Introduction of My First Book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jim Gallagher. My First Book by Various. 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 information after a pause. I haven't got to be until 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 most calculated, the short legs might be hard put to it? Oh, no, only over there, he answered, indicating, with a sweep of his arm, the northern half of London, where it laid 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. Oh, I don't know, he replied. I think. And what do you think about? Oh, lots of things. He inspected me shyly out of the corner of his eye, but, satisfied apparently by the scrutiny, he siled up a little nearer. Mama does not like this evening time, he confided 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 was so. And do you like this evening time, I inquired? Yes, he answered, don't you? Yes, I like it too, I admitted. But tell me why you like it, and 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, fancy, he explained. I'm going to be an author when I grow up and write books. 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 it seems so familiar to me, as if someone I had once known long ago. So we talked of books and bookmen. He told me how, having been born on the 14th of February, his name had come to be Valentine, though privileged parties, for example Aunt Emma and Mr. Dawson and cousin Naomi, had shortened it to Val. And Mama would sometimes call him Piccinini, 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 paid me for the moment, until I found that, of all my confrers, accepting only Mr. Stevenson, he was equally ignorant. He, having lived for the heroes and the heroines of the past, the new man and the new woman, the new pathos, the new humor, being alike unknown to him. Scott and Dumas and Victor Hugo were his favorites. 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 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 Quince's confessions. He called them Quince, 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-advertisement 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 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 higher worthy of the laborer, and who were not ashamed, men and women who 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 wrang 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 used to live when she was a little girl, and take her back to live in the country. The country here is so much better for her, you know, and Aunt Emma too. 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 terrified him not. Mama says that every work worth doing is difficult, he replied, and that it doesn't matter what career we choose, there are difficulties and disappointments 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 calligraphy, and all obstacles thus removed, the business of a literary gent seemed to him an exceptionally pleasant and joyous one. 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 inquired? 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. And what else does your mama say about literature, Valentine? I asked. For the strangeness of it was that though I kept repeating under my breath, copybook maxims, copybook 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 learned to laugh at, and had thought forgotten. I, with my ears of knowledge and experience behind me, seen for the nonce to be sitting with Valentine at the feet of this unseen lady, listening, as I again told myself to copybook maxims, and finding in them, in spite of myself, a certain element of truth, a certain amount of helpfulness and unpleasant suggestion of reproach. He tucked his hands underneath them 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 to be ashamed of, I laughed away his answering questions, 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. It is sort of, he explained, sort of autobiographical, you know? And what does Mama think of it was my next question, after he had discussed the advantage of drawing upon one's own personal experiences for one's material. Mama thinks it's very clever, in parts, he told me. You read it to her, I suggested. Yes, he acknowledged, in the evening, when she was 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. Suddenly it said a little more distinctly, 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 liked to come instead of an evening, like I do. Why? So I did, Valentine, I replied, but I've changed my mind.  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 horse-harsh cry. All out, all out! And slowly I moved homeward. End of introduction. Recording by Jim Gallagher. Chapter 1 of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, order volunteer. Please visit LibriVox.org. My first book by Various. Chapter 1. Ready Money Mortiboy by Walter Besant. Not the very first, that, after causing its right at labour infinite, hope exaggerated and disappointment dire, was consigned while still in manuscript to the flames. My little experience, however, with this work of art, which never saw the light, may help others to believe what is so constantly denied, that publishers do consider manuscripts sent to them. My manuscript 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 sufficient 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 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 Jeffries, he will understand the weight of that burden. My first manuscript, 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 creature'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 terrible 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 presentation, rather than by talk. I do not say that this discovery 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 that they do not read contributions offered to them. When editors publicly advertise that they do not invite contributions, or that they will not return contributions, is it reasonable to suppose that they do not read them? Well, you have heard my first experience with a publisher. Here 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 contribution that I owed a connection of many years with a certain monthly magazine. It was, lastly, through an unsolicited 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 contributions, 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 courty's 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 concluded 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 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 was engaged at a salary to furnish so many 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 undertake 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 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 except 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. 