social law which crush a man and make him just like his fellows, or so
nearly like that only intimacy can distinguish individual differences,
had allowed me to grow in another way, and become more myself; more
independent, more like a savage, better able to fight and endure. That
is the use of going abroad, and going abroad to places that are not
civilised. They allow a man to revert and be himself. It may make his
return hard, his endurance of social bonds bitterer, but it may help him
to refuse to endure. He may attain to some natural sight.
[Illustration: DEFYING THE UNIVERSE]
Not many weeks ago I was talking to a well-known American publisher, and
our conversation ran on the trans-oceanic view of Europe. He was amused
and delighted to come across an Englishman who was so Americanised in
one way as to look on our standing camps and armed kingdoms as citizens
of the States do, especially those who live in the West. To the
American, Europe seems like a small collection of walled yards, each
with a crowing fighting-cock defying the universe on the top of his own
dunghill, with an occasional scream from the wall. The whole of our
international politics gets to look small and petty, and a bitter waste
of power. Perhaps the American view is right. At any rate, it seemed so
when I sat far aloof upon the lofty mountains to the west of the great
plains. The isolation from the politics of the moment allowed me to see
nature and natural law.
And as it was with nations, so it was with men. Out yonder, in the West,
most of us were brutal at times, and ready to kill, or be killed, but my
American-bred acquaintances looked like men, strikingly like men,
independent, free, equal to the need of the ensuing day or the call of
some sudden hour. It is a liberal education to the law-abiding
Englishman to see a good specimen of a Texan cowboy walk down a Western
street; for he looks like a law unto himself, calm and greatly assured
of the validity of his own enactments. We live in a crowd here, and it
takes a rebel to be himself; and in the struggle for freedom he is
likely to go under.
[Illustration: COWBOY ROBERTS]
While I was gaining the experience that went solid and crystallised into
'The Western Avernus,' I was discovering much that had never been
discovered before, not in a geographical sense--for I have been in few
places where men have not been--but in myself. Each new task teaches us
something new, and something more than the mere way to do it. To drive
horses or milk a cow or make bread, or kill a sheep, sets us level with
facts and face to face with some reality. We are called on to be real,
and not the shadow of others. This is the worth that is in all real
workers, whatever they do, under whatever conditions. Every truth so
learnt strips away ancient falsehood from us; it is real education, not
the taught instruction which makes us alike, and thus shams, merely
arming us with weapons to fight our fellows in the crowded, unwholesome
life of falsely civilised cities.
[Illustration: THE VERY PRAIRIE DOGS TAUGHT ME]
And in America there is the sharp contrast between the city life and the
life of the mountain and the plain. It is seen more clearly than in
England, which is all more or less city. There are no clear stellar
interspaces in our life here. But out yonder, a long day's train ride
across the high barren cactus plateaus of Arizona teaches us as much as
a clear and open depth in the sky. For, of a sudden, we run into the
very midst of a big town, and shams are made gods for our worship. It is
difficult to be oneself when all others refuse to be themselves.
This was for me the lesson of the West and the life there. When I wrote
this book I did not know it; I wrote almost unconsciously, without
taking thought, without weighing words, without conscious knowledge.
But I see now what I learnt in a hard and bitter school.
For I acknowledge that the experience was at times bitterly painful. It
is not pleasant to toil sixteen hours a day; it is not good to starve
overmuch; it is not well to feel bitter for long months. And yet it is
well and good and pleasant in the end to learn realities and live
without lies. It is better to be a truthful animal than a civilised man,
as things go. I learnt much from horses and cattle and sheep; the very
prairie dogs taught me; the ospreys and the salmon they preyed on
expressed truths. They didn't attempt to live on words, or the dust and
ashes of dead things. They were themselves and no one else, and were not
diseased with theories or a morbid altruism that is based on dependence.
This, I think, is the lesson I learnt from my own book. I did not know
it when I wrote it. I never thought of writing it; I never meant to
write anything; I only went to America because England and the life of
London made me ill. If I could have lived my own life here I would have
stayed, but the crushing combination of social forces drove me out. For
fear of cutting my own throat I left, and took my chance with natural
forces. To fight with nature makes men, to fight with society makes
devils, or criminals, or martyrs, and sometimes a man may be all three.
I preferred to revert to mere natural conditions for a time.
To lead such a life for a long time is to give up creeds, and to go to
the universal storehouse whence all creeds come. It is giving up dogmas
and becoming religious. In true opposition to instructive nature, we
find our own natural religion, which cannot be wholly like any other. So
a life of this kind does not make men good, in the common sense of the
word. But it makes a man good for something. It may make him an ethical
outcast, as facts faced always will. He prefers induction to deduction,
especially the sanctioned unverified deductions of social order. For
nature affords the only verification for the logical process of
deduction. 'We fear nature too much, to say the least.' For most of us
hold to other men's theories instead of making our own.
