at that
initial stage than it ever became after long practice.

I dashed headlong at my work, conjured up my images
of horror or of mirth, and boldly built the framework of my
story, and set my puppets moving. To me, at least, they
were living creatures, who seemed to follow impulses of their
own, to be impelled by their own passions, to love and hate,
and plot and scheme of their own accord. There was

n8 MY FIRST BOOK

unalloyed pleasure in the composition of that first story, and
in the knowledge that it was to be actually printed and
published, and not to be declined with thanks by adamantine
magazine editors, like a certain short story which I had
lately written, and which contained the germ of Lady
Audley s Secret Indeed, at this period of my life, the
postman s knock had become associated in my mind with the
sharp sound of a rejected MS. dropping through the open
letter-box on to the floor of the hall, while my heart seemed
to drop in sympathy with that book-post packet.

Short of never being printed at all, my Beverley-born
novel could have hardly entered upon the world of books in
a more profound obscurity. That one living creature ever
bought a number of Three Times Dead I greatly doubt, i
can recall the thrill of emotion with which 1 tore open the
envelope that contained my complimentary copy of the first
number, folded across, and in aspect inferior to a gratis
pamphlet about a patent medicine. The miserable little
wood block which illustrated that first number would have
disgraced a baker s whitey-brown bag, would have been un
worthy to illustrate a penny bun. My spirits were certainly
dashed at the technical shortcomings of that first serial, and
I was hardly surprised when 1 was informed a few weeks
later, that although my admirers at Beverley were deeply
interested in the story, it was not a financial success, and that
it would be only obliging on my part, and in accordance with
my known kindness of heart, if I were to restrict the develop
ment of the romance to half its intended length, and to
accept five pounds in lieu of ten as my reward. Having no
desire that the rash Beverley printer should squander his own
or his children s fortune in the obscurity of Warwick Lane, I
immediately acceded to his request, shortened sail, and went
on with my story, perhaps with a shade less enthusiasm,
having seen the shabby figure it was to make in the book
world. I may add that the Beverley publisher s payments

M. E. BRADDON

began and ended with his noble advance of fifty shillings.
The balance was never paid ; and it was rather hard lines
that, on his becoming bankrupt in his poor little way a few
years later, a judge in the Bankruptcy Court remarked that,
as Miss Braddon was now making a good deal of money by
her pen, she ought to come to the relief of her first
publisher.

And now my volume of verses being well under way, I
went with my mother to farmhouse lodgings in the neighbour
hood of that very Beverley, where I spent perhaps the
happiest half-year of my life
half a year of tranquil,
studious days, far from the
madding crowd, with the
mother whose society was
always all sufficient for me
half a year among level pas
tures, with unlimited books
from the library in Hull, an
old farm-horse to ride about
the green lanes, the breath of
summer, with all its sweet
odours of flower and herb,
around and about us ; half a
year of unalloyed bliss, had it

not been for one dark shadow, the heroic figure of Garibaldi,
the sailor-soldier, looming large upon the foreground of my
literary labours, as the hero of a lengthy narrative poem in the
Spenserian metre.

My chief business at Beverley was to complete the volume
of verse commissioned by my Yorkshire Maecenas, at that
time a very rich man, who paid me a much better price for
my literary work than his townsman, the enterprising printer,
and who had the first claim on my thought and time.

With the business-like punctuality of a salaried clerk, I

MISS BRADDON S FAVOURITE MARE

120

MY FIXST BOOK

.went every morning to my file of the Times, and pored and
puzzled over Neapolitan revolution and Sicilian campaign,
and I can only say that if Emile Zola has suffered as much
.over Sedan as I suffered in the freshness of my youth, when
flowery meadows and the old chestnut mare invited to summer
idlesse, over the fighting in Sicily, his dogged perseverance in
uncongenial labour should place him among the Immortal
Forty. How I hated the great Joseph G. and the Spenserian
metre, with its exacting demands upon the rhyming faculty !
How I hated my own ignorance of
modern Italian history, and my own
eyes for never having looked upon
Italian landscape, whereby historical
allusion and local colour were both

THE ORANGERY

wanting to that dry-as-dust record of heroic endeavour ! I
had only the Times corrrespondent ; where he was picturesque
I could be picturesque allowing always for the Spenserian
straining where he was rich in local colour I did my utmost
to reproduce his colouring, stretched always on the Spen
serian rack, and lengthened out by the bitter necessity of
finding triple rhymes. Next to Giuseppe Garibaldi I hated
Edmund Spenser, and it may be from a vengeful remembrance
of those early struggles with a difficult form of versification,
that, although throughout my literary life I have been a lover
of England s earlier poets, and have delighted in the quaintness

M. E. BR ADDON 121

and naivete of Chaucer, I have refrained from reading more
than a casual stanza or two of the Faery Queen. When I
lived at Bcverley, Spenser was to me but a name, and Byron s
Childe Harold was my only model for that exacting verse.
I should add that the Beverley Maecenas, when commissioning
this volume of verse, was less superb in his ideas than the
literary patron of the past. He looked at the matter from a
purely commercial standpoint, and believed that a volume of
verse, such as I could produce, would pay a delusion on his
part which I honestly strove to combat before accepting his
handsome offer of remuneration for my time and labour. It
was with this idea in his mind that he chose and insisted upon

MISS BRADDON S COTTAGE AT LYNDHURST

the Sicilian campaign as a subject for my muse, and thus
started me heavily handicapped on the racecourse of Par
nassus.

The weekly number of Three Times Dead was thrown
off in brief intervals of rest from my magnum opus, and it
was an infinite relief to turn from Garibaldi and his brothers
in arms to the angels and the monsters which my own brain
had engendered, and which to me seemed more alive than the
good great man whose arms I so laboriously sang. My rustic
pipe far better loved to sing of melodramatic poisoners and
ubiquitous detectives ; of fine houses in the West of London,
and dark dens in the East. So the weekly chapter of my first

122

MY FIRST BOOK

novel ran merrily off my pen while the printer s boy waited
in the farmhouse kitchen.

Happy, happy days, so near to memory, and yet so far !
In that peaceful summer I finished my first novel, knocked
Garibaldi on the head with a closing rhapsody, saw the
York spring and summer races in hopelessly wet weather,

learnt to love the Yorkshire
people, and left Yorkshire
almost broken-heartedly on
a dull, grey October morn
ing, to travel Londomvards
through a landscape that
was mostly under water.

And, behold, since that October morning I have written
fifty-three novels ; I have lost dear old friends and found new
friends, who are also dear, but I have never looked on a
Yorkshire landscape since I turned my reluctant eyes from
those level meadows and green lanes where the old chestnut
mare used to carry me ploddingly to and fro between tall,
tangled hedges of eglantine and honeysuckle.

MISS BRADDON S INKSTAND

T2 3

THE HOUSE OF ELM ORE
BY F. W. ROBINSON

T is a far cry back to 1853, when
dreams of writing a book had
almost reached the boundary line of
probable events. I was then a pale,
long - haired, consumptive - looking
youth, who had been successful in
prize poems for there were prize
competitions even in those far-off
days and in acrostics, and in the
acceptance of one or two short stories,
which had been actually published in
a magazine that did not pay for con
tributions (it was edited by a clergy
man of the Church of England, and
the chaplain to a real duke), which
magazine has gone the way of many
magazines, and is now as extinct as
the dodo. It was in the year 1853,
or a month or two earlier, that I wrote
my first novel
which, upon a
moderate com
putation,! think,
would make four
or five good-
sized library volumes, but I have never attempted to scale
the manuscript. It is in my possession still, although I have

124

MY FIRST BOOK

not seen it for many weary years. It is buried with a heap
more rubbish in a respectable old oak chest, the key of which
is even lost to me. And yet that MS. was the turning-point
of my small literary career. And it is the history of that
manuscript which leads up to the publication of my first
novel ; my first step, though I did not know it, and hence
it is part and parcel of the history of my first book a link
in the chain.

When that manuscript was completed, it was read aloud,
night after night, to an admiring audience of family members,

and pronounced as fit for publication
as anything of Dickens or Thackeray
or Bulwer, who were then in the full
swing of their mighty capacities.
Alas ! I was a better judge than my
partial and amiable critics. I had
very grave doubts qualms, I think
they are called and I had read that
it was uphill work to get a book pub
lished, and swagger through the world
as a real live being who had actually
written a novel. There was a faint
hope, that was all ; and so, with
my MS. under my arm, I strolled
into the palatial premises of Messrs. Hurst & Blackett
( successors to Henry Colburn they proudly designated
themselves at that period), laid my heavy parcel on the
counter, and waited, with fear and trembling, for some
one to emerge from the galleries of books and rows
of desks beyond, and inquire the nature of my business.
And here ensued my first surprise quite a dramatic coin
cidence for the tall, spare, middle-aged gentleman who
advanced from the shadows towards the counter, proved*
to my intense astonishment, to be a constant -chess an
tagonist of mine at Kling s Chess Rooms, round the

AT TWENTY

(From a photograph by Elliott &&amp;gt; Fry )

126

MY FIRST BOOK

corner, in New Oxford Street rooms which have long since
disappeared, together with Horwitz, Harrwitz, Loewenthal,
Williams, and other great chess lights of those far-away times,
who were to be seen there, night after night, prepared for all

comers. Kling s was a
great chess house, and I
was a chess enthusiast,
as well as a youth who
wanted to get into print.
Failing literature, I had
made up my mind to
become a chess cham
pion, if possible, although
I knew already by quiet
observation of my an
tagonists, that in that
way madness lay, sheer
uncontrollable, raging
madness for me at any
rate. And the grave,
middle-aged gentleman
behind the counter of
1 3 Great Marlborough
Street, proved to be the
cashier of the firm, and
used being chess-mad
with the rest of us to
spend his evenings at
Kling s. He was a
player of my own
strength, and for twelve
months or so had I skirmished with him over the chessboard,
and fought innumerable battles with him. He had never
spoken of his occupation, nor I of my restless ambitions chess
players never go far beyond the chequered board.

ELMORE HOUSE

F. W. ROBINSON

127

1 Hallo, Robinson ! he exclaimed in his surprise, you
don t mean to say that you

And then he stopped and regarded my youthful appear
ance very critically.

4 Yes, Mr. Kennyit s a novel, I said modestly ; my
first.

There s plenty of it, he remarked dryly. I ll send it
upstairs at once. And I ll wish you luck, too ; but, he added,
kindly preparing to soften
the shock of a future re
fusal, \ve have plenty of
these come in about
seven a day and most
of them go back to their
writers again.

Ye-es, I suppose so,
I answered, with a sigh.

For a while, however,
I regarded the meeting as
a happy augury a lucky
coincidence. I even had
the vain, hopeless notion
that Mr. Kenny might put
in a good word for me,
ask for special considera
tion, out of that kindly
feeling which we had for
each other, and which chess antagonists have invariably
for each other, 1 am inclined to believe. But though we
met three or four times a week, from that day forth not one
word concerning the fate of my manuscript escaped the lips
of Mr. Kenny. It is probable the incident had passed from
his memory ; he had nothing to do with the novel department
itself, and the delivery of MSS. was a very common every
day proceeding to him. I was too bashful, perhaps too proud,

AT THIRTY

128

MY FIRST BOOK

an individual to ask any questions ; but every evening that I
encountered him I used to wonder if he had heard any
thing, if any news of the book s fate had reached him,
directly or indirectly; occasionally even, as time went on, I
was disposed to imagine that he was letting me win the game
out of kindness for he was a gentle, kindly soul always in
order to soften the shock of a disappointment which he knew
perfectly well was on its way towards me.

Some months afterwards, the fate
ful letter came to me from the firm.

regretting its inability to make use of the MS., and ex
pressing many thanks for a perusal of the same a polite,
concise, all-round kind of epistle, which a publisher is
compelled to keep in stock, and to send out when rejected
literature pours forth like a waterfall from the dusky caverns
of a publishing house in a large way of business. It was all
over, then I had failed ! From that hour I would turn
chess player, and soften my brain in a quest for silver cups

F. W. ROBINSON

129

or champion amateur stakes. I could play chess better than
I could write fiction, I was sure. Still, after some days of
dead despair, I sent the MS. once more on its travels this
time to Smith & Elder s, whose reader, Mr. Williams, had
leapt into singular prominence since his favourable judgment
of Charlotte Bronte s book, and to whom most MSS. flowed
spontaneously for many years afterwards. And in due course
of time, Mr. Williams, acting for
Messrs. Smith & Elder, asked me
to call upon him for tJie MS. !
at Cornhill, and there I received
my first advice, my first thrill of
exultation. Presently, and pro
bably, and with perseverance, he
said, you will succeed in
literature, and if you will
remember now, that to
write a good novel is a
very considerable achieve
ment. Years of short
story-writing is the
best apprenticeship
for you. Write and
rewrite, and spare
no pains. I thanked
him, and I went home
with tears in my eyes

of gratitude and consolation, though my big story had been
declined with thanks. But I did not write again. I put away
my MS., and went on for six or eight hours a day at chess for
many idle months before I was in the vein for composition,
and then, with a sudden dash, I began The House of Elmore.
It was half finished when another strange incident occurred.
I received one morning a letter from Lascelles Wraxall
(afterwards Sir Lascelles Wraxall, Bart., as the reader may

THE GARDEN

1 3 o MY FIRST BOOK

be probably aware), informing me that he was one of the
readers for Messrs. Hurst & Blackett, and that it had been
his duty some time ago to decide unfavourably against a
story which I had submitted to the notice of his firm, but
that he had intended to write to me a private note urging me
to adopt literature as a profession. His principal object in
writing at that time was to suggest my trying the fortunes of

THE DRAWING-ROOM

the novel, which he had already read, with Messrs. Routledge,
and he kindly added a letter of introduction to that firm in
the Broadway an introduction which, by the way, never
came to anything.

Poor Lascelles Wraxall, clever writer and editor, press
man and literary adviser, real Bohemian and true friend-
indeed, everybody s friend but his own I look back at him
with feelings of deep gratitude. He was a rolling stone, and

R n: ROBINSON

when I met him for the first time in my life, years afterwards,
he had left Marlborough Street for the Crimea ; he had been
given a commission in the Turkish Contingent at Kertch ;
he had come back anathematising the Service, and chock
full of grievances against the Government, and he became
once more editor and sub-editor, and publisher s hack even,
until he stepped into his baronetcy an empty title, for he
had sold the reversion of the estates for a mere song long
ago and became special corre
spondent in Austria for the Daily
Telegraph. And in Vienna he
died, young in years still not
forty, I think closing a life that
only wanted one turn more of
application, I have often thought,
to have achieved very great dis
tinction. There are still a
few writing men about who
remember Lascelles Wraxall,
but they are the boys of the
old brigade.

It was to Lascelles
Wraxall I sent, when finished,
The House of Elmore, as the
reader may very easily guess.
Wraxall had stepped so much
out of his groove for the
busy literary man that he was to take me by the hand, and
point the way along the perilous road ; he had given me so
many kind words, that I wrote my hardest to complete my new
story before I should fade from his recollection. The book was
finished in five w r eeks, and in hot haste, and for months again
I was left wondering what the outcome of it all was to be ;
whether Wraxall was reading my story, or whether oh,
horror ! some other reader less kindly disposed, and more

AT FORTY

132

MY FIRST BOOK

austere and critical, and hard to please, had been told off to
sit in judgment upon my second MS.

I went back to chess for a distraction till the fate of that
book was pronounced or sealed it was always chess in the
hours of my distress and anxiety and I once again faced
Charles Kenny, and once again wondered if he knew, and
how much he knew, whilst he was deep in his king s gambit
or his giuoco piano ; but he was not even aware that 1 had

MR. ROBINSON AT WORK

sent in a second story, I learned afterwards. And then at
last came the judgment the pleasant, if formal, notice from
Marlborough Street that the novel had been favourably re
ported upon by the reader, and that Messrs. Hurst &
Blackett would be pleased to see me at Marlborough Street
to talk the matter of its publication over with me. Ah ! what
a letter that was ! what a surprise, after all ! what a good
omen !

F. W. ROBINSON 133

And some three months afterwards, at the end of the year
1854, my first book but my second novel was launched
into the reading world, and I have hardly got over the feeling
yet that I had actually a right to dub myself a novelist !

When the first three notices of the book appeared, wild
dreams of a brilliant future beset me. They were all favour
able notices too favourable ; but John Bull, The Press, and
Bell s Messenger (I think they were the papers) scattered
favourable notices indiscriminately at that time. Presently
the Athenceum sobered me a little, but wound up with a kindly
pat on the back, and the Saturday Review, then in its seventh
number, drenched me with vitriolic acid, and brought me to
a lower level altogether ; and, finally, the Morning Herald
blew a loud blast to my praise and glory that last notice, I
believe, having been written by my old friend Sir Edward
Clarke, then a very young reviewer on the Herald staff, with
no dreams of becoming Her Majesty s Solicitor-General just
then ! The House of Elmore actually paid its publishers
expenses, and left a balance, and brought me in a little
cheque ; and thus my writing life began in sober earnest.

DA WN
BY H. RIDER HAGGARD

T THINK that it
J- was in an article
by a fellow-scribe,
where, doubtless more
in sorrow than in
anger, that gentleman
exposed the worth-
lessness of the pro
ductions of sundry of
his brother authors,
in which I read that
whatever success I
had met with as a
writer of fiction was
due to my literary
friends and nepotic
criticism. This is
scarcely the case,
since when I began
to write I do not

think that I knew a single creature who had published
books blue books alone excepted. Nobody was ever more
outside the ring, or less acquainted with the art of * rolling
logs/ than the humble individual who pens these lines. But
the reader shall judge for himself.

1 This and succeeding illustrations are from photographs by Fradelle and Young.

THE FRONT GARDEN

136 MY FIRST BOOK

To begin at the beginning : My very first attempt at
imaginative writing was made while I was a boy at school.
One of the masters promised a prize to that youth who
should best describe on paper any incident, real or imaginary.
I entered the lists, and selected the scene at an operation in
a hospital as my subject. The fact that I had never seen an
operation, nor crossed the doors of a hospital, did not deter
me from this bold endeavour, which, however, was justified
by its success. I was declared to have won in the com
petition, though, probably through the forgetfulness of the
master, I remember that I never received the promised prize.
My next literary effort, written in 1876, was an account
of a Zulu war dance, which I witnessed when I was on the
staff of the Governor of Natal. It was published in the
Gentleman s Magazine, and very kindly noticed in various
papers. A year later I wrote another article, entitled A
Visit to the Chief Secocoeni, which very nearly got me
into trouble. I was then serving on the staff of Sir
Theophilus Shepstone, and the article, signed with my
initials, reached South Africa in its printed form shortly
after the annexation of the Transvaal. Young men with
a pen in their hands are proverbially indiscreet, and in this
instance I was no exception. In the course of my article
I had described the Transvaal Boer at home with a fidelity
that should be avoided by members of a diplomatic mission,
and had even gone the length of saying that most of the
Dutch women were * fat. Needless to say, my remarks were
translated into the Africander papers, and somewhat ex
tensively read, especially by the ladies in question and their
male relatives ; nor did the editors of those papers forbear to
comment on them in leading articles. Shortly afterwards,
there was a great and stormy meeting of Boers at Pretoria.
As matters began to look serious, somebody ventured among
them to ascertain the exciting cause, and returned with the
pleasing intelligence that they were all talking of what the

H. RIDER HAGGARD 137

Englishman had written about the physical proportions of
their womenkind and domestic habits, and threatening to
take up arms to avenge it. Of my feelings on learning this
news I will not discourse, but they were uncomfortable, to
say the least of it. Happily, in the end, the gathering broke
up without bloodshed, but when the late Sir Bartle Frere
came to Pretoria, some months afterwards, he administered
to me a sound and well-deserved lecture on my indiscretion.
I excused myself by saying that I had set down nothing

MR. RIDER HAGGARD AND HIS DAUGHTERS

which was not strictly true, and he replied to the effect that
therein lay my fault. I quite agree with him ; indeed, there
is little doubt but that these bald statements of fact as to the
stoutness of the Transvaal fraus, and the lack of cleanliness
in their homes, went near to precipitating a result that, as it
chanced, was postponed for several years. Well, it is all
done with now, and I take this opportunity of apologising to
such of the ladies in question as may still be in the land of
life.

138 MY FIRST BOOK

This unfortunate experience cooled my literary ardour,
yet, as it chanced, when some five years later I again took
up my pen, it was in connection with African affairs. These
pages are no place for politics, but I must allude to them in
explanation. It will be remembered that the Transvaal was
annexed by Great Britain in 1877, In 1881 the Boers rose
in rebellion and administered several thrashings to our troops,
whereon the Government of this country came suddenly to
the conclusion that a wrong had been done to the victors, and,
subject to some paper restrictions, gave them back their inde
pendence. As it chanced, at the time I was living on some
African property belonging to me in the centre of the opera
tions, and so disgusted was I, in common with thousands of
others, at the turn which matters had taken, that I shook the
dust of South Africa off my feet and returned to England.
Now, the first impulse of an aggrieved Englishman is to write
to the Times, and if I remember right I took this course, but,
my letter not being inserted, I enlarged upon the idea and
composed a book called Cetewayo and his White Neigh
bours/ This semi-political work, or rather history, was very
carefully constructed from the records of some six years ex
perience, and by the help of a shelf full of blue books that
stare me in the face as I write these words ; and the fact that
it still goes on selling seems to show that it has some value
in the eyes of students of South African politics. But when
I had written my book I was confronted by a difficulty which
I had not anticipated, being utterly without experience in such
affairs that of finding somebody willing to publish it. I re
member that I purchased a copy of the Athenceum, and
selecting the names of various firms at hazard, wrote to them
offering to submit my manuscript, but, strange to say, none
of them seemed anxious to peruse it. At last how I do not
recollect it came into the hands of Messrs. Triibner, who,
after consideration, wrote to say that they were willing to
bring it out on the half profit system, provided that I paid

H. RIDER HAGGARD

down fifty pounds towards the cost of production. I did not
at all like the idea of parting with the fifty pounds, but I be
lieved in my book, and was anxious to put my views on the
Transvaal rebellion and other African questions before the
world. So I consented to the terms, and in due course
* Cetcwayo was published in a neat green binding. Some
what to my astonishment, it proved a success from a literary
point of view. It was not largely purchased indeed, that
fifty pounds took se
veral years on its re
turn journey to my
pocket, but it was
favourably, and in
some instances almost
enthusiastically, re
viewed, especially in
the colonial papers.

About this time
the face of a girl whom
I saw in a church at
Norwood gave me the
idea of writing a
novel. The face was
so perfectly beautiful,
and at the same time
so refined, that I felt
I could fit a story to
it which should be worthy of a heroine similarly endowed.
When next I saw Mr. Triibner I consulted him on the subject.

1 You can write it is certain that you can write. Yes, do
it, and I will get the book published for you/ he answered.

Thus encouraged I set to work. How to compose a novel
I knew not, so I wrote straight on, trusting to the light of
nature to guide me. My main object was to produce the
picture of a woman perfect in mind and body, and to show

THE HALL

i 4 o MY FIRST BOOK

her character ripening and growing spiritual, under the
pressure of various afflictions. Of course, there is a vast gulf
between a novice s aspiration and his attainment, and I do
not contend that Angela as she appears in Dawn fulfils this
ideal ; also, such a person in real life might, and probably
would, be a bore-
Something too bright and good
For human nature s daily food.

Still, this was the end I aimed at. Indeed, before I had done
with her, I became so deeply attached to my heroine that, in
a literary sense, I have never quite got over it. I worked very
hard at this novel during the next six months or so, but at
length it was finished and despatched to Mr. Triibner, who, as
his firm did not deal in this class of book, submitted it to five
or six of the best publishers of fiction. One and all they de
clined it, so that by degrees it became clear to me that I might
as well have saved my labour. Mr. Triibner, however, had
confidence in my \vork, and submitted the manuscript to Mr.
John Cordy Jeaffreson for report ; and here I may pause to
say that I think there is more kindness in the hearts of literary
men than is common in the world. It is not a pleasant task,
in the face of repeated failure, again and again to attempt the
adventure of persuading brother publishers to undertake the
maiden effort of an unknown man. Still less pleasant is it,
as I can vouch from experience, to wade through a lengthy
and not particularly legible manuscript, and write an elaborate
opinion thereon for the benefit of a stranger. Yet Mr. Triibner
and Mr. Jeaffreson did these things for me without fee or re
ward. Mr. Jeaffreson s report I have lost or mislaid, but I
remember its purport well. It was to the effect that there
was a great deal of power in the novel, but that it required to
be entirely rewritten. The first part he thought so good that
he advised me to expand it, and the unhappy ending he could
not agree with. If I killed the heroine, it would kill the book&gt;

H. RIDER HAGGARD

141

he said. He may have been right, but I still hold to my first
conception, according to which Angela was doomed to an
early and pathetic end, as the fittest crown to her career.
That the story needed rewriting there is no doubt, but I
believe that it would have been better as a work of art if I
had dealt with it on the old lines, especially as the expansion

MR. RIDER HAGGARD S STUDY

of the beginning, in accordance with the advice of my kindly
critic, took the tale back through the history of another
generation always a most dangerous experiment. Still, I
did as I was told, not presuming to set up a judgment of my
own in the matter. If I had worked hard at the first draft of
the novel, I worked much harder at the second, especially as
I could not give all my leisure to it, being engaged at the time

142 MY FIRST BOOK

in reading for the Bar. So hard did I work that at length
my eyesight gave out, and I was obliged to complete the last
hundred sheets in a darkened room. But let my eyes ache
as they might, I would not give up till it was finished, within
about three months from the date of its commencement.
Recently, I went through this book to prepare it for a new
edition, chiefly in order to cut out some of the mysticism and
tall writing, for which it is too remarkable, and was pleased
to find that it still interested me. But if a writer may be
allowed to criticise his own work, it is two books, not one.
Also, the hero is a very poor creature. Evidently I was too
much occupied with my heroines to give much thought to
him ; moreover, women are so much easier and more interest
ing to write about, for whereas no two of them are alike, in
modern men, or rather, in young men of the middle and upper
classes, there is a paralysing sameness. As a candid friend
once said to me, There is nothing manly about that chap,
Arthur he is the hero except his bull-dog ! With
Angela herself I am still in love ; only she ought to have
died, which, on the whole, would have been a better fate than
being married to Arthur, more especially if he was anything
like the illustrator s conception of him in the current edition.
In its new shape Dawn was submitted to Messrs. Hurst
& Blackett, and at once accepted by that firm. Why it was
called Dawn I am not now quite clear, but I think it was
because I could find no other title acceptable to the publishers.
The discovery of suitable titles is a more difficult matter than
people who do not write romances would suppose, most of the
good ones having been used already and copyrighted. In
due course the novel was published in three fat volumes, and
a pretty green cover, and I sat down to await events. At the
best I did not expect to win a fortune out of it, as if every one
of the five hundred copies printed were sold, I could only
make fifty pounds under my agreement not an extravagant
reward for a great deal of labour. As a matter of fact, but

H. RIDER HAGGARD 143

four hundred and fifty sold, so the net proceeds of the venture
amounted to ten pounds only, and forty surplus copies of the
book, which I bored my friends by presenting to them. But
as the copyright of the work reverted to me at the expiration
of a year, I cannot grumble at this result. The reader may
think that it was mercenary of me to consider my first book
from this financial point of view, but to be frank, though the
story interested me much in its writing, and I had a sneaking

SOME CURIOS

belief in its merits, it never occurred to me that I, an utterly
inexperienced beginner, could hope to make any mark in
competition with the many brilliant writers of fiction who
were already before the public. Therefore, so far as I was
concerned, any reward in the way of literary reputation seemed
to be beyond my reach.