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 a 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 seemed 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 CD 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. Everyone I remembered 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, rollicking 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 vestues of our native land, would prove enormously popular. If not the vestues, 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 those 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. Sometimes, sitting in that sanctum, I looked through their manuscripts for them. Sometimes the writers called in person, and the editor had to see them, and if they were women, they 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 glance at the very first page was sufficient. The manuscript 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 Wright handed over the paper to his successor, there were piles of manuscripts lying on all the shelves. Where are those manuscripts now? To be sure, I do not believe there was one among them all, worth having. Wright 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 rewrite. He was always going to rewrite 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 installment, 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 his 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, ready 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 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 publishing 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 replaced the book, ready for publication, in the hands of Mr. William Tinsley. We 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 anything at all. We had only printed a modest edition of six hundred, and these all went off, leaving, of course, a very encouraging margin. The cheap edition was sold to Henry F. King and Company for a period of five years. Then the novel was purchased outright by Chateau and 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 to publish, provided you have such a book, and provided your publisher will push the book with as much vigor 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. The profligate, with his dreadful path 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, formed together a group which I have always thought to be commanding, strong, 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 presentment or working out of that story. No doubt it might have been better told, but I wish I was five and twenty years younger, sitting once more in that dingy little office where we wrangled over this headstrong hero of ours, and had to suppress so many, oh so very many, of the rouse and troubles and fights into which he fell, even after he became respectable. The office was handy for rules and oysters. We would adjourn for the delicious mollusk, and then go back again to the editor's room to resume the wrangle. Here we would be 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 wanted to catch science on the wing, sir, on the wing, or by the economics 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 the wrangle. We used to take an hour of van tell by way of relaxation, and always during that period whatever we did, wherever we went, Dick Mortiboy sat between us. Dear old Dick. 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, not honour, such as comes to most men, nor the quiet Reedifamy, 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 story was all told and done with. The manuscript finished. The last wrangle over. The fatal word. The melancholy word. Fini. Written below the last line. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of my first book. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Jennifer Painter. My first book by Various. Chapter 2. The Family's Scape Grace by James Payne. I 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 appearance of them I have since had caused to regret. Not at all because they were immature and still less because I am ashamed of them. On the contrary, 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, he was like an extravagant cook who wastes too much material on a single dish. The entrees of the storyteller, 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. I do not know how many years I went on writing narratives of school and college life and spinning short stories like a literary spider out of my own interior, but I don't remember that it was ever born in upon me that the reservoir could hardly hold out forever 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 traveling 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 mistrusted 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 imagination had no material to work upon. One can't glow even glass out of nothing at all. Just in the nick of time, arrived in Edinburgh, where I was then editing Chambers Journal, Tickera Candua, the African lion tamer. At that time, though I have seen a great deal of them since, lions were entirely out of my lion, and also tamers, but this gentleman was the most attractive specimen of his class. Handsome, frank, and intelligent, he took my fancy from the first, and we became great friends. His actual height, says my notebook, could scarcely have been less than six feet two, while it was artificially increased by a circlet of cox feathers set in a coronet, which the majority of enraptured beholders believed to be a 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 relatives' cast-off clothing. 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 in the wrong place. 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. 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 him with it, if 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 ear. 