When Mill said, 'Solitude, in the sense of being frequently alone, is
necessary to the formation of any depth of character,' he spoke almost
absolute truth. But here we can never be alone; the very air is full of
the dead breath of others. I learnt more in a four days' walk over the
California coast range, living on parched Indian corn, than I could have
done in a lifetime of the solitude of a lonely house. The Selkirks and
the Rocky Mountains are books of ancient learning: the long plains of
grey grass, the burnt plateaus of the hot South, speak eternal truths to
all who listen. They need not listen, for there men do not learn by the
ear. They breathe the knowledge in.
[Illustration: THE CALIFORNIA COAST RANGE]
In speaking as I have done about America I do not mean to praise it as a
State or a society. In that respect it is perhaps worse than our own,
more diseased, more under the heel of the money fiend, more recklessly
and brutally acquisitive. But there are parts of it still more or less
free; nature reigns still over vast tracts in the West. As a democracy
it is so far a failure, as democracies must be organised on a
plutocratic basis; but it at any rate allows a man to think himself a
man. Walt Whitman is the big expression of that thought, but his fervent
belief in America was really but deep trust in man himself, in man's
power of revolt, in his ultimate recognition of the beauty of the truth.
The power of America to teach lies in the fact that a great part of her
fertile and barren soil has not yet been taught, not yet cultivated for
the bread which of itself can feed no man wholly.
[Illustration: BY THE CAMP FIRE]
Perhaps among the few who have read 'The Western Avernus' (for it was
not a financial success), fewer still have seen what I think I myself
see in it now. But it has taken me six years to understand it, six years
to know how I came to write it, and what it meant. That is the way in
life: we do not learn at once what we are taught, we do not always
understand all we say even when speaking earnestly. There is often one
aspect of a book that the writer himself can learn from, and that is not
always the technical part of it. All sayings may have an esoteric
meaning. In those hard days by the camp fire, on the trail, on the
prairie with sheep and cattle, I did not understand that they called up
in me the ancient underlying experience of the race, and, like a deep
plough, brought to the surface the lowest soil which should hereafter be
a little fertile. When I starved, I thought not of our far ancestors who
had suffered too; as I watched the sheep or the sharp-horned Texas
steers, I could not reflect upon our pastoral forefathers; as I climbed
with bleeding feet the steep slopes of the Western hills, my thoughts
were set in a narrow circle of dark misery. I could not think of those
who had striven, like me, in distant ages. But the songs of the camp
fire, and the leap of the flame, and the crackling wood, and the lofty
snow-clad hills, and the long dim plains, the wild beast, and the
venomous serpents, and the need of food, brought me back to nature, the
nature that had created those who were the fathers of us all, and,
bringing me back, they taught me, as they strive to teach all, that the
real and deeper life is everywhere, even in a city, if we will but look
for it with unsealed eyes and minds set free from the tedious
trivialities of this debauched modern life.
[Illustration: (_From a photograph by Thos. Fall, Baker Street_)
signed:
Yours very truly,
D. Christie Murray]
'_A LIFE'S ATONEMENT_'
BY DAVID CHRISTIE MURRAY
[Illustration: I HANDED HIM TWO CHAPTERS]
[Illustration: SENT ALL MY PEOPLE INTO A COAL-MINE]
I began my first book more years ago than I care to count, and,
naturally enough, it took poetic form, if not poetic substance. In its
original shape it was called 'Marsh Hall,' and ran into four cantos. On
the eve of my twenty-first birthday I sent the MS. to Messrs. Macmillan,
who, very wisely, as I have since come to believe, counselled me not to
publish it. I say this in full sincerity, though I remember some of the
youthful bombast not altogether without affection. Here and there I can
recall a passage which still seems respectable. I wrote reams of verse
in those days, but when I came into the rough and tumble of journalistic
life I was too occupied to court the Muses any longer, and found myself
condemned to a life of prose. I was acting as special correspondent for
the _Birmingham Morning News_ in the year '73--I think it was '73,
though it might have been a year later--and at that time Mr. Edmund
Yates was lecturing in America, and a novel of his, the last he ever
wrote, was running through our columns. Whether the genial 'Atlas,' who
at that time had not taken the burden of _The World_ upon his shoulders,
found his associations too numerous and heavy, I can only guess, but he
closed the story with an unexpected suddenness, and the editor, who had
supposed himself to have a month or two in hand in which to make
arrangements for his next serial, was confronted with the _finis_ of Mr.
