heart-burning. When I began to think of a theme, I found four or five
subjects clamouring for acceptance. There was the story of the Prodigal
Son, which afterwards became 'The Deemster'; the story of Jacob and
Esau, which in the same way turned into 'The Bondman'; the story of
Samuel and Eli, which, after a fashion, moulded itself ultimately into
'The Scapegoat'; and half-a-dozen other stories, chiefly Biblical, which
are still on the forehead of my time to come. But the Cumbrian legend
was first favourite, and to that I addressed myself. I thought I had
seen a way to meet Rossetti's objection. The sympathy was to be got out
of the elder son. He was to think God's hand was upon him. But whom
God's hand rested on had God at his right hand; so the elder son was to
be a splendid fellow--brave, strong, calm, patient, long-suffering, a
victim of unrequited love, a man standing square on his legs against all
weathers. It is said that the young 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.
[Illustration: MR. HALL CAINE IN HIS STUDY
(_From a photograph by A. M. Pettit_)]
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.
[Illustration: MRS. HALL CAINE
(_From a photograph by A. M. Pettit_)]
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 Marner,' and then cast it
aside in despair. A third time I began, and when the alehouse looked
tolerable the retrospective chapter that followed it seemed flat and
poor. How to begin by gripping the interest, how to tell all and yet
never stop the action--these were agonising difficulties.
It took me nearly a fortnight to start that novel, sweating drops as of
blood at every fresh attempt. I must have written the first half volume
four times at the least. After that I saw the way clearer, and got on
faster. At the end of three months I had written nearly two volumes, and
then in good spirits I went up to London.
My first visit was to J. S. Cotton, an old friend, and to him I detailed
the lines of my story. His rapid mind saw a new opportunity. 'You want
_peine forte et dure_,' he said. 'What's that?' I said. 'An old
punishment--a beautiful thing,' he answered. 'Where's my dear old
Blackstone?' and the statute concerning the punishment for standing mute
was read to me. It was just the thing I wanted for my hero, and I was in
rapture, but I was also in despair. To work this fresh interest into my
theme, half of what I had written would need to be destroyed!
It _was_ destroyed, the interesting piece of ancient 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,
ye--s,' I said. 'It's crude,' he said. 'But it only wants sub-editing.'
Sub-editing!
I took it back to London, began again at the first line, and wrote every
page over again. At the end of another month the story had been
reconstructed, and was shorter by some fifty pages of manuscript. It had
drawn my heart's blood to cut out my pet passages, but they were gone,
and I knew the book was better. After that I went on to the end and
finished with a tragedy. Then the story was sent back to Lovell, and I
waited for his verdict.
My home (or what served for it) was now on the fourth floor of New
Court, in Lincoln's Inn, and one morning Lovell came purring and blowing
and steaming (the good fellow was a twenty-stone man) into my lofty
nest. He had re-read my novel coming up in the train. 'Well?' I asked,
nervously. 'It's magnificent,' he said. That was all the favourable
criticism he offered. All save one practical and tangible bit. 'We'll
give you 100_l._ for the serial right of the story for the _Weekly_'.
[Illustration: COMING UP IN THE TRAIN]
He offered one unfavourable criticism. 'The death of your hero will
never do,' he said. 'If you kill that man Ralph, you'll kill your book.
What's the good? Take no more than the public will give you to begin
with, and by-and-by they'll take what _you_ give _them_.' It was
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 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: 'Kill that man, and you kill your book.'
With much diffidence I altered the catastrophe and made my hero happy.
Then, thinking my work complete, 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
'nobbuts' and the 'dustas' and the 'wiltas.'
My first novel was now written, but I had still to get it published. In
my early days in London, while trying to live in the outer court of a
calling wherein the struggle for existence is keenest and bitterest and
cruellest, I conceived one day the idea of offering myself as a reader
to the publishers. With this view I called on several of that ilk, who
have perhaps no recollection of my early application. I recall my
interview with one of them. He was sitting at a table when I was taken
into his room, and he never once raised his head from his papers to look
at me. I just remember that he had a neck like a three-decker, and a
voice like a peahen's. 'Well, sir?' he said. I mentioned the object of
my visit. 'What can you read?' 'Novels and poems,' I answered. 'Don't
publish either--good day,' he said, and I went out.
But one of the very best, and quite, I think, the very oldest of
publishers now living, received me differently. '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_l._ for my
copyright. That was wages at the rate of about four shillings a day for
the time I had been actually engaged upon the work, sweating brain and
heart and every faculty. Nevertheless, one of my friends urged me to
accept it. 'Why?' I asked. 'Because it is a story of the past, and
therefore not one publisher in ten will look at it.' I used strong
language, and then took my novel to Chatto & Windus. Within a few hours
Mr. Chatto made me an offer which I accepted. The book is now, I think,
in its fifteenth edition.