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 autobiography, without his having the least suspicion of the appropriation, became in fact my autobiography, as may be 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 want to exclaim, I am anticipating. Another official connected with the menagerie gave daily lectures upon the animals, so curiously dry and grey, that they filled me with admiration. He was like an embodiment of the answers to mangle's questions. Whatever suspicions Ticca Ray Candua 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 presentiments outside the show. I also became acquainted with the earthmen and earthwoman, the slaughtermen of the establishment, Mr and Mrs Treadgold, its proprietors, and other individuals seldom met with in ordinary society. The adventures of Richard Arbor, where, 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 boys 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 Kant Gotzachekov. It was a mistake to call such a somber and serious individual by so ludicrous a name, but it was a characteristic one. My disposition was at that time lively, not to say frivolous, and the atmosphere I usually lived in was one of mirth, but, as often happens, it had another side to it, which was melancholy almost to melodrama. In after years I found this to be the case in an infinitely greater storyteller, 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. Tikarokandua himself was not dearer to me than the Kant, who was almost entirely the offspring of my own invention, and though I have since seen in nihilist novels a good many gentlemen 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 resolution 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, 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 certainly not in such good handwriting as his own, and observed slyly. Could you mind just reading 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 prop, 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. I think it will suit nicely for the journal, said my friend, which I think were the presentest 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 particularly disagreeable, but it aroused no emotion in my breast warmer than gratitude. So, a family scape grace came out in Chambers Journal. I do not remember whether it had any effect upon its circulation, 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 Peyton Osterow, to whom I very strongly recommended them by proxy. If I was 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 sometimes very frank, and though I didn't much like it at the time, their candle, when I had sold the book tolerably well, tickled me afterwards immensely.  The family scape grace, 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 never forgotten the kindness of Mr. Douglas, of the firm of Edmundston and 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 Arbor, which, contrary to the wishes both of myself and my publisher, was insisted upon by a leading librarian. It is difficult nowadays to guess his reason, but people were more square-toed in those times, and I fancy he thought his highly respectable customers would sense something bohemian, if not absolutely scampish, in escape grace. A mere name is not an attractive title for a book. Though many books so-called, such as Martin Chusselwit and Robinson Crusoe, have become immensely popular, they owed nothing to their baptism, and certainly Richard Arbor 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 taken to their heads. Somebody wrote to complain that he had written, not published, a story upon the same lines, and even incidents as the family escape grace, just before its appearance in the columns of Chambers' 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 composition, 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 injudicious 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 cancy, but also sometimes begotten by the desire to levy blackmail. The above, so far as I can remember them, are the circumstances under which I published my first novel. I am sorry to add that poor Tickera Candua, 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 the show, he came to the same end as Don't Care did in the nursery story, and was eaten, or to all events killed, by lions. THE RECK OF THE GROVENER by W. CLARK RUSSELL I 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 grovener, I approach the subject with diffidence and ask the reader to forgive me if he thinks or finds me unduly egotistical. John Holesworth, chief mate, preceded the wreck of the grovener. 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 grovener, I went to sea like a man. I signed articles aboard her as second mate. I had ruffians for shipmates, and the stench of the harness cask was the animating 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. At 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 Duncan Dunbar, commanded by an old salt named Neatby, who will always be memorable to me for his habit of wearing the tall chimney-pot hat of the London streets in all weathers and parallels, whether in the roasting comms 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's 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 shelling a month, and with the rest of us there were ten, was called Young Gentleman. But we were put to work which enabled seaman would have been within his rights in refusing, as being what is called boy's duty. I need not be particular. Enough that the discipline was as rough as though we had been lads in the Folk Soul, with a huge boson and brutal boson's mates to look after us. We paid ten guineas each as a contribution to some imagination of his stock of eatables from the midshipman's birth, 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 Folk Soul 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 myself, 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. The great mass of readers, those who support the circulating libraries, are ladies. Will it be possible to interest ladies in Folk Soul 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 on parallel shipwreck, some marvelous island of treasure. This writer of a clan numerous as Wadsworth's little lot of stars warned me off and affrighted me. His papership had so long and successfully filled the public eye that I shrank from launching anything real, anything with streaks and tree nails, 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 irremediately depressed and rendered wholly ridiculous by the strenuous periodic and Christmas labors of the writer for boys. Had he not sunk even Marriott and Michael Scott, well because they wrote about the sea were compelled in due course by the publishers to address themselves exclusively to boys. The late George Couples, a man of fine genius in the course of a letter to me, complained warmly of being made to figure as Captain George Couples. 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 Years Before the Mask 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 fiction to shipward life on the high seas under the flag of the merchant's 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 folksal and the cabin. It chanced one day that a big ship with a mast-headed color, 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, clearly attired fellows in scotch caps, diverge-colored shirts, dungary britches stuffed into half-wellingtons were brought before the magistrates. The bench consisted of an old sea captain who had lost a ship in his day through the ill conduct of his crew and whose hatred of the folksal 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 folksal 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 vile in the shape of food ever set a famished mongrel hiccuping. Nevertheless, this crew of thirteen or fourteen men, for refusing to sail in the vessel unless fresh folksal stores were shipped, were sent to jail for terms ranging from three to six weeks. Sometime earlier than this there had been legislation helpful to the seamen through the humane and impassioned struggles of Mr. Samuel Plimsel. 