the key must be made to unlock something far more uncommon than a
quadrant; and I still think it a capital apparatus, had I only possessed
the wit to use it properly. There was romance in this key--that was
obvious enough, and I puzzled over it for some weeks, by the end of
which my plot had grown to something like this: A family living in
poverty, though heirs to great wealth--this wealth buried close to their
door, and the key to unlock it hanging over their heads from morning to
night. It was soon settled, too, that this family should be Cornish, and
the scene laid on the Cornish coast, Cornwall being the only corner of
the earth with which I had more than a superficial acquaintance.
So far, so good; but what was the treasure to be? And what the reason
that stood between its inheritors and their enjoyment of it? As it
happened, these two questions were answered together. The small library
at Trinity--a delightful room, where Dr. Johnson spent many quiet hours
at work upon his 'Dictionary'--is fairly rich in books of old travel and
discovery; fine folios, for the most part, filling the shelves on your
left as you enter. To the study of these I gave up a good many hours
that should have been spent on ancient history of another pattern, and
more directly profitable for Greats; and in one of them--Purchas, I
think, but will not swear--first came on the Great Ruby of Ceylon. Not
long after, a note in Yule's edition of 'Marco Polo' set my imagination
fairly in chase of this remarkable gem; and I hunted up all the
accessible authorities. The size of this ruby (as thick as a man's arm,
says Marco Polo, while Maundevile, who was an artist, and lied with
exactitude, puts it at a foot in length and five fingers in girth), its
colour, 'like unto fire,' and the mystery and completeness of its
disappearance, combined to fascinate me. No form of riches is so
romantic as a precious stone with a heart in it and a history. I had
only to endow it with a curse proportionate to its size and beauty, and
I had all that a story-teller could possibly want.
[Illustration: 'THE HAVEN,' FOWEY[E]]
But even a treasure hunt is a poor affair unless you have two parties
vying for the booty, and a curse can hardly be worked effectively until
you introduce the fighting element, and make destiny strike her blows
through the passions--hate, greed, &c.--of her victims. I had shaped my
story to this point: the treasure was to be buried by a man who had
slain his comrade and only confidant in order to enjoy the booty alone,
and had afterwards become aware of the curse attached to its possession.
And the descendants of these two men were to be rivals in the search for
it, each side possessing half of the clue. It was at this point that,
like George IV., I invented a buckle. My buckle had two clasps, and on
these the secret of the treasure was so engraved as to become
intelligible only when they were united.
My plot had now taken something like a shape; but it had one serious
defect. It would not start to walk. Coax it as I might it would not
budge. Even the worst book must have a beginning--this reflection was no
less distressing than obvious, for mine had none. And there is no saying
it would ever have found one but for a lucky accident.
In the Long Vacation of 1885 I spent three weeks or a month at the
Lizard pollacking and reading Plato. Knowing at that time comparatively
little of this corner of the coast, I had brought one or two guide books
and local histories in the bottom of my portmanteau. One evening, after
a stiff walk along the cliffs, I put the 'Republic' aside for a certain
'History and Description of the Parish of Mullyon,' by its vicar, the
Rev. E. G. Harvey, and came upon a passage that immediately shook my
scraps of invention into their proper places.
The passage in question was a narrative of the wreck of the 'Jonkheer
Meester Van de Wall,' a Dutch barque, on the night of March 25, 1867. I
cannot quote at length the vicar's description of this wreck; but in
substance and in many of its details it is the story of the 'Belle
Fortune' in 'Dead Man's Rock.' The vessel broke up in the night and
drowned every soul on board except a Greek sailor, who was found early
next morning clambering about the rocks under cliff, between Polurrian
and Poljew. This man's behaviour was mysterious from the first, and his
evidence at the inquest held on the drowned bodies of his shipmates was,
to say the least, extraordinary. He said: 'My name is Georgio Buffani. I
was seaman on board the ship, which belonged to Dordrecht. I joined the
ship at Batavia, _but I do not know the name of the ship or the name of
the captain_.' Being shown, however, the official list of Dutch East
Indiamen, he pointed to one built in 1854, the 'Kosmopoliet,' Captain
König. He then told his story of the disaster, which there was no one to
contradict, and the jury returned a verdict of 'Accidentally drowned.'
The Greek made his bow and left the neighbourhood.