The story I have told of many breakdowns in the attempt to write my
first novel may suggest the idea that I was merely serving my
apprenticeship to fiction. It is true that I was, but it would be wrong
to conclude that the writing of a novel has been plain sailing with me
ever since. Let me 'throw a crust to my critics,' and confess that I am
serving my apprenticeship still. Every book that I have written since
has offered yet greater difficulties. Not one of the little series but
has at some moment been a despair to me. There has always been a point
of the story at which I have felt confident that it must kill me. I have
written six novels (that is to say, about sixteen), and sworn as many
oaths that I would never begin another. Three times I have thrown up
commissions in sheer terror of the work ahead of one. Yet here I am at
this moment (like half-a-dozen of my fellow-craftsmen), with contracts
in hand which I cannot get through for three years. The public expects a
novel to be 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
cants that I despise and hate, the one I hate and despise the most is
that which would have the world believe that greatly gifted men who have
become distinguished in literature and are earning thousands a year by
it, and have no public existence and no apology apart from it, hold it
in pity as a profession and in contempt as an art. For my own part, I
have found the profession of letters a serious pursuit, of which in no
company and in no country have I had need to be ashamed. It has demanded
all my powers, fired all my enthusiasm, developed my sympathies,
enlarged my 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.
'_THE SOCIAL KALEIDOSCOPE_'
BY GEORGE R. SIMS
My first book hardly deserved the title. I have only a dim remembrance
of it now, because it is one of those things which I have studiously set
myself to forget. I was very proud of it before I saw it. After I had
seen it, I realised in one swift moment's anguish the concentrated truth
of the word vanity as applied to human wishes. Hidden away in the bottom
corner of an old box, which is not to be opened until after I am dead,
that first book lies at the present moment; that is to say, unless the
process of decay, which had already set in upon the paper on which it
was printed, has gone on to the bitter end, and the book has disappeared
entirely of its own accord.
[Illustration: 12 CLARENCE TERRACE]
Before that book was published, I used to lie awake at night and fancy
how great and how grand a thing it would be for me to see a book with
my name on the cover lying on Smith's bookstalls, and staring me in the
face from the booksellers' windows. After it was published, I felt that
I owed Messrs. Smith & Sons a deep debt of gratitude for refusing to
take it, and my heart rejoiced within me greatly that the only
booksellers who exhibited it lived principally in old back streets and
half-finished suburban thoroughfares.
[Illustration: THE HALL]
Stay--I will go upstairs to my lumber room, I will open that box, I will
dig deep down among the buried memories of the past, and I will find
that book, and I will summon up my courage and ask the publishers of
this volume to kindly allow the cover of that book to be reproduced
here. It is only by looking at it as I looked at it that you will
thoroughly appreciate my feelings on the subject.
I have found the box, but my heart sinks within me as I try to open the
lid. All my lost youth lies there. The key is rusty and will hardly turn
in the lock.
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
signed: Very sincerely yours,
George R. Sims]
So--so--so, at last! Ghosts of the long ago, come forth from your
resting-places and haunt me once again.
Dear me! dear me! how musty everything smells; how old, and worn, and
time-stained everything is. A folded poster:
'GRECIAN THEATRE
'Mr. G. R. Sims will positively _not_ appear
this evening at the entertainment held in the
Hall.'
Yes, I remember. I had been announced, entirely without my consent or
knowledge, to appear at a hall attached to the Grecian Theatre with Mrs.
Georgina Weldon, and take part in an entertainment. This notice was
stuck about outside the theatre in consequence of my indignant
remonstrance. My old friend Mr. George Conquest had, I need hardly say,
nothing to do with that bill. Some one had taken the hall for a special
occasion. I think it was something remotely connected with lunatics.
[Illustration: GEORGE R. SIMS]
My first play! Poor little play--a burlesque written for my brothers and
sisters, and played by us in the Theatre Royal Day Nursery. There were
some really brilliant lines in it, I remember. They were taken bodily
from a burlesque of H. J. Byron's, which I purchased at Lacy & Son's
(now French's) in the Strand--'a new and original burlesque by Master G.
