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. Chatto, 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. Chatto and from Mr. Arrowsmith,
of Bristol, I have met, time and again, with what I cannot help
describing as most generous treatment. One day it happened that I wanted
to write a scientific article on the impossibility of knowing one had
seen a ghost, even if one saw one. For convenience sake, and to make the
moral clearer, I threw the argument into narrative form, but without the
slightest intention of writing a story. It was published in _Belgravia_
under the title of 'Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost,' and was
reprinted later in my little volume of 'Strange Stories.' A little while
after, to my immense surprise, Mr. Chatto wrote to ask me whether I
could supply him with another story, like the last I had written, for
the _Belgravia Annual_. I was rather taken aback at this singular
request, as I hadn't the slightest idea I could do anything at all in
the way of fiction. Still, like a good journalist, I never refuse an
order of any sort; so I sat down at once and wrote a tale about a mummy
on the ghastliest and most approved Christmas number pattern. Strange to
say, Mr. Chatto again printed it, and, what was still more remarkable,
asked for more of the same description. From that time forth, I went on
producing short stories for _Belgravia_; but I hardly took them
seriously, being immersed at the time in biological study. I looked upon
my own pretensions in the way of fiction as an amiable fad of my kind
friend Chatto; and not to prejudice any little scientific reputation I
might happen to have earned, I published them all under the carefully
veiled pseudonym of 'J. Arbuthnot Wilson.'
I would probably never have gone any further on my downward path had it
not been for the accidental intervention of another believer in my
powers as a story-writer. I had sent to _Belgravia_ a little tale about
a Chinaman, entitled 'Mr. Chung,' and written perhaps rather more
seriously and carefully than my previous efforts. This happened to
attract the attention of Mr. James Payn, who had then just succeeded to
the editorship of the _Cornhill_. I had been a constant contributor to
the _Cornhill_ under Leslie Stephen's management, and by a singular
coincidence I received almost at the same time two letters from Mr.
Payn, one of them addressed to me in my own name, and regretting that he
would probably be unable to insert my scientific papers in his magazine
in future; the other, sent through Chatto & Windus to the imaginary J.
Arbuthnot Wilson, and asking for a short story somewhat in the style of
my 'admirable Mr. Chung.'
[Illustration]
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 Creedy'--a
tale of a black parson who reverted to savagery--which has perhaps
attracted more attention than any other of my short stories. The other,
which I myself immensely prefer, was 'The Curate of Churnside.' Both
were so well noticed that I began to think seriously of fiction as an
alternative subject. In the course of the next year I wrote several more
sketches of the same sort, which were published, either anonymously or
still under the pseudonym, in the _Cornhill_, _Longmans'_, _The
Gentleman's_, and _Belgravia_. If I recollect aright, the first
suggestion to collect and reprint them all in a single volume came from
Mr. Chatto. They were published as 'Strange Stories,' under my own name,
and I thus, for the first time, acknowledged my desertion of my earliest
loves--science and philosophy--for the less profound but more lucrative
pursuit of literature.
[Illustration: A SHELF IN THE STUDY]
'Strange Stories' was well received and well reviewed. Its reception
gave me confidence for future ventures. Acting upon James Payn's advice,
I set to work seriously upon a three-volume novel. My first idea was to
call it 'Born out of Due Time,' as it narrated the struggles of a
Socialist thinker a century in front of his generation; but, at Mr.
Chatto's suggestion, the title was afterwards changed to 'Philistia.' I
desired, if possible, to run it through the _Cornhill_, and Mr. Payn
promised to take it into his most favourable consideration for that
purpose. However, when 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.
[Illustration: 'THANK YOU, SIR']
Mr. Chatto, however, was prepared to accept the undoubted risk of
publishing 'Philistia.' Only, to meet his views, the _dénoûment_ 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. Chatto gave me a lump sum down for serial rights and
copyright, and ran 'Philistia' through the pages of _The Gentleman's_.