[Illustration: MR. AND MRS. QUILLER COUCH]
Just after the inquest Mr. Broad, Dutch Consul at Falmouth, arrived,
bringing with him the captains of two Dutch East Indiamen then lying at
Falmouth. One of them asked at once 'Is it Klaas Lammerts's?' Being told
that the 'Kosmopoliet' was the name of the wrecked ship, he said, 'I
don't believe it. The "Kosmopoliet" wouldn't be due for a fortnight,
almost. It must be Klaas Lammerts's vessel.' The vicar, who had now come
up, showed a scrap of flannel he had picked up, with '6. K. L.' marked
upon it. 'Ah!' said the Dutchman, 'it must be so. It _must_ be the
"Jonkheer."' But she had been returned 'Kosmopoliet' at the inquest, so
there the matter rested.
'On the Friday following, however,' pursues the vicar, 'when Mr. Broad
and this Dutch captain again visited Mullyon, the first thing handed
them was a parchment which had been picked up meanwhile, and this was
none other than the masonic diploma of Klaas van Lammerts. Here, then,
was no room for doubt. The ship was identified as the "Jonkheer Meester
van de Wall van Puttershoek," Captain Klaas van Lammerts, 650 tons
register, homeward bound from the East Indies, with a cargo of sugar,
coffee, spices, and some Banca tin. The value of the ship and cargo
would be between 40,000_l._ and 50,000_l._' It may be added that on the
afternoon before the wreck, the vessel had been seen to miss stays more
than once in her endeavour to beat off the land, and generally to behave
as if handled by an unaccountably clumsy crew. Altogether, folks on
shore had grave suspicions that there was mutiny or extreme disorder of
some kind on board; but of this nothing was ever certainly known.
I think this narrative was no sooner read than digested into the scheme
of my romance, now for some months neglected and almost forgotten. But
the Final School of Literæ Humaniores loomed unpleasantly near, and just
a year passed before I could turn my discovery to account. The following
August found me at Petworth, in Sussex, lodging over a clockmaker's shop
that looked out upon the Market Square. Petworth is quiet; and at that
time I knew scarcely a soul in the place; but lovely scenery lies all
around it, and on a hot afternoon you may do worse than stretch yourself
on the slopes above the weald and smoke and do nothing. There is one
small common in particular, close to the monument at the top of the
park, and just outside the park wall, where I spent many hours looking
across the blue country to Blackdown, and lazily making up my mind about
the novel. In the end--it was some time in September--I called on the
local stationer and bought a large heap of superior foolscap.
[Illustration: FOWEY GRAMMAR SCHOOL CREW AND MR. QUILLER COUCH]
A travelling waxwork company was unpacking its caravan in the square
outside my window on the morning when I pulled in my chair and
light-heartedly wrote 'Dead Man's Rock (a Romance), by Q.,' at the top
of the first sheet of foolscap. The initial was my old initial of the
_Oxford Magazine_ verses, and the title had been settled on for some
time before. Staying with some friends on the Cornish coast, I had been
taken to a picnic, or some similar function, on a beach, where they
showed me a pillar-shaped rock, standing boldly up from the sands, and
veined with curious red streaks resembling bloodstains. 'I want a story
written about that rock,' a lady of the party had said; 'something
really blood-thirsty. "Slaughter Rock" might do for the name.' But my
title was really borrowed from the Dodman, locally called Deadman, a
promontory east of Falmouth, between Veryan and St. Austell bays.
I had covered two pages of foolscap before the brass band of the waxwork
show struck up and drove me out of doors and along the road that leads
to the railway station--the only dull road around Petworth, and chosen
now for that very reason. A good half of that morning's work was
afterwards torn up; but I felt at the time that the enterprise was going
well. I had written slowly, but easily; and, of course, believed that I
had found my vocation, and would always be able to write easily--most
vain delusion! For in six years and a half I have recaptured the fluency
of that morning not half-a-dozen times. Still, I continued to take a
lively interest in my story, and wrote at it very steadily, finishing
Book I. before my return to Oxford. It surprised me, though, that, for
all my interest in it, the story gave me little or no emotion. Once only
did I get a genuine thrill, and that was at the point where young Jasper
finds the sailor's cap (p. 25), and why at this point more than another
is past explaining. In later efforts I have written several pages with a
shaking pen and amid dismal signs of grief; and, on revision, have
usually had to tear those pages up. On the whole, my short experience
goes against
_si vis me flere, dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi._
But if _on revision_ an author is moved to tears or laughter by any part
of his work, then he may reckon pretty safely upon it, no matter with
how stony a gravity it was written.