It was on the occasion of the publication of this novel
that I made my first and last attempt to roll a log, with
somewhat amusing results. Almost the only person of

i 4 4 MY FIRST BOOK

influence whom I knew in the world of letters was the editor
of a certain society paper. I had not seen him for ten years,
but at this crisis I ventured to recall myself to his memory,
and to ask him, not for a favourable notice, but that the book
should be reviewed in his journal. He acceded to my prayer ;
it was reviewed, but after a fashion for which I did not
bargain. This little incident taught me a lesson, and the
moral of it is : never trouble an editor about your immortal
works ; he can so easily be even with you. I commend it to
all literary tiros. Even if you are in a position to command
puffs, the public will find you out in the second edition, and
revenge itself upon your next book. Here is a story that
illustrates the accuracy of this statement ; it came to me on
good authority, and I believe it to be true. A good many
years ago, the relation of an editor of a great paper published
a novel. It was a bad novel, but a desperate effort was
made to force it upon the public, and in many of the leading
journals appeared notices so laudatory that readers fell into
the trap, and the book went through several editions. En
couraged by success, the writer published a second book, but
the public had found her out, and it fell flat. Being a person
of resource, she brought out a third work under a nom de
plume, which, as at first, was accorded an enthusiastic recep
tion by previous arrangement, and forced into circulation. A
fourth followed under the same name, but again the public
had found her out, and her career as a novelist came to an
end.

To return to the fate of Dawn. In most quarters it
met with the usual reception of a first novel by an unknown
man. Some of the reviewers sneered at it, and some * slated
it, and made merry over the misprints a cheap form of wit
that saves those who practise it the trouble of going into the
merits of a book. Two very good notices fell to its lot, how
ever, in the Times and in the Morning Post, the first of these
speaking about the novel in terms of which any amateur

H. RIDER HAGGARD 145

writer might feel proud, though, unfortunately, it appeared too
late to be of much service. Also, I discovered that the story
had interested a great many readers, and none of them more
than the late Mr. Triibner, through whose kind offices it came
to be published, who, I was told, paid me the strange
compliment of continuing its perusal till within a few hours
of his death, a sad event that the enemy might say was
hastened thereby. In this connection I remember that the
first hint I received that my story was popular with the

A STUDY CORNER

ordinary reading public, whatever reviewers might say of it,
came from the lips of a young lady, a chance visitor at my
house, whose name I have forgotten. Seeing the book lying
on the table, she took a volume up, saying

Oh, have you read Dawn ? It is a first-rate novel ; I
have just finished it. Somebody explained, and the subject
dropped, but I was not a little gratified by the unintended
compliment.

These facts encouraged me, and I wrote a second novel
The Witch s Head. This book I endeavoured to publish

146 MY FIRST BOOK

serially by posting the MS. to the editors of various maga
zines for their consideration. But in those days there were
no literary agents or Authors Societies to help young writers
with their experience and advice, and the bulky manuscript
always came back to my hand like a boomerang, till at length
I wearied of the attempt. Of course I sent to the wrong
people ; afterwards the editor of a leading monthly told me
that he would have been delighted to run the book had it
fallen into the hands of his firm. In the end, as in the case
of Dawn, I published * The Witch s Head in three volumes.
Its reception astonished me, for I did not think so well of the
book as I had done of its predecessor. In that view, by the
way, the public has borne out my judgment, for to this day
three copies of Dawn are absorbed for every two of The
Witch s Head, a proportion that has never varied since the
two works appeared in one-volume form.

1 The Witch s Head was very well reviewed ; indeed, in
one or two cases, the notices were almost enthusiastic, most
of all when they dealt with the African part of the book,
which I had inserted as padding, the fight between Jeremy
and the Boer giant being singled out for especial praise.
Whatever it may lack, one merit this novel has, however, that
was overlooked by all the reviewers. Omitting the fictitious
incidents introduced for the purposes of the story, it contains
an accurate account of the great disaster inflicted upon our
troops by the Zulus at Isandhlwana. I was in the country
at the time of the massacre, and heard its story from the lips
of survivors ; also, in writing of it, I studied the official reports
in the blue books and the minutes of the court martial.

* The Witch s Head attained the dignity of being pirated
in America, and in England went out of print in a few weeks,
but no argument that I could use would induce my publishers
to re-issue it in a one volume edition. The risk was too great,
they said. Then it was I came to the conclusion that I
would abandon the making of books. The work was very

H. RIDER HAGGARD

hard, and when put to the test of experience the glamour
that surrounds this occupation vanished. I did not care much
for the publicity it involved, and, like most young authors, I
failed to appreciate being sneered at by anonymous critics
who happened not to admire what I wrote, and whom I had
no opportunity of answering. It is true that then, as now, I
liked the work for its own sake. Indeed, I have always
thought that literature would be a charming profession if its
conditions allowed of the depositing of manuscripts, when
completed, in a drawer,
there to languish in ob
scurity, or of their private
publication only. But I
could not afford myself
these luxuries. I was too
modest to hope for any
renown worth having, and
for the rest the game
seemed scarcely worth the
candle. I had published a
history and two novels.
On the history I had lost
fifty pounds, on the first
novel I had made ten
pounds, and on the second
fifty ; net profit on the
three, ten pounds, which in the case of a man with other
occupations and duties did not appear to be an adequate
return for the labour involved. But I was not destined to
escape thus from the toils of romance. One day I chanced
to read a clever article in favour of boys books, and it
occurred to me that I might be able to do as well as others in
that line. I was working at the Bar at the time, but in my
spare evenings, more from amusement than from any other
reason, I entered on the literary adventure that ended in the

L 2

MR. RIDER HAGGARD

148 MY FIRST BOOK

appearance of King Solomon s Mines. This romance has
proved very successful, although three firms, including my
own publishers, refused even to consider it. But as it can
scarcely be called one of my first books, I shall not speak of
it here.

In conclusion, I will tell a moving tale, that it may be a
warning to young authors for ever. After my publishers
declined to issue The Witch s Head in a six-shilling edition,
I tried many others without success, and at length in my
folly signed an agreement with a firm since deceased. Under
this document the firm in question agreed to bring out
Dawn and The Witch s Head in a two-shilling edition,
and generously to remunerate me with a third share in the
profits realised, if any. In return for this concession, I on
my part undertook to allow the said firm to republish any
novel that I might write, for a period of five years from the
date of the agreement, in a two-shilling form, and on the same
third-profit terms. Of course, so soon as the success of
King Solomon s Mines was established, I received a polite
letter from the publishers in question, asking when they
might expect to republish that romance at two shillings.
Then the matter came under the consideration of lawyers
and other skilled persons, with the result that it appeared
that, if the Courts took a strict view of the agreement, ruin
stared me in the face, so far as my literary affairs were con
cerned. To begin with, either by accident or design, this
artful document was so worded that, primd facie, the con
tracting publisher had a right to place his cheap edition on
the market whenever it might please him to do so, subject
only to the payment of a third of the profit, to be assessed by
himself, which practically might have meant nothing at all.
How could I expect to dispose of work subject to such a
legal servitude ? For five long years I was a slave to the
framer of the hanging clause of the agreement. Things
looked black indeed, when, thanks to the diplomacy of my

H. RIDER HAGGARD

149

agent, and to a fortunate change in the personnel of the firm
to which I was bound, I avoided disaster. The fatal agree
ment was cancelled, and in consideration of my release I un
dertook to write two books upon a moderate royalty. Thus,
then, did I escape out of bondage. To be just, it was my
own fault that I should ever have been sold into it, but
authors are proverbially guileless when they are anxious to
publish their books, and a piece of printed paper with a

THE FARM

few additions written in a neat hand looks innocent enough.
Now no such misfortunes need happen, for the Authors
Society is ready and anxious to protect them from them
selves and others, but in those days it did not exist.

This is the history of how I drifted into the writing of
books. If it saves one beginner so inexperienced and un
friended as I was in those days from putting his hand to a
hanging agreement under any circumstances whatsoever, it
will not have been set out in vain.

1 5 o MY FIRST BOOK

The advice that I give to would-be authors, if I may
presume to offer it, is to think for a long while before they
enter at all upon a career so hard and hazardous, but having
entered on it, not to be easily cast down. There are great
virtues in perseverance, even though critics sneer and pub
lishers prove unkind.

HUDSON S BAY
BY R. M. BALLANTYNE

HAVING been asked to give some account of the
commencement of my literary career, I begin by
remarking that my first book was
not a tale or story-book, but a free-
and-easy record of personal adven
ture and every-day life in those wild
reckons of North America

which are known, variously,
as Rupert s Land The
Hudson s Bay Ter
ritory The Nor
West, and The
Great Lone Land.
The record was
never meant to see
the light in the
form of a book. It
was written solely
for the eye of my
mother, but, as it
may be said that
it was the means
of leading me ulti
mately into the path of my life-work, and was penned under
somewhat peculiar circumstances, it may not be out of place
to refer to it particularly here.

WHERE I WROTE MY FIRST BOOK

(A Sketch by the Author]

152 MY FIRST BOOK

The circumstances were as follows :

After having spent about six years in the wild Nor West,
as a servant of the Hudson s Bay Fur Company, I found
myself, one summer at the advanced age of twenty-two in
charge of an outpost on the uninhabited northern shores of
the Gulf of St. Lawrence named Seven Islands. It was a
dreary, desolate spot ; at that time far beyond the bounds of
civilisation. The gulf, just opposite the establishment, was
about fifty miles broad. The ships which passed up and
down it were invisible, not only on account of distance, but
because of seven islands at the mouth of the bay coming
between them and the outpost. My next neighbour, in
command of a similar post up the gulf, was about seventy
miles distant. The nearest house down the gulf was about
eighty miles off, and behind us lay the virgin forests, with
swamps, lakes, prairies, and mountains, stretching away with
out break right across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.

The outpost which, in virtue of a ship s carronade and
a flagstaff, was occasionally styled a fort consisted of
four wooden buildings. One of these the largest, with a
verandah was the Residency. There was an offshoot in
rear which served as a kitchen. The other houses were a
store for goods wherewith to carry on trade with the Indians,
a stable, and a workshop. The whole population of the
establishment indeed of the surrounding district consisted
of myself and one man also a horse ! The horse occupied
the stable, I dwelt in the Residency, the rest of the population
lived in the kitchen.

There were, indeed, five other men belonging to the
establishment, but these did not affect its desolation, for they
were away netting salmon at a river about twenty miles
distant at the time I write of.

My * Friday who was a French-Canadian being cook,
as well as man-of-all-works, found a little occupation in
attending to the duties of his office, but the unfortunate

A f

THB

TT-NTTVF.RSITY

154 MY FIRST BOOK

Governor had nothing whatever to do except await the
arrival of Indians, who were not due at that time. The
horse was a bad one, without a saddle, and in possession of a
pronounced backbone. My Friday was not sociable. I
had no books, no newspapers, no magazines or literature of
any kind, no game to shoot, no boat wherewith to prosecute
fishing in the bay, and no prospect of seeing anyone to speak
to for weeks, if not months, to come. But I had pen and ink,
and, by great good fortune, was in possession of a blank paper
book fully an inch thick.

These, then, were the circumstances in which I began my
first book.

When that book was finished, and, not long afterwards,
submitted to the I need hardly say favourable criticism of
my mother, I had not the most distant idea of taking to
authorship as a profession. Even when a printer-cousin,
seeing the MS., offered to print it, and the well-known
Blackwood of Edinburgh, seeing the book, offered to publish
it and did publish it my ambition was still so absolutely
asleep that I did not again put pen to paper in that way for
eight years thereafter, although I might have been encouraged
thereto by the fact that this first book named * Hudson s
Bay besides being a commercial success, received favour
able notice from the Press.

It was not until the year 1854 that my literary path was
opened up. At that time I was a partner in the late publish
ing firm of Constable & Co., of Edinburgh. Happening one
day to meet with the late William Nelson, publisher, I was
asked by him how I should like the idea of taking to litera
ture as a profession. My answer I forget. It must have
been vague, for I had never thought of the subject before.

Well/ said he, * what would you think of trying to write
a story ?

Somewhat amused, I replied that I did not know what to
think, but I would try if he wished me to do so.

. M. BALLANTYNE 155

( Do so, said he, and go to work at once or words to
that effect.

I went to work at once, and wrote my first story or work
of fiction. It was published in 1855 under the name of
* Snowflakes and Sunbeams ; or, The Young Fur-traders.
Afterwards the first part of the title was dropped, and the

MR. BALLANTYNE S HOUSE AT HARPOW !

book is now known as The Young Fur-traders. From that
day to this I have lived by making story-books for young folk.
From what I have said it will be seen that I have never
aimed at the achieving of this position, and I hope that it is
not presumptuous in me to think and to derive much comfort

! This and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by Fradelle &
Young.

156 MY FIRST BOOK

from the thought that God led me into the particular path
along which I have walked for so many years.

The scene of my first story was naturally laid in those
backwoods with which I was familiar, and the story itself was
founded on the adventures and experiences of myself and my
companions. When a second book was required of me, I
stuck to the same regions, but changed the locality. When
casting about in my mind for a suitable subject, I happened
to meet with an old retired Nor wester who had spent an
adventurous life in Rupert s Land. Among other duties he
had been sent to establish an outpost of the Hudson s Bay
Company at Ungava Bay, one of the most dreary parts of a
desolate region. On hearing what I wanted he sat down and
wrote a long narrative of his proceedings there, which he
placed at my disposal, and thus furnished me with the
foundation of Ungava.

But now I had reached the end of my tether, and when a
third story was wanted I was compelled to seek new fields of
adventure in the books of travellers. Regarding the Southern
seas as a most romantic part of the world after the back
woods ! I mentally and spiritually plunged into those warm
waters, and the dive resulted in the Coral Island.

It now began to be borne in upon me that there was
something not quite satisfactory in describing, expatiating on,
and energising in, regions which one has never seen. For
one thing, it was needful to be always carefully on the watch
to avoid falling into mistakes geographical, topographical,
natural-historical, and otherwise.

For instance, despite the utmost care of which I was
capable while studying up for the Coral Island, I fell into a
blunder through ignorance in regard to a familiar fruit. I was
under the impression that cocoanuts grew on their trees in the
same form as that in which they are usually presented to us
in grocers windows namely, about the size of a large fist,
with three spots at one end. Learning from trustworthy

. M. BALLANTYNE

157

books that at a certain stage of development the nut contains
a delicious beverage like lemonade, I sent one of my heroes
up a tree for a nut, through the shell of which he bored a hole
with a penknife. It was not till long after the story was

TROPHIES FROM MR. BALLANTYXE s TRAVELS

published that my own brother who had voyaged in Southern
seas wrote to draw my attention to the fact that the cocoa-
nut is nearly as large as a man s head, and its outer husk is
over an inch thick, so that no ordinary penknife could bore
to its interior ! Of course I should have known this, and,

158 MY FIXST BOOK

perhaps, should be ashamed of my ignorance, but, somehow
I m not !

I admit that this was a slip, but such, and other slips,
hardly justify the remark that some people have not hesitated
to make namely, that I have a tendency to draw the long
bow. I feel almost sensitive on this point, for I have always
laboured to be true to nature and to fact even in my wildest
flights of fancy.

This reminds me of the remark made to myself once by a
lady in reference to this same Coral Island. There is one
thing, Mr. Ballantyne, she said, which I really find it hard
to believe. You make one of your three boys dive into a
clear pool, go to the bottom, and then, turning on his back,
look up and wink and laugh at the other two.

No, no, not " laugh" said I, remonstratively.

( Well, then, you make him smile.

Ah ! that is true, but there is a vast difference between
laughing and smiling under water. But is it not singular
that you should doubt the only incident in the story which I
personally verify ? I happened to be in lodgings at the sea
side while writing that story, and, after penning the passage
you refer to, I went down to the shore, pulled off my clothes,
dived to the bottom, turned on my back, and, looking up, I
smiled and winked.

The lady laughed, but I have never been quite sure, from
the tone of that laugh, whether it was a laugh of conviction or
of unbelief. It is not improbable that my fair friend s mental
constitution may have been somewhat similar to that of the old
woman who declined to believe her sailor-grandson when he
told her he had seen flying-fish, but at once recognised his
veracity when he said he had seen the remains of Pharaoh s
chariot wheels on the shores of the Red Sea.

Recognising, then, the difficulties of my position, I formed
the resolution to visit when possible the scenes in which
my stories were laid ; converse with the people who, under

&. M. BALLANTYNE

modification, were to form the dramatis persona of the tales,
and, generally, to obtain information in each case, as far as lay
in my power, from the fountain-head.

Thus, when about to begin * The Lifeboat, I went to
Ramsgate, and, for some time, was hand and glove with
Jarman, the heroic coxswain of the Ramsgate boat, a lion-like

THE STUDY

as well as a lion-hearted man, who rescued hundreds of lives
from the fatal Goodwin Sands during his career. In like
manner, when getting up information for The Lighthouse,
I obtained permission from the Commissioners of Northern
Lights to visit the Bell Rock Lighthouse, where I hobnobbed
with the three keepers of that celebrated pillar-in-the-sea for
three weeks, and read Stevenson s graphic account of the

160 MY FIRST BOOK

building of the structure in the library, or visitors room, just
under the lantern. I was absolutely a prisoner there during
those three weeks, for no boats ever came near us, and it need
scarcely be said that ships kept well out of our way. By good
fortune there came on a pretty stiff gale at the time, and
Stevenson s thrilling narrative was read to the tune of whist
ling winds and roaring seas, many of which latter sent the
spray right up to the lantern and caused the building, more
than once, to quiver to its foundation.

In order to do justice to Fighting the Flames I careered
through the streets of London on fire-engines, clad in a pea-
jacket and a black leather helmet of the Salvage Corps. This
to enable me to pass the cordon of police without question-
though not without recognition, as was made apparent to me
on one occasion at a fire by a fireman whispering confiden
tially, I know what you are, sir, you re a hamitoor !

1 Right you are, said I, and moved away in order to
change the subject.

It was a glorious experience, by the way, this galloping on
fire-engines through the crowded streets. It had in it much
of the excitement of the chase possibly that of war with
the noble end in view of saving instead of destroying life !
Such tearing along at headlong speed ; such wild roaring of
the firemen to clear the way ; such frantic dashing aside of
cabs, carts, buses, and pedestrians ; such reckless courage on
the part of the men, and volcanic spoutings on the part of the
fires ! But I must not linger. The memory of it is too
enticing. Deep Down took me to Cornwall, where, over
two hundred fathoms beneath the green turf, and more than
half a mile out under the bed of the sea, I saw the sturdy
miners at work winning copper and tin from the solid rock,
and acquired some knowledge of their life, sufferings, and toils.

In the land of the Vikings I shot ptarmigan, caught salmon,
and gathered material for Erling the Bold. A winter in
Algiers made me familiar with the Pirate City. I enjoyed

M. BALLANTYNE

161

a fortnight with the hearty inhabitants of the Gull Lightship
off the Goodwin Sands ; and went to the Cape of Good Hope

MR. R. M. BALLAXTYXE

and up into the interior of the Colony, to spy out the land and
hold intercourse with The Settler and the Savage although
I am bound to confess that, with regard to the latter, I talked

162 MY FIRST BOOK

to him only with mine eyes. I also went afloat for a short
time with the fishermen of the North Sea in order to be able
to do justice to The Young Trawler.

To arrive still closer at the truth, and to avoid errors, I
have always endeavoured to submit my proof sheets, when
possible, to experts and men who knew the subjects well.
Thus, Captain Shaw, late chief of the London Fire Brigade,
kindly read the proofs of Fighting the Flames, and prevented
my getting off the rails in matters of detail, and Sir Arthur
Blackwood, financial secretary to the General Post Office,
obligingly did me the same favour in regard to Post Haste.

One other word in conclusion. Always, while writing
whatever might be the subject of my story I have been
influenced by an undercurrent of effort and desire to direct the
minds and affections of my readers towards the higher life.

THE PREMIER AND THE PAINTER
BY I. ZANGWILL

AS it is scarcely two years since my name (which, I hear,
is a nom de plume] appeared in print on the cover of a
book, I may be suspected of professional humour when I say
I do not really know which was my first book. Yet such is
the fact. My literary career has been so queer that I find it
not easy to write my autobibliography.

What is a pound ? asked Sir Robert Peel in an interroga
tive mood futile as Pilate s. What is a book ? I ask, and
the dictionary answers with its usual dogmatic air, A collec
tion of sheets of paper, or similar material, blank, written, or
printed, bound together. At this rate my first book would
be that romance of school life in two volumes, which, written
in a couple of exercise books, circulated gratuitously in the
schoolroom, and pleased our youthful imaginations with
teacher-baiting tricks we had not the pluck to carry out in
the actual. I shall always remember this story because, after
making the tour of the class, it was returned to me with thanks
and a new first page from which all my graces of style had
evaporated. Indignant inquiry discovered the criminal he
admitted he had lost the page, and had rewritten it from
memory. He pleaded that it was better written (which in
one sense was true), and that none of the facts had been omitted.

This ill-treated tale was published when I was ten, but
an old schoolfellow recently wrote to me reminding me of an
earlier novel written in an old account-book. Of this I have
no recollection, but, as he says he wrote it day by day at my

M 2

164

MY FIRST BOOK

dictation, I suppose he ought to know. I am glad to find
I had so early achieved the distinction of keeping an
amanuensis.

The dignity of print I achieved not much later, contribut
ing verses and virtuous essays to various juvenile organs. But
it was not till I was eighteen that I achieved a printed first
book. The story of this first book is peculiar ; and, to tell it
in approved story form, I must request the reader to come

back two years with
me.

One fine day,
when I was sixteen,
I was wandering
about the Rams-
gate sands looking for
Toole. I did not really
expect to see him, and I
had no reason to believe
he was in Ramsgate, but I
thought if Provi
dence were kind
to him it might
throw him in my
way. I wanted to
do him a good
turn. I had written
a three-act farcical
comedy at the request of an amateur dramatic club. I had
written out all the parts, and I think there were rehearsals.
But the play was never produced. In the light of after
knowledge I suspect some of those actors must have been of
quite professional calibre. You understand, therefore, why
my thoughts turned to Toole. But I could not find Toole.
Instead, I found on the sands a page of a paper called
Society. It is still running merrily at a penny, but at that

LOOKING FOR
TOOLE

i66

MY FIRST BOOK

time it had also a Saturday edition at threepence. On this
page was a great prize-competition scheme, as well as
details of a regular weekly competition. The competi
tions in those days were always literary and intellectual,
but then popular education had not made such strides as
to-day.

I sat down on the spot, and wrote something which took
a prize in the weekly competition. This emboldened me to

enter for the great stakes.

There were various events. I
resolved to enter for two. One
was a short novel, and the other a
comedietta. The 5/. humorous
story competition I did not go
in for ; but when the last day of
sending in MSS. for that had
passed, I reproached myself with
not having despatched one of my
manuscripts. Modesty had pre
vented me sending in old work,
as I felt assured it would stand
no chance, but when it was too
late I was annoyed with myself
for having thrown away a possi
bility. After all I could have lost
nothing. Then I discovered that

I had mistaken the last date, and that there was still
a day. In the joyful reaction I selected a story called
Professor Grimmer/ and sent it in. Judge of my amaze
ment when this got the prize (5/.), and was published in
serial form running through three numbers of Society. Last
year, at a Press dinner, I found myself next to Mr. Arthur
Goddard, who told me he had acted as Competition Editor,
and that quite a number of now well-known people had taken
part in these admirable competitions. My painfully laboured

I SAT DOWN AND WROTE
SOMETHING

ZANGIVILL

167

novel only got honourable mention, and my comedietta was
lost in the post.

But I was now at the height of literary fame, and success
stimulated me to fresh work. I still marvel when I think of
the amount of rubbish I turned out in my seventeenth and
eighteenth years, in the scanty leisure of a harassed pupil-
teacher at an elementary school, working hard in the evenings
for a degree at the London University to boot. There was a
fellow pupil-teacher (let
us call him Y.) who be
lieved in me, and who
had a little money with
which to back his belief.
I was for starting a comic
paper. The name was to
be Grimaldi) and I was

all

every

ARTHUR GODDARD

to write it
week.

But don t you think
your invention would give
way ultimately ? asked
Y. It was the only time
he ever doubted me.

k By that time I shall L
be able to afford a staff,
I replied triumphantly.

Y. was convinced. But before the comic paper was born,
Y. had another happy thought. He suggested that if I wrote
a Jewish story, we might make enough to finance the comic
paper. I was quite willing. If he had suggested an epic, I
should have written it.

So I wrote the story in four evenings (I always write in
spurts), and within ten days from the inception of the idea
the booklet was on sale in a coverless pamphlet form. The
printing cost ten pounds. I paid five (the five I had won)*

i68

MY FIRST BOOK

Y. paid five, and we divided the profits. He has since not
become a publisher.

My first book (price one penny nett) went well. It was
loudly denounced by those it described, and widely bought
by them ; it was hawked about the streets. One little shop
in Whitechapel sold 400 copies. It was even on Smith s
bookstalls. There was great curiosity among Jews to know
the name of the writer. Owing to my anonymity, I was
enabled to see those enjoying its perusal, who were afterwards

IT WAS HAWKED ABOUT THE STREETS

to explain to me their horror and disgust at its illiteracy and
vulgarity. By vulgarity vulgar Jews mean the reproduction
of the Hebrew words with which the poor and the old-fashioned
interlard their conversation. It is as if English-speaking
Scotchmen and Irishmen should object to dialect novels
reproducing the idiom of their uncultured countrymen. I
do not possess a copy of my first book, but somehow or other
I discovered the MS. when writing * Children of the Ghetto.
The description of market-day in Jewry was transferred bodily
from the MS. of my first book, and is now generally admired

ZANGWILL

169

What the profits were I never knew, for they were invested
in the second of our publications. Still jealously keeping the
authorship secret, we published a long comic ballad which I
had written on the model of Bab. With this we determined
to launch out in style, and so we had gorgeous advertisement
posters printed in three
colours, which were to be
stuck about London to
beautify that great dreary
city. Y. saw the back-hair
of Fortune almost within
our grasp.

One morning our head
master walked into my
room with a portentously
solemn air. I felt instinc
tively that the murder was
out. But he only said,
W T here is Y. ? though the
mere coupling of our names
was ominous, for our pub
lishing partnership was un
known. I replied, How
should I know ? In his
room, I suppose.

He gave me a peculiar
sceptical glance.

When did you last see
Y. ? he said.

Yesterday afternoon, I replied wonderingly,

And you don t know where he is now ?

Haven t an idea isn t he in school ?

No, he replied in low, awful tones.

Where then ? I murmured.