R. Sims.' My misguided parents actually had the playbill printed and
invited friends to witness the performance. They little knew what they
were doing by pandering to my boyish vanity in such a way. But for that
printed playbill, and that public performance in my nursery, I might
never have taken to the stage, and inflicted upon a long-suffering
public Adelphi melodrama and Gaiety burlesque, farcical comedy and comic
opera; I might have remained all my life an honest, hard-working City
man, relieving my feelings occasionally by joining in the autumn
discussions in the _Daily Telegraph_. I was still in the City when my
first book was published. I used, in those days, to get to the City at
nine and leave it at six, but I had a dinner hour, and in that dinner
hour I wrote short stories and little things that I fancied were funny,
and I used to put them in big envelopes and send them to the different
magazines. I sent about twenty out in that way. I never had one
accepted, but several returned.
[Illustration: Photo of title page of "The Social Kaleidoscope."]
I wrote my first book in my dinner hour, in a City office. I have just
found it. Here is the cover. You will observe that it has my portrait on
it. I look very ill and thin and haggard. That was, perhaps, the result
of going without my dinner in order to devote myself to 'literature.'
If you could look inside that book, if you could see the paper on which
it is printed, you would understand the shock it was to me when they
laid it in my arms and said: 'Behold your firstborn.'
All the vanity in me (and they tell me that I have a good deal) rose up
as I gazed at the battered wreck upon the cover--the man with the face
that suggested a prompt subscription to a burial club.
But I shouldn't have minded that so much if the people who bought my
book hadn't written to me personally to complain. One gentleman sent me
a postcard to say that his volume fell to pieces while he was carrying
it home. Another assured me that he had picked enough pieces of straw
out of the leaves to make a bed for his horse with, and a third returned
a copy to me without paying the postage, and asked me kindly to put it
in _my_ dustbin, because his cook was rather proud of the one he had in
his back garden.
Still the book sold (the sketches had all previously appeared in the
_Weekly Dispatch_), and when the first edition was exhausted, a new and
better one was prepared (without that haggard face upon the cover), and
I was happy.
The sale ran into thirty thousand the first year of publication, and as
I was fortunate enough to have published it on a royalty, I am glad to
say it is still selling.
[Illustration: THE SNUGGERY]
'The Social Kaleidoscope' was my first book. With it I made my actual
_début_ between covers.
I hadn't done very well before then; since then I have, from a worldly
point of view, done remarkably well--far better than I deserved to do,
my good-natured friends assure me, and I cordially agree with them.
But I had made a good fight for it, and I had suffered years of
disappointment and rebuff. I began to send contributions to periodicals
when I was fourteen years old, and a boy at Hanwell College. _Fun_ was
the first journal I favoured with my effusions, and week after week I
had a sinking at the heart as I bought that popular periodical and
searched in vain for my comic verses, my humorous sketches, and my smart
paragraphs.
It took me thirteen years to get something printed and paid for, but I
succeeded at last, and it was _Fun_, my early love, that first took me
by the hand. When I was on the staff of _Fun_, and its columns were open
to me for all I cared to write, I used often to look over the batch of
boyish efforts that littered the editor's desk, and let my heart go out
to the writers who were suffering the pangs that I had known so well.
[Illustration: MR. SIMS'S 'LITTLE DAWG']
I had had effusions of mine printed before that, but I didn't get any
money for them. I had the pleasure of seeing my signature more than once
in the columns of certain theatrical journals, in the days when I was a
constant first-nighter, and a determined upholder of the privileges of
the pit. And I even had some of my poetry printed. In the old box to
which I have gone in search of the first edition of my first book, there
are two papers carefully preserved, because they were once my pride and
glory. One is a copy of the _Halfpenny Journal_, and the other is a copy
of the _Halfpenny Welcome Guest_. On the back page of the correspondence
column of the former there is a poem signed 'G. R. S.,' addressed to a
young lady's initials in affectionately complimentary terms. Alas! I
don't know what has become of that young lady. Probably she is married,
and is the mother of a fine family of boys and girls, and has forgotten
that I ever wrote verses in her honour. I think I sent her a copy of the
_Halfpenny Journal_, but a few weeks after a coldness sprang up between
us. She was behind the counter of a confectioner's shop in Camden Town,
and I found her one afternoon giggling at a young friend of mine who
used to buy his butterscotch there. My friend and I had words, but
between myself and that fair confectioner 'the rest was silence.'
[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM]
I was really very much distressed that my pride compelled me never again
to cross the threshold of that establishment. There wasn't a
confectioner's in all Camden Town that could come within measurable
distance of it for strawberry ices.
In the correspondence column of the _Halfpenny Welcome Guest_, which is
among my buried treasures, there is an 'answer' instead of the poem
which I had fondly hoped to see inserted in its glorious pages. And
this is the answer: 'G. R. S.--Your poem is not quite up to our
standard, but it gives decided promise of better things. We should
advise you to persevere.'