[Illustration: THE OLD STUDY]
Book I.--just half the tale--was finished then, and put aside. The
Oxford Michaelmas Term was beginning, and there were lectures to be
prepared; but this was not all the reason. To tell the truth, I had
wound up my story into a very pretty coil, and how to unwind it was past
my contriving. When the book appeared, its critics agreed in pronouncing
Part I. to be a deal better than Part II., and they were right; for Book
II. is little more than a violent cutting of half-a-dozen knots that had
been tied in the gayest of spirits; and it must be owned, moreover, that
the long arm of coincidence was invoked to perform a great part of the
cutting. For the time, however, the unfinished MS. lay in the drawer of
my writing-table; and I went back to Virgil and Aristophanes and
scribbled more verses for the _Oxford Magazine_. None of my friends knew
at that time of my excursion into fiction; but one of them possesses the
acutest eye in Oxford, and, with just a perceptible twinkle in it, he
asked me suddenly, one evening towards the end of Term, if I had yet
begun to write a novel. The shot was excellently fired, and I
surrendered my MS. at once, the more gladly because believing in his
judgment. Next morning he asserted that he had sat up half the night to
read it. His look was of the freshest, but he came triumphantly out of
cross-examination, and urged me to finish the story. In my elated mood I
would have promised anything, and set to work at once to think out the
rest of the plot; but it was not until the Easter Vacation that I
finished the book, in a farmhouse at the head of Wastwater.
Another friend was with me, who, in the intervals of climbing, put all
his enthusiasm into Aristotelian logic while I hammered away at the
'immortal product,' as we termed it by consent. It was further agreed
that he should abstain from looking at a line of it until the whole was
written--a compact which I have not heard he found any difficulty in
keeping. Indeed, there was plenty to occupy us both without the book.
Snow lay thick on the fells that spring, and the glissading was
excellent; we had found, or thought we had, a new way up the Mickledore
cliffs; and Mr. Gladstone had just introduced his first Home Rule Bill,
and made the newspapers (which reached us a day late) very good reading.
However, the MS. was finished and read with sincere, if discriminating,
approval, on the eve of our departure.
The next step was to find a publisher. My earliest hopes had inclined
upon my friend, Mr. Arrowsmith, of Bristol, who (I hoped) might remember
me as having for a time edited the _Cliftonian_; but the book was
clearly too long for his 'Railway Library,' and on this reflection I
determined to try the publishers of 'Treasure Island.' Mr. Lyttelton
Gell, of the Clarendon Press, was kind enough to provide a letter of
introduction; the MS. went to Messrs. Cassell & Co., and I fear the end
of my narrative must be even duller than the beginning. Messrs. Cassell
accepted the book, and have published all its successors. The inference
to be drawn from this is pleasant and obvious, and I shall be glad if my
readers will draw it.
[Illustration: MR. AND MRS. QUILLER COUCH IN A CANADIAN CANOE]
It is the rule, I find, to conclude such a confession as this with a
paragraph or so in abuse of the literary calling; to parade one's self
before the youth of merry England as the Spartans paraded their drunken
Helot; to mourn the expense of energies that in any other profession
would have fetched a nobler pecuniary return. I cannot do this; at any
rate, I cannot do it yet. My calling ties me to no office stool, makes
me no man's slave, compels me to no action that my soul condemns. It
sets me free from town life, which I loathe, and allows me to breathe
clean air, to exercise limbs as well as brain, to tread good turf and
wake up every morning to the sound and smell of the sea and that wide
prospect which to my eyes is the dearest on earth. All happiness must
be purchased with a price, though people seldom recognise this; and part
of the price is that, living thus, a man can never amass a fortune. But
as it is extremely unlikely that I could have done this in any pursuit,
I may claim to have the better of the bargain.
Certain gentlemen who have preceded me in this series have spoken of
letters as of any ordinary characteristic pursuit. Naturally, therefore,
they report unfavourably; but they seem to me to prove the obvious.