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 sure-going 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 sailor's 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. Plimsel 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 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 Grovener. I said to myself, I'll found a story on a mutiny at sea, occasioned entirely by the shipment of bad provisions for the crew.  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, harnessed cask, then in the started butt. There are wilder and bloodier possibilities in a barrel of rotten pork, and in a cask of worm riddled ship spread, then in a whole passage of shifting cargoes, and in a long round voyage of dead weight 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 panicked of rum I propose to offer must be palatable enough to tempt the lips of the ladies to sip it. My publisher would want a market, and if Messers Muddy 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 can't 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 a hundred of them loathe. So I skamed out a nautical romance and went to work, and in two months and a week I finished the story of the wreck of the Grovener. Once I was writing at 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 Holesworth, 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 Grovener. One of his readers was a 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 folksal, throbbing with suppressed oaths, glamorous with rolling oceans the like of which no female would ever dream of leaving her bunk to behold, to submit all this and how much more to a lady for an opinion on its merits. Of course the poor woman barely understood a third of what she looked at, and as obviously she couldn't quite collect the meaning of the remainder, she pronounced against the whole. She called it a catalogue of ship's furniture, and the manuscript came back to me. I never regret this. I do not believe that this sea book would have cut a figure in my old esteemed friend's list. Publishers are well known by the public for the sort of intellectual fare they 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 while 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 apparel grinning with a scarcely sunburned face through the horse collar of a crinoline, the deep sea roll of his gate hampered and destroyed by the clinging foals 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 Samson 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 check received from Messers Harper and Brothers, was all I ever got for this sea book? Certainly not. The transaction was absolutely fair. And what learning there was, was in my favor. 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 successful in America, and that its reception there somewhat influenced 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. It is many years now since the wreck of the Grove 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 the edition seriously, we must first learn the number of copies which made it. Since this was written, my friend Mr. R. B. Marston of the firm of Samson Low & Co. has been good enough to look into the sales of the wreck of the Grovener, 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 suppose that the review was written by the editor, Mr. Thomas Gibson-Bowles, until I learned 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 Balone and Folkston, but had never witnessed such seas, as I described, and another that he had frequently traveled to Plymouth on the Great Western Railway in company with sailors, but had never met such seamen as the folksal 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, or at my property I would rewrite it. I had quitted to see 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 technicalities and in accounts of the internal discipline of the ship. Yet on the whole, the blunders are few considering how very complicated a fabric of vessel is, and how ceaselessly one needs to go on living the life of the sea to hold all parts of it clear in the sight of the mind. Professionally the influence of the book has been small. I have heard that it made one shipowner sorry and rather virtuous, and that for some time his harnessed casks went their voyages fairly sweet. He is however but a solitary figure, the lonesome crucible of my little principality of fancy. As a piece of literature the wreck of the grovener has been occasionally imitated. Mr. Plimsel, I understand, has lately been dealing with the subject of sailor's food. I heartily wish success to his efforts. are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The story of my first book is a good deal mixed and, like many other stories, cannot be fully understood without some previous illusion 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 aesthetics 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 Chakas. 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, Cheltenham College, Reading Grammar School, successively, was the 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 excurgitate by slow degrees various expatsive works on the science of mind, the greater number of which still remain unwritten. Returning to England in 1976, I found myself out of work, and so committed 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 Physiological Assetics. It was not my very first attempt at literature, already I had produced about a hundred or more magazine articles on various philosophical and scientific subjects, every one of which I sent to the editors of Leading Reviews, 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 Assetics in lodgings at Oxford. When it was finished and carefully revised, I offered it to Messrs Henry S. King and Company, who were then leading publishers of philosophical literature. Mr Keegan-Paul, their reader, reported doubtfully of the work. It was not likely to pay, he said, but it contained good matter, and the firm 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 Assetics. 