In prison I

A POLICEMAN TOLD HIM TO GET
DOWN

\\ B R A ,/ pfx,

" OF THK &gt;k

TTNTTVPT*ciTT"Y" I

iyo MY FIRST BOOK

In prison ! I gasped.

In prison ; I have just been to help bail him out.

It transpired that Y. had suddenly been taken with a
further happy thought. Contemplation of those gorgeous
tricoloured posters had turned his brain, and, armed with an
amateur paste-pot and a ladder, he had sallied forth at mid
night to stick them about the silent streets, so as to cut down
the publishing expenses. A policeman, observing him at
work, had told him to get down, and Y., being legal-minded,
had argued it out with the policeman de haut en has from the
top of his ladder. The outraged majesty of the law thereupon
haled Y. off to the cells.

Naturally the cat was now out of the bag, and the fat in
the fire.

To explain away the poster was beyond the ingenuity ot
even a professed fiction-monger.

Straightway the committee of the school was summoned
in hot haste, and held debate upon the scandal of a pupil-
teacher being guilty of originality. And one dread afternoon,
when all Nature seemed to hold its breath, I was called down
to interview a member of the committee. In his hand were
copies of the obnoxious publications.

I approached the great person with beating heart. He
had been kind to me in the past, singling me out, on account
of some scholastic successes, for an annual vacation at the
seaside. It has only just struck me, after all these years, that,
if he had not done so, I should not have found the page of
Society, and so not have perpetrated the deplorable com
positions.

In the course of a bad quarter of an hour, he told rne
that the ballad was tolerable, though not to be endured ; he
admitted the metre was perfect, and there wasn t a single
false rhyme. But the prose novelette was disgusting. * It is
such stuff, said he, * as little boys scribble upon walls.

I said I could not see anything objectionable in it.

/. ZANGWILL

171

Come now, confess you are ashamed of it, he urged.
4 You only wrote it to make money.

If you mean that I deliberately wrote low stuff to make
money, I replied calmly, it is untrue. There is nothing I
am ashamed of. What you object to is simply realism. I
pointed out that Bret Harte had been as realistic; but they
did not understand literature on that committee.

Confess you are
ashamed of yourself,
he reiterated, and we
will look over it.

I am not, I per
sisted, though I foresaw
only too clearly that my
summer s vacation was
doomed if I told the
truth. What is the use
of saying I am ?

The headmaster up
lifted his hands in
horror. How, after
all your kindness to
him, he can contradict
you ! he cried.

When I come to
be your age, 1 conceded
to the member of the
committee, it is possible I may look back on it with shame.
At present I feel none.

In the end I was given the alternative of expulsion or of
publishing nothing which had not passed the censorship of
the committee. After considerable hesitation I chose the
latter.

This was a blessing in disguise ; for, as I have never been
able to endure the slightest arbitrary interference with my

SUCH STUFF AS LITTLE BOYS SCRIBBLE
UPON WALLS

172 MY FIRST BOOK

work, I simply abstained from publishing. Thus, although
I still wrote mainly sentimental verses- -my nocturnal
studies were less interrupted. Not till I had graduated, and
was of age, did I return to my inky vomit. Then came my
next first book a real book at last.

In this also I had the collaboration of a fellow-teacher,
Louis Covven by name. This time my colleague was part-
author. It was only gradually that I had been admitted to
the privilege of communion with him, for he was my senior
by five or six years, and a man of brilliant parts who had
already won his spurs in journalism, and who enjoyed
deservedly the reputation of an Admirable Crichton. What
drew me to him was his mordant wit (to-day, alas ! wasted
on anonymous journalism ! If he would only reconsider his
indetermination, the reading public would be the richer !)
Together we planned plays, novels, treatises on political
economy, and contributions to philosophy. Those were the
days of dreams.

One afternoon he came to me with quivering sides, and
told me that an idea for a little shilling book had occurred to
him. It was that a Radical Prime Minister and a Conserva
tive working man should change into each other by super
natural means, and the working man be confronted with the
problem of governing, while the Prime Minister should be as
comically out of place in the East End environment. He
thought it would make a funny * Arabian Nights sort of
burlesque. And so it would have done ; but, unfortunately,
I saw subtler possibilities of political satire in it, nothing less
than a reductio ad absurdum of the whole system of Party
Government. I insisted the story must be real, not super
natural, the Prime Minister must be a Tory, weary of office,
and it must be an ultra-Radical atheistic artisan bearing a
marvellous resemblance to him who directs (and with com
plete success) the Conservative Administration. To add to
the mischief, owing to my collaborator s evenings being

/. ZANGWILL

173

largely taken up by other work, seven-eighths of the book
came to be written by me, though the leading ideas were, of

LIFE IX
BETHNAL GREEN

course, threshed out and the whole revised in common, and
thus it became a vent-hole for all the ferment of a youth of
twenty-one, whose literary faculty had furthermore been pent

174 MY FIRST BOOK

up for years by the potential censorship of a committee.
The book, instead of being a shilling skit, grew to a ten-and-
sixpenny (for that was the unfortunate price of publication)
political treatise of over sixty long chapters and 500 closely
printed pages. I drew all the characters as seriously and
complexly as if the fundamental conception were a matter of
history ; the outgoing Premier became an elaborate study
of a nineteenth-century Hamlet ; the Bethnal Green life
amid which he came to live was presented with photographic
fulness and my old trick of realism ; the governmental
manoeuvres were described with infinite detail ; numerous
real personages were introduced under nominal disguises ;
and subsequent history was curiously anticipated in some of
the Female Franchise and Home Rule episcdes. Worst of
all, so super-subtle was the satire, that it was never actually
stated straight out that the Premier had changed places with
the Radical working man, so that the door might be left
open for satirically suggested alternative explanations of the
metamorphosis in their characters ; and as, moreover, the two
men re-assumed their original roles for one night only with
infinitely complex effects, many readers, otherwise unim
peachable, reached the end without any suspicion of the
actual plot and yet (on their own confession) enjoyed the
book!

In contrast to all this elephantine waggery the half-dozen
chapters near the commencement, in which my collaborator
sketched the first adventures of the Radical working man in
Downing Street, were light and sparkling, and I feel sure the
shilling skit he originally meditated would have been a great
success. We christened the book The Premier and the
Painter, ourselves J. Freeman Bell, had it type-written, and
sent it round to the publishers in two enormous quarto volumes.
I had been working at it for more than a year every evening
after the hellish torture of the day s teaching, and all da}- every
holiday, but now I had a good rest while it was playing its

ZANGWILL

boomerang prank of returning to me once a month. The only
gleam of hope came from Bentleys, who wrote to say that they
could not make up their minds to reject it ; but they prevailed
upon themselves to part with it at last, though not without
asking to see Mr. Bell s next book. At last it was accepted
by Spencer Blackett, and, though it had been refused by all
the best houses, it failed. Failed in a material sense, that is ;
for there was plenty of praise in the papers, though at too
long intervals to do us any good.
The A tlienczuin has never spoken so
well of anything I have done since.
The late James Runciman (I learnt
after his death that it was he) raved
about it in various uninfluential
organs. It even called forth a
leader in the Family Herald^, and
there are odd people here and there,
who know the secret of J. Freeman
Bell, who declare that I. Zangwill
will never do anything so good.
There was a cheaper edition, but
it did not sell much then, though
now it is in its third edition, issued
uniformly with my other books by
Heinemann, and absolutely unre-
vised. But not only did The Pre
mier and the Painter fail with the
great public at first, it did not even help either of us one step
up the ladder ; never got us a letter of encouragement nor a
stroke of work. I had to begin journalism at the very bottom
and entirely unassisted, narrowly escaping canvassing for
advertisements, for I had by this time thrown up my scholastic
position, and had gone forth into the world penniless and
without even a character, branded as an Atheist (because I
did not worship the Lord who presided over our committee)

WE SENT IT ROUND

176 MY FIRST BOOK

and a Revolutionary (because I refused to break the law of
the land).

I should stop here if I were certain I had written the
required article. But as The Premier and the Painter was
not entirely my first book, I may perhaps be expected to say
something of my third first book, and the first to which I put
my name The Bachelors Club. Years of literary apathy
succeeded the failure of The Premier and the Painter. All
I did was to publish a few serious poems (which, I hope, will
survive Time], a couple of pseudonymous stories signed The
Baroness Von S. (!), and a long philosophical essay upon
religion, and to lend a hand in the writing of a few playlets.
Becoming convinced of the irresponsible mendacity of the
dramatic profession, I gave up the stage, too, vowing never
to write except on commission (I kept my vow and yet
was played ultimately), and sank entirely into the slough of
journalism (glad enough to get there), inter alia editing a
comic paper (not Grimaldi, but Ariel) with a heavy heart.
At last the long apathy wore off, and I resolved to cultivate
literature again in my scraps of time. It is a mere accident
that I wrote a pair of funny books, or put serious criticism
of contemporary manners into a shape not understood in a
country where only the dull are profound and only the
ponderous are earnest. The Bachelors Club was the result
of a whimsical remark made by my dear friend, Eder of
Bartholomew s, with whom I was then sharing rooms in
Bernard Street, and who helped me greatly with it, and its
publication was equally accidental. One spring day, in the
year of grace 1891, having lived unsuccessfully for a score of
years and seven upon this absurd planet, I crossed Fleet
Street and stepped into what is called success. It was like
this. Mr. J. T. Grein, now of the Independent Theatre,
meditated a little monthly called The Playgoers Review , and
he asked me to do an article for the first number, on the
strength of some speeches I had made at the Playgoers Club.

ZANGWILL

177

When I got the proof it was marked, Please return at once
to 6 Bouverie Street. My office boy being out, and Bouverie

MR. ZANGWILI. AT
WORK

Street being only a few steps away, I took it over myself, and
found myself, somewhat to my surprise, in the office of Henry
& Co., publishers, and in the presence of Mr. J. Hannaford

i 7 8

MY FIRST BOOK

Bennett, an active partner in the firm. He greeted me by
name, also to my surprise, and told me he had heard me
speak at the Playgoers Club. A little conversation ensued,
and he mentioned that his firm was going to bring out a
Library of Wit and Humour. I told him I had begun a
book, avowedly humorous, and had written two chapters of it,
and he straightway came over to my office, heard me read
them, and immediately secured the book. (The then editor
ultimately refused to have it in the Whitefriars Library of

EDITING A COMIC PAPER

Wit and Humour, and so it was brought out separately.)
Within three months, working in odds and ends of time, I
finished it, correcting the proofs of the first chapters while I
was writing the last ; indeed, ever since the day I read those
two chapters to Mr. Hannaford Bennett I have never written
a line anywhere that has not been purchased before it was
written. For, to my undying astonishment, two average
editions of my real * first book were disposed of on the day
of publication, to say nothing of the sale in New York.
Unless I had acquired a reputation of which I was totally

7. ZANGWILL

179

unconscious, it must have been the title that fetched the
trade. Or, perhaps, it was the illustrations by my friend, Mr.
George Hutchinson, whom I am proud to have discovered as
a cartoonist for Ariel.

So here the story comes to a nice sensational climax.
Re-reading it, I feel dimly that there ought to be a moral in
it somewhere for the benefit of struggling fellow-scribblers.
But the best I can find is this : That if you are blessed with
some talent, a great deal of industry, and an amount of
conceit mighty enough to enable you to disregard superiors,
equals and critics, as well as the fancied demands of the
public, it is possible, without friends, or introductions, or
bothering celebrities to read your manuscripts, or cultivating
the camp of the log-rollers, to attain, by dint of slaving day
and night for years during the flower of your youth, to a fame
infinitely less widespread than a prizefighter s, and a pecuniary
position which you might with far less trouble have been
born to.

SMASHED
THE ttM

SLOCCtR

A FAME LESS WIDESPREAD THAN A PRIZEFIGHTER S

THE WESTERN AVERNUS
BY MORLEY ROBERTS

/""^ERTAINLY no one was more
^-^ surprised than myself when I dis
covered that I could write decent prose,
and even make money out of it, for dur
ing many years
my youthful aspira
tions had been to
rival Rossetti, or
l|| get on a level with
Browning, rather
than to make a
living out of litera
ture as a profession.
But when I did
start a book, I
went through three years of
American experience like
fire through flax, and wrote
The Western Avernus, a
volume containing ninety-
three thousand words, in
less than a lunar month.

I had been in Australia
years before, coming home
before the mast as an A.B.
in a Blackwall liner, but my
occasional efforts to turn that experience into form always
failed. Once or twice. I read some of my prose to friends,
who told me that it was worse even than my poetry. Such

BEFORE THE MAST

182

MY FIltST BOOK

criticism naturally confirmed me in the belief that I must be
a poet or nothing, and I soon got into a fair way to become
nothing, for my health broke down. At last, finding my
choice lay between two kinds of tragedies, I chose the least,
and went off to Texas. On February 27, 1884, I was working
in a Government office as a writer ; on March 27, I was sheep-
herding in Scurry County, North-west Texas, in the south

of the Panhandle.
This experience was
the opening of The
Western Avernus.

But I should
never have written
the book if it had
not been for two
friends of mine. One
was George Gissinof,

o o /

and the other W. H.
Hudson, the Argen
tine naturalist. When
I returned from the West,
and yarned to them of
starvation and toil and
strife in that new world,
they urged me to put it
down instead of talking it.
I suppose they looked on

it as good material running to verbal conversational waste,
being both writers of many years standing. Now I understand
their point of view, and carry a note-book, or an odd piece of
paper, to jot down motives that crop up in occasional talk,
but then I was ignorant, and astonished at the wild notion of
writing anything saleable. However, in desperation, for I
had no money, I began to write, and went ahead in the same
way that I have so far kept to. I wrote it without notes,

I MARRIED THEM ALL OFF AT THE END

MO R LEY ROBERTS

183

without care, without thought, save that each night the past
was resurgent and alive before and within me, just as it was
when I worked and starved between Texas and the great
North-west. Each Sunday I read what I had done to George
Gissing ; at first with terror, but afterwards with more confi
dence when he nodded approval, and as the end approached
I began to believe in it myself.

It is only six years since the book was finished and sent
to Messrs. Smith, Elder, & Co., but it seems half a century
ago, so much has happened since then ; and when it was

AX AMERICAN SAW-MILL
WHERE MR. ROBERTS WORKED

accepted and published and paid for, and actually reviewed
favourably, I almost determined to take to literature as a
profession. I remembered that when I was a boy of eleven I
wrote a romance with twenty people, men and women, in it.
I married them all off at the end, being then in the childish
mind of the most usual novelist who believes, or pretends to
believe, or at any rate by implication teaches, that the inter
esting part of life finishes then instead of beginning. I recalled
the fact that I wrote doggerel verse at the age of thirteen
when I was at Bedford Grammar School, and that an ar
dent, ignorant Conservatism drove me, when I was at Owens

1 84 MY FIRST BOOK

College, Manchester, to lampoon the Liberal candidates in
rhymes, and paste them up in the big lavatory ; and under
the influence of these memories I began to think that perhaps
scribbling was my natural trade. I had tried some forty differ
ent callings, including sailorising, saw-mill work, bullock-
driving, tramping, and the selling of books in San Francisco,
with indifferent financial success, so perhaps my metier was
the making of books instead. So I went on trying, and had
a very bad time for two years.

Having written * The Western Avernus in a kind of
intuitive, instructive way, it came easy enough to me, but very
soon I began to think of the technique of writing, and wrote
badly. I had to look back at the best part of that book to be
assured I could write at all. For a long time it was a con
solation and a distress to me, for I had to find out that
knowledge must get into one s fingers before it can be used.
Only those who know nothing, or who know a great deal very
well, can write decently, and the intermediate state is exceed
ingly painful. Both the public and private laudation of my
American book made me unhappy then. I thought I had
only that one book in me.

Some of the letters I received from America, and, more
particularly, British Columbia, were anything but cheerful
reading. One man, of whom I had spoken rather freely, said
I should be hanged on a cottonwood tree if I ever set foot in
the Colony again. I do not believe there are any cottonwoods
there, but he used a phrase common in American literature.
Another whilom friend of mine, who had read some favourable
criticisms, wrote me to say he was sure Messrs. Smith & Elder
had paid for them. He had understood it was always done,
and now he knew the truth of it, because the book was so
bad. I almost feared to return to British Columbia : the
critics there might use worse weapons than a sneering para
graph. In England the worst one need fear is an action for
criminal libel, or a rough and tumble fight. There it might
end in an inquest. I wrote back to my critics that if I ever

MORLEY ROBERTS

185

came out again, I would come armed, and endeavour to reply
effectually.

Eor that wild life, far away from the ancient set and
hardened bonds of social law which crush a man and make
him just like his fellows, or so nearly like that only intimacy
can distinguish individual differences, had allowed me to grow
in another way, and become more myself; more independent,
more like a savage, better able to fight and endure. That is
the use of going abroad, and going abroad to places that are
not civilised. They allow a man to revert and be himself. It
may make his return hard, his endurance of social bonds
bitterer, but it may
help him to refuse
to endure. He may
attain to some na
tural sight.

Not many weeks
ago I was talking to
a well-known Ame
rican publisher, and
our conversation
ran on the trans
oceanic view of
Europe. He was amused and delighted to come across an
Englishman who was so Americanised in one way as to look
on our standing camps and armed kingdoms as citizens of
the States do, especially those who live in the West. To the
American, Europe seems like a small collection of walled yards,
each with a crowing fighting-cock defying the universe on the
top of his own dunghill, with an occasional scream from the wall.
The whole of our international politics gets to look small and
petty, and a bitter waste of power. Perhaps the American view
is right. At any rate, it seemed so when I sat far aloof upon the
lofty mountains to the west of the great plains. The isolation
from the politics of the moment allowed me to see nature and
natural law.

DEFYING THE UNIVERSE

TTNTV

1 86

MY FIRST BOOK

And as it was with nations, so it was with men. Out
yonder, in the W 7 est, most of us were brutal at times, and ready
to kill, or be killed, but my American-bred acquaintances,
looked like men, strikingly like men, independent, free, equal
to the need of the ensuing day or the call of some sudden hour.

It is a liberal educa
tion to the law-abiding
Englishman to see a
good specimen of a
Texan cowboy walk
down a Western street ;
for he looks like a law
unto himself, calm and.
greatly assured of the
validity of his own
enactments. We live
in a crowd here, and
it takes a rebel to be
himself ; and in the
struggle for freedom
he is likely to go
under.

While I was gain
ing the experience that
went solid and crys*-
tallised into The Wes
tern Avernus, I was
discovering much that
had never been dis
covered before, not in a geographical sense for I have been
in few places where men have not been but in myself. Each
ne\v task teaches us something ne\v, and something more
than the mere way to do it. To drive horses or milk a cow
or make bread, or kill a sheep, sets us level with facts and
face to face with some reality. We are called on to be real,

COWBOY ROBERTS

MO R LEY ROBERTS 187

and not the shadow of others. This is the worth that is in
all real workers, whatever they do, under whatever conditions.
Every truth so learnt strips away ancient falsehood from us ;
it is real education, not the taught instruction which makes
us alike, and thus shams, merely arming us with weapons to
fight our fellows in the crowded, unwholesome life of falsely
civilised cities.

And in America there is the sharp contrast between the
city life and the life of the mountain and the plain. It is seen
more clearly than in England, which is all more or less city.

THE VERY PRAIRIE DOGS TAUGHT ME

There are no clear stellar interspaces in our life here. But out
yonder, a long clay s train ride across the high barren cactus
plateaus of Arizona teaches us as much as a clear and open
depth in the sky. For, of a sudden, we run into the very
midst of a big town, and shams are made gods for our wor
ship. It is difficult to be oneself when all others refuse to be
themselves.

This was for me the lesson of the West and the life there-
When I wrote this book I did not know it ; I wrote almost
unconsciously, without taking thought, without weighing words,

i88 MY FIRST BOOK

without conscious knowledge. But I see now what I learnt in
a hard and bitter school.

For I acknowledge that the experience was at times
bitterly painful. It is not pleasant to toil sixteen hours a day ;
it is not good to starve overmuch ; it is not well to feel bitter
for long months. And yet it is well and good and pleasant
in the end to learn realities and live without lies. It is better
to be a truthful animal than a civilised man, as things go. I
learnt much from horses and cattle and sheep ; the very
prairie dogs taught me; the ospreys and the salmon they
preyed on expressed truths. They didn t attempt to live on
words, or the dust and ashes of dead things. They were
themselves and no one else, and were not diseased with
theories or a morbid altruism that is based on dependence.

This, I think, is the lesson I learnt from my own book. I
did not know it when I wrote it. I never thought of writing
it ; I never meant to write anything ; I only went to America
because England and the life of London made me ill. If I
could have lived my own life here I would have stayed, but
the crushing combination of social forces drove me out. For
fear of cutting my own throat I left, and took my chance with
natural forces. To fight with nature makes men, to fight with
society makes devils, or criminals, or martyrs, and sometimes
a man may be all three. I preferred to revert to mere natural
conditions for a time.

To lead such a life for a long time is to give up creeds, and
to go to the universal storehouse whence all creeds come. It
is giving up dogmas and becoming religious. In true opposi
tion to instructive nature, we find our own natural religion,
which cannot be wholly like any other. So a life of this kind
does not make men good, in the common sense of the word.
But it makes a man good for something. It may make him
an ethical outcast, as facts faced always will. He prefers
induction to deduction, especially the sanctioned unverified
deductions of social order. For nature affords the only

MO R LEY ROBERTS

189

verification for the logical process of deduction. We fear
nature too much, to say the least. For most of us hold to
other men s theories instead of making our own.

When Mill said, Solitude, in the sense of being fre
quently alone, is necessary to the formation of any depth of
character, he spoke almost absolute truth. But here we can
never be alone ; the very
air is full of the dead
breath of others. I learnt
more in a four days walk
over the California coast
range, living on parched
Indian corn, than I could
have done in a lifetime of
the solitude of a lonely
house. The Selkirks and
the Rocky Mountains are
books of ancient learning :
the long plains of grey grass,
the burnt plateaus of
the hot South, speak
eternal truths to all
who listen. They
need not listen, for
there men do not
learn by the ear.
They breathe the
knowledge in.

In speaking as I
have done about America I do not mean to praise it as a
State or a society. In that respect it is perhaps worse
than our own, more diseased, more under the heel of the
money fiend, more recklessly and brutally acquisitive. But
there are parts of it still more or less free ; nature reigns
still over vast tracts in the West. As a democracy it is

THE CALIFORNIA COAST RANGE

190

MY FIRST BOOK

so far a failure, as democracies must be organised on a
plutocratic basis ; but it at any rate allows a man to think
himself a man. Walt Whitman is the big expression of that
thought, but his fervent belief in America was really but deep

BY THE CAMP FIRE

trust in man himself, in man s power of revolt, in his ultimate
recognition of the beauty of the truth. The power of America
to teach lies in the fact that a great part of her fertile and
barren soil has not yet been taught, not yet cultivated for the
bread which of itself can feed no man wholly.

MORLEY ROBERTS 191

Perhaps among the few who have read The Western
Avernus Tor it was not a financial success), fewer still have
seen what I think I myself see in it now. But it has taken
me six years to understand it, six years to know how I came
to write it, and what it meant. That is the way in life : we
do not learn at once what we are taught, we do not always
understand all we say even when speaking earnestly. There
is often one aspect of a book that the writer himself can learn
from, and that is not always the technical part of it. All
sayings may have an esoteric meaning. In those hard days
by the camp fire, on the trail, on the prairie with sheep and
cattle, I did not understand that they called up in me the
ancient underlying experience of the race, and, like a deep
plough, brought to the surface the lowest soil which should
hereafter be a little fertile. When I starved, I thought not of
our far ancestors who had suffered too ; as I watched the
sheep or the sharp-horned Texas steers, I could not reflect
upon our pastoral forefathers ; as I climbed with bleeding feet
the steep slopes of the Western hills, my thoughts were set in
a narrow circle of dark misery. I could not think of those
who had striven, like me, in distant ages. But the songs of
the camp fire, and the leap of the flame, and the crackling
wood, and the lofty snow-clad hills, and the long dim plains,
the wild beast, and the venomous serpents, and the need of
food, brought me back to nature, the nature that had created
those who were the fathers of us all, and, bringing me back,
they taught me, as they strive to teach all, that the real and
deeper life is everywhere, even in a city, if we will but look for
it with unsealed eyes and minds set free from the tedious
trivialities of this debauched modern life.

(From a photograph by Thos. Fall, Baker Street)

193

A LIFE S ATONEMENT
BY DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

I BEGAN my first book more years ago than I care to
count, and, naturally enough, it took poetic form, if not
poetic substance. In its original shape it was called Marsh
Hall, and ran into four cantos. On the eve of my twenty-
first birthday I sent the MS. to Messrs. Macmillan, who, very
wisely, as I have since come to believe, counselled me not to
publish it. I say this in full sincerity, though I remember
some of the youthful bombast not altogether without affec
tion. Here and there I can recall a passage which still seems
respectable. I wrote reams of verse in those days, but when
I came into the rough and tumble of journalistic life I was
too occupied to court the Muses any longer, and found
myself condemned to a life of prose. I was acting as special
correspondent for the Birmingham Morning News in the
year 73 I think it was 73, though it might have been a
year later and at that time Mr. Edmund Yates was lecturing
in America, and a novel of his, the last he ever wrote, was
running through our columns. Whether the genial * Atlas,
who at that time had not taken the burden of The World
upon his shoulders, found his associations too numerous and
heavy, I can only guess, but he closed the story with an
unexpected suddenness, and the editor, who had supposed
himself to have a month or two in hand in which to make
arrangements for his next serial, was confronted with the
finis of Mr. Yates s work, and was compelled to start a new

194

MY FIRST BOOK

novel at a week s notice. In this extremity he turned to me.
* I think, young un, he said, that you ought to be able to
write a novel. I shared his faith, and had, indeed, already
begun a story which I had christened Grace Forbeach. I
handed him two chapters, which he read at once, and, in high
feather, sent to the printer. It never bade fair to be a mighty
work, but at least it fulfilled the meaning of the original
edition of Pope s famous line, for it was certainly all without

I HANDED HIM TWO CHAPTERS

a plan. I had appropriate scenery in my mind, no end of
typical people to draw, and one or two moving actualities to
work from. But I had forgotten the plot. To attempt a
novel without a definite scheme of some sort is very like
trying to make a Christmas pudding without a cloth. Ruth
Pinch was uncertain as to whether her first venture at a
pudding might not turn out a soup. My novelistic effort, I
am sorry to confess, had no cohesion in it. Its parts got

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

loose in the cooking, and I have reason to think that most

people who tried it found the dish repellent. The cashier

assured me that I had sent down the circulation of the

Saturday issue by sixteen thousand. I

had excellent reasons for disbelieving

circumstantial statement in

the fact that the Saturday

issue had never reached that

number, but I have no doubt.

I did a deal of damage.