Literature has her own pains, her own rewards; and it scarcely needs
demonstration that one who can only bring to these a bagman's estimate
had very much better be a bagman than an author.
_'UNDERTONES' AND 'IDYLS AND LEGENDS OF INVERBURN'_
BY ROBERT BUCHANAN
My first serious effort in literature was what I may call a
double-barrelled one; in other words, I was seriously engaged upon two
books at the same time, and it was by the merest accident that they did
not appear simultaneously. As it was, only a few months divided one from
the other, and they are always, in my own mind, inseparable, or Siamese,
twins. The book of poems called 'Undertones' was the one; the book of
poems called 'Idyls and Legends of Inverburn' was the other. They were
published nearly thirty years ago, when I was still a boy, and as they
happened to bring me into connection, more or less intimately, with some
of the leading spirits of the age, a few notes concerning them may be of
interest.
A word, first, as to my literary beginnings. I can scarcely remember the
time when the idea of winning fame as an author had not occurred to me,
and so I determined very early to adopt the literary profession, a
determination which I unfortunately carried out, to my own life-long
discomfort, and the annoyance of a large portion of the reading public.
When a boy in Glasgow, I made the acquaintance of David Gray, who was
fired with a similar ambition to fly incontinently to London--
The terrible City whose neglect is Death,
Whose smile is Fame!
and to take it by storm. It seemed so easy! 'Westminster Abbey,' wrote
my friend to a correspondent; 'if I live, I shall be buried there--so
help me God!' 'I mean, after Tennyson's death,' I myself wrote to Philip
Hamerton, 'to be Poet Laureate!' From these samples of our callow
speech, the modesty of our ambition may be inferred. Well, it all
happened just as we planned, only otherwise! Through some blunder of
arrangement we two started for London on the same day, but from
different railway stations, and, until some weeks afterwards, one knew
nothing of the other's exodus. I arrived at King's Cross Railway Station
with the conventional half-crown in my pocket; literally and absolutely
half-a-crown; I wandered about the Great City till I was weary, fell in
with a Thief and Good Samaritan who sheltered me, starved and struggled
with abundant happiness, and finally found myself located at 66 Stamford
Street, Waterloo Bridge, in a top room, for which I paid, when I had the
money, seven shillings a week. Here I lived royally, with Duke Humphrey,
for many a day; and hither, one sad morning, I brought my poor friend
Gray, whom I had discovered languishing somewhere in the Borough, and
who was already death-struck through 'sleeping out' one night in Hyde
Park.[F] 'Westminster Abbey--if I live, I shall be buried there!' Poor
country singing-bird, the great Dismal Cage of the Dead was not for
_him_, thank God! He lies under the open Heaven, close to the little
river which he immortalised in song. After a brief sojourn in the 'dear
old ghastly bankrupt garret at No. 66,' he fluttered home to die.
[Illustration: drawing by Geo. Hutchinson
signed: Truly yours,
Robert Buchanan]
To that old garret, in these days, came living men of letters who were
of large and important interest to us poor cheepers from the North:
Richard Monckton Milnes, Laurence Oliphant, Sydney Dobell, among others,
who took a kindly interest in my dying comrade. But afterwards, when I
was left to fight the battle alone, the place was solitary. Ever
reserved and independent, not to say 'dour' and opinionated, I made no
friends, and cared for none. I had found a little work on the newspapers
and magazines, just enough to keep body and soul alive, and while
occupied with this I was busy on the literary twins to which I referred
at the opening of this paper. What did my isolation matter, when I had
all the gods of Greece for company, to say nothing of the fays and
trolls of Scottish Fairyland? Pallas and Aphrodite haunted that old
garret; out on Waterloo Bridge, night after night, I saw Selene and all
her nymphs; and when my heart sank low, the fairies of Scotland sang me
lullabies! It was a happy time. Sometimes, for a fortnight together, I
never had a dinner--save, perhaps, on Sunday, when a good-natured Hebe
would bring me covertly a slice from the landlord's joint. My favourite
place of refreshment was the Caledonian Coffee House in Covent Garden.
Here, for a few coppers, I could feast on coffee and muffins--muffins
saturated with butter, and worthy of the gods! Then, issuing forth,
full-fed, glowing, oleaginous, I would light my pipe, and wander out
into the lighted streets.