When it finally appeared in book form, it obtained on the whole more
praise than blame, and, as it paid a great deal better than scientific
journalism, it decided me that my _rôle_ in life henceforth must be that
of a novelist. And a novelist I now am, good, bad, or indifferent.
If anybody gathers, however, from this simple narrative, that my upward
path from obscurity to a very modest modicum of popularity and success
was a smooth and easy one, he is immensely mistaken. I had a ten years'
hard struggle for bread, into the details of which I don't care to
enter. It left me broken in health and spirit, with all the vitality and
vivacity crushed out of me. I suppose the object of this series of
papers is to warn off ingenuous and aspiring youth from the hardest
worked and worst paid of the 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.'
_'THE SHADOW OF A CRIME'_
BY HALL CAINE
I cannot follow Mr. Besant with any pitiful story of rejection at the
hands of publishers. If refusal is quite the best thing that can happen
to the candidate for literary honours, my fate has not been favourable.
No tale of mine has yet passed from publishing house to publishing
house. Except the first of the series, my stories have been accepted
before they have been read. In two or three instances they have been
bought before they have been written. It has occurred to me, as to
others, to have two or three publishers offering terms for the same
book. I have even been offered half payment in hand on account of a book
which I could not hope to write for years, and might never write at all.
Thus the most helpful confession which the more or less 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 eighteen I wrote a poem of a mystical
sort, which was printed (not at my own risk) and published under a
pseudonym. Happily, no man will ever identify me behind the romantic
name wherein I hid my own. Only one literary man knew my secret. That
was George Gilfillan, and he is dead. Then at twenty I wrote an
autobiography for another person, and was paid ten pounds for it. These
were really my first books, and I grow quite hot when I think of them.
At five-and-twenty I came up to London with the manuscript 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.
[Illustration: I LEFT IT]
After waiting three torturing weeks for the decision of the publishers,
I made bold to call again. At the same little box at the door of the
office I had once more to fill up the same little document. The boy took
it in, and I was left to sit on his table, to look at the desk which he
had been whittling away with his penknife, to wait and to tremble. After
a time I heard a footstep returning. I thought it might be the publisher
or the editor of the house. It was the boy back again. He had a pile of
loose sheets of white paper in his hands. They were the sheets of my
book. 'The editor's compliments, 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.
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
signed: with Kindest regards,
Hall Caine]
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 Marah. And three
times since that day the publishing house I speak of has come to me with
the request that I should write a book for them. I have never been able
to do so, but I have outgrown my bitterness, and, of course, I show no
malice. Indeed, I have now the best reasons for wishing the great
enterprise well. But if literary confessions are worth 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 backstairs of the house of letters. There is room enough
inside.
[Illustration: MY MS. WENT SPRAWLING OVER THE TABLE.]
[Illustration: DERWENTWATER]
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 heart-broken 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 is
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 vanishing 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!'
[Illustration: STY HEAD PASS]
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 course lay across Sty Head Pass, a bleak and 'brant'
place, where the winds are often high. The eldest son, a strong-hearted
lad, undertook the duty. He strapped the coffin on to the back of a
young horse, and they started away. The day was wild, and on the top of
the pass, where the path dips into Wastdale, between the breast of Great
Gable and the heights of Scawfell, the wind rose to a gale. The horse
was terrified. It broke 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.
[Illustration: WASTWATER FROM STY HEAD PASS]
[Illustration: THE HORSE BROKE AWAY]
[Illustration: SOMETHING STRAPPED ON ITS BACK]
This was in the spring, and nearly all the summer through the surviving
son of the widow was out on the mountains, trying to recover the runaway
horse, but never once did he catch sight of it, though sometimes, as he
turned homeward at night, he thought he heard, in the gathering
darkness, above the sough of the wind, the horse's neigh. Then winter
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 Scawfell pikes it hung in great
toppling masses. All went well with the little funeral party until they
came to the top of the pass, and though the day was dead calm the son
held the rein with a hand that was like a vice. But just as the mare
reached the spot where the wind had frightened the young horse, there
was a terrific noise. An immense body of the snow had parted at that
instant from the beetling heights overhead, and rushed down into the
valley with the movement as of a mighty earthquake, and the deafening
sound as of a peal of thunder. The dale echoed and re-echoed from side
to side, and from height to height. The old mare was affrighted; she
reared, leapt, flung her master away, and galloped off. When they had
recovered from their 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.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE ROCK, ST. JOHN'S VALE]
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? I cannot say how
many years this ghost of a conception (with various brothers and sisters
of a similar complexion) haunted my mind before I recognised it as the
central incident of a story, the faggot for a fire from which other
incidents might radiate and imaginary characters take life. When I began
to think of it in this practical way I was about six-and-twenty, and was
lodging in a lonely farmhouse in the Vale of St. John.
[Illustration: THIRLMERE]
[Illustration: ROSSETTI WALKING TO AND FRO]
Rossetti was with me, for I had been up to London at his request, and
had brought him down to my retreat. The story of that sojourn among the
mountains I have told elsewhere. It lives in my memory as a very sweet
and sad experience. The poet was a dying man. He spent a few hours of
every day in painful efforts to paint a picture. His nights were long,
for sleep never came to him until the small hours of the 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, Rossetti
suggested that I should read aloud, and I did so. Many an evening we
passed in this way. The farmhouse stood at the foot of a fell by the
side of the lowest pool of a ghyll, Fishers' Ghyll, and the roar of
falling waters could be heard from within. On the farther side of the
vale there were black crags where ravens lived, and in the unseen bed of
the dale between lay the dark waters of Thirlmere. The surroundings were
striking to the eye and ear in the daylight, but when night came, and
the lamp 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 ghyll like faint thunder overhead, the
crackle of the wood fire, myself reading aloud, and Rossetti in a long
sack painting coat, his hands thrust into its upright pockets, walking
with his heavy and uncertain step to and fro, to and fro, laughing
sometimes his big deep laugh, and sometimes sitting down to wipe his
moist spectacles and clear his dim eyes. The autumn was far spent, and
the nights were long. Not rarely the dead white gleams of the early dawn
before the coming of the sun met the yellow light of our candles as we
passed on the staircase going to bed a little window that looked up to
the mountains, and over them to the east.
[Illustration: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI]
Perhaps it was not all pleasure, 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. Rossetti 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 story-telling, to recall
the general principles which he seemed to formulate out of the back of
his head for the defence of his swift verdicts. 'Now why?' I would say,
when the art of the novelist seemed to me to fail, or when the poet's
condemnation appeared extreme. 'Because so-and-so _must_ happen,' he
would answer. He was always right. He grasped with masterly strength the
operation of the two fundamental factors in the novelist's art--the
sympathy and the 'tragic mischief.' If these were not working well, he
knew by the end of the first chapters that, however fine in observation,
or racy in humour, or true in pathos, the work as an organism must fail.
It was an education in literary art to sharpen one's wits on such a
grindstone, to clarify one's thought in such a stream, to strengthen
one's imagination by contact with a mind that was 'of imagination all
compact.'
Now, down to that time, though I had often aspired to the writing of
plays, it had never occurred to me that I might write a novel. But I
began to think of it then as a remote possibility, and the immediate
surroundings of our daily life brought back recollection of the old
Cumberland legend. I told the story to Rossetti, and he was impressed by
it, but he strongly advised me not to tackle it. The incident did not
repel him by its ghastliness, but he saw no way of getting sympathy into
it on any side. His judgment disheartened me, and I let the idea go back
to the dark chambers of memory. He urged me to try my hand at a Manx
story. '"The Bard of Manxland"--it's worth while to be that,' he
said--he did not know the author of 'Foc's'le Yarns.' I thought so, too,
but the Cumbrian 'statesman' had begun to lay hold of my imagination. I
had been reviving my 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 passed, the poet died, I had spent eighteen months in daily
journalism in London, and was then settled in a little bungalow of three
rooms in a garden near the beach at Sandown in the Isle of Wight. And
there, at length, I began to write my first novel. I had grown 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.