There had been an idea in

1 Marsh Hall/ and what with

interpolated ballads and poetic

excursions and alarums of all

sorts, I had found in it matter

enough to fill out my four

cantos. I set out with the

intent to work that

same idea through

the pages of Grace
Forbeach, but it
was too scanty for
the uses of a three-
volume novel, at
least in the hands
of a tiro. I know
one or two accomplished
gentlemen who could
make it serve the purpose ad
mirably, and, perhaps, I myself might
do something with it at a pinch at
this time of day. Anyhow, as it was, the cloth was too small
to hold the pudding, and, in the process of cooking, I was
driven to the most desperate expedients. To drop the simile
and to come to the plain facts of the case, I sent all my

196 MY FIRST BOOK

wicked and superfluous people into a coal-mine, and there
put an end to them by an inrush of water. I forget what
became of the hero, but I know that some of the most
promising characters dropped out of that story, and were no
more heard of. The sub-editor used occasionally, for my
encouragement, to show me letters he received, denouncing
the work, and asking wrathfully when it would end.

Whilst I am about Grace Forbeach, it may be worth
while to tell the story of the champion printer s error of my
experience. I wrote at the close of the story :

1 Are there no troubles now ? the lover asks.

Not one, dear Frank. Not one.

And then, in brackets, thus [ ] I set the words :
[White line.]

This was a technical instruction to the printer, and meant
that one line of space should be left clear. The genius who
had the copy in hand put the lover s speech in type correctly,
and then, setting it out as if it were a line of verse, he gave
me

Not one, dear Frank, not one white line !

It was a custom in the printing office to suspend a leather
medal by a leather bootlace round the neck of the man who
had achieved the prize betisc of the year. It was somewhere
about midsummer at this time, but it was instantly and
unanimously resolved that nothing better than this would
or could be done by anybody. The compositors performed
what they called a jerry in the blunderer s honour, and
invested him, after an animated fight, with the medal.

* Grace Forbeach has been dead and buried for very
nearly a score of years. It never saw book form, and I was
never anxious that it should do so, but as it had grown out
of Marsh Hall/ so my first book grew out of it, and, oddly
enough, not only my first, but my second and my third,
Joseph s Coat, which made my fortune, and gave me such

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY 197

literary standing as I have, was built on one episode of that
abortive story, and Val Strange was constructed and written
to lead up to the episode of the attempted suicide on Wei-
beck Head, which had formed the culminating point in the
poem.

When I got to London I determined to try my hand
anew, and, having learned by failure something more than
success could ever have taught me, I built up my scheme
before I started on my book. Having come to utter grief
for want of a scheme to work on, I ran, in my eagerness to
avoid that fault, into the opposite extreme, and built an iron-

THEY INVESTED HIM WITH THE MEDAL

bound plot, which afterwards cost me very many weeks of
unnecessary and unvalued labour. I am quite sure that
no reader of * A Life s Atonement ever guessed that the
author took one tithe, or even one-twentieth part, of the
trouble it actually cost to weave the two strands of its narra
tive together. I divided my story into thirty- six chapters.
Twelve of these were autobiographical, in the sense that
they were supposed to be written by the hero in person.
The remaining twenty-four were historical, purporting to be
written, that is, by an impersonal author. The autobio
graphical portions necessarily began in the childhood of the

198 MY FIRST BOOK

narrator, and between them and the History there was
a considerable gulf of time. Little by little this gulf had to
be bridged over until the action in both portions of the story
became synchronous. I really do not suppose that the most
pitiless critic ever felt it worth his while to question the
accuracy of my dates, and I dare say that all the trouble I
took was quite useless, but I fixed in my own mind the
actual years over which the story extended, and spent scores
of hours in the consultation of old almanacs. I have never
verified the work since it was done, but I believe that in this
one respect, at least, it is beyond cavil. The two central
figures of the book were lifted straight from the story of
Marsh Hall, and Grace Forbeach gave her quota to the
narrative.

I had completed the first volume when I received a
commission to go out as special correspondent to the Russo-
Turkish war. I left the MS. behind me, and for many months
the scheme was banished from my mind. I went through
those cities of the dead, Kesanlik, Calofar, Carlova, and Sopot.
I watched the long-drawn artillery duel at the Shipka Pass,
made the dreary month-long march in the rainy season from
Orkhanie to Plevna, with the army of reinforcement, under
Chefket Pasha and Chakir Pasha, lived in the besieged town
until Osman drove away all foreign visitors, and sent out his
wounded to sow the whole melancholy road with corpses. I
put up on the heights of Tashkesen, and saw the stubborn
defence of Mehemet Ali, and there was pounced upon by the
Turkish authorities for a too faithful dealing with the story of
the horrors of the war, and was deported to Constantinople.
I had originally gone out for an American journal at the
instance of a gentleman who exceeded his instructions in
despatching me, and I was left high and dry in the Turkish
capital without a penny and without a friend. But work of
the kind I could do was wanted, and I was on the spot. I slid
into an engagement with the Scotsman, and then into another

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

199

with the Times. The late Mr. Macdonald, who was killed by
the Pigott forgeries, was then manager of the leading journal,
and offered me fresh work. I waited for it, and a year of wild
adventure in the face of war had given me such a taste for
that sort of existence that I let * A Life s Atonement slide,
and had no thought of taking it up again. A misunderstand
ing with the Times authori-

ties happily cleared up

years after left me in the

cold, and I was bound to

do something for a living.

The first volume of

A Life s Atonement

had been written in

the intervals of labour

in the Gallery of the

House of Commons,

and such work as an

active hack journalist

can find among the

magazines and the

weekly society papers.

I had been away

a whole year, and

everywhere my place

was filled. It was

obviously no use to a

man in want of ready

money to undertake the completion of a three-volume novel

of which only one volume was written, and so I betook myself

to the writing of short stories. The very first of these was

blessed by a lucky accident. Mr. George Augustus Sala had

begun to write for The Gentleman s Magazine a story called,

if I remember rightly, Dr. Cupid. Sala was suddenly

summoned by the proprietors of the Daily TelegrapJi to

CONSULTING OLD
ALMANACS

200 MY FIRST BOOK

undertake one of his innumerable journeys, and the copy of
the second instalment of his story reached the editor too late
for publication. Just when the publishers of the Gentleman s
were at a loss for suitable copy, my MS. of * An Old
Meerschaum reached them, and, to my delighted surprise, I
received proofs almost by return of post. The story appeared,
with an illustration by Arthur Hopkins, and, about a week
later, there came to me, through Messrs. Chatto & Windus,
a letter from Robert Chambers : Sir, I have read, with
unusual pleasure and interest, in this month s Gentleman s
Magazine, a story from your pen entitled "An Old Meer
schaum." If you have a novel on hand, or in preparation, I
should be glad to see it. In the meantime, a short story,
not much longer than " An Old Meerschaum," would be
gladly considered by Yours very truly, ROBERT CHAMBERS.
P.S. We publish no authors names, but we pay handsomely.
This letter brought back to mind at once the neglected Life s
Atonement, but I was uncertain as to the whereabouts of the
MS. I searched everywhere amongst my own belongings in
vain, but it suddenly occurred to me that I had left it in
charge of a passing acquaintance of mine, who had taken up
the unexpired lease of my chambers in Gray s Inn at the
time of my departure for the seat of war. I jumped into a
cab, and drove off in search of my property. The shabby old
laundress who had made my bed and served my breakfast
was pottering about the rooms. She remembered me perfectly
well, of course, but could not remember that I had left any
thing behind me when I went away. I talked of manuscript,
and she recalled doubtfully a quantity of waste paper, of the
final destination of which she knew nothing. I began to
think it extremely improbable that I should ever recover a
line of the missing novel, when she opened a cupboard and
drew from it a brown- paper parcel, and, opening it, displayed
to me the MS. of which I was in search. I took it home and
read it through with infinite misgiving. The enthusiasm with

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

201

which I had begun the work had long since had time
to pall, and the whole thing looked weary, flat, stale, and
unprofitable. For one thing, I had adopted the abominable
expedient of writing in the present tense so far as the auto
biographical portion of the work was concerned, and, in the

interval which had gone by, my
taste had, I suppose, undergone
an unconscious correction. It was
a dull business, but, despondent

SHE DREW FROM IT A BROWX-PAPER
PARCEL

as I was, I found the heart to rewrite those chapters.
Charles Reade describes the task 1 of writing out one s work
a second time as nauseous/ and I confess that I am with
him with all my heart. It is a misery which I have
never since, in all my work, imposed upon myself. At that
time I counted amongst my friends an eminent novelist, on
whose critical faculty and honesty I knew I could place the

202

MY FIRST BOOK

most absolute reliance. I submitted my revised first volume
to his judgment, and was surprised to learn that he thought
highly of it. His judgment gave me new courage, and I sent
the copy in to Chambers. After a delay of a week or two, I
received a letter which gave me, I think, a keener delight

than has ever touched me at
the receipt of any other com
munication. If, wrote Robert
Chambers, the rest is as good
as the first volume, I shall ac
cept the book with pleasure.
Our price for the serial use
will be 25&lt;D/., of which we will
pay ioo/. on receipt of com
pleted MS. ; the remaining
I5O/. will be paid on the pub
lication of the first monthly
number. I had been out of
harness for so long a time,
and had been, by desultory
work, able to earn so little,
that this letter seemed to

IF THERE

HAD BEEN

NO DAVID open a sort of Eldorado to my

COPPER-
FIELD

gaze,
which

It was not that alone
made it so agreeable
to receive. It opened the
way to an honourable ambition which I
had long nourished, and I slaved away at the
remaining two volumes with an enthusiasm
which I have never been able to revive. There
are two or three people still extant who know in part the priva
tions I endured whilst the book was being finished. I set every
thing else on one side for it, incautiously enough, and for two
months I did not earn a penny by other means. The most
trying accident of all the time was the tobacco famine which

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY

203

set in towards the close of the third volume, but, in spite of all
obstacles, the book was finished. I worked all night at the
final chapter, and wrote Finis somewhere about five o clock
on a summer morning. I shall never forget the solemn
exultation with which I laid down my pen
and looked from the window of the little
room in which I had been working over the
golden splendour of the gorse-covered com
mon of Ditton Marsh. All my original
enthusiasm had revived, and in the course of
my lonely labours had grown to
a white heat. I solemnly be
lieved at that moment that I
had written a great book. I
suppose I may make
that confession now
without proclaiming
myself a fool. I really
and seriously believed
that the work I had
just finished was original in con
ception, style, and character. No
reviewer ever taunted me with
the fact, but the truth is that A
Life s Atonement is a very
curious instance of unconscious
plagiarism. It is quite evident
to my mind now that if there
had been no * David Copperfield
there would have been no Life s

Atonement. My Gascoigne is Steerforth, my John Campbell
is David, John s aunt is Miss Betsy Trotwood, Sally Troman
is Peggotty. The very separation of the friends, though brought
about by a different cause, is a reminiscence. I was utterly
unconscious of these facts, and, remembering how devotedly

THE STOCK WAS TRANSFERRED

204

MY FIRST BOOK

and honestly I worked, how resolute I was to put my best of
observation and invention into the story, I have ever since felt
chary of entertaining a charge of plagiarism against anybody.
There are, of course, flagrant and obvious cases, but I believe
that in nine instances out of ten the supposed criminal has
worked as I did, having so completely absorbed and digested
in childhood the work of an admired master that he has come
to feel that work as an actual portion of himself. * A Life s
Atonement ran its course through Chamber s*s Journal in due
time, and was received with favour. Messrs. Griffith &
Farran undertook its publication in book form, but one or

SOME NOVELS

two accidental circumstances forbade it to prosper in their
hands. To begin with, the firm at that time had only newly
decided on publishing novels at all, and a work under such a
title, and issued by such a house, was naturally supposed to
have a theological tendency. Then again, in the very week in
which my book saw the light, c Lothair appeared, and for the
time being swamped everything. All the world read * Lothair/
all the world talked about it, and all the newspapers and
reviews dealt with it, to the exclusion of the products of the
smaller fry. Later on, A Life s Atonement was handsomely
reviewed, and was indeed, as I am disposed to think, praised

DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY 205

a good deal beyond its merits. But it lay a dead weight on
the hands of its original publishers, until Messrs. Chatto &
Windus expressed a wish to incorporate it in their Piccadilly
Series. The negotiations between the two houses were easily
completed, the stock was transferred from one establishment
to the other, the volumes were stripped of their old binding
and dressed anew, and with this novel impetus the story
reached a second edition in three-volume form. It brought
me almost immediately two commissions, and by the time
that they were completed I had grown into a professional
novel-writer.

206 MY FIRST BOOK

A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS
BY MARIE CORELLI

IT is an unromantic thing for an author to have had no
literary vicissitudes. One cannot expect to be con
sidered interesting, unless one has come up to London with
the proverbial solitary shilling, and gone about hungry and
footsore, begging from one hard-hearted publisher s house to
another with one s perpetually rejected manuscript under
one s arm. One ought to have consumed the midnight oil ;
to have coined one s heart s blood (to borrow the tragic
expression of a contemporary gentleman-novelist) ; to have
sacrificed one s self-respect by metaphorically crawling on
all-fours to the critical faculty ; and to have become aestheti
cally cadaverous and blear-eyed through the action of
inspired dyspepsia. Now, I am obliged to confess that I
have done none of these things, which, to quote the Prayer-
book, I ought to have done. I have had no difficulty in
making my career or winning my public. And I attribute
my good fortune to the simple fact that I have always tried
to write straight from my own heart to the hearts of others,
regardless of opinions and indifferent to results. My object
in writing has never been, and never will be, to concoct a
mere story which shall bring me in a certain amount of cash
or notoriety, but solely because I wish to say something
which, be it ill or well said, is the candid and independent
expression of a thought which I will have uttered at all
risks.

MARIE CORELLI 207

In this spirit I wrote my first book, * A Romance of Two
Worlds/ now in its seventh edition. It was the simply
worded narration of a singular psychical experience, and
included certain theories on religion which I, personally
speaking, accept and believe. I had no sort of literary pride
in my work whatsoever ; there was nothing of self in the wish
I had, that my ideas, such as they were, should reach the
public, for I had no particular need of money, and certainly
no hankering after fame. When the book was written I
doubted whether it would ever find a publisher, though I
determined to try and launch it if possible. My notion was
to offer it to Arrowsmith as a shilling railway volume, under
the title Lifted Up. But in the interim, as a kind of test of
its merit or demerit, I sent the MS. to Mr. George Bentley,
head of the long-established and famous Bentley publishing
firm. It ran the gauntlet of his readers first, and they all
advised its summary rejection. Among these readers at
that time was Mr. Hall Caine. His strictures on my work
were peculiarly bitter, though, strange to relate, he afterwards
forgot the nature of his own report. For, on being intro
duced to me at a ball given by Miss Eastlake, when my name
was made and my success assured, he blandly remarked,
before a select circle of interested auditors, that he * had had
the pleasure of recommending my first book to Mr. Bentley!
Comment on this were needless and unkind : he tells stories
so admirably that I readily excuse him for his slip of
memory, and accept the whole incident as a delightful
example of his inventive faculty.

His severe judgment pronounced upon me, combined
with similar, but perhaps milder, severity on the part of the
other readers, had, however, an unexpected result. Mr.
George Bentley, moved by curiosity, and possibly by com
passion for the impending fate of a young woman so sat
upon by his selected censors, decided to read my MS. himself.
Happily for me, the consequence of his unprejudiced and

208 MY FIRST BOOK

impartial perusal was acceptance ; and I still keep the kind
and encouraging letter he wrote to me at the time, informing
me of his decision, and stating the terms of his offer. These
terms were, a sum down for one year s rights, the copyright
of the work to remain my own entire property. I did not
then understand what an advantage this retaining of my
copyright in my own possession was to prove to me, finan
cially speaking ; but I am willing to do Mr. Bentley the
full justice of supposing that he foresaw the success of the
book ; and that, therefore, his action in leaving me the sole
owner of my then very small literary estate redounds very
much to his credit, and is an evident proof amongst many
of his manifest honour and integrity. Of course, the copy
right of an unsuccessful book is valueless ; but my Romance
was destined to prove a sound investment, though I never
dreamed that it would be so. Glad of my chance of reaching
the public with what I had to say, I gratefully closed with
Mr. Bentley s proposal. He considered the title Lifted Up
as lacking attractiveness ; it was therefore discarded, and Mr.
Eric Mackay, the poet, gave the book its present name, A
Romance of Two Worlds.

Once published, the career of the Romance became
singular, and totally apart from that of any other so-called
* novel. It only received four reviews, all brief and distinctly
unfavourable. The one which appeared in the dignified
Morning Post is a fair sample of the rest. I keep it by me
preciously, because it serves as a wholesome tonic to my
mind, and proves to me that when a leading journal can so
review a book, one need fear nothing from the literary
knowledge, acumen, or discernment of reviewers. I quote it
verbatim : Miss Corelli would have been better advised had
she embodied her ridiculous ideas in a sixpenny pamphlet.
The names of Heliobas and Zara are alone sufficient indications
of the dulness of this book. This was all. No explanation
was vouchsafed as to why my ideas were ridiculous, though

MARIE CORELLI

209

such explanation was justly due ; nor did the reviewer state
why he (or she) found the * names of characters sufficient
indications of dulness, a curious discovery which I believe is
unique. However, the so-called critique did one good
thing ; it moved me to sincere laughter, and showed me what
I might expect from the critical brethren in these days days
which can no longer boast of a Lord Macaulay, a bri lliant, if
bitter, Jeffrey, or a generous Sir Walter Scott.

THE DRAWING-ROOM

To resume : the four notices having been grudgingly
bestowed, the Press dropped the Romance/ considering, no
doubt, that it was quashed/ and would die the usual death of
women s novels/ as they are contemptuously called, in the
prescribed year. But it did nothing of the sort. Ignored by
the Press, it attracted the public. Letters concerning it and

1 This and the succeeding illustrations are from photographs by Adrian.

210 MY FIRST BOOK

its theories began to pour in from strangers in all parts of the
United Kingdom ; and at the end of its twelvemonth s run
in the circulating libraries Mr. Bentley brought it out in one
volume in his Favorite series. Then it started off at full
gallop the great majority got at it, and, what is more, kept
at it. It was * pirated in America ; chosen out and liberally
paid for by Baron Tauchnitz for the Tauchnitz series ;
translated into various languages on the Continent, and
became a topic of social discussion. A perfect ocean of
correspondence flowed in upon me from India, Africa,
Australia, and America, and at this very time I count through
correspondence a host of friends in all parts of the world
whom I do not suppose I shall ever see ; friends who even
carry their enthusiasm so far as to place their houses at my
disposal for a year or two years and surely the force of
hospitality can no further go ! With all these attentions, I
began to find out the advantage my practical publisher had
given me in the retaining of my copyright ; my * royalties
commenced, increased, and accumulated with every quarter,
and at the present moment continue still to accumulate, so
much so, that the Romance of Two Worlds alone, apart
from all my other works, is the source of a very pleasant
income. And I have great satisfaction in knowing that its
prolonged success is not due to any influence save that which
is contained within itself. It certainly has not been helped
on by the Press, for since I began my career six years ago, I
have never had a word of open encouragement or kindness
from any leading English critic. The only real reviews 1
ever received worthy of the name appeared in the Spectator
and the Literary World. The first was on my book Ardath :
The Story of a Dead Self, and in this the over-abundant
praise in the beginning was all smothered by the unmitigated
abuse at the end. The second in the Literary World was
eminently generous ; it dealt with my last book, The Soul of
Lilith. So taken aback was I with surprise at receiving an

MARIE CORELLI

211

all-through kindly, as well as scholarly, criticism from any
quarter of the Press, that, though I knew nothing about the
Literary World, I wrote a letter of thanks to my unknown
reviewer, begging the editor to forward it in the right direction.
He did so, and my generous critic turned out to be a woman
a literary woman, too, fighting a hard fight herself, who
would have had an excuse to slate me as an unrequired rival

in literature had she so chosen, but who, instead of this easy
course, adopted the more difficult path of justice and un
selfishness.

After the Romance of Two Worlds I wrote Vendetta ;
then followed Thelma, and then Ardath : The Story of a
Dead Self, which, among other purely personal rewards,
brought me a charming autograph letter from the late Lord
Tennyson, full of valuable encouragement. Then followed

P 2

212 MY FIRST BOOK

Wormwood : A Drama of Paris now in its fifth edition ;
Ardath and Thelma being in their seventh editions. My
publishers seldom advertise the number of my editions, which
is, I suppose, the reason why the continuous run of the
books escapes the Press comment of the great success
supposed to attend various other novels which only attain to
third or fourth editions. The Soul of Lilith, published only
last year, ran through four editions in three-volume form ; it
is issued now in one volume by Messrs. Bentley, to whom,
however, I have not offered any new work. A change of
publishers is sometimes advisable ; but I have a sincere
personal liking for Mr. George Bentley, who is himself an
author of distinct originality and ability, though his literary
gifts are only known to his own private circle. His book of
essays, entitled After Business/ is a delightful volume, full
of point and brilliancy, two specially admirable papers being
those on Villon and Carlyle, while it would be difficult to
discover a more taking prose bit than the concluding
chapter, Under an Old Poplar/

A very foolish and erroneous rumour has of late been
circulated concerning me, asserting that I owe a great measure
of my literary success to the kindly recognition and interest
of the Queen. I take the present opportunity to clear up this
perverse misunderstanding. My books have been running
successfully through several editions for six years, and the
much-commented-upon presentation of a complete set of them
to Her Majesty took place only last year. If it were possible
to regret the honour of the Queen s acceptance of these
volumes, I should certainly have cause to do so, as the
extraordinary spite and malice that has since been poured on
my unoffending head has shown me a very bad side of human
nature, which I am sorry to have seen. There is very little
cause to envy me in this matter. I have but received the
courteously formal thanks of the Queen and the Empress
Frederick, conveyed through the medium of their ladies-in-

MARIE CORELLI

213

waiting, for the special copies of the books their Majesties were
pleased to admire ; yet for this simple and quite ordinary
honour I have been subjected to such forms of gratuitous abuse
as I did not think possible to a just and noble English Press.
I have often wondered why I was not equally assailed when
the Queen of Italy, not content with merely accepting a copy
of the Romance of Two Worlds, sent me an autograph

THE STUDY

portrait of herself, accompanied by a charming letter, a souvenir
which I value, not at all because the sender is a queen, but
because she is a sweet and noble woman whose every action
is marked by grace and unselfishness, and who has deservedly
won the title given her by her people, the blessing of Italy.
I repeat, I owe nothing whatever of my popularity, such as it
is, to any royal notice or favour, though I am naturally glad
to have been kindly recognised and encouraged by those

2i 4 MY FIRST BOOK

throned powers who command the nation s utmost love and
loyalty. But my appeal for a hearing was first made to the
great public, and the public responded ; moreover, they do
still respond with so much heartiness and goodwill, that I
should be the most ungrateful scribbler that ever scribbled if
I did not (despite Press drubbings and the amusing total
ignoring of my very existence by certain cliquey literary
magazines) take up my courage in both hands, as the French
say, and march steadily onward to such generous cheering and
encouragement.

I am told by an eminent literary authority that critics are
* down upon me because I write about the supernatural. I
do not entirely believe the eminent literary authority, inasmuch
as I have not always written about the supernatural. Neither
Vendetta, nor * Thelma/ nor Wormwood is supernatural.
But, says the eminent literary authority, why write at all, at any
time, about the supernatural ? Why ? Because I feel the
existence of the supernatural, and feeling it, I must speak of
it. I understand that the religion we profess to follow ema
nates from the supernatural. And I presume that churches
exist for the solemn worship of the supernatural. Wherefore,
if the supernatural be thus universally acknowledged as a
guide for thought and morals, I fail to see why I, and as many
others as choose to do so, should not write on the subject. An
author has quite as much right to characterise angels and
saints in his or her pages as a painter has to depict them on
his canvas. And I do not keep my belief in the supernatural
as a sort of special mood to be entered into on Sundays only ;
it accompanies me in my daily round, and helps me along in
all my business. But I distinctly wish it to be understood
that I am neither a Spiritualist nor a * Theosophist. I am
not a strong-minded woman, with egotistical ideas of a
mission. I have no other supernatural belief than that which
is taught by the Founder of our Faith, and this can never be
shaken from me or sneered down. If critics object to my

MARIE CORELLI

2I 5

dealing with this in my books, they are very welcome to do so ;
their objections will not turn me from \vhat they are pleased
to consider the error of my ways. I know that unrelieved
naturalism and atheism are much more admired subjects with
the critical faculty ; but the public differ from this view. The
public, being in the main healthy-minded and honest, do not
care for positivism and pessimism. They like to believe in
something better than themselves ; they like to rest on the
ennobling idea that there is a great loving Maker of this
splendid Universe, and they have no lasting affection for any
author whose tendency and teaching is to despise the hope of
heaven, and reason away the existence of God. It is very
clever, no doubt, and very brilliant to deny the Creator ; it is
as if a monkey should, while being caged and fed by man, deny
man s existence. Such a circumstance would make us laugh,
of course ; we should think it uncommonly smart of the
monkey. But we should not take his statement for a fact all
the same.

Of the mechanical part of my \vork there is little to say.
I write every day from ten in the morning till two in the
afternoon, alone and undisturbed, save for the tinpot tinkling
of unmusical neighbours pianos, and the perpetual organ-
grinding which is freely permitted to interfere ad libitum with
the quiet and comfort of all the patient brain-workers who pay
rent and taxes in this great and glorious metropolis. I gene
rally scribble off the first rough draft of a story very rapidly in
pencil ; then I copy it out in pen and ink, chapter by chapter,
with fastidious care, not only because I like a neat manuscript,
but because I think everything that is worth doing at all is
worth doing well ; and I do not see why my publishers should
have to pay for more printers errors than the printers them
selves make necessary. I find, too, that in the gradual process
of copying by hand, the original draft, like a painter s first
sketch, gets improved and enlarged. No one sees my manu
script before it goes to press, as I am now able to refuse to

216 M* FIRST BOOK

submit my work to the judgment of readers. These worthies
treated me roughly in the beginning, but they will never have
the chance again. I correct my proofs myself, though I regret
to say my instructions and revisions are not always followed.
In my novel * Wormwood I corrected the French article le
chose to la chose three times, but apparently the printers
preferred their own French, for it is still le chose in the
Favorite edition, and the error is stereotyped. In accord
ance with the arrangement made by Mr. George Bentley for
my first book, I retain to myself sole possession of all my
copyrights, and as all my novels are successes, the financial
^results are distinctly pleasing. America, of course, is always
a thorn in the side of an author. The Romance, Vendetta,
Thelma and Ardath were all * pirated over there before
the passing of the American Copyright Act, it being appa
rently out of Messrs. Bentley & Son s line to make even an
attempt to protect my rights. After the Act was passed, I
was paid a sum for Wormwood, and a larger sum for The
Soul of Lilith/ but, as everyone knows, the usual honorarium
offered by American publishers for the rights of a successful
English novel are totally inadequate to the sales they are able
to command. American critics, however, have been very good
to me. They have at least read my books before starting to
review them, which is a great thing. I have always kept my
Tauchnitz rights, and very pleasant have all my dealings
been with the courteous and generous Baron. All wanderers
on the Continent love the * Tauchnitz volumes their neat
ness, handy form, and remarkably clear type give them
precedence over every other foreign series. Baron Tauchnitz
pays his authors excellently well, and takes a literary as w r ell
as commercial interest in their fortunes.