Criticisms for the _Athenæum_, then edited by Hepworth Dixon, brought me
ten-and-sixpence a column. I used to go to the old office in Wellington
Street and have my contributions measured off on the current number with
a foot-rule, by good old John Francis, the publisher. I wrote, too, for
the _Literary Gazette_, where the pay was less princely--seven-and-sixpence
a column, I think, but with all extracts deducted! The _Gazette_ was
then edited by John Morley, who came to the office daily with a big dog.
'I well remember the time when you, a boy, came to me, a boy, in
Catherine Street,' wrote honest John to me years afterwards. But the
neighbourhood of Covent Garden had greater wonders! Two or three times a
week, walking, black bag in hand, from Charing Cross Station to the
office of _All the Year Round_ in Wellington Street, came the good, the
only Dickens! From that good genie the poor straggler from Fairyland
got solid help and sympathy. Few can realise now what Dickens was then
to London. His humour filled its literature like broad sunlight; the
Gospel of Plum-pudding warmed every poor devil in Bohemia.
[Illustration: MR. BUCHANAN'S HOUSE]
At this time, I was (save the mark!) terribly in earnest, with a dogged
determination to bow down to no graven literary idol, but to judge men
of all ranks on their personal merits. I never had much reverence for
gods of any sort; if the superior persons could not win me by love, I
remained heretical. So it was a long time before I came close to any
living souls, and all that time I was working away at my poems. Then, a
little later, I used to go o' Sundays to the open house of Westland
Marston, which was then a great haunt of literary Bohemians. Here I
first met Dinah Muloch, the author of 'John Halifax,' who took a great
fancy to me, used to carry me off to her little nest on Hampstead Heath,
and lend me all her books. At Hampstead, too, I foregathered with Sydney
Dobell, a strangely beautiful soul, with (what seemed to me then) very
effeminate manners. Dobell's mouth was ever full of very pretty
Latinity, for the most part Virgilian. He was fond of quoting, as an
example of perfect expression, sound conveying absolute sense of the
thing described, the doggrel lines--
Down the stairs the young missises ran
To have a look at Miss Kate's young man!
The sibilants in the first line, he thought, admirably suggested the
idea of the young ladies slipping along the banisters and peeping into
the hall!
But I had other friends, more helpful to me in preparing my first
twin-offering to the Muses; the faces under the gas, the painted women
on the bridge (how many a night have I walked up and down by their
sides, and talked to them for hours together), the actors in the
theatres, the ragged groups at the stage doors. London to me, then, was
still Fairyland! Even in the Haymarket, with its babbles of nymph and
satyr, there was wonderful life from midnight to dawn--deep sympathy
with which told me that I was a born Pagan, and could never be really
comfortable in any modern Temple of the Proprieties. On other points
connected with that old life on the borders of Bohemia, I need not
touch; it has all been so well done already by Murger, in the 'Vie de
Bohème,' and it will not bear translation into contemporary English.
There were cakes and ale, pipes and beer, and ginger was hot in the
mouth too! _Et ego fui in Bohemiâ!_ There were inky fellows and bouncing
girls, _then; now_ there are only fine ladies, and respectable,
God-fearing men of letters.
It was while the twins were fashioning, that I went down in summer time
to live at Chertsey on the Thames, chiefly in order to be near to one I
had long admired, Thomas Love Peacock, the friend of Shelley and the
author of 'Headlong Hall'--'Greekey Peekey,' as they called him, on
account of his prodigious knowledge of things and books Hellenic. I soon
grew to love the dear old man, and sat at his feet, like an obedient
pupil, in his green old-fashioned garden at Lower Halliford. To him I
first read some of my 'Undertones,' getting many a rap over the
knuckles for my sacrilegious tampering with Divine Myths. What mercy
could _I_ expect from one who had never forgiven 'Johnny' Keats for his
frightful perversion of the sacred mystery of Endymion and Selene? and
who was horrified at the base 'modernism' of Shelley's 'Prometheus
Unbound?' But to think of it! He had known Shelley, and all the rest of
the demigods, and his speech was golden with memories of them all! Dear
old Pagan, wonderful in his death as in his life. When, shortly before
he died, his house caught fire, and the mild curate of the parish begged
him to withdraw from the library of books he loved so well, he flatly
refused to listen, and cried roundly, in a line of vehement blank verse,
'By the immortal gods, I will not stir!'[G]