Yates's work, and was compelled to start a new novel at a week's
notice. In this extremity he turned to me. 'I think, young 'un,' he
said, 'that you ought to be able to write a novel.' I shared his faith,
and had, indeed, already begun a story which I had christened 'Grace
Forbeach.' I handed him two chapters, which he read at once, and, in
high feather, sent to the printer. It never bade fair to be a mighty
work, but at least it fulfilled the meaning of the original edition of
Pope's famous line, for it was certainly 'all without a plan.' I had
appropriate scenery in my mind, no end of typical people to draw, and
one or two moving actualities to work from. But I had forgotten the
plot. To attempt a novel without a definite scheme of some sort is very
like trying to make a Christmas pudding without a cloth. Ruth Pinch was
uncertain as to whether her first venture at a pudding might not turn
out a soup. My novelistic effort, I am sorry to confess, had no cohesion
in it. Its parts got loose in the cooking, and I have reason to think
that most people who tried it found the dish repellent. The cashier
assured me that I had sent down the circulation of the Saturday issue by
sixteen thousand. I had excellent reasons for disbelieving this
circumstantial statement in the fact that the Saturday issue had never
reached that number, but I have no doubt I did a deal of damage. There
had been an idea in 'Marsh Hall,' and what with interpolated ballads and
poetic excursions and alarums of all sorts, I had found in it matter
enough to fill out my four cantos. I set out with the intent to work
that same idea through the pages of 'Grace Forbeach,' but it was too
scanty for the uses of a three-volume novel, at least in the hands of a
tiro. I know one or two accomplished gentlemen who could make it serve
the purpose admirably, and, perhaps, I myself might do something with it
at a pinch at this time of day. Anyhow, as it was, the cloth was too
small to hold the pudding, and, in the process of cooking, I was driven
to the most desperate expedients. To drop the simile and to come to the
plain facts of the case, I sent all my wicked and superfluous people
into a coal-mine, and there put an end to them by an inrush of water. I
forget what became of the hero, but I know that some of the most
promising characters dropped out of that story, and were no more heard
of. The sub-editor used occasionally, for my encouragement, to show me
letters he received, denouncing the work, and asking wrathfully when it
would end.
Whilst I am about 'Grace Forbeach,' it may be worth while to tell the
story of the champion printer's error of my experience. I wrote at the
close of the story:
'Are there no troubles now?' the lover asks.
'Not one, dear Frank. Not one.'
And then, in brackets, thus [] I set the words:
[White line.]
This was a technical instruction to the printer, and meant that one line
of space should be left clear. The genius who had the copy in hand put
the lover's speech in type correctly, and then, setting it out as if it
were a line of verse, he gave me--
'Not one, dear Frank, not one white line!'
* * * * *
It was a custom in the printing office to suspend a leather medal by a
leather bootlace round the neck of the man who had achieved the prize
_bêtise_ of the year. It was somewhere about midsummer at this time, but
it was instantly and unanimously resolved that nothing better than this
would or could be done by anybody. The compositors performed what they
called a 'jerry' in the blunderer's honour, and invested him, after an
animated fight, with the medal.
'Grace Forbeach' has been dead and buried for very nearly a score of
years. It never saw book form, and I was never anxious that it should do
so, but as _it_ had grown out of 'Marsh Hall,' so my first book grew out
of it, and, oddly enough, not only my first, but my second and my third.
'Joseph's Coat,' which made my fortune, and gave me such literary
standing as I have, was built on one episode of that abortive story, and
'Val Strange' was constructed and written to lead up to the episode of
the attempted suicide on Welbeck Head, which had formed the culminating
point in the poem.
[Illustration: THEY INVESTED HIM WITH THE MEDAL]
When I got to London I determined to try my hand anew, and, having
learned by failure something more than success could ever have taught
me, I built up my scheme before I started on my book. Having come to
utter grief for want of a scheme to work on, I ran, in my eagerness to
avoid that fault, into the opposite extreme, and built an iron-bound
plot, which afterwards cost me very many weeks of unnecessary and
unvalued labour. I am quite sure that no reader of 'A Life's Atonement'
ever guessed that the author took one tithe, or even one-twentieth part,
of the trouble it actually cost to weave the two strands of its
narrative together. I divided my story into thirty-six chapters. Twelve
of these were autobiographical, in the sense that they were supposed to
be written by the hero in person. The remaining twenty-four were
historical, purporting to be written, that is, by an impersonal author.
The autobiographical portions necessarily began in the childhood of the
narrator, and between them and the 'History' there was a considerable
gulf of time. Little by little this gulf had to be bridged over until
the action in both portions of the story became synchronous. I really do
not suppose that the most pitiless critic ever felt it worth his while
to question the accuracy of my dates, and I dare say that all the
trouble I took was quite useless, but I fixed in my own mind the actual
years over which the story extended, and spent scores of hours in the
consultation of old almanacs. I have never verified the work since it
was done, but I believe that in this one respect, at least, it is beyond
cavil. The two central figures of the book were lifted straight from the
story of 'Marsh Hall,' and 'Grace Forbeach' gave her quota to the
narrative.
[Illustration: CONSULTING OLD ALMANACS]
[Illustration: SHE DREW FROM IT A BROWN-PAPER PARCEL]
[Illustration: IF THERE HAD BEEN NO 'DAVID COPPERFIELD']