Perhaps one of the pleasantest things connected with my
1 success is the popularity I have won in many quarters of
the Continent without any exertion on my own part. My
name is as well known in Germany as anywhere, while in

* \ ^ N

^ 4 ^ ^

^ o. \^ X

T ^-,
"^ *. I 4

a ^
&lt; |

& ^

c/:

&lt;_
3*

S ^5

218 MY FIRST BOOK

Sweden they have been good enough to elect me as one of
their favourite authors, thanks to the admirable translations
made of all my books by Miss Emilie Kullmann, of Stock
holm, whose energy did not desert her even when she had so
difficult a task to perform as the rendering of Ardath into
Swedish. In Italy and Spain Vendetta/ translated into the
languages of those countries, is popular. Madame Emma
Guarducci-Giaconi is the translator of Wormwood into
Italian, and her almost literal and perfect rendering has been
running as the fenilleton in the Florentine journal, La Nazione,
under the title L Alcoolismo : Un Dramma di Parigi. The
* Romance of Two Worlds is to be had in Russian, so I
am told ; and it will shortly be published at Athens, rendered
into modern Greek. While engaged in writing this article, I
have received a letter asking for permission to translate this
same Romance into one of the dialects of North-west India,
a request I shall very readily grant. In its Eastern dress the
book will, I understand, be published at Lucknow. I may
here state that I gain no financial advantage from these
numerous translations, nor do I seek any. Sometimes the
translators do not even ask my permission to translate, but
content themselves with sending me a copy of the book when
completed, without any word of explanation.

And now to wind up ; if I have made a name, if I have
made a career, as it seems I have, I have only one piece of
pride connected with it. Not pride in my work, for no one
with a grain of sense or modesty would, in these days, dare
to consider his or her literary efforts of much worth, as com
pared with what has already been done by the past great
authors. My pride is simply this : that I have fought my
fight alone, and that I have no thanks to offer to anyone,
save those legitimately due to the publisher who launched
my first book, but who, it must be remembered, would, as a
good business man, have unquestionably published nothing

MARIE CORELLI 219

else of mine had I been a failure. I count no friend on the
Press, and I owe no distinguished critic any debt of grati
tude. I have come, by happy chance, straight into close and
sympathetic union with my public, and attained to independence
and good fortune while still young and able to enjoy both.
An incomprehensibly successful novelist I was called last
summer by an irritated correspondent of Life, who chanced
to see me sharing in the full flow of pleasure and social
amusement during the season at Homburg. Well, if it be
so, this incomprehensible success has been attained, I
rejoice to say, without either log-roller or boom, and were
I of the old Greek faith, I should pour a libation to the gods
for giving me this victory. Certainly I used to hope for
what Britishers aptly call l fair play from the critics, but I
have ceased to expect that now. It is evidently a delight to
them to abuse me, else they would not go out of their way to
do it ; and I have no wish to interfere with either their copy
or their fun. The public are beyond them altogether. And
Literature is like that famous hill told of in the Arabian
Nights, where threatening anonymous voices shouted the
most deadly insults and injuries to anyone who attempted to
climb it. If the adventurer turned back to listen, he was
instantly changed into stone ; but if he pressed boldly on, he
reached the summit and found magic talismans. Now I am
only at the commencement of the journey, and am ascending
the hill with a light heart and in good humour. I hear the
taunting voices on all sides, but I do not stop to listen, nor
have I once turned back. My eyes are fixed on the distant
peak of the mountain, and my mind is set on arriving there
if possible. My ambition may be too great, and I may
never arrive. That is a matter for the fates to settle. But,
in the meanwhile, I enjoy climbing. I have nothing to
grumble about. I consider Literature the noblest Art in the
world, and have no complaint whatever to urge against it as

220

MY FIRST BOOK

a profession. Its rewards, whether great or small, are suffi
cient for me, inasmuch as I love my work, and love makes all
things easy.

NOTE. Since writing the above I have been asked to state whether, in my
arrangements for publishing, I employ a literary agent or use a type-writer.
I do not. With regard to the first part of the query, I consider that authors, like
other people, should learn how to manage their own affairs themselves, and that
when they take a paid agent into their confidence, they make open confession of
their business incapacity, and voluntarily elect to remain in foolish ignorance of
the practical part of their profession. Secondly, I dislike type-writing, and prefer
to make my own MS. distinctly legible. It takes no more time to write clearly
than in spidery hieroglyphics, and a slovenly scribble is no proof of cleverness,
but rather of carelessness and a tendency to scamp work.

22 I

ON THE STAGE AND OFF
BY JEROME K. JEROME

THE story of one s first book I take to be the last
chapter of one s literary romance. The long wooing
is over. The ardent young author has at last won his coy
public. The good publisher has joined their hands. The
merry critics, invited to the feast of reason, have blessed the
union, and thrown the rice and slippers occasionally other
things. The bridegroom sits alone with his bride, none
between them, and ponders.

The fierce struggle, with its wild hopes and fears, its
heart-leapings and heart-achings, its rose-pink dawns of end
less promise, its grey twilights of despair, its passion and its
pain, lies behind. Before him stretches the long, level road
of daily doing. Will he please her to all time ? Will she
always be sweet and gracious to him ? Will she never tire
of him ? The echo of the wedding-bells floats faintly through
the darkening room. The fair forms of half-forgotten dreams
rise up around him. He springs to his feet with a slight
shiver, and rings for the lamps to be lighted.

Ah ! that first book we meant to write ! How it pressed
forward an oriflamme of joy, through all ranks and peoples ;
how the world rang with the wonder of it ! How men and
women laughed and cried over it ! From every page there
leaped to light a new idea. Its every paragraph scintillated
with fresh wit, deep thought, and new humour. And, ye

222

MY FIRST BOOK

gods ! how the critics praised it ! How they rejoiced over the
discovery of the new genius ! How ably they pointed out to
the reading public its manifold merits, its marvellous charm !
Aye, it was a great work, that book we wrote as we strode
laughing through the silent streets, beneath the little stars.

And, heigho ! what a poor little thing it was, the book
that we did write ! I draw him from his shelf (he is of a
faint pink colour, as though blushing all over for his sins),
and stand him up before me on the desk. Jerome K.
Jerome the K very big, followed by a small J, so that in

many quarters the author
v . " is spoken of as Jerome

Kjerome/ a name that in
S certain smoke-laden circles
still clings to me On the
Stage and Off: The Brief
Career of a would-be Actor.
One Shilling.

I suppose I ought to
be ashamed of him, but
how can I be ? Is he not
my first-born ? Did he
not come to me in the
days of weariness, making
Do I not love him the more for

MY FIRST-BORN

my heart glad and proud ?
his shortcomings ?

Somehow, as I stare at him in this dim candlelight, he
seems to take odd shape. Slowly he grows into a little pink
imp, sitting cross-legged among the litter of my books and
papers, squinting at me (I think the squint is caused by the
big * K ), and I find myself chatting with him.

It is an interesting conversation to me, for it is entirely
about myself, and I do nearly all the talking, he merely
throwing in an occasional necessary reply, or recalling to my
memory a forgotten name or face.

224 MY FIRST BOOK

We chat of the little room in Whitfield Street, off the
Tottenham Court Road, where he was born ; of our depressing,
meek-eyed old landlady, and of how, one day, during the
course of chance talk, it came out that she, in the far back
days of her youth, had been an actress, winning stage love
and breaking stage hearts with the best of them ; of how the
faded face would light up as, standing with the tea-tray in
her hands, she would tell us of her triumphs, and repeat to
us her * Press Notices/ which she had learned by heart ; and
of how from her we heard not a few facts and stories useful
to us. We talk of the footsteps that of evenings would
climb the creaking stairs and enter at our door ; of George,
who always believed in us (God bless him !), though he could
never explain why ; of practical Charley, who thought we
should do better if we left literature alone and stuck to
work. Ah ! well, he meant kindly, and there be many who
would that he had prevailed. We remember the difficulties
we had to contend with ; the couple in the room below, who
would come in and go to bed at twelve, and lie there,
quarrelling loudly, until sleep overcame them about two,
driving our tender and philosophical sentences entirely out
of our head ; of the asthmatical old law-writer, whose never-
ceasing cough troubled us greatly (maybe, it troubled him
also, but I fear we did not consider that) ; of the rickety
table that wobbled as we wrote, and that, whenever in a
forgetful moment we leant upon it, gently but firmly
collapsed.

Yes, I said to the little pink imp ; as a study the room
had its drawbacks, but we lived some grand hours there, didn t
we? We laughed and sang there, and the songs we chose
breathed ever of hope and victory, and so loudly we sang
them we might have been modern Joshuas, thinking to cap
ture a city with our breath.

And then that wonderful view we used to see from its
dingy window panes that golden country that lay stretched

JEROME K. JEROME 225

before us, beyond the thousand chimney pots, above the
drifting smoke, above the creeping fog do you remember
that ?

It was worth living in that cramped room, worth sleeping
on that knobbly bed, to gain an occasional glimpse of that
shining land, with its marble palaces, where one day we
should enter, an honoured guest ; its wide market-places,
where the people thronged to listen to our words. I have
climbed many stairs, peered through many windows in this
London town since then, but never have I seen that view
again. Yet, from somewhere in our midst, it must be visible
for friends of mine, as we have sat alone, and the talk has
sunk into low tones, broken by long silences, have told me
that they, too, have looked upon those same glittering towers
and streets. But the odd thing is that none of us has seen
them since he was a very young man. So, maybe, it is only
that the country is a long way off, and that our eyes have
grown dimmer as we have grown older.

And who was that old fellow that helped us so much ?
I ask of my little pink friend ; you remember him surely a
very ancient fellow, the oldest actor on the boards he always
boasted himself had played with Edmund Kean and Mac-
read} . I used to put you in my pocket of a night and meet
him outside the stage door of the Princess s ; and we would
adjourn to a little tavern in old Oxford Market to talk you
over, and he would tell me anecdotes and stories to put in
you.

You mean Johnson, says the pink imp ; J. B. Johnson.
He was with you in your first engagement at Astley s, under
Murray Wood and Virginia Blackwood. He and you were
the High Priests in " Mazeppa," if you remember, and had to
carry Lisa Weber across the stage, you taking her head and
he her heels. Do you recollect what he said to her, on the
first night, as you were both staggering towards the couch?
" Well, I ve played with Fanny Kemble, Cushman, Glyn, and

~~~
UNIVERSITY

226

MY FIRST BOOK

all of them, but hang me, my dear, if you ain t the heaviest
lead I ve ever supported."

( That s the old fellow, I reply ; I owe a good deal to
him, and so do you. [ used to read bits of you to him in a
whisper as we stood in the bar ; and he always had one

HE AND YOU HAD TO CARRY LISA WEBER ACROSS THE STAGE 5

formula of praise for you : " It s damned clever, young un ;
damned clever. I shouldn t have thought it of you."

And that reminds me, I continue I hesitate a little here,
for I fear what I am about to say may offend him * what
have you done to yourself since I wrote you ? I was
looking you over the other day, and really I could scarcely
recognise you. You were full of brilliancy and originality

JEROME K. JEROME

227

when you were in manuscript. What have you done with

it all?

By some mysterious process he contrives to introduce an

extra twist into the squint with which he is regarding me, but

makes no reply, and I continue :

Take, for example, that gem I lighted upon one drizzly

night in Portland Place. I

remember the circumstance ^h^

distinctly. I had been walk- * ^

ing the deserted streets, work
ing at you ; my note-book in

one hand and a pencil in the

other. I was coming home

through Portland Place, when

suddenly, just beyond the

third lamp-post from the

Crescent, there flashed into
my brain a thought so ori
ginal, so deep, so true, that
involuntarily I exclaimed :
;&lt; My God, what a grand idea ! "
and a coffee-stall keeper, pass
ing with his barrow just at
that moment, sang out : " Tell
it us, guv nor. There ain t
many knocking about."

I took no notice of the THA T BRILLIANT IDEA

man, but hurried on to the

next lamp-post to jot down that brilliant idea before I should
forget it ; and the moment I reached home I pulled you out of
your drawer and copied it out on to your pages, and sat long
staring at it, wondering what the world would say when it
came to read it. Altogether I must have put into you nearly
a dozen startlingly original thoughts. \Vhat have you done
with them ? They are certainly not there now.

228 MY FIXST BOOK

Still he keeps silence, and I wax indignant at the evident
amusement with which he regards my accusation.

1 And the bright wit, the rollicking humour with which I
made your pages sparkle, where are they ? I ask him, re
proachfully ; those epigrammatic flashes that, when struck,
illumined the little room with a blaze of sudden light, showing
each cobweb in its dusty corner, and dying out, leaving my
dazzled eyes groping for the lamp ; those grand jokes at which
I myself, as I made them, laughed till the rickety iron bed
stead beneath me shook in sympathy with harsh metallic
laughter ; where are they, my friend ? I have read you
through, page by page, and the thoughts in you are thoughts
that the world has grown tired of thinking ; at your wit one
smiles, thinking that anyone could think it wit ; and your
humour your severest critic could hardly accuse of being very
new. What has happened to you ? What wicked fairy has
bewitched you ? I poured gold into your lap, and you yield
me back only crumpled leaves.

With a jerk of his quaint legs he assumes a more upright
posture.

My dear Parent, he begins in a tone that at once reverses
our positions, so that he becomes the monitor and I the
wriggling admonished ; don t, I pray you, turn prig in your
old age ; don t sink into the " superior person " who mistakes
carping for criticism, and jeering for judgment. Any fool can
see faults, they lie on the surface. The merit of a thing is
hidden within it, and is visible only to insight. And there is
merit in me, in spite of your cheap sneers, sir. Maybe I do
not contain an original idea. Show me the book published
since the days of Caxton that does ! Are our young men, as
are the youth of China, to be forbidden to think, because
Confucius thought years ago ? The wit you appreciate now
needs to be more pungent than the wit that satisfied you at
twenty ; are you sure it is as wholesome ? You cannot smile
at humour you would once have laughed at ; is it you or the

JEROME K. JEROME 229

humour that has grown old and stale ? I am the work of a
very young man, who, writing of that which he knew and had
felt, put clown all things truthfully as they appeared to him,
in such way as seemed most natural to him, having no thought
of popular taste, standing in no fear of what critics might say.
Be sure that all your future books are as free from unworthy
aims.

Besides, he adds, after a short pause, during which I have
started to reply, but have turned back to think again, is not
this talk idle between you and me ? This apologetic attitude,
is it not the cant of the literary profession ? At the bottom
of your heart you are proud of me, as ever} author is of every
book he has written. Some of them he thinks better than
others ; but, as the Irishman said of whiskies, they are all
good. He sees their shortcomings. He dreams he could
have clone better ; but he is positive no one else could.

His little twinkling eyes look sternly at me, and, feeling
that the discussion is drifting into awkward channels, I hasten
to divert it, and we return to the chat about our early
experiences.

I ask him if he remembers those dreary days when,
written neatly in round hand on sermon paper, he journeyed a
ceaseless round from newspaper to newspaper, from magazine
to magazine, returning always soiled and limp to Whitfield
Street, still further darkening the ill-lit room as he entered.
Some would keep him for a month, making me indignant at
the waste of precious time. Others would send him back by
the next post, insulting me by their indecent haste. Many,
in returning him, would thank me for having given them the
privilege and pleasure of reading him, and I would curse
them for hypocrites. Others would reject him with no
pretence at regret whatever, and I would marvel at then
rudeness.

I hated the dismal little slavey who, twice a week, on an
average, would bring him up to me. If she smiled as she

230

MY FIRST BOOK

handed me the packet, I fancied she was jeering at me. If
she looked sad, as she more often did, poor little over
worked slut, I thought she was pitying me. I shunned the
postman if I saw him in the street, sure that he guessed my
shame.

Did anyone ever read you out of all those I sent you to ?
I ask him.

1 Do editors read manuscript by unknown authors ? he

asks me in return.

I fear not more than
they can help, I confess ;
they would have little else
to do.

* Oh/ he remarks de
murely, I thought I had
read that they did.

Very likely, I reply ;
I have also read that
theatrical managers read all
the plays sent to them, eager
to discover new talent. One
obtains much curious infor
mation by reading.

But somebody did read
me eventually, he reminds
me ; and liked me. Give credit where credit is due.

Ah, yes, I admit ; my good friend Aylmer Cowing
the " Walter Gordon " of the old Haymarket in Buckstone s
time, " Gentleman Gordon " as Charles Matthews nicknamed
him kindliest and most genial of men. Shall I ever forget
the brief note that came to me four days after I had posted
you to " The Editor Play " : " Dear Sir, I like your articles
very much. Can you call on me to-morrow morning before
twelve ? Yours truly, W. AYLMER COWING."

So success had come at last not the glorious goddess I

I HATED THE DISMAL LITTLE SLAVEY

JEROME K. JEROME

231

had pictured, but a quiet, pleasant-faced lady. I had imagined
the editor of Cornhill, or the Nineteenth Century, or The Illus
trated London Neivs writing me that my manuscript was the
most brilliant, witty, and powerful story he had ever read, and
enclosing me a cheque for two hundred guineas. The Play
was an almost unknown little penny weekly, * run by Mr.

THE STUDY
(From a photograph by F raddle &&amp;gt; Young)

Cowing who, though retired, could not bear to be altogether
unconnected with his beloved stage at a no inconsiderable
yearly loss. It could give me little fame and less wealth. But
a crust is a feast to a man who has grown weary of dreaming
dinners, and as I sat with that letter in my hand a mist rose
before my eyes, and I acted in a way that would read foolish
if written down.

232 MY FIRST BOOK

The next morning, at eleven, I stood beneath the porch
of 37 Victoria Road, Kensington, wishing I did not feel so
hot and nervous, and that I had not pulled the bell-rope quite
so vigorously. But when Mr. Gowing, in smoking-coat and
slippers, came forward and shook me by the hand, my
shyness left me. In his stud} , lined with theatrical books, we
sat and talked. Mr. Gowing s voice seemed the sweetest I
had ever listened to, for, with unprofessional frankness, it
sang the praises of my work. He, in his young acting days,
had been through the provincial mill, and found my pictures
true, and many of my pages seemed to him, so he said, as
good as Punch! (He meant it complimentary.) He explained
to me the position of his paper, and I agreed (only too gladly)
to give him the use of the book for nothing. As I was
leaving, however, he called me back and slipped a five-pound
note into my hand a different price from what friend A. P.
Watt charms out of proprietors pockets for me nowadays,
yet never since have I felt as rich as on that foggy November
morning when I walked across Kensington Gardens with that
bit of flimsy held tight in my left hand. I could not bear
the idea of spending it on mere mundane things. Now and
then, during the long days of apprenticeship, I drew it from
its hiding-place and looked at it, sorely tempted. But it
always went back, and later, when the luck began to turn, I
purchased with it, at a second-hand shop in Goodge Street,
an old Dutch bureau that I had long had my eye upon. It
is an inconvenient piece of furniture. One cannot stretch
one s legs as one sits writing at it, and if one rises suddenly it
knocks bad language into one s knees and out of one s mouth.
But one must pay for sentiment, as for other things.

In The Play the papers gained a fair amount of notice,
and won for me some kindly words ; notably, I remember,
from John Clayton and Palgrave Simpson. I thought that
in the glory of print they would readily find a publisher, but
I was mistaken. The same weary work lay before me, only

JEROME K. JEROME 233

no\v I had more heart in me, and, having wrestled once with
Fate and prevailed, stood less in fear of her.

Sometimes with a letter of introduction, sometimes without,
sometimes with a bold face, sometimes with a timid step, I
visited nearly ever} publisher in London. A few received me
kindly, others curtly, many not at all. From most of them
I gathered that the making of books was a pernicious and
unprofitable occupation. Some thought the work would
prove highly successful if I paid the expense of publication,
but were less impressed with its merits on my explaining
to them my financial position. All kept me waiting long
before seeing me, but made haste to say Good day to
me.

I suppose all young authors have had to go through the
same course. I sat one evening, a few months ago, with a
literary friend of mine. The talk turned upon early struggles,
and, with a laugh, he said : Do you know one of the foolish
things I love to do ? I like to go with a paper parcel under
my arm into some big publishing house, and to ask, in a low,
nervous voice, if Mr. So-and-so is disengaged. The clerk,
with a contemptuous glance towards me, says that he is not
sure, and asks if I have an appointment. " No," I reply ; " not
not exactly, but I think he will see me. It s a matter of
importance. I shall not detain him a minute."

The clerk goes on with his writing, and I stand waiting.
At the end of about five minutes, he, without looking up, says
curtly, " What name ? " and I hand him my card.

Up to that point, I have imagined myself a young man
again, but there the fancy is dispelled. The man glances at
the card, and then takes a sharp look at me. " I beg your
pardon, sir," he says, " will you take a seat in here for a
moment?" In a few seconds he flies back again with "Will
you kindly step this way, sir?" As I follow him upstairs I
catch a glimpse of somebody being hurriedly bustled out of
the private office, and the great man himself comes to the

234

MY FIRST BOOK

door, smiling, and as I take his outstretched hand I am
remembering other times that he has forgotten.

In the end to make a long story short, as the saying is

I AM REMEMliERING

Mr. Tuer, of Ye
Leadenhall Press/
urged thereto by
a mutual friend,
read the book,
and, I presume,
found merit in it,
for he offered to
publish it if I
would make him
a free gift of
the copyright. I
thought the terms
hard at the time

(though in my eagerness to see my name upon the cover of a
real book I quickly agreed to them), but with experience; I am
inclined to admit that the bargain was a fair one. The English

JEROME K. JEROME 235

arc not a book-buying people. Out of every hundred publi
cations hardly more than one obtains a sale of over a
thousand, and, in the case of an unknown writer, with no
personal friends upon the Press, it is surprising how few
copies sometimes can be sold.

I am happy to think that in this instance, however, nobody
suffered. The book was, as the phrase goes, well received by
the public, who were possibly attracted to it by its subject, a
perennially popular one. Some of the papers praised it, others
dismissed it as utter rubbish ; and then, fifteen months later,
on reviewing my next book, regretted that a young man who
had written such a capital first book should have followed it
up by so wretched a second.

One writer the greatest enemy I have ever had, though
I exonerate him of all but thoughtlessness wrote me down
a humourist, which term of reproach (as it is considered to
be in Merrie England) has clung to me ever since, so that
now, if I pen a pathetic story, the reviewer calls it depressing
humour, and if I tell a tragic story, he says it is false humour/
and, quoting the dying speech of the broken-hearted heroine,
indignantly demands to know where he is supposed to laugh.
I am firmly persuaded that if I committed a murder half the
book reviewers would allude to it as a melancholy example
of the extreme lengths to which the new humour had de
scended.

1 Once a humourist, always a humourist, is the reviewer s
motto.

And all things allowed for the unenthusiastic publisher,
the insufficiently appreciative public, the wicked critic, says
my little pink friend, breaking his somewhat long silence,
what do you think of literature as a profession ?

I take some time to reply, for I wish to get down to what
I really think, not stopping, as one generally does, at what
one thinks one ought to think.

I think, I begin, at length, that it depends upon the

236 MY Fl&ST BOOK

literary man. If a man think to use literature merely as a
means to fame and fortune, then he will find it an extremely
unsatisfactory profession, and he would have done better to
take up politics or company promoting. If he trouble himself
about his status and position therein, loving the uppermost
tables at feasts, and the chief seats in public places, and
greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Master,
Master, then he will find it a profession fuller than most pro
fessions of petty jealousy, of little spite, of foolish hating and
foolish log-rolling, of feminine narrowness and childish queru-
lousness. If he think too much of his prices per thousand
words, he will find it a degrading profession ; as the solicitor,
thinking only of his bills-of-cost, will find the law degrading ;
as the doctor, working only for two-guinea fees, will find
medicine degrading ; as the priest, with his eyes ever fixed
on the bishop s mitre, will find Christianity degrading.

But if he love his work for the work s sake, if he remain
child enough to be fascinated with his own fancies, to laugh
at his own jests, to grieve at his own pathos, to weep at his
own tragedy then, as, smoking his pipe, he watches the
shadows of his brain coming and going before his half-closed
eyes, listens to their voices in the air about him, he will thank
God for making him a literary man. To such a one, it seems
to me, literature must prove ennobling. Of all professions it
is the one compelling a man to use whatever brain he has to
its fullest and widest. With one or two other callings, it in
vites him nay, compels him to turn from the clamour of the
passing day to speak for a while with the voices that are eternal.

To me it seems that if anything outside oneself can help
one, the service of literature must strengthen and purify a man.
Thinking of his heroine s failings, of his villain s virtues, may he
not grow more tolerant of all things, kinder thinking towards
man and woman ? From the sorrow that he dreams, may he
not learn sympathy with the sorrow that he sees ? May not his
own brave puppets teach him how a man should live and die?

JEROME K. JEROME 237

To the literary man, all life is a book. The sparrow on
the telegraph wire chirps cheeky nonsense to him as he passes
by. The urchin s face beneath the gas lamp telis him a story,
sometimes merry, sometimes sad. Fog and sunshine have
their voices for him.

( Xor can I see, even from the most worldly and business
like point of view, that the modern man of letters has cause

MR. JEROME K. JEROME
(From a photograph by F raddle & 1 on tig)

of complaint. The old Grub Street days when he starved or
begged are gone. Thanks to the men who have braved sneers
and misrepresentation in unthanked championship of his plain
rights, he is now in a position of dignified independence ; and
if he cannot attain to the twenty thousand a year prizes of
the fashionable O.C. or M.D., he does not have to wait their

238 MY FIRST BOOK

time for his success, while what he can and does earn is amply
sufficient for all that a man of sense need desire. His calling
is a password into all ranks. In all circles he is honoured.
He enjoys the luxury of a power and influence that many a
prime minister might envy.

There is still a last prize in the gift of literature that needs
no sentimentalist to appreciate. In a drawer of my desk lies
a pile of letters, of which if I were not very proud I should be
something more or less than human. They have come to me
from the uttermost parts of the earth, from the streets near at
hand. Some are penned in the stiff phraseology taught when
old fashions were new, some in the free and easy colloquialism
of the rising generation. Some, written on sick beds, are
scrawled in pencil. Some, written by hands unfamiliar with
the English language, are weirdly constructed. Some are
crested, some are smeared. Some are learned, some are ill-
spelled. In different ways they tell me that, here and there,
I have brought to some one a smile or pleasant thought ; that
to some one in pain and in sorrow 1 have given a moment s
laugh.

Pinky yawns (or a shadow thrown by the guttering candle
makes it seem so). Well, he says, are we finished ? Have
we talked about ourselves, glorified our profession, and anni
hilated our enemies to our entire satisfaction ? Because, if so,
you might put me back. I m feeling sleepy.

I reach out my hand, and take him up by his wide, flat
waist. As I draw him towards me, his little legs vanish into
his squat body, the twinkling eye becomes dull and lifeless.
The dawn steals in upon him, for I have sat working long into
the night, and I see that he is only a little shilling book bound
in pink paper. Wondering whether our talk together has
been as good as at the time I thought it, or whether he has
led me into making a fool of myself, I replace him in his
corner.

239

CAVALRY LIFE 1

BY JOHN STRANGE WINTER
(MRS. ARTHUR STANNARD)

"\/r Y first book as ever was was written, or, to speak quite
correctly, was printed, on the nursery floor some thirty
odd years ago. I remember the making of the book very well ;
the leaves were made from an old copybook, and the back was
a piece of stiff paper, sewed in place and
carefully cut down to

\ V \ . r^

the right size. So far
as I remember, it was
about three soldiers and
a pig. I don t
quite know

3&gt; ,

. &gt;

Jtfte-S^^

-*.{ ,!&lt;- / .. , kT

THREE SOLDIERS AND
A PIG

how the pig came in, but that is a me4-e detail. I have no
data to go upon (as I did not dream thirty years ago that I
should ever be so known to fame as to be asked to write the
true history of my first book), but I have a wonderful memory,

2 4 o MY FIRST BOOK

and to the best of my recollection it was, as I say, about
three soldiers and a pig.

It never saw the light, and there are times when I feel
thankful to a gracious Providence that I have been spared the
power of gratifying the temptation to give birth to those early
efforts, after the manner of Sir Edwin Landseer and that
pathetic little childish drawing of two sheep, which is to be
seen at provincial exhibitions of pictures, for the encourage
ment and example of the rising generation.

So far as I can recall, I made no efforts for some years to
woo fickle fortune after the attempt to recount the story of the
three soldiers and a pig ; but when I was about fourteen my
heart was fired by the example of a schoolfellow, one Josephine

H , who spent a large portion of her time writing stones,

or, as our schoolmistress put it, wasting time and spoiling

paper. All the same, Josephine H s stories were very

good, and I have often wondered since those days whether
she, in after life, went on with her favourite pursuits. I have
never heard of her again except once, and then somebody told
me that she had married a clergyman, and lived at West
Hartlepool. Yes, all this has something to do, and very
materially, with the story of my first book. For in emulating

Josephine H , whom I was very fond of, and whom I

admired immensely, I discovered that I could write myself, or
at least that I wanted to write, and that I had ideas that I
wanted to see on paper. Without that gentle stimulant,
however, I might never have found out that I might one day
be able to do something in the same way myself.

My next try was at a joint story a story written by three
girls, myself and two friends. That was in the same year.
We really made considerable headway with that story ; and
had visions of completely finishing it and getting no less a
sum than thirty pounds for it. I have a sort of an idea that
I supplied most of the framework for the story, and that the
elder of my collaborators filled in the millinery and the love-

PT^ * I

/ y.^.!-&gt; f

*r /5r I ^ ^

(From a photograph by Russell & Sons, Wimbledon}

242 MY FIRST BOOK

making. But alas for the futility of human hopes and
desires ! that book was destined never to be finished, for I had
a violent quarrel with my collaborators, and we have never
spoken to each other from that day to this.

So came to an untimely end my second serious attempt at
writing a book ; for the stories that I had written in emulation
of Josephine H - - were only short ones, and were mostly
unfinished.

I wasted a terrible deal of paper between my second try
and my seventeenth birthday, and I believe that I was, at that
time, one of the most hopeless trials of my father s life. He
many times offered to provide me with as much cheap paper
as I liked to have ; but cheap paper did not satisfy my artistic
soul, for I always liked the best of everything. Good paper
was my weakness as it was his and I used it, or wasted it,
which you will, with just the same lavish hand as I had done
aforetime.

When I was seventeen, I did a skit on a little book called
How to Live on Sixpence a Day. It was my first soldier
story excepting the original three soldiers and a pig and
introduced the sixpence a day pamphlet into a smart cavalry
regiment, whose officers were in various degrees of debt and
difficulty, and every man was a barefaced portrait, without the
smallest attempt at concealment of his identity. Eventually
this sketch was printed in a York paper, and the honour of
seeing myself in print was considered enough reward for me.
I, on the contrary, had no such pure love of fame. I had done
what I considered a very smart sketch, and I thought it well
worth payment of some kind, which it certainly was.

After this, I spent a year abroad, improving my mind
and I think, on the whole, it will be best to draw a veil over
that portion of my literary history, for I went out to dinner
on every possible occasion, and had a good time generally.
Stay did I not say my literary history ? Well, that year
had a good deal to do with my literary history, for I wrote

JOHN STRANGE WINTER

2 43

stories most of the time, during a large part of my working
hours and during the whole of my spare time, when I did not
happen to be going out to dinner. And when I came home,
I worked on just the same until, towards the end of 75, 1 drew
blood for the first time. Oh, the joy of that first bit of money
my first earnings ! And it was but a bit, a mere scrap. To
be explicit, it amounted to ten shillings. I went and bought
a watch on the strength of it not a very costly affair ; a
matter of two pounds ten
and an old silver turnip that
I had by me. It was won
derful how that one half-
sovereign opened up my
ideas. I looked into the
future as far as eye could
see, and I saw myself earning
an income for at that time
of day I had acquired no
artistic feelings at all, and I
genuinely wanted to make
name and fame and money
I saw myself a young
woman who could make a
couple of hundred pounds
from one novel, and I gloried
in the prospect.

I disposed of a good
many stories in the same quarter at starvation prices, ranging
from the original ten shillings to thirty-five. Then, after a
patient year of this not very luxurious work, I made a
step forward and got a story accepted by the dear old
Family Herald. Oh, yes, this is really all relevant to
my first book ; very much so, indeed, for it was through
Mr. William Stevens, one of the proprietors of the Family
Herald, that I learned to know the meaning of the word

MR. ARTHUR STANNARD

{From a photograph by Frances Browne,
135 Regent Street, /F.)

244 MY FIRST BOOK

caution a word absolutely indispensable to any young
author s vocabulary.

At this time I wrote a great deal for the Family Herald,
and also for various magazines, including London Society. In
the latter, my first Winter work appeared a story called
A Regimental Martyr.

I was very oddly placed at this point of my career, for I
liked most doing the Winter work, but the ordinary young-
lady-like fiction paid me so much the best, that I could not
afford to give it up. I was, like all young magazine writers,
passionately desirous of appearing in book form. I knew not
a single soul in the way connected with literary matters, had
absolutely no help or interest of any kind to aid me over the
rough places, or even of whom to ask advice in times of doubt
and difficulty. Mr. William Stevens was the only editor that
I knew to whom I could go and say, Is this right ? or Is
that wrong ? And I think it may be interesting to say here
that I have never asked for, or indeed used, a letter of intro
duction in my life that is, in connection with any literary
business.

Well, when I had been hard at work for several years, I
wrote a very long book upon my word, in spite of my good
memory, I forget what it was called. The story, however,
lives in my mind well enough ; it was the story of a very
large family about ten girls and boys, who all made brilliant
marriages and lived a sort of shabby, idyllic, happy life, some
what on the plan of God for us all and the devil take the
hindermost. Need I say that it was told in the first person
and in the present tense, and that the heroine was anything
but good-looking ?

I was very young then, and thought a great deal of my
pretty bits of writing and those seductive scraps of moralising,
against which Mr. Stevens was always warning me. Well,
this very long, not to say spun-out, account of this very large
family of boys and girls, did not happen to please the * readers

JOHN STRANGE WINTER 245

for the Family Herald then my stay-by so I thought I
would have a try round the various publishers and see if I
could not get it brought out in three volumes. Of course, I
tried all the best people first, and very often, when I receive
from struggling young authors (who know a great deal more
about my past history than I do myself, and who frequently
write to ask me the best and easiest way to get on at novel-
writing, without either hard work, or waiting, or disappoint
ment, because, if you please, my own beginnings were so
singularly successful and delightful) the information that I
have never known of any of their troubles, it seems to me
that my past and my present cannot be the past and present
of the same woman. Yet they are. I went through it all ;
the same sickening disappointments, the same hopes and fears ;
I trod the self-same path that every beginner must assuredly
tread, as we must all in time tread that other path to the grave.
I went through it all, and with that exceedingly long and
detailed account of that large and shabby family, I trod the
thorny path of publishing almost to the bitter end ay, even
to the goal where we find the full-blown swindler waiting for
us, with bland looks and honeyed words of sweetest flattery.
Dear, dear ! many who read this will know the process. It
seldom varies. First, I sent my carefully written MS., whose
very handwriting betrayed my youth, to a certain firm which
had offices off the Strand, to be considered for publication. The
firm very kindly did consider it, and their consideration was
such that they made me an offer of publication on certain
terms.

Their polite note informed me that their readers had read
the work and thought very highly of it, that they were inclined
just by the way of completing their list for the approaching
September, the best month in the year for bringing out novels
to bring it out, although I was, as yet, unknown to fame.
Then came the first hint of * the consideration, which took the
form of a hundred pounds, to be paid down in three sums, all to

246

MY FIRST BOOK

fall due before the day of publication. I worked out the profits
which could accrue if the entire edition sold out. I found that,
in that case, I should have a nice little sum for myself of i8o/.
Now, no struggling young author in his or her senses is silly
enough to throw away the chance of making 1 8o/. in one lump.
I thought, and I thought the whole scheme out, and I must

confess that the more I
thought about it, the
more utterly tempting
did the offer seem. To

THE FIRM
CONSIDERING

, risk ioo/. and
to make I So/. !
Why, it was a
positive sin to lose
such a chance.
Therefore, I

scraped a hundred pounds together, and, with my mother, set
off for London, feeling that, at last, I was going to conquer
the world. We did a theatre on the strength of my coming
good fortune, and the morning after our arrival in town set off
in my case, at all events with swelling hearts, to keep the
appointment with the kindly publisher who was going to put
me in the way of making fame and fortune.

JOHN STRANGE WINTER 247

I opened the door and went in. Is Mr. at home ? I

asked. I was forthwith conducted to an inner sanctum, where
I was received by the head of the firm himself. Then I
experienced my first shock he squinted ! Now, I never could
endure a man with a squint, and I distrusted this man in
stantly. You know, there are squints and squints ! There is
the soft uncertain squint feminine, which is really charming.

HE SQUINTED !

And there is a particular obliquity of vision which, in a man,
rather gives a larky expression, and so makes you feel that
there is nothing prim and formal about him, and seems to put
you on good terms at once.

And there is a cold-blooded squint, which makes your
flesh creep, and which, when taken in connection with busi
ness, brings little stories to your mind Is anyone coming,
sister Anne ? and that sort of thing.

248

MY FIRST BOOK

Mr. asked me to excuse him a moment while he

gave some instructions, and, without waiting for my permis
sion, looked through a few letters, shouted a message down a
speaking-tube, and then, after having arranged the fate of
about half-a-dozen novels by the means of the same instru
ment, he sent a final message down the tube asking for my
MS., only to be told that he would find it in the top right-
hand drawer of his desk.

As a matter of fact, all this delay, intended to impress
me and make me understand what
a great thing had happened to me
in having won attention from so
busy a man, simply did for Mr.
so far as I was concerned. Instead
of impressing me, it gave me time
to get used to the place, it gave

me time to look at Mr. when

he was not looking at me.

Then, having found the MS., he
looked at me and prepared to give
me his undivided attention.

Well, he said, with a long
breath, as if it was quite a relief to
see a new face, I am very glad you
have decided to close with our offer.
We confidently expect a great success with your book. We
shall have to change the title though. There s a good deal
in a title.

I replied modestly that there was a good deal in a title.
But, I added, I have not closed with your offer on the
contrary, I

He looked up sharply, and he squinted worse than ever.

Oh, I quite thought that you had definitely

* Not at all, I replied ; then added a piece of infor
mation, which could not by any chance have been new to

MISS STANNARD

{From a photograph by H . S.
Mendelssohn)

JOHN STRANGE WINTER

249

him. A hundred pounds is a lot of money, you know/
I remarked.

Mr. looked at me in a meditative fashion. Well, if

you have not got the money, he said rather contemptuously,
* we might make a slight reduction say, if we brought it
down to 75/., solely because our readers have spoken so
highly of the story. Now look here, I will show you what
our reader says which is a favour that we don t extend to
everyone, that I can tell you. Here it is !

THE TWINS BOOTLES AND BETTY

(From photographs by //. .S. Mendelssohn )

Probably in the whole of his somewhat chequered career

as a publisher, Mr. never committed such a fatal mistake

as by handing me the report on my history (in detail) of that
very large family of boys and girls. Bright, crisp, racy, it
ran. Very unequal in parts, wants a good deal of revision,
and should be entirely re-written. Would be better if the
story was brought to a conclusion when the heroine first
meets with the hero after the parting, as all the rest forms an
anti-climax. This might be worked up into a really popular
novel, especially as it is written very much in Miss s

250 MY FIRST BOOK

style (naming a then popular authoress whose sole merit
consisted in being the most faithful imitator of the gifted
founder of a very pernicious school).

I put the sheet of paper down, feeling very sick and ill.
And the worst of it was, I knew that every word of it was
true. I was young and inexperienced then, and had not
nous enough to say plump out that my eyes had been opened,
and that I could see that I should be neither more nor less
than a fool if I wasted a single farthing over a story that must
be utterly worthless. So I prevaricated mildly, and said that
I certainly did not feel inclined to throw a hundred or even
seventy-five pounds away over a story without some cer
tainty of success. I ll think it over during the day, I said,
rising from my chair.

Oh, we must know within an hour, at the outside/ Mr.

said very curtly. * Our arrangements will not wait, and

the time is very short now for us to decide on our books for
September. Of course, if you have not got the money, we
might reduce a little more. We are always glad, if possible,
to meet our clients.

It s not that, I replied, looking at him straight. I have
the money in my pocket ; but a Yorkshire woman does not
put down a hundred pounds without some idea what is going
to be done with it.

You must let me have your answer within an hour, Mr.
remarked briefly.

{ I will/ said I, in my most polite manner; but I really
must think out the fact that you are willing to knock off
twenty-five pounds at one blow. It seems to me if you
could afford to take that much off, and perhaps a little more,
there must have been something very odd about your original
offer.

My time is precious/ said Mr. in a grumpy voice.

Then, good morning/ said I cheerfully.

My hopes were all dashed to the ground again, but I felt

JOHN STRANGE WINTER

251

very cheerful, nevertheless. I trotted round to my friend,
Mr. Stevens, who gave a whistle of astonishment at my story.
I ll send my head clerk round for your MS. at once, he said,
else you ll probably never see it again.

And so he did, and so ended my next attempt to bring
out my first book.

After this I felt very keenly the real truth of the old
saying, Virtue is its
own reward. For, not
long after my episode

with Mr. , the then

editor of London So
ciety wrote to me, say
ing that he thought
that as I had already
had several stories pub
lished in the magazine,
it might make a very
attractive volume if I
could add a few more
and bring them out as
a collection of soldier
stories.

I did not hesitate
very long over this
offer, but set to work
with all the enthusiasm
of youth and youth does have the advantage of being full
of the fire of enthusiasm, if of nothing else and I turned out
enough new stories to make a very respectable volume.

Then followed the period of waiting to which all literary
folk must accustom themselves.

I was, however, always of a tolerably long-suffering dis
position, and possessed my soul in patience as well as I
could. The next thing I heard was that the book had very

LONG-LEGGED SOLDIERS

252 MY FIRST BOOK

good prospects, but that it would have its chances greatly
improved if it were in two volumes instead of being in only
one.

Well, youth is generous, and I did not see the wisdom of
spoiling the ship for the traditional ha porth of tar, so I
cheerfully set to work and evolved another volume of stories,
all of smart, long-legged soldiers, and with as Heaven
knows no more idea of setting myself up as possessing all
knowledge about soldiers and the Service than I had of
aspiring to the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Ireland. But, even then, I had need of a vast
amount of patience, for time went on, and really my book
seemed as far from publication as ever. Every now and
then I had a letter telling me that the arrangements were
nearly completed, and that it would probably be brought
out by Messrs. So-and-so. But days wore into weeks,
and weeks into months, until I really began to feel as if
my first literary babe was doomed to die before it was
born.

Then arose a long haggle over terms, which I had thought
were settled, and to be on the same terms as the magazine
rates no such wonderful scale after all. However, my
literary guide, philosopher, and friend thought, as he was
doing me the inestimable service of bringing me out, that 2O/.
was an ample honorarium for myself; but I, being young and
poor, did not see things in the same light at all. Try as I
would and I cannot lay claim to trying very hard I could
not see why a man, who had never seen me, should have put
himself to so much trouble out of a spirit of pure philanthropy,
and a desire to help a struggling young author forward. So
I obstinately kept to my point, and said if I did not have 3O/.,
I would rather have all of the stories back again. I think

nobody would credit to-day what that special bit of firmness
cost me. Still, I would cheerfully have died before I would
have given in, having once conceived my claim to be a just

STRANGE WINTER

253

one. A bad habit on the whole, and one that has since cost
me dear more than once.

Eventually, my guide and I came to terms for the sum
for which I had held out, namely, 3&lt;D/., which was the price I
received for my very first book, in addition to about S/. that
I had already had from
the magazine for serial
use of a few of the stories.

So, in due course,
my book, under the title
of Cavalry Life/ was
brought out in two great
cumbersome volumes by

CAVALRY LIFE

Messrs. Chatto & Windus, and I was launched upon the world
as a full-blown author under the name of Winter.

So many people have asked me why I took that name,
and how I came to think of it, that it will not, perhaps, be
amiss if I give the reason in this paper. It happened like
this. During our negotiations, my guide suggested that I

254 MY FIRST BOOK

had better take some nom de guerre, as it would never do to
bring out such a book under a woman s name. * Make it as
real-sounding and non-committing as you can/ he wrote, and
so, after much cogitation and cudgelling of my brains, I chose
the name of the hero of the only story of the series which was
written in the first person, and called myself J. S. Winter. I
believe that Cavalry Life was published on the last day
of 1881.

Then followed the most trying time of all that of waiting
to see what the Press would say of this, my first child, which
had been so long in coming to life, and had been chopped
and changed, bundled from pillar to post, until my heart was
almost worn out before ever it saw the light. Then, on
January 14, 1882, I went into the Subscription Library at
York, where I was living, and began to search the new
journals through, in but faint hopes, however, of seeing a
review of my book so soon as that ; for I was quite alone in
the world, so far as literary matters went. Indeed, not one
friend did I possess who could in any way influence my
career, or obtain the slightest favour for me.

I remember that morning so well ; it is, I think, printed
on my memory as the word Calais was on the heart of Queen
Mary. It was a fine, cold morning, and there was a blazing
fire in the inner room, where the reviews were kept. I sat
down at the table, and took up the Saturday Review, never
dreaming for a moment that I should be honoured by so much
as a mention in a journal which I held in such awe and respect.
And as I turned over the leaves, my eyes fell on a row of
foot-notes at the bottom of the page, giving the names of the
books which were noticed above, and among them I saw
1 Cavalry Life, by J. S. Winter.

For full ten minutes I sat there, feeling sick and more fit
to die than anything else. I was perfectly incapable of looking
at the notice above. But, at last, I plucked up courage to
meet my fate, very much as one summons up courage to have

JOHN STRANGE WINTER

255

a tooth out and get the horrid wrench over. Judge of my
surprise and joy when, on reading the notice, I found that the
Saturday had given me a rattling good notice, praising the
new author heartily and without stint. I shall never, as long
as I live, forget the effect of that, my first review, upon me.
For quite half an hour I sat without moving, only feeling,
I shall never be able to keep it up. I shall never be able

I TOOK UP THE SATURDAY REVIEW

to follow it up by another. I felt paralysed, faint, crushed,
anything but elated and jubilant. And, at last, through some
instinct, I put my hand up to my head to find that it was
cold and wet, as if it had been dipped in the river. Thank
Heaven, from that day to this I have never known what a
cold sweat was. It was my first experience of such a thing,
and sincerely I hope it will be my last.

Ill

A Sketch from Life

257

CALIFORNIAN VERSE
BY BRET HARTE

WHEN I say that my * first book was not my own, and
contained beyond the title-page not one word of my
own composition, I trust that I shall not be accused of trifling
with paradox, or tardily unbosoming myself of youthful
plagiary. But the fact remains that in priority of publication
the first book for which I became responsible, and which
probably provoked more criticism than anything I have
written since, was a small compilation of California!! poems
indited by other hands.

A well-known bookseller of San Francisco one day
handed me a collection of certain poems which had already
appeared in Pacific Coast magazines and newspapers, w r ith
the request that I should, if possible, secure further additions
to them, and then make a selection of those which I con
sidered the most notable and characteristic for a single
volume to be issued by him. I have reason to believe that
this unfortunate man was actuated by a laudable desire to
publish a pretty Californian book his first essay in publica
tion and at the same time to foster Eastern immigration by
an exhibit of the Californian literary product, but, looking
back upon his venture, I am inclined to think that the little
volume never contained anything more poetically pathetic or
touchingly imaginative than that gentle conception. Equally
simple and trustful was his selection of myself as compiler.
It was based somewhat, I think, upon the fact that the

258

MY FIRST HOOK

artless Helicon I boasted was Youth/ but I imagine it was
chiefly owing to the circumstance that I had from the outset,
with precocious foresight, confided to him my intention of not
putting any of my own verses in the volume. Publishers are
appreciative ; and a self-abnegation so sublime, to say nothing
of its security, was not without its effect.

WE SETTLED TO OUR WORK

We settled to our work with fatuous self-complacency, and
no suspicion of the trouble in store for us, or the storm that
was to presently hurtle around our devoted heads. I win
nowed the poems, and he exploited a preliminary announce
ment to an eager and waiting Press, and we moved together
unwittingly to our doom. I remember to have been early
struck with the quantity of material coming in evidently the

BRET HARTE

259

I knew now the

result of some popular misunderstanding of the announcement.
I found myself in daily and hourly receipt of sere and yellow
fragments, originally torn from some dead and gone newspaper,
creased and seamed from long folding in wallet or pocket-book.
Need I say that most of them were of an emotional or didactic
nature ; need I add any criticism of these homely souvenirs,
often discoloured by the morning coffee, the evening tobacco,
or, Heaven knows ! perhaps blotted by too easy tears !
Enough that I knew now what had become of those original
but never re-copied verses which filled the Poet s Corner of
every country newspaper on the coast,
genesis of every di
dactic verse that
* coldly furnished
forth the marriage
table in the an
nouncement of wed
dings in the rural
Press. I knew now
who had read and
possibly indited
the dreary Jiic jacets
of the dead in their
mourning columns. I knew now why certain letters of the
alphabet had been more tenderly considered than others,
and affectionately addressed. I knew the meaning of the
1 Lines to Her who can best understand them, and I knew
that they had been understood. The morning s post buried
my table beneath these withered leaves of posthumous pas
sion. They lay there like the pathetic nosegays of quickly-
fading wild flowers, gathered by school children, inconsistently
abandoned upon roadsides, or as inconsistently treasured
as limp and flabby superstitions in their desks. The chill
wind from the Bay blowing in at my window seemed to
rustle them into sad articulate appeal. I remember that

S 2

A CIRCULATION IT HAD NEVER KNOWN BEFORE

260 MY FIRST BOOK

when one of them was whisked from the window by a
stronger gust than usual, and was attaining a circulation it
had never known before, I ran a block or two to recover it.
I was young then, and in an exalted sense of editorial re
sponsibility which I have since survived, I think I turned pale
at the thought that the reputation of some unknown genius
might have thus been swept out and swallowed by the all-
absorbing sea.

There were other difficulties arising from this unexpected
wealth of material. There were dozens of poems on the same
subject. The Golden Gate, Mount Shasta, &lt; The Yoscmite,
were especially provocative. A beautiful bird known as the
Californian Canary appeared to have been shot at and
winged by every poet from Portland to San Diego. Lines to
the Mariposa flower were as thick as the lovely blossoms
themselves in the Merced Valley, and the Madrone tree was as
berhymed as Rosalind. Again, by a liberal construction of
the publisher s announcement, manuscript poems, which had
never known print, began to coyly unfold their virgin blossoms
in the morning s mail. They were accompanied by a few lines
stating, casually, that their sender had found them lying
forgotten in his desk, or, mendaciously, that they were thrown
off on the spur of the moment a few hours before. Some of
the names appended to them astonished me. Grave, practical
business men, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding
traders, never before suspected of poetry, or even correct prose,
were among the contributors. It seemed as if most of the
able-bodied inhabitants of the Pacific Coast had been in the
habit at some time of expressing themselves in verse. Some
sought confidential interviews with the editor. The climax
was reached when, in Montgomery Street, one day, I was
approached by a well-known and venerable judicial magnate.
After some serious preliminary conversation, the old gentleman
finally alluded to what he was pleased to call a task of great
delicacy and responsibility laid upon my young shoulders.

BRET HARTE

261

* In fact, he went on paternally, adding the weight of his
judicial hand to that burden, I have thought of speaking to
you about it. In my leisure moments on the Bench I have,
from time to time, polished and perfected a certain college
poem begun years ago, but which may now be said to have
been finished in California, and thus embraced in the scope of
your proposed selection. If a few extracts, selected by myself,
to save you all trouble and re
sponsibility, be of any benefit
to you, my dear young friend,
consider them at your service/
In this fashion the con
tributions had increased to
three times the bulk of the
original collection, and the
difficulties of selection were
augmented in proportion. The
editor and publisher eyed each
other aghast, Never thought
there were so many of the
blamed things alive,
said the latter with
great simplicity, had
you ? The editor
had not. Couldn t
you sort of shake em

CONSIDER THEM AT YOUR SERVICE

up and condense em,

you know ? keep their ideas and their names separate, so
that they d have proper credit. See ? The editor pointed
out that this would infringe the rule he had laid clown. I see,
said the publisher thoughfully \vell, couldn t you pare em
down ; give the first verse entire and sorter sample the others ?
The editor thought not. There was clearly nothing to do but
to make a more rigid selection a difficult performance when
the material was uniformly on a certain dead level, which it is

262 MY FIRST BOOK

not necessary to define here. Among the rejections were, of
course, the usual plagiarisms from well-known authors imposed
upon an inexperienced country Press ; several admirable
pieces detected as acrostics of patent medicines, and certain
veiled libels and indecencies such as mark the first publi
cations on blank walls and fences of the average youth. Still
the bulk remained too large, and the youthful editor set to
work reducing it still more with a sympathising concern which
the good-natured, but unliterary, publisher failed to under
stand, and which, alas ! proved to be equally unappreciated
by the rejected contributors.

The book appeared a pretty little volume typographi
cally, and externally a credit to pioneer book-making.
Copies were liberally supplied to the Press, and authors
and publisher self-corn placently awaited the result. To the
latter this should have been satisfactory ; the book sold
readily from his well-known counters to purchasers who
seemed to be drawn by a singular curiosity, unaccompanied,
however, by any critical comment. People would lounge into
the shop, turn over the leaves of other volumes, say carelessly,
Got a new book of California poetry out, haven t you?
purchase it, and quietly depart. There were as yet no notices
from the Press ; the big dailies were silent ; there was some
thing ominous in this calm.

Out of it the bolt fell. A well-known mining weekly,
which I here poetically veil under the title of the Red Dog
Jay Hawk, was first to swoop down upon the tuneful and
unsuspecting quarry. At this century-end of fastidious and
complaisant criticism, it may be interesting to recall the
direct style of the Californian sixties/ The hogwash and
" purp "-stuff ladled out from the slop bucket of Messrs. -
& Co., of Frisco, by some lop-eared Eastern apprentice,
and called " A Compilation of Californian Verse," might be
passed over, so far as criticism goes. A club in the hands of
any able-bodied citizen of Red Dog and a steamboat ticket

BRET HARTE

263

to the Bay, cheerfully contributed from this office, would be
all-sufficient. But when an imported greenhorn dares to call
his flapdoodle mixture " Californian," it is an insult to the
State that has produced the gifted " Yellow Hammer," whose
lofty flights have from time to time dazzled our readers in
the columns of the Jay Hawk. That this complacent editorial

I WAS INWARDLY RELIEVED

jackass, browsing among the dock and thistles which he has
served up in this volume, should make no allusion to Cali
fornia s greatest bard, is rather a confession of his idiocy than
a slur upon the genius of our esteemed contributor. I turned
hurriedly to my pile of rejected contributions the nom de
plume of Yellow Hammer did not appear among them ;

264 MY FIRST BOOK

certainly I had never heard of its existence. Later, when a
friend showed me one of that gifted bard s pieces, I was
inwardly relieved ! It was so like the majority of the other
verses, in and out of the volume, that the mysterious poet
might have written under a hundred aliases. But the Dutch
Flat Clarion, following, with no uncertain sound, left me
small time for consideration. : We doubt, said that journal,
if a more feeble collection of drivel could have been made,
even if taken exclusively from the editor s own verses, which
we note he has, by an equal editorial incompetency, left out
of the volume. When we add that, by a felicity of idiotic
selection, this person has chosen only one, and the least
characteristic, of the really clever poems of Adoniram Skaggs,
which have so often graced these columns, we have said
enough to satisfy our readers. The Mormon Hill Quartz
Crustier relieved this simple directness with more fancy : We
don t know why Messrs. - - & Co. send us, under the
title of " Selections of Californian Poetry," a quantity of slum-
gullion which really belongs to the sluices of a placer mining
camp, or the ditches of the rural districts. W T e have some
times been compelled to run a lot of tailings through our
stamps, but never of the grade of the samples offered, which,
we should say, would average about 33 J cents per ton. We
have, however, come across a single specimen of pure gold
evidently overlooked by the serene ass who has compiled
this volume. We copy it with pleasure, as it has already
shone in the " Poet s Corner " of the Crusher as the gifted
effusion of the talented Manager of the Excelsior Mill, other
wise kno\vn to our delighted readers as " Outcrop." The
Green Springs Arcadian was no less fanciful in imagery:
Messrs. & Co. send us a gaudy green-and-ycllow,
parrot-coloured volume, which is supposed to contain the
first callow " cheepings " and " peepings " of Californian song
sters. From the flavour of the specimens before us we should
say that the nest had been disturbed prematurely. There

BRET HARTE

265

seems to be a good deal of the parrot inside as well as outside
the covers, and we congratulate our own sweet singer " Blue
Bird, who has so often made these columns melodious, that
she has escaped the ignominy of being exhibited in Messrs.

& Co. s aviary. I should add that this simile of the

aviary and its occupants was ominous, for my tuneful choir
was relentlessly slaughtered ; the bottom of the cage was

THE BOOK SOLD TREMENDOUSLY

strewn with feathers ! The big dailies collected the criticisms
and published them in their own columns with the grim irony
of exaggerated head-lines. The book sold tremendously on
account of this abuse, but I am afraid that the public was
disappointed. The fun and interest lay in the criticisms, and
not in any pointedly ludicrous quality in the rather common
place collection, and I fear I cannot claim for it even that
merit. And it will be observed that the animus of the

266 MY FIRST BOOK

criticism appeared to be the omission rather than the reten
tion of certain writers.

But this brings me to the most extraordinary feature of
this singular demonstration. I do not think that the pub
lishers were at all troubled by it ; I cannot conscientiously
say that / was ; I have every reason to believe that the poets
themselves, in and out of the volume, were not displeased at
the notoriety they had not expected, and I have long since
been convinced that my most remorseless critics were not in
earnest, but were obeying some sudden impulse started by
the first attacking journal. The extravagance of the Red
Dog fay Hawk was emulated by others : it was a large, con
tagious joke, passed from journal to journal in a peculiar
cyclonic Western fashion. And there still lingers, not un
pleasantly, in my memory the conclusion of a cheerfully
scathing review of the book which may make my meaning
clearer : If we have said anything in this article which might
cause a single pang to the poetically sensitive nature of the
youthful individual calling himself Mr. Francis Bret Harte
but who, we believe, occasionally parts his name and his hair
in the middle we will feel that we have not laboured in vain,
and are ready to sing Nunc Dimittis, and hand in our checks,
We have no doubt of the absolutely pellucid and lacteal
purity of Franky s intentions. He means well to the Pacific
Coast, and we return the compliment. But he has strayed
away from his parents and guardians while he was too fresh.
He will not keep without a little salt.

It was thirty years ago. The book and its Rabelaisian
criticisms have been long since forgotten. Alas ! I fear that
even the capacity for that Gargantuan laughter which met
them, in those days, exists no longer. The names I have
used are necessarily fictitious, but where I have been obliged
to quote the criticisms from memory I have, I believe, only
softened their asperity. I do not know that this story has
any moral. The criticisms here recorded never hurt a repu-

BRET HARTE 267

tation nor repressed a single honest aspiration. A few
contributors to the volume, who were of original merit, have
made their mark, independently of it or its critics. The
editor, who was for two months the most abused man on the
Pacific slope, within the year became the editor of its first
successful magazine. Even the publisher prospered, and
died respected !

269

DEAD MAN S ROCK
BY Q. :

I CHERISH no parental illusions about Dead Man s Rock.
It is two or three years since I read a page of that blood
thirsty romance, and my only copy of it was found, the other
day, in turning" out the lumber-room at the top of the house.
Later editions have been al
lowed to appear with all the
inaccuracies and crudities of
the first. On page 1 1 6, Bom
bay is still situated in the Bay
of Bengal, and may continue
to adorn that shore. The
error must be amusing, since
unknown friends continue to
write and confess themselves
tickled by it ; and it is stupid
to begin amending a book in
which you have lost interest.
But though this is my attitude
towards * Dead Man s Rock,
I can still look back on the
writing of it as on an amus

ing adventure.

It was begun in the late summer of 1886, and was my
first attempt at telling a story on paper. I am careful to say
on paper, because in childhood I was telling myself stories
from morning to night. Tens of thousands of small boys are

270 MY FIRST BOOK

doing the same every day in the year ; but I should be sorry
to guess how much of my time, between the ages of seven and
thirteen, must have been given up to weaving these childish
epics. They were curious jumbles ; the characters (of which
I had a constant set) being drawn indiscriminately from the

* Morte d Arthur, Bunyan s Holy War, Pope s Iliad/
1 Ivanhoe, and a book of Fairy Tales by Holme Lee, as well
as from history ; and the themes ranging from battles and
tournaments to cricket, wrestling, and sailing matches. Ana
chronisms never troubled the story-teller. The Duke of
Wellington would cheerfully break a lance with Captain
Credence or Tristram of Lyonesse, and I rarely made up a
football fifteen without including Hardicanute (whom I loved
for his name), Hector (dear for his own sake) and Wamba
(who supplied the comic interest and scored off Thersites).
They were brave companions ; but at the age of thirteen they
deserted me suddenly. Or perhaps after reading Mr. Steven
son s Chapter on Dreams, I had better say it was the Piskies
the Small People who deserted me. They alone know
why for their pensioner had never betrayed a single one of
their secrets or why in these later times, when he sells their
confidences for money, they have come back to help him,
though more sparingly. Three or four of the little stories in

* Noughts and Crosses are but translated dreams, and there
are others in my notebook ; but now I never compose without
some pain, whereas in the old days I had but to sit alone in
a corner or take a solitary walk and invite them, and they did
all the work. But one summer evening I summoned them
and met with no response. Without warning the tales had
come to an end.

From my first school at Newton Abbot I went to Clifton,
and from Clifton in my nineteenth year to Oxford. It was
here that the old desire to weave stories began to come back.
Mr. Stevenson s Treasure Island was the immediate cause.
I had been scribbling all through my school days ; had written

a prodigious quantity of bad reflective poetry and burnt it
as soon as I really began to reflect ; and was now plying the
Oxford Magazine with light verse, a large proportion of which
was lately reprinted in a thin volume, with the title of Green
Bays. But I wrote little or no prose. My prose essays at
school were execrable. I had followed after false models for
a while, and when gently made aware of this by the sound
and kindly scholar who looked over our sixth-form essays
at Clifton, had turned dispirited and wrote scarcely at all.
Though reading great quantities of fiction, I had, as has been
said, no thought of telling a story, and so far as I knew, no
faculty. The desire, at least, was awakened by Treasure
Island, and, in explanation of this, I can only quote the
gentleman who reviewed my first book in the Athenceum, and
observed that great wits jump, and lesser wits jump with
them. That is just the truth of it. I began as a pupil and
imitator of Mr. Stevenson, and was lucky in my choice of a
master.

The germ of Dead Man s Rock was a curious little bit
of family lore, which I may extract from my father s history of
Polperro, a small haven on the Cornish coast. The Richard
Ouiller of whom he speaks is my great grandfather.

In the old home of the Quillers, at Polperro, there was hanging
on a beam a key, which we as children regarded with respect and
awe, and never dared to touch, for Richard Quiller had put the key
of his quadrant on a nail, with strong injunctions that no one should
take it off until his return (which never happened), and there, I
believe, it still hangs. His brother John served for several years as
commander of a hired armed lugger, employed in carrying despatches
in the French war, Richard accompanying him as subordinate officer.
They were engaged in the inglorious bombardment of Flushing in
1809. Some short time after this they were taken, after a desperate
fight with a pirate, into Algiers, but were liberated on the severe remon
strances of the British Consul. They returned to their homes in
most miserable plight, having lost their all, except their Bible, much
valued then by the unfortunate sailors, and now by a descendant in

272 MY FIRST BOOK

whose possession it is. About the year 1812 these same brothers
sailed to the island of Teneriffe in an armed merchant ship, but after
leaving that place were never heard of.

Here, then, I had the simple apparatus for a mystery ; for,
of course, the key must be made to unlock something- far more
uncommon than a quadrant ; and I still think it a capital
apparatus, had I only possessed the wit to use it properly.
There was romance in this key that was obvious enough,
and I puzzled over it for some weeks, by the end of which my
plot had grown to something like this : A family living in
poverty, though heirs to great wealth this wealth buried
close to their door, and the key to unlock it hanging over their
heads from morning to night. It was soon settled, too, that
this family should be Cornish, and the scene laid on the
Cornish coast, Cornwall being the only corner of the earth
with which I had more than a superficial acquaintance.

So far, so good ; but what was the treasure to be ? And
what the reason that stood between its inheritors and their
enjoyment of it ? As it happened, these two questions were
answered together. The small library at Trinity a delightful
room, where Dr. Johnson spent many quiet hours at work upon
his Dictionary is fairly rich in books of old travel and dis
covery ; fine folios, for the most part, filling- the shelves on your
left as you enter. To the study of these I gave up a good
many hours that should have been spent on ancient history
of another pattern, and more directly profitable for Greats ;
and in one of them Purchas, I think, but will not swear first
came on the Great Ruby of Ceylon. Not long after, a note
in Yule s edition of Marco Polo set my imagination fairly in
chase of this remarkable gem ; and I hunted up all the ac
cessible authorities. The size of this ruby (as thick as a man s
arm, says Marco Polo, while Maundevile, who was an artist,
and lied with exactitude, puts it at a foot in length and five
fingers in girth), its colour, * like unto fire, and the mystery
and completeness of its disappearance, combined to fascinate

y- 273

me. No form of riches is so romantic as a precious stone with
a heart in it and a history. I had only to endow it with a
curse proportionate to its size and beauty, and I had all that
a story-teller could possibly want,

But even a treasure hunt is a poor affair unless you have
two parties vying for the booty, and a curse can hardly be
worked effectively until you introduce the fighting element,
and make destiny strike her blows through the passions hate,
greed, &c. of her victims. I had shaped my story to this

THE HAVEN, FOWEY 1

point : the treasure was to be buried by a man who had slain
his comrade and only confidant in order to enjoy the booty
alone, and had afterwards become aware of the curse attached
to its possession. And the descendants of these two men were
to be rivals in the search for it, each side possessing half of the
clue. It was at this point that, like George IV., I invented a
buckle. My buckle had two clasps, and on these the secret

1 Most of the illustrations in this chapter are from photographs by Messrs. W.
Heath & Co. , Plymouth.

274 MY FIRST BOOK

of the treasure was so engraved as to become intelligible only
when they were united.

My plot had now taken something like a shape ; but it had
one serious defect. It would not start to walk. Coax it as I
might it would not budge. Even the worst book must have a
beginning this reflection was no less distressing than obvious,
for mine had none. And there is no saying it would ever have
found one but for a lucky accident.

In the Long Vacation of 1885 I spent three weeks or a
month at the Lizard pollacking and reading Plato. Knowing
at that time comparatively little of this corner of the coast, I
had brought one or two guide books and local histories in the
bottom of my portmanteau. One evening, after a stiff walk
along the cliffs, I put the Republic aside for a certain ( History
and Description of the Parish of Mullyon, by its vicar, the Rev.
E. G. Harvey, and came upon a passage that immediately
shook my scraps of invention into their proper places.

The passage in question was a narrative of the wreck of
the Jonkheer Meester Van de Wall, a Dutch barque, on the
night of March 25, 1867. I cannot quote at length the vicar s
description of this wreck ; but in substance and in many of its
details it is the story of the Belle Fortune in Dead Man s
Rock. The vessel broke up in the night and drowned every
soul on board except a Greek sailor, who was found early next
morning clambering about the rocks under cliff, between
Polurrian and Poljew. This man s behaviour was mysterious
from the first, and his evidence at the inquest held on the
drowned bodies of his shipmates was, to say the least, extra
ordinary. He said : My name is Georgio Buffani. I was
seaman on board the ship, which belonged to Dordrecht. I
joined the ship at Batavia, but I do not know t/ie name of tJie
ship or the name of the captain! Being shown, however, the
official list of Dutch East Indiamen, he pointed to one built
in 1854, the Kosmopoliet/ Captain Konig. He then told his
story of the disaster, which there was no one to contradict, and

(? 275

the jury returned a verdict of Accidentally drowned. The
Greek made his bow and left the neighbourhood.

Just after the inquest Mr. Broad, Dutch Consul at Falmouth,
arrived, bringing with him the captains of two Dutch East

MR. AND MHS. QUILLER COUCH

Indiamen then lying at Falmouth. One of them asked at once
Is it Klaas Lammerts s ? Being told that the Kosmopoliet
was the name of the wrecked ship, he said, * I don t believe it.

T 2

276 MY FIRST BOOK

The " Kosmopoliet " wouldn t be due for a fortnight, almost. It
must be Klaas Lammerts s vessel. The vicar, who had now
come up, showed a scrap of flannel he had picked up, with

* 6. K. L. marked upon it. Ah ! said the Dutchman, it must
be so. It must be the " Jonkheer. " But she had been returned

* Kosmopoliet at the inquest, so there the matter rested.

On the Friday following, however/ pursues the vicar,
when Mr. Broad and this Dutch captain again visited
Mullyon, the first thing handed them was a parchment which
had been picked up meanwhile, and this was none other than
the masonic diploma of Klaas van Lammerts. Here, then,
was no room for doubt. The ship was identified as the
"Jonkheer Meester van de Wall van Puttershoek," Captain
Klaas van Lammerts, 650 tons register, homeward bound from
the East Indies, with a cargo of sugar, coffee, spices, and some
Banca tin. The value of the ship and cargo would be between
4O,ooo/. and 5O,ooo/. It may be added that on the afternoon
before the wreck, the vessel had been seen to miss stays more
than once in her endeavour to beat off the land, and generally
to behave as if handled by an unaccountably clumsy crew.
Altogether, folks on shore had grave suspicions that there was
mutiny or extreme disorder of some kind on board ; but of
this nothing was ever certainly known.

I think this narrative was no sooner read than digested
into the scheme of my romance, now for some months
neglected and almost forgotten. But the Final School of
Literae Humaniores loomed unpleasantly near, and just a year
passed before I could turn my discovery to account. The
following August found me at Petworth, in Sussex, lodging
over a clockmaker s shop that looked out upon the Market
Square. Petworth is quiet ; and at that time I knew scarcely
a soul in the place ; but lovely scenery lies all around it, and
on a hot afternoon you may do worse than stretch yourself
on the slopes above the weald and smoke and do nothing.
There is one small common in particular, close to the monu-

&lt;- 277

ment at the top of the park, and just outside the park wall,
where I spent many hours looking across the blue country
to Blackdown, and lazily making up my mind about the
novel. In the end it was some time in September I called
on the local stationer and bought a large heap of superior
foolscap.

A travelling waxwork company was unpacking its caravan
in the square outside my window on the morning when I

FOWEY GRAMMAR SCHOOL CREW AND MR. QUILLER COUCH

pulled in my chair and light-heartedly wrote Dead Man s
Rock (a Romance), by Q./ at the top of the first sheet of
foolscap. The initial was my old initial of the Oxford
Magazine verses, and the title had been settled on for some
time before. Staying with some friends on the Cornish coast,
I had been taken to a picnic, or some similar function, on a
beach, where they showed me a pillar-shaped rock, standing
boldly up from the sands, and veined with curious red streaks

278 MY FIRST BOOK

resembling bloodstains. I want a story written about that
rock, a lady of the party had said ; something really blood
thirsty. " Slaughter Rock " might do for the name. But my
title was really borrowed from the Dodman, locally called
Deadman, a promontory east of Falmouth, between Veryan
and St. Austell bays,

I had covered two pages of foolscap before the brass band
of the waxwork show struck up and drove me out of doors
and along the road that leads to the railway station the only
dull road around Petworth, and chosen now for that very
reason. A good half of that morning s work was afterwards
torn up ; but I felt at the time that the enterprise was going
well. I had written slowly, but easily ; and, of course, believed
that I had found my vocation, and would always be able to
write easily most vain delusion ! For in six years and a half
I have recaptured the fluency of that morning not half-a-
dozen times. Still, I continued to take a lively interest in my
story, and wrote at it very steadily, finishing Book I. before
my return to Oxford. It surprised me, though, that, for all
my interest in it, the story gave me little or no emotion.
Once only did I get a genuine thrill, and that was at the point
where young Jasper finds the sailor s cap (p. 25), and why
at this point more than another is past explaining. In later
efforts I have written several pages with a shaking pen and amid
dismal signs of grief ; and, on revision, have usually had to
tear those pages up. On the whole, my short experience goes
against

si vis me flere^ dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi.

But if on revision an author is moved to tears or laughter
by any part of his work, then he may reckon pretty safely
upon it, no matter with how stony a gravity it was written.

Book I. just half the tale was finished then, and put
aside. The Oxford Michaelmas Term was beginning, and

&lt;v. 279

there were lectures to be prepared ; but this was not all the
reason. To tell the truth, I had wound up my story into a
very pretty coil, and how to unwind it was past my contriving
When the book appeared, its critics agreed in pronouncing
Part I. to be a deal better than Part II., and they were right ;
for Book II. is little more than a violent cutting of half-a-
dozen knots that had been tied in the gayest of spirits ; and

THE OLD STUDY

it must be owned, moreover, that the long arm of coincidence
was invoked to perform a great part of the cutting. For the
time, however, the unfinished MS. lay in the drawer of my
writing-table ; and I went back to Virgil and Aristophanes
and scribbled more verses for the Oxford Magazine. None of
my friends knew at that time of my excursion into fiction ; but
one of them possesses the acutest eye in Oxford, and, with

280 MY FIRST BOOK

just a perceptible twinkle in it, he asked me suddenly, one
evening towards the end of Term, if I had yet begun to write
a novel. The shot was excellently fired, and I surrendered my
MS. at once, the more gladly because believing in his judgment.
Next morning he asserted that he had sat up half the night
to read it. His look was of the freshest, but he came
triumphantly out of cross-examination, and urged me to finish
the story. In my elated mood I would have promised any
thing, and set to work at once to think out the rest of the plot ;
but it was not until the Easter Vacation that I finished the
book, in a farmhouse at the head of Wastwater.

Another friend was with me, who, in the intervals of
climbing, put all his enthusiasm into Aristotelian logic while I
hammered away at the * immortal product, as we termed it by
consent. It was further agreed that he should abstain from
looking at a line of it until the whole was written a compact
which I have not heard he found any difficulty in keeping.
Indeed, there was plenty to occupy us both without the book.
Snow lay thick on the fells that spring, and the glissading was
excellent ; we had found, or thought we had, a new way up
the Mickledore cliffs ; and Mr. Gladstone had just introduced
his first Home Rule Bill, and made the newspapers (which
reached us a day late) very good reading. However, the MS.
was finished and read with sincere, if discriminating, approval,
on the eve of our departure.

The next step was to find a publisher. My earliest hopes
had inclined upon my friend, Mr. Arrowsmith, of Bristol, who
(I hoped) might remember me as having for a time edited the
Cliftonian ; but the book was clearly too long for his Railway
Library/ and on this reflection I determined to try the
publishers of * Treasure Island. Mr. Lyttelton Gell, of the
Clarendon Press, was kind enough to provide a letter of
introduction ; the MS. went to Messrs. Cassell & Co., and I
fear the end of my narrative must be even duller than the
beginning. Messrs. Cassell accepted the book, and have

(V 281

published all its successors. The inference to be drawn from
this is pleasant and obvious, and I shall be glad if my readers
will draw it.

It is the rule, I find, to conclude such a confession as this
with a paragraph or so in abuse of the literary calling ; to
parade one s self before the youth of merry England as the
Spartans paraded their drunken Helot ; to mourn the expense

MR. AND MRS. QUILLER COUCH IN A CANADIAN CANOE

oi energies that in any other profession would have fetched a
nobler pecuniary return. I cannot do this ; at any rate, I
cannot do it yet. My calling ties me to no office stool, makes
me no man s slave, compels me to no action that my soul
condemns. It sets me free from town life, which I loathe, and
allows me to breathe clean air, to exercise limbs as well as
brain, to tread good turf and wake up every morning to the
sound and smell of the sea and that wide prospect which to

is T IVERSITY

282 MY FIRST BOOK

my eyes is the dearest on earth. All happiness must be
purchased with a price, though people seldom recognise this ;
and part of the price is that, living thus, a man can never
amass a fortune. But as it is extremely unlikely that I could
have done this in any pursuit, I may claim to have the better
of the bargain.

Certain gentlemen who have preceded me in this series
have spoken of letters as of any ordinary characteristic pursuit.
Naturally, therefore, they report unfavourably ; but they seem
to me to prove the obvious. Literature has her own pains,
her own rewards ; and it scarcely needs demonstration that
one who can only bring to these a bagman s estimate had very
much better be a bagman than an author.

283

UNDERTONES AND IDYLS AND LEGENDS
OF INVERBURN*

BY ROBERT BUCHANAN

MY first serious effort in literature was what I may call
a double-barrelled one; in other words, I was seriously
engaged upon two books at the same time, and it was by
the merest accident that they did not appear simultaneously.
As it was, only a few months divided one from the other, and
they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or Siamese,
twins. The book of poems called * Undertones was the one;
the book of poems called Idyls and Legends of Inverburn
was the other. They were published nearly thirty years ago,
when I was still a boy, and as they happened to bring me
into connection, more or less intimately, with some of the
leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may
be of interest.

A word, first, as to my literary beginnings. I can scarcely