I am quoting from memory, for after turning that box upside down, I
can't lay my hand on this particular _Welcome Guest_, though I know that
it is there. I don't know who the editor was who gave me that kindly pat
on the head, but whoever he was he earned my undying gratitude. At the
time I felt I should have liked him better had he printed my poem. I was
no more fortunate with my prose than I was with my poetry. I began to
tell stories at a very early age, but it was not until after I had
succeeded in getting a poem printed among the 'Answers to
Correspondents' that I took seriously to prose with a view of
publication. I was encouraged to try my hand at writing stories by the
remembrance of the success which had attended my efforts at romantic
narrative when I was a school-boy.
[Illustration: THE LIBRARY]
There were eight other boys in the dormitory I slept in at Hanwell (the
College, not the Asylum), and they used to make me tell them stories
every night until they fell asleep, and woe betide me if I cut my
narrative short while one of them remained awake. I wasn't much of a boy
with a bolster or a boot, but they were all champions, and many a time
when I had married the hero and heroine and wound up my story did I have
to start a fresh complication in a hurry to save myself from
chastisement. I remember on one occasion, when I was dreadfully sleepy,
and I had got into a fearful fog as to who committed the murder, I made
a wild plunge at a ghost to get me out of the difficulty, and the whole
dormitory rose to a boy and set about me with bolsters in their
indignation at such a lame and impotent conclusion.
Night after night did those maddening words, 'Tell us a story,' salute
my ears as I laid my weary little head upon the pillow, and I had to
tell one or run the gauntlet of eight bolsters and sixteen slippers, to
say nothing of the biggest boy of all, who kept a reserve pair of boots
hidden away under his bed for purposes not altogether unconnected with
midnight excursions to a neighbouring orchard.
[Illustration: 'SIR HUGO']
It was the remembrance of my early story-telling days that prompted me,
when poetry seemed a drug in the market, to try my hand at what is now,
I believe, called 'The Complete Novelette.'
I set myself seriously to work, laid in a large stock of apples and
jumbles, and spent several consecutive afternoons in completing a story
which I called 'A Pleasant Evening.' After I had written it I copied it
out in my best hand, and then, with fear and trembling, I sent it to
the _Family Herald_.
I sent it to the _Family Herald_ because I had heard a lady who visited
at our house say that she knew a lady who knew a lady who had sent a
story to the _Family Herald_, never having written anything before in
her life, and the story had been accepted, and the writer had received
five pounds for it by return of post.
[Illustration: THE BALCONY]
I didn't receive anything by return of post, but in about a fortnight my
manuscript came back to me. Nothing daunted, I carefully cut off the
corner on which 'Declined with thanks' had been written, and I sent the
story to _Chamber's Journal_. Here it met with a similar fate, but I
fancy it took a little longer to come back, and it bore signs of wear
and tear. I knew, or I had read, that it was not wise to let your
manuscript have the appearance of being rejected, so I spent several
unpleasant evenings in writing 'A Pleasant Evening' out again, and I
sent it to _All the Year Round_.
It came back! This time I didn't take the trouble to open it I knew it
directly I saw it, and as it reached me so I flung it in my desk and bit
my lips, and made up my mind that after all it was better to be accepted
as a poet in the 'Answers to Correspondents' column of the _Halfpenny
Journal_ than to be rejected as a story-writer by the editors of
higher-priced periodicals.
[Illustration: 'Beauty,' an old Favourite, Twenty Years old.]
But though I played with poetry again, I didn't even succeed in getting
into the 'Answers to Correspondents.' My vaulting ambition o'erleaped
its selle, and I sent my verses to journals which didn't 'correspond.'
In those days I kept a little book, in which I entered all the
manuscripts I sent to editors, and from it now I copy the following
instructive record. R stands for 'Returned':--
_Once a Week_ 'The Minstrel's Curse' R.
_Belgravia_ 'After the Battle' R.
_Broadway_ 'After the Battle' R.
_Fun_ 'Nearer and Dearer' R.
_Fun_ 'An Unfortunate Attachment' R.
_Fun_ 'A Song of May' R.
_Banter_ 'Nearer and Dearer' R.
_Judy_ 'An Unfortunate Attachment' R.
_London Society_ 'The Minstrel's Curse' R.
_Owl_ 'Nearer and Dearer' R.
Returned! Returned! Returned! All I got for my pains was the chance of
making a joke in my diary on my birthday. In those days of my wild
struggles with Fate I find written against the 2nd of September, 'Many
unhappy Returns.'
I believe that I should have flung up authorship in despair, and never
have had a first book, but for the chance remark of the dear old doctor
who looked after my health in the days when I hadn't to pay my own
doctor's bills.
[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM]