I was walking one night in the verandah of a small house in which I
lived, outside the hamlet of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very
dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and sweet with the purity of
forests. From a good way below, the river was to be heard contending
with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, scattered unevenly among
the darkness, but so far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation.
For the making of a story here were fine conditions. I was besides moved
with the spirit of emulation, for I had just finished my third or fourth
perusal of _The Phantom Ship_. ‘Come,’ said I to my engine, ‘let us make
a tale, a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land,
savagery and civilisation; a story that shall have the same large
features, and may be treated in the same summary elliptic method as the
book you have been reading and admiring.’ I was here brought up with a
reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, as the sequel shows, I
failed to profit by. I saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Milton,
and Virgil, profited by the choice of a familiar and legendary subject;
so that he prepared his readers on the very title-page; and this set me
cudgelling my brains, if by any chance I could hit upon some similar
belief to be the centre-piece of my own meditated fiction. In the course
of this vain search there cropped up in my memory a singular case of a
buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been often told by an uncle of
mine, then lately dead, Inspector-General John Balfour.
On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below zero,
the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had seen the
circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the Adirondack
wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border. Here then,
almost before I had begun my story, I had two countries, two of the ends
of the earth involved: and thus though the notion of the resuscitated man
failed entirely on the score of general acceptation, or even (as I have
since found) acceptability, it fitted at once with my design of a tale of
many lands; and this decided me to consider further of its possibilities.
The man who should thus be buried was the first question: a good man,
whose return to life would be hailed by the reader and the other
characters with gladness? This trenched upon the Christian picture, and
was dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any use at all for me, I
had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and family, take him
through many disappearances, and make this final restoration from the pit
of death, in the icy American wilderness, the last and the grimmest of
the series. I need not tell my brothers of the craft that I was now in
the most interesting moment of an author’s life; the hours that followed
that night upon the balcony, and the following nights and days, whether
walking abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours of unadulterated
joy. My mother, who was then living with me alone, perhaps had less
enjoyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is my usual helper in
these times of parturition, I must spur her up at all seasons to hear me
relate and try to clarify my unformed fancies.
And while I was groping for the fable and the character required, behold
I found them lying ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease porridge
hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine years old. Was
there ever a more complete justification of the rule of Horace? Here,
thinking of quite other things, I had stumbled on the solution, or
perhaps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) the Curtain or final
Tableau of a story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry
and Strathardle, conceived in Highland rain, in the blend of the smell of
heather and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the Athole correspondence
and the memories of the dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far away it
was, that I had first evoked the faces and the mutual tragic situation of
the men of Durrisdeer.
My story was now world-wide enough: Scotland, India, and America being
all obligatory scenes. But of these India was strange to me except in
books; I had never known any living Indian save a Parsee, a member of my
club in London, equally civilised, and (to all seeing) equally accidental
with myself. It was plain, thus far, that I should have to get into
India and out of it again upon a foot of fairy lightness; and I believe
this first suggested to me the idea of the Chevalier Burke for a
narrator. It was at first intended that he should be Scottish, and I was
then filled with fears that he might prove only the degraded shadow of my
own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began to occur to me it would be
like my Master to curry favour with the Prince’s Irishmen; and that an
Irish refugee would have a particular reason to find himself in India
with his countryman, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I decided
he should be, and then, all of a sudden, I was aware of a tall shadow
across my path, the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in Lord Foppington’s
phrase) of a nice morality could go very deep with my Master: in the
original idea of this story conceived in Scotland, this companion had
been besides intended to be worse than the bad elder son with whom (as it
was then meant) he was to visit Scotland; if I took an Irishman, and a
very bad Irishman, in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was I to
evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch besieged me, offering his services; he
gave me excellent references; he proved that he was highly fitted for the
work I had to do; he, or my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to
disguise his ancient livery wit a little lace and a few frogs and
buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then
of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I
was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking with,
upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth
of an extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any
influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in
fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he
would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, and in place of entering into
competition with the Master, would afford a slight though a distinct
relief. I know not if I have done him well, though his moral
dissertations always highly entertained me: but I own I have been
surprised to find that he reminded some critics of Barry Lyndon after
all. . . .