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 a 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 accordingly. When the bill came in it was, if I recollect a right, somewhere about £120. I paid it without a murmur. I got my money's worth. The book appeared in a stately green cover with my name in front, and looked very philosophical, and learned, and psychological. Poor Physiological Assetics had a very hard fate. When I come to look back upon the circumstances calmly and dispassionately now, I'm not entirely surprised that it's unhappy end. It was a good book in its way, to be sure, though it's me that says it, as autent 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 philosophy. Darwin and Herbert Spencer and the editor of Mind, 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 aesthetics 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 three hundred 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 Keegan 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 fifteen pounds as compensation for loss sustained. And I believe I came out some thirty pounds 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 aesthetics was a financial failure, it paid me in the end both scientifically and commercially. 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 immediately after its appearance Leslie Stephen, I met the Mr Honourous Causa, accepted two papers of mine for publication in the Corn Hill. Carving a coconut 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 B-men's, and I was overjoyed at so much wealth poured suddenly in upon me. Other magazine articles followed in due course, and before long I was earning 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 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 of the north-west provinces, the Punjab, the Sindh, 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 Trubner. Compared with my first unhappy venture, The Colour Sense might be counted a distinct success. It brought me in during the course of about ten years, something like twenty-five pounds or thirty pounds, 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-five pounds a year are 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 intermediate books, most of which were published first as newspaper 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 Chateau, most generous of men, was one of my earliest and staunchest literary supporters. From the outset of my journalistic days he printed my articles in Belgravia and the Gentleman's Magazine with 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 Chateau and from Mr Arrowsmith at 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 Chateau 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 refused 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 Chateau again printed it, and, what was still more remarkable, asked for more of the same description, and 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 Chateau, 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 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 Chong, and written perhaps rather more seriously and carefully than my previous efforts. This happened to attract the attention of Mr James Payne, who had then just succeeded to the editorship of the Cornhill. I had been a constant contributor to the Cornhill under Leslie Stevens' management, and by a singular coincidence I received almost at the same time two letters from Mr Payne, 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 Chateau and Windus through the imaginary J. Arbuthnot Wilson, and asking for a short story somewhat in the style of my admirable Mr Chong. Encouraged by the discovery 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 Creedie, a tale of a black person 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 alternate subject. In the course of the next year I wrote several more sketches of the same sort, which were published either anonymously or still under the pseudonym in the Cornhill, Longmans, The Gentleman's and Belgravia. If I recollect a right, the first suggestion to collect and reprint them all in a single volume came from Mr Chateau. 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. Strange stories were well received and well reviewed. Its reception gave me confidence for future ventures. Acting upon James Paine'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 Chateau's suggestion the title was afterwards changed to Philistia. I desired, if possible, to run it through the Cornhill, and Mr Paine promised to take it into his most favourable consideration for that purpose. However, when 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 of an English novelist consists entirely in learning to subordinate all his own ideas and tastes and opinions to the wishes and beliefs of the inexorable British matron. Mr Chateau, however, was prepared to accept the undoubted risk of publishing Philistia. Only, to meet his views, the denouement was altered. In the original version the hero came to a bad end, as a hero in real life who is in advance of 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 Chateau 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 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 work and worst paid of the professions. 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. I cannot follow Mr Beesant 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 honors, 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 successful 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 18 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 Gill Fillon, and he is dead. Then at 20 I wrote an autobiography for another person, and was paid £10 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 of 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 manuscript for consideration. It seemed to me that somebody might 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 pen knife, to wait and to tremble. After a time I heard a footstep returning. I thought it might be the publisher or the editor of the house. It was the boy back again.  They were the sheets of my book. The editor's compliment, 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, 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 intercourse by telling him how, when I was young, and a word of cheer would have buoyed me up, he made me drink the waters of Mara. 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 anything, 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 back stairs 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. Hence, my first novel may very properly be regarded as my first book, and if I have no tale to tell of heartbroken impediments 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 as true of every tale I have ever written or shall ever write. I think it must be in the nature of imagination that an imaginative idea does not spring into being, that it has no spontaneous generation, but as a germinating 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 banishing form of some delicious dream, a dim but familiar ghost of an idea comes up unbidden for the hundredth 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. I think it was, in actual fact, first of all, a tale of a grandfather. My mother's 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 valleys. The younger son died, and the body had to be carried over the mountains to be buried. Its coarse layer crossed 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 onto 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 Skor Fell, the wind rose to a gale. The horse was terrified. It broke 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 sigh of the wind, the horse's nae. Then winter 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 mother of the young one that had been lost. The snow lay deep on the pass, and from the cliffs of the Skor Fell Pikes it hung in great toppling masses. All went well with the little funeral party, until they came to the top of the pass.  But just as the mare reached the spot where the wind had frightened the young horse, there was a terrific noise. An immense body of the snow had parted at that instant from the beatling heights overhead, and rushed down into the valley with the movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening sound as of a peel of thunder. The day echoed and re-echoed from side to side, and from height to height. The old mare was affrighted.  When they had recovered from their consternation, the funeral party gave chase, and at length, down 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 the grip of a ghost story without ever passing out of the world of reality. Imagination 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 became of him? Did he die mad? Or was he a man, and did he rise out of all doubt and terror?  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. Rosetti 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 had 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 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 again. Seeing this, Rosetti 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 gill, Fisher's gill, and the roar of falling waters could be heard from within. On the far 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 was lit, and the curtains were drawn, and darkness covered everything outside, they were yet more impressive to the imagination. I remember those evenings with gratitude and some pain. The little oblong room, the dull thud of the gill like faint thunder overhead, the crackle of the wood fire, myself reading aloud, and Rosetti 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 pleasures so far as I was concerned, 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. Rosetti had not, I think, been a great reader of fiction, but his critical judgment 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, given any thought to fiction as an art, but his intellect played over it like a bright light. It amazes me now after ten years' close study of the methods of storytelling 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 recollections 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 worthwhile to be that, he said. He did not know the author of folksal yarns. I thought so too, but the Cumbrian statesman had begun to lay hold of my imagination. I had been reviving my recollection, and sharpening my practice of the Cumbrian dialect, which had been familiar to my ear, and even to my tongue in childhood, and so my Manx ambitions had to wait. Two years past, the poet died. I had spent 18 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 impatient 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 Rosetti'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 novelist usually begins with a glorified version of his own character. But it must interest my friends to see how every quality of my first hero was a rebuke to my own peculiar infirmities. 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. 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 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 Silas Marna, 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. Cotten, an old friend. And to him I detailed the lines of my story. His rapid mind saw a new opportunity. You want pen fort adore, 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 jurisprudence 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, yes, 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 50 pages of manuscript. It had drawn my heart's blood to cut out my pet passages, but they were gone and I 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 Newcourt in Lincoln's Inn, and one morning Lovell came purring and blowing and steaming. The good fellow was a 20 stone man into my lofty nest. He had reread 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 a hundred pounds for the serial right of the story for the weekly. He offered one unfavourable criticism. The death of your hero will never do, he said.  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 practical 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 an 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 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.  With much diffidence, I altered the catastrophe and made my hero happy. Then, thinking my work complete, I 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 properly. 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 knobbits and the dusters and the wilters. 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 core of a calling wherein the struggle for existence is keenest and bitterest and cruelest, 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.  Well, sir, he said, I mentioned the object of my visit. What can you read? Dovels 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. 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 50 pounds 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 novels of Chateau and Windus. Within a few hours, Mr. Chateau made me an offer which I accepted. The book is now, I think, in its 15th edition. A story I have told of many breakdowns in the attempt to write my first novel may suggest the idea that I was nearly 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 16, 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 light reading. It may revenge itself for occasional disappointments 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 camps 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 friendships, 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. End of chapter 5


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