remember the time when the idea of winning fame as an
author had not occurred to me, and so I determined very
early to adopt the literary profession, a determination which
I unfortunately carried out, to my own life-long discomfort,
and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public.
When a boy in Glasgow, I made the acquaintance of David
Gray, who was fired with a similar ambition to fly incon
tinently to London

The terrible City whose neglect is Death,
Whose smile is Fame !

284 MY FIRST BOOK

and to take it by storm. It seemed so easy ! Westminster
Abbey, wrote rny friend to a correspondent ; if I live, I
shall be buried there so help me God ! I mean, after
Tennyson s death, I myself wrote to Philip Hamerton,
* to be Poet Laureate ! From these samples of our callow
speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well,
it all happened just as we planned, only otherwise ! Through
some blunder of arrangement we two started for London on
the same day, but from different railway stations, and, until
some weeks afterwards, one knew nothing of the other s
exodus. I arrived at King s Cross Railway Station with the
conventional half-crown in my pocket ; literally and absolutely
half-a-crown ; I wandered about the Great City till I was
weary, fell in with a Thief and Good Samaritan who sheltered
me, starved and struggled with abundant happiness, and
finally found myself located at 66 Stamford Street, Waterloo
Bridge, in a top room, for which I paid, when I had the
money, seven shillings a week. Here I lived royally, with
Duke Humphrey, for many a day ; and hither, one sad
morning, I brought my poor friend Gray, whom I had
discovered languishing somewhere in the Borough, and who
was already death-struck through sleeping out one night
in Hyde Park. 1 * Westminster Abbey if I live, I shall^be
buried there ! Poor country singing-bird, the great Dismal
Cage of the Dead was not for him&gt; thank God ! He lies
under the open Heaven, close to the little river which he
immortalised in song. After a brief sojourn in the dear old
ghastly bankrupt garret at No. 66, he fluttered home tojiie.

To that old garret, in these days, came living men of
letters who were of large and important interest to us poor
cheepers from the North : Richard Monckton Milnes, Laurence
Oliphant, Sydney Dobell, among others, who took a kindly
interest in my dying comrade. But afterwards, when I was
left to fight the battle alone, the place was solitary. Ever

1 See the writer s Life of David Gray.

.X. i

CL^.

286 MY FIRST BOOK

reserved and independent, not to say dour and opinionated,
I made no friends, and cared for none. I had found a little
work on the newspapers and magazines, just enough to keep
body and soul alive, and while occupied with this I was busy
on the literary twins to which I referred at the opening of
this paper. What did my isolation matter, when I had all
the gods of Greece for company, to say nothing of the fays
and trolls of Scottish Fairyland ? Pallas and Aphrodite
haunted that old garret ; out on Waterloo Bridge, night after
night, I saw Selene and all her nymphs ; and when my heart
sank low, the fairies of Scotland sang me lullabies ! It was
a happy time. Sometimes, for a fortnight together, I never
had a dinner save, perhaps, on Sunday, when a good-natured
Hebe would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord s
joint. My favourite place of refreshment was the Caledonian
Coffee House in Covent Garden. Here, for a few coppers, I
could feast on coffee and muffins muffins saturated with
butter, and worthy of the gods ! Then, issuing forth, full-fed,
glowing, oleaginous, I would light my pipe, and wander out
into the lighted streets.

Criticisms for the Athen&um, then edited by Hepworth
Dixon, brought me ten-and-sixpence a column. I used to
go to the old office in Wellington Street and have my contri
butions measured off on the current number with a foot-rule,
by good old John Francis, the publisher. I wrote, too, for
the Literary Gazette, where the pay was less princely seven-
and-sixpence a column, I think, but with all extracts deducted !
The Gazette was then edited by John Morley, who came to
the office daily with a big dog. I well remember the time
when you, a boy, came to me, a boy, in Catherine Street/
wrote honest John to me years afterwards. But the neighbour
hood of Covent Garden had greater wonders ! Two or three
times a week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross
Station to the office of All the Year Round in Wellington Street,
came the good, the only Dickens ! From that good genie the

ROBERT BUCHANAN

287

poor straggler from Fairyland got solid help and sympathy.
Few can realise now what Dickens was then to London.
His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight ; the Gospel
of Plum-pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia.

At this time, I was (save the mark !) terribly in earnest,
with a dogged determination to bow down to no graven
literary idol, but to judge men of all ranks on their personal
merits. I never had
much reverence for
gods of any sort ;
if the superior per
sons could not win
me by love, I re
mained heretical.
So it was a long
time before I came
close to any living
souls, and all that
time I was working

away at my poems.
Then, a little later,
I used to go o
Sundays to the
open house of
Westland Marston,
which was then a
great haunt of lite
rary Bohemians.

Here I first met Dinah Muloch, the author of John Halifax/
who took a great fancy to me, used to carry me off to her
little nest on Hampstead Heath, and lend me all her books.
At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sydney Dobell, a
strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very
effeminate manners. Dobell s mouth was ever full of very
pretty Latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of

288 MY FIRST BOOK

quoting, as an example of perfect expression, sound conveying
absolute sense of the thing described, the doggrel lines

Down the stairs the young missises ran
To have a look at Miss Kate s young man !

The sibilants in the first line, he thought, admirably suggested
the idea of the young ladies slipping along the banisters and
peeping into the hall !

But I had other friends, more helpful to me in preparing
my first twin-offering to the Muses ; the faces under the gas,
the painted women on the bridge (how many a night have I
walked up and down by their sides, and talked to them for
hours together), the actors in the theatres, the ragged groups
at the stage doors. London to me, then, was still Fairyland !
Even in the Haymarket, with its babbles of nymph and
satyr, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn-
deep sympathy with which told me that I was a born Pagan,
and could never be really comfortable in any modern Temple
of the Proprieties. On other points connected with that old
life on the borders of Bohemia, I need not touch ; it has all
been so well done already by Muiger, in the Vie de Boheme/
and it will not bear translation into contemporary English.
There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was
hot in the mouth too ! Et ego fiii in Bohemia ! There were
inky fellows and bouncing girls, then ; now there are only
fine ladies, and respectable, God-fearing men of letters.

It was while the twins were fashioning, that I went down
in summer time to live at Chertsey on the Thames, chiefly in
order to be near to one I had long admired, Thomas Love
Peacock, the friend of Shelley and the author of Headlong-
Hall Greekey Peekey, as they called him, on account of
his prodigious knowledge of things and books Hellenic. I
soon grew to love the dear old man, and sat at his feet, like
an obedient pupil, in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower
Halliford. To him I first read some of my Undertones/ getting

ROBERT BUCHANAN 289

many a rap over the knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering
with Divine Myths. What mercy could / expect from one
who had never forgiven Johnny Keats for his frightful per
version of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene ? and
who was horrified at the base modernism of Shelley s
* Prometheus Unbound ? But to think of it ! He had known
Shelley, and all the rest of the demigods, and his speech was
golden with memories of them all ! Dear old Pagan, wonder
ful in his death as in his life. When, shortly before he died,
his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged
him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well,
he flatly refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of
vehement blank verse, By the immortal gods, I will not
stir ! &gt;

Under such auspices, and with all the ardour of youth to
help, my Book, or Books, progressed. Meantime, I was
breaking out into poetry in the magazines, and writing
criticism by the yard. At last the time came when I
remembered another friend \vith whom 1 had corresponded,
and whose advice I thought I might now ask with some con
fidence. This was George Henry Lewes, to whom, when I
was a boy in Glasgow , I had sent a bundle of manuscript,
with the blunt question, Am I, or am I not, a Poet ? To
my delight he had replied to me with a qualified affirmative,
saying that in the productions he had discerned a real faculty,
and perhaps a future poet. I say perhaps, he added, because
I do not know your age, and because there are so many poetical
blossoms which never come to fruit. He had, furthermore,
advised me to write as much as I felt impelled to write, but
to publish nothing at any rate, for a coupie of years. Three
years had passed, and I had neither published anything that
is to say, in book form nor had I had any further communi
cation with my kind correspondent, To Lewes, then, I wrote,
reminding him of our correspondence, telling him that I had
1 I have given a detailed account of Peacock in my Look Round Literature.

2 9 o MY FIRST BOOK

waited, not two years, but three, and that I now felt inclined
to face the public. I soon received an answer, the result of
which was that I went, on Lewes s invitation, to the Priory,
North Bank, Regent s Park, and met my friend and his
partner, better known as George Eliot.

But, as the novelists say, I am anticipating. Sick to death,
David Gray had returned to the cottage of his father, the
handloom weaver, at Kirkintilloch, and there had peacefully
passed away, leaving as his legacy to the world the volume
of beautiful poems published under the auspices of Lord
Houghton. I knew of his death the hour he died ; awaking
in the night, I was certain of my loss, and spoke of it
(long before the formal news reached me) to a friend. This
by the way ; but what is more to the purpose is that my
first grief for a beloved comrade had expressed itself in the
words which were to form the proem of my first book

Poet gentle hearted,

Are you then departed,
And have you ceased to dream the dream we loved of old so well ?

Has the deeply-cherish d

Aspiration perished,
And are you happy, David, in that heaven where you dwell ?

Have you found the secret

We, so wildly, sought for,
And is your soul enswath d at last in the singing robes you fought for ?

Full of my dead friend, I spoke of him to Lewes and George
Eliot, telling them the piteous story of his life and death.
Both were deeply touched, and Lewes cried, Tell that story
to the public ; which I did, immediately afterwards, in the
Cornhill Magazine. By this time I had my Twins ready, and
had discovered a publisher for one of them, Undertones, The
other, Idyls and Legends of Inverbnrn, was a ruggeder bantling,
containing almost the first blank verse poems ever written in
Scottish dialect. I selected one of the poems, Willie Baird/
and showed it to Lewes. He expressed himself delighted.,

ROBERT BUCHANAN

291

and asked for more. I then showed him the Two Babes.
Better and better ! he wrote ; publish a volume of such
poems and your position is assured. More than this, he at
once found me a publisher, Mr. George Smith, of Messrs.
Smith and Elder, who offered me a good round sum (such it
seemed to me then) for the copyright. Eventually, however,
alter Willie Baird had been published in the

withdrew the manuscript from Messrs. Smith and Elder, and
transferred it to Mr. Alexander Strahan, who offered me both
more liberal terms and more enthusiastic appreciation.

It was just after the appearance of my story of David
Gray in the Cornhill that I first met, at the Priory, North
Bank, with Robert Browning. It was an odd and repre
sentative gathering of men, only one lady being present, the
hostess, George Eliot. I was never much of a hero-worshipper,

292 MY FIRST BOOK

but I had long been a sympathetic Browningite, and I well
remember George Eliot taking me aside after my first tcte-a-
tcte with the poet, and saying, Well, what do you think of
him ? Does he come up to your ideal ? He didn t quite, I
must confess, but I afterwards learned to know him well and
to understand him better. He was delighted with my state
ment that one of Gray s wild ideas was to rush over to Florence
and throw himself on the sympathy of Robert Browning.

Phantoms of these first books of mine, how they begin to
rise around me ! Faces of friends and counsellors that have
flown for ever ; the sibylline Marian Evans with her long,
weird, dreamy face ; Lewes, with his big brow and keen
thoughtful eyes ; Browning, pale and spruce, his eye like a
skipper s cocked-up at the weather ; Peacock, with his round,
mellifluous speech of the old Greeks ; David Gray, great-eyed
and beautiful, like Shelley s ghost ; Lord Houghton, with his
warm worldly smile and easy-fitting enthusiasm. Where are
they all now ? Where are the roses of last summer, the snows
of yester year ? I passed by the Priory to-day, and it looked
like a great lonely Tomb. In those days, the house where I
live now was not built ; all up here Hampsteacl-ways was
grass and fields. It was over these fields that Herbert Spencer
and George Eliot used to walk on their way to Hampstead
Heath. The Sibyl has gone, but the great Philosopher still
remains, to brighten the sunshine. It was not my luck to
know him then would it had been ! but he is my friend and
neighbour in these latter days, and, thanks to him, I still get
glimpses of the manners of the old gods.

With the publication of my first two books, I was fairly
launched, I may say, on the stormy waters of literature. When
the Athencsum told its readers that this was/w/rr, and of a
noble kind, and when Lewes vowed in the Fortnightly Review
that even if I * never wrote another line, my place among the
pastoral poets would be undisputed, I suppose I felt happy
enough far more happy than any praise could make me now.

ROBERT BUCHANAN 293

Poor little pigmy in a cockle-boat, I thought Creation was
ringing with my name ! I think I must have seemed rather
conceited and bounceable, for I have a vivid remembrance
of a Fortnightly dinner at the Star and Garter, Richmond,
when Anthony Trollope, angry with me for expressing a doubt
about the poetical greatness of Horace, wanted to fling a
decanter at my head ! It was about this time that an
omniscient publisher, after an interview with me, exclaimed
(the circumstance is historical), I don t like that young man ;
he talked to me as if he was God Almighty, or Lord Byron \
But in sober truth, I never had the sort of conceit with which
men credited me ; I merely lacked gullibility, and saw, at the
first glance, the whole unmistakable humbug and insincerity
of the Literary Life. I think still that, as a rule, the profession
of letters narrows the sympathy and warps the intelligence.
When I saw the importance which a great man or woman
could attach to a piece of perfunctory criticism, when I saw
the care with which this Eminent Person humoured his
reputation, and the anxiety with which that Eminent Person
concealed his true character, I found my young illusions very
rapidly fading. On one occasion, when George Eliot was
very much pestered by an unknown lady, an insignificant
individual, who had thrust herself somewhat pertinaciously
upon her, she turned to me and asked, with a smile, for my
opinion. I gave it, rudely enough, to the effect that it was
good for f distinguished people to be reminded occasionally
of how very small consequence they really were, in the mighty
life of the World !

Erom that time until the present I have pursued the
vocation into which fatal Fortune, during boyhood, incon
tinently thrust me, and have subsisted, ill sometimes, well
sometimes, by a busy pen. I may, therefore, with a certain
experience, if with little authority, imitate those who have
preceded me in giving reminiscences of their first literary
beginnings, and offer a few words of advice to my younger

294 MY FIKST BOOK

brethren to those persons, I mean, who are entering the
profession of Literature. To begin with, I entirely agree with
Mr. Grant Allen in his recent avowal that Literature is the
poorest and least satisfactory of all professions ; I will go even
further, and affirm that it is one of the least ennobling. With
a fairly extensive knowledge of the writers of my own period,
I can honestly say that I have scarcely met one individual
who has not deteriorated morally by the pursuit of literary
Fame. For complete literary success among contemporaries,
it is imperative that a man should either have no real opinions,
or be able to conceal such as he possesses, that he should have
one eye on the market and the other on the public journals,
that he should humbug himself into the delusion that book-
writing is the highest work in the Universe, and that he should
regulate his likes and dislikes by one law, that of expediency.
If his nature is in arms against anything that is rotten in
Society or in Literature itself, he must be silent. Above all,
he must lay this solemn truth to heart, that when the World
speaks well of him the World will demand the price of praise,
and that price will possibly be his living Soul. He may tinker,
he may trim, he may succeed, he may be buried in Westminster
Abbey, he may hear before he dies all the people saying, How
good and great he is ! how perfect is his art ! how gloriously
he embodies the Tendencies of his Time ! l but he will know
all the same that the price has been paid, and that his living
Soul has gone, to furnish that whitewashed Sepulchre, a
Blameless Reputation.

For one other thing, also, the Neophyte in Literature had
better be prepared. He will never be able to subsist by
creative writing unless it so happens that the form of expres
sion he chooses is popular in form (fiction, for example), and

1 O those Tendencies of one s Time ! O those dismal Phantoms, conjured
up by the blatant Book-taster and the indolent Reviewer ! How many a poor
Soul, that would fain have been honest, have they bewildered into the Slough of
Despond and the Bog of Beautiful Ideas ! R. B.

ROBERT BUCHANAN

2 95

even in that case, the work he does, if he is to live by it, must
be in harmony with the social and artistic status quo. Revolt

MR. ROBERT IJUCHANAN AND HIS FAVOURITE DOG

of any kind is always disagreeable. Three-fourths of the
success of Lord Tennyson (to take an example) was due to

296 MY FIRST BOOK

the fact that this fine poet regarded Life and all its phenomena
from the standpoint of the English public school, that he
ethically and artistically embodied the sentiments of our
excellent middle-class education. His great American con
temporary, Whitman, in some respects the most command
ing spirit of this generation, gained only a few disciples, and
was entirely misunderstood and neglected by contemporary
criticism. Another prosperous writer, to whom I have already
alluded, George Eliot, enjoyed enormous popularity in her
lifetime, while the most strenuous and passionate novelist of
her period, Charles Reade, was entirely distanced by her in
the immediate race for Fame. In Literature, as in all things^
manners and costume are most important ; the hall-mark of
contemporary success is perfect Respectability. It is not
respectable to be too candid on any subject, religious, moral,
or political. It is very respectable to say, or imply, that this
country is the best of all possible countries, that War is a noble
institution, that the Protestant Religion is grandly liberal, and
that social evils are only diversified forms of social good.
Above all, to be respectable, one must have beautiful ideas/
Beautiful ideas are the very best stock-in-trade a young
writer can begin with. They are indispensable to every
complete literary outfit. Without them, the short cut to
Parnassus will never be discovered, even though one starts
from Rugby.

2 9 7

t TREASURE ISLAND
BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

IT was far indeed from being my first book, for I am not a
novelist alone. But I am well aware that my paymaster,
the Great Public, regards what else I have written with
indifference, if not aversion ; if it call upon me at all, it calls
on me in the familiar and indelible character ; and when I am
asked to talk of my first book, no question in the world but
what is meant is my first novel.

Sooner or later, somehow, anyhow, I was bound to write a
novel. It seems vain to ask why. Men are born with various
manias : from my earliest childhood, it was mine to make a
plaything of imaginary series of events ; and as soon as I was
able to write, I became a good friend to the paper-makers.
Reams upon reams must have gone to the making of Rathillet/
4 The Pentland Rising, 1 The King s Pardon (otherwise Park
Whitehead ), Edward Daven/ A Country Dance, and A
Vendetta in the West ; and it is consolatory to remember
that these reams are now all ashes, and have been received
again into the soil. I have named but a few of my ill-fated
efforts, only such indeed as came to a fair bulk ere they were
desisted from ; and even so they cover a long vista of years.
Rathillet was attempted before fifteen, The Vendetta at

1 Ne pas confondre. Not the slim green pamphlet with the imprint of Andrew
Elliott, for which (as I see with amazement from the book-lists) the gentlemen of
England are willing to pay fancy prices ; but its predecessor, a bulky historical
romance without a spark of merit, and now deleted from the world.

298 MY FIRST BOOK

twenty-nine, and the succession of defeats lasted unbroken till
I was thirty-one. By that time, I had written little books and
little essays and short stories ; and had got patted on the back
and paid for them though not enough to live upon. I had
quite a reputation, I was the successful man ; I passed my
days in toil, the futility of which would sometimes make my
cheek to burn that I should spend a man s energy upon this
business, and yet could not earn a livelihood : and still there
shone ahead of me an unattained ideal : although I had at
tempted the thing with vigour not less than ten or twelve times,
I had not yet written a novel. All all my pretty ones had
gone for a little, and then stopped inexorably like a schoolboy s
watch. I might be compared to a cricketer of many years
standing who should never have made a run. Anybody can
write a short story a bad one, I mean who has industry
and paper and time enough ; but not everyone may hope to
write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. The
accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend
days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes
haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has
certain rights ; instinct the instinct of self-preservation-
forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the conscious
ness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of
unsuccessful literary toil beyond a period to be measured in
weeks. There must be something for hope to feed upon. The
beginner must have a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be
running, he must be in one of those hours when the words
come and the phrases balance of themselves even to begin.
And having begun, what a dread looking forward is that until
the book shall be accomplished ! For so long a time, the slant
is to continue unchanged, the vein to keep running, for so long
a time you must keep at command the same quality of style :
for so long a time your puppets are to be always vital, always
consistent, always vigorous ! I remember I used to look, in
those days, upon every three-volume novel with a sort of

**^S

300 MY FIRST BOOK

veneration, as a feat not possibly of literature but at least
of physical and moral endurance and the courage of Ajax.

In the fated year I came to live with my father and mother
at Kinnaird, above Pitlochry. Then I walked on the red
moors and by the side of the golden burn ; the rude, pure air
of our mountains inspirited, if it did not inspire us, and my
wife and I projected a joint volume of logic stories, for which
she wrote The Shadow on the Bed, and I turned out Thrawn
Janet and a first draft of * The Merry Men. I love my native
air, but it does not love me ; and the end of this delightful
period was a cold, a fly-blister, and a migration by Strathairdlc
and Glenshee to the Castleton of Braemar. There it blew a
good deal and rained in a proportion ; my native air was more
unkind than man s ingratitude, and I must consent to pass a
good deal of my time between four walls in a house lugubri
ously known as the Late Miss McGregor s Cottage. And now
admire the finger of predestination. There was a schoolboy
in the Late Miss McGregor s Cottage, home from the holidays,
and much in want of something craggy to break his mind
upon. He had no thought of literature ; it was the art of
Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages ; and with the aid
of pen and ink and a shilling box of water colours, he had
soon turned one of the rooms into a picture gallery. My more
immediate duty towards the gallery was to be showman ; but
I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist (so to speak)
at the easel, and pass the afternoon with him in a generous
emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these
occasions, I made the map of an island ; it was elaborately
and (I thought) beautifully coloured ; the shape of it took my
fancy beyond expression ; it contained harbours that pleased
me like sonnets ; and with the unconsciousness of the pre
destined, I ticketed my performance Treasure Island. I am
told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it
hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands,
the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

301

man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills
.and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing
Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath ; here is an inex
haustible fund of interest for any man with eyes to see or
twopence worth of imagination to understand with ! No child
but must remember laying his head in the grass, staring into
the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy
armies. Somewhat in this way, as I paused upon my map of
4 Treasure Island, the future character of the book began to

MR. STEVENSON S HOUSE IN SAMOA

appear there visibly among imaginary woods ; and their brown
faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected
quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting
treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The
next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was
writing out a list of chapters. How often have I done so, and
the thing gone no further ! But there seemed elements of
success about this enterprise. It was to be a story for boys ;
no need of psychology or fine writing ; and I had a boy at

302 MY FIRST BOOK

hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded. I was
unable to handle a brig (which the Hispaniola should have
been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a
schooner without public shame. And then I had an idea for
John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertain
ment ; to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader
very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive
him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament,
to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his
quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express
these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such
psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of making
character ; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can put
in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us
yesterday by the wayside ; but do we know him ? Our friend
with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know but can we
put him in ? Upon the first, we must engraft secondary and
imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong ; from the second, knife-
in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arbor-
escence of his nature, but the trunk and the few branches that
remain we may at least be fairly sure of.

On a chill September morning, by the cheek of a brisk
fire, and the rain drumming on the window, I began The Sea
Cook, for that was the original title. I have begun (and
finished) a number of other books, but I cannot remember to
have sat down to one of them with more complacency. It is
not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet.
I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once
belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is
conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and
details ; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of
skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade
I am told, is from Masterman Ready. It may be, I care not
a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet s saying :
departing, they had left behind them Footprints on the sands

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 303

of time, Footprints which perhaps another and I was the
other ! It is my debt to \Yashington Irving that exercises my
conscience, and justly so, for I believe plagiarism was rarely
carried farther. I chanced to pick up the Tales of a Traveller
some years ago with a view to an anthology of prose narrative,
and the book flew up and struck me : Billy Bones, his chest,,
the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit, and a good
deal of the material detail of my first chapters all were there,
all were the property of Washington Irving. But I had no-
guess of it then as I sat writing by the fireside, in what seemed
the spring-tides of a somewhat pedestrian inspiration ; nor yet
day by day, after lunch, as I read aloud my morning s work
to the family. It seemed to me original as sin ; it seemed to-
belong to me like my right eye. 1 had counted on one boy,
I found I had two in my audience. My father caught fire at
once with all the romance and childishness of his original
nature. His own stories, that every night of his life he put
himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside-
inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travellers before the
era of steam. He never finished one of these romances ; the
lucky man did not require to ! But in Treasure Island he
recognised something kindred to his own imagination ; it was
his kind of picturesque ; and he not only heard with delight
the daily chapter, but set himself acting to collaborate. When
the time came for Billy Bones s chest to be ransacked, he must
have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of
a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly
followed ; and the name of Flint s old ship the Walrus
was given at his particular request. And now who should
come dropping \\\,ex viachinA, but Dr. Japp, like the disguised
prince who is to bring down the curtain upon peace and
happiness in the last act ; for he carried in his pocket, not a
horn or a talisman, but a publisher had, in fact, been charged
by my old friend, Mr. Henderson, to unearth new writers for
Young Folks. Even the ruthlessness of a united family recoiled

304 MY FIRST BOOK

before the extreme measure of inflicting on our guest the
mutilated members of The Sea Cook ; at the same time, we
would by no means stop our readings ; and accordingly the tale
was begun again at the beginning, and solemnly re-delivered
for the benefit of Dr. Japp. From that moment on, I have
thought highly of his critical faculty ; for when he left us, he
carried away the manuscript in his portmanteau.

Here, then, was everything to keep me up, sympathy, help,
and now a positive engagement I had chosen besides a very
easy style. Compare it with the almost contemporary Merry
Men ; one reader may prefer the one style, one the other tis
.an affair of character, perhaps of mood ; but no expert can
fail to see that the one is much more difficult, and the other
much easier to maintain. It seems as though a full-grown
experienced man of letters might engage to turn out Treasure
Island at so many pages a day, and keep his pipe alight.
But alas ! this w r as not my case. Fifteen days I stuck to it,
and turned out fifteen chapters ; and then, in the early
paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My
mouth was empty ; there was not one word of Treasure
Island in my bosom ; and here were the proofs of the
beginning already waiting me at the Hand and Spear !
Then I corrected them, living for the most part alone, walking
on the heath at Weybridge in dewy autumn mornings, a good
deal pleased with what I had done, and more appalled than I can
depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was
thirty one ; I was the head of a family ; I had lost my health ;
I had never yet paid my way, never yet made 2OO/. a year ; my
father had quite recently bought back and cancelled a book
that was judged a failure : was this to be another and last fiasco?
I was indeed very close on despair ; but I shut my mouth
hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass
the winter, had the resolution to think of other things and
bury myself in the novels of M. de Boisgobey. Arrived at my
destination, down I sat one morning to the unfinished tale ;

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

305

and behold ! it flowed from me like small talk ; and in a second
tide of delighted industry, and again at a rate of a chapter a
day, I finished Treasure Island. It had to be transcribed

MRS. R. L. STEVENSON

almost exactly ; my wife was ill ; the schoolboy remained
alone of the faithful ; and John Addington Symonds (to whom
I timidly mentioned what I was engaged on) looked on me
askance. He was at that time very eager I should write on

306 MY FIRST BOOK

the characters of Theophrastus : so far out may be the
judgments of the wisest men. But Symonds (to be sure) was
scarce the confidant to go for sympathy on a boy s story.
He was large-minded ; a full man, if there was one ; but the
very name of my enterprise would suggest to him only
capitulations of sincerity and solecisms of style. Well ! he
was not far wrong.

Treasure Island it was Mr. Henderson who deleted the
first title, The Sea Cook appeared duly in the story paper,
where it figured in the ignoble midst, without woodcuts, and
attracted not the least attention. I did not care. 1 liked the
tale myself, for much the same reason as my father liked the
beginning : it was my kind of picturesque. I was not a little
proud of John Silver, also ; and to this day rather admire that
smooth and formidable adventurer. What was infinitely more
exhilarating, I had passed a landmark ; I had finished a tale,
and written The End upon my manuscript, as I had not done
since The Pentland Rising, when I was a boy of sixteen not
yet at college. In truth it was so by a set of lucky accidents ;
had not Dr. Japp come on his visit, had not the tale flowed
from me with singular ease, it must have been laid aside like
its predecessors, and found a circuitous and unlamented way
to the fire. Purists may suggest it would have been better so.
I am not of that mind. The tale seems to have given much
pleasure, and it brought (or was the means of bringing) fire and
food and wine to a deserving family in which I took an
interest. I need scarcely say I mean my own.

But the adventures of Treasure Island are not yet quite
at an end. I had written it up to the map. The map was
the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an
islet Skeleton Island, not knowing what I meant, seeking
only for the immediate picturesque, and it was to justify this
name that I broke into the gallery of Mr. Foe and stole Flint s
pointer. And in the same way, it was because I had made
two harbours that the Hispaniola was sent on her wanderings

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 307

with Israel Hands. The time came when it was decided to
republish, and I sent in my manuscript, and the map along
with it, to Messrs. Cassell. The proofs came, they were
corrected, but I heard nothing of the map. I wrote and asked ;
was told it had never been received, and sat aghast. It is one
thing to draw a map at random, set a scale in one corner of it

STEVENSON TELLING YARNS

at a venture, and write up a story to the measurements. It is
quite another to have to examine a whole book, make an
inventory of all the allusions contained in it, and with a pair
of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. I did
it ; and the map was drawn again in my father s office, with
embellishments of blowing whales and sailing ships, and my

3o8 MY FIRST BOOK

father himself brought into service a knack he had of various
writing, and elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint,
and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it
was never ( Treasure Island to me.

I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might
almost say it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe,
Defoe, and Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson s
Buccaneers, the name of the Dead Man s Chest from
Kingsley s At Last, some recollections of canoeing on the
high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite, eloquent
suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is, perhaps,
not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it is
always important. The author must know his countryside,
whether real or imaginary, like his hand ; the distances, the
points of the compass, the place of the sun s rising, the
behaviour of the moon, should all be beyond cavil. And how
troublesome the moon is ! I have come to grief over the moon
in Prince Otto, and so soon as that was pointed out to me,
adopted a precaution which I recommend to other men I
never write now without an almanack. With an almanack, and
the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either
actually plotted on paper or already and immediately
apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of
the grossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he
will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in * The
Antiquary. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow
two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ
six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the
Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred
miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags,
to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the in
imitable novel of Rob Roy. And it is certainly well, though
far from necessary, to avoid such croppers. But it is my
contention my superstition, if you like that who is faithful
to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 309

daily and hourly, gains positive support, and not mere negative
immunity from accident. The tale has a root there ; it grows
in that soil ; it has a spine of its own behind the words. Better
if the country be real, and he has walked every foot of it and
knows ever} r milestone. But even with imaginary places
he will do well in the beginning to provide a map ; as he
studies it, relations will appear that he had not thought upon ;
he will discover obvious, though unsuspected, shortcuts and
footprints for his messengers ; and even when a map is not all
the plot, as it was in Treasure Island, it will be found to be
a mine of